Archive for September, 2004

SMB market has higher rate of IT spending

by eleanor on 29 Sep 2004 @ 12:19 pm in Enterprise IT | Datapoints   ++

InformationWeek had a piece, Oracle Puts Pressure On Microsoft, which captures an interesting datapoint:

Oracle’s move toward small and midsize businesses is being driven by a saturated software market at larger companies. Also, IT budgets at small and midsize companies are on the rise, in part because of a need to remain competitive. Today, small and midsize companies spend an average 6.3% of revenue on IT, compared with larger enterprises whose budgets are typically at 2% for manufacturers and 5% for services companies, according to AMR Research.

Implications:
While this outwardly looks promising, this larger ratio means that IT is a larger net line-item in operating budgets for SMBs; it’s relatively more money, and so will receive relatively more scrutiny. And, the budgets of thes relatively cash-strapped SMBs are unlikely to grow much beyond their current rate (in my estimation), and then they will decline as the larger players woo customers by promising to take cost out of their IT budgets. The competition will erode prices, and eventually decrease this rate to something approaching parity with larger firms. This will likely take several years to play out.

Still, from the perspective of the larger players now entering this market, that 6.3% of revenue was flowing to others, and thus represents a revenue growth opportunity - even if the market itself shrinks.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

Report from BAMF Sept 2004 meeting on Brew

by eleanor on 27 Sep 2004 @ 1:12 pm in Mobility   ++

Bay Area Mobility Forum’s September meeting gave an overview of the technical and business model underpinnings of application development via Brew.

As I learned, Brew is the primary development platform for Verizon and several other US carriers. Qualcomm provides all the back end and billing support for developers. End users just download applications to their phone and are charged on their monthly billing cycle. In contrast to the J2ME market, there are significant barriers to entry for developers, including building relationships with Qualcomm and Verizon as well as the maintenance and service requirements serving such demanding customers.

This is a miserable system where some application vendors are making some money, but jumping through a lot of hoops to do so. Carrier lock-in and total ownership of the system is a huge problem and stifles innovation: carriers are saying ‘no’ to applications just because they have one that already does about the same thing.

I made a valuable contact with a fellow researcher in the Masters CS program at Berkeley, Hong Qu. He is studying this space and trying to determine its future shape as well. There may be opportunities for him to work with our researchers at Stanford as well.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

Report from ASP Sept 2004 meeting - SRI Scanning Process

by eleanor on 24 Sep 2004 @ 11:50 am in Events & Happenings   ++

This event yesterday was tremendously useful. People from the Business Intelligence group of SRI Consulting (formerly connected with Stanford as the Stanford Research Institute but now private) presented on how they track change in the marketplace.

Their process is very similar to what I’ve been doing here, but their format of Summary and Implications will be very useful. I will be including a summary with each blog post which will be followed by an explicit implications section.

As a future planning item, I think SRI’s services can be of tremendous value to NEC as a corporation. They have offices in Tokyo and focus on providing intelligence on emerging trends covering technology, culture and business. I set up a call to learn more about their services and pricing for next week and will share more in-depth information after that.

I also need to track down the presentation. I will post the link here when I get it.

Participate: 1 Comment | Trackback

Report from SDForum Open Source SIG Oct 2004 meeting

by eleanor on 23 Sep 2004 @ 12:48 pm in Events & Happenings | Open Source   ++

I attended SDForum’s Open Source SIG monthly meeting “Facts and Fallacies of Open Source Licensing” with Larry Rosen, counsel for OSI (chief licensing gatekeeper for open source) and Steve Mutkowski, corporate counsel for Microsoft in charge of advising on internal use of open source (in tools, embedded, code snippets, running on servers, etc). This meeting attracted mainstream attendees, far different than many open source events. Among the attendees were lawyers from most of the Valley’s big firms and corporate counsel for companies like Cadence. People were very interested in how they could use open source in their businesses, and where specifically the GPL/LGP would present problems. As such, there were a lot of basic questions, which showed that awareness of open source has penetrated to new groups that are just learning about the issues. That is the most significant data point I absorbed from the meeting.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

Resource: Association for Strategic Planning

by eleanor on 22 Sep 2004 @ 8:00 pm in Toys, Tips, & Tricks   ++

Tomorrow I will attend a breakfast hosted by the Association of Strategic Planners. ASP is an interesting association. They started a chapter in the Bay Area last year, and I attended most of their meetings last year. This is the first meeting I’ve attended since I’ve been with NECSAM.

Their meetings are generally good, but the resource I value the most is that membership gives full text access to the articles of the McKinsey Quarterly and Booz Allen Hamilton’s journal Strategy+Business. This is current thinking from two of the most influential strategy consulting houses in the business. If you’re interested in viewing articles from these publications, let me know.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

Report from Sept 2004 BMA PMM RT

by eleanor on 21 Sep 2004 @ 5:47 pm in Events & Happenings | Strategy-Marketing   ++

NorCal Business Marketing Association Product Marketing/Management Roundtable Breakfast meeting on “Getting Great Product Reviews”:
We had 11 attendees, ranging from consultants to big companies (Agilent) and startups. The presenter, Brian Lawley of the < href="http://280group.com/">280 Group, gave very good overview of integrating preparation for product reviews into product launch and development plan. You can download the presentation , it has some good process guidelines and templates. Brian’s business is consulting to help companies plan better, so if we wanted more information or help from them, they’d be happy to provide.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

InfoWorld: Cisco to buy VoIP software vendor: September 14, 2004: By Phil Hochmuth Network World : TELECOM

by eleanor on 17 Sep 2004 @ 9:43 am in Emergent   ++

InfoWorld reports:

Cisco Systems Inc. this week announced plans to acquire Dynamicsoft Inc., a maker of carrier VoIP software based on Session Initiation Protocol
Cisco will pay $55 million in cash for the Parsippany, N.J.-based Dynamicsoft, assuming the vendor’s $3.8 million in debt, according to a statement from Cisco. The acquisition fills out Cisco’s software portfolio for carriers interested in providing converged applications to subscribers, such as presence management and unified messaging.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

Oracle On Demand gets new chief

by eleanor on @ 8:08 am in Emergent | Enterprise IT   ++

CNET News.com has a piece focusing on Oracle’s subscription services, which just got a new head, Juergen Rottler, former SVP at HP (another refugee from Carly’s last shakeup?). Among the interesting things is the 3-5% pricepoint quoted here.

Rottler’s post is a new one within Oracle, and its creation signals a stronger effort by the company to crack the subscription software market. The company has offered software-hosting services for the past five years but has redoubled its efforts recently, as such services have gained popularity. A successful initial stock offering by hosting rival Salesforce.com in June further validated the budding market.
Oracle says On Demand is one of its most fruitful new endeavors, announcing yesterday that first-quarter revenue from the division was 34 percent greater than in the same quarter last year.
Under the hosting program, customers license Oracle’s software as they normally would but let Oracle set up, host and maintain the software on its computers for 3 percent to 5 percent of the cost of the software per month. The service is available for Oracle’s database programs, as well as its business management applications and application server software.

Participate: 1 Comment | Trackback

CA releases BrightStor integrating 13 products

by eleanor on 16 Sep 2004 @ 11:20 am in Enterprise IT   ++

Information Week reports that CA announced integrated storage-management software “designed to help customers keep costs in line” The CA BrightStor r11.1 suite includes “13 integrated products that will support multiple types of storage products, databases, and apps” and aiming to “undercut the management costs of offerings of primary competitors EMC Corp. and Veritas Software Corp.”

Enhancements include the ability to align different types of data with appropriate media to support business goals. Together, the new modules could help customers gain a common view across mainframe and open-systems-based data. New backup and recovery software could let customers manage those operations and improve the success rate. New resource-management capabilities should help customers back up data based on business value and cut down on capital hardware costs by getting optimum efficiency from the existing storage network.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

MSFT & Polycom Partner on Desktop Web Conferencing

by eleanor on @ 11:11 am in Emergent   ++

Information Week reports that Microsoft And Polycom Strike Desktop Conferencing Pact.

Microsoft and Polycom Inc. disclosed plans to integrate their products to give PC users new options for audio and video conferencing.

The first fruits of the alliance are due later this year, when instant messaging and presence awareness capabilities in Microsoft’s Office Live Communications Server and Windows Messenger instant-messaging client extend to Polycom’s hardware, including its desktop and group video conference systems, IP handsets and conference phones, voice and video bridges, and WebOffice conference portal. Later, the companies plan to establish similar integration between Polycom products and Microsoft’s Office Live Meeting, a Web conferencing application…… The two companies tout the real-time rich media collaboration capabilities they plan to provide as a way to enable faster decision making, increase the productivity of workgroups and remote workers, and improve relationships with customers and others, while lowering costs. “We think people will expect more and more to be able to collaborate in real time,” says Sanders, who notes that the two companies will be using the tools they co-develop within their own companies.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

Presence Stat from MSFT Staffer

by eleanor on @ 11:07 am in Emergent   ++

InformationWeek > Real-Time Web Conferencing > Microsoft And Polycom Strike Desktop Conferencing Pact > September 15, 2004
Marc Sanders, senior product manager in the Real Time Collaboration Group at Microsoft, sees information about a computer user’s online “presence” as an increasingly critical to business productivity. “Without presence, three out of four business calls typically end in voicemail,” he says.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

JPMorgan Chase ends ITO/’on demand’ deal with IBM

by eleanor on @ 9:09 am in Enterprise IT   ++

As was speculated when the merger was first announced earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal reported (JPMorgan Ends Accord With IBM) that, he combined company of JPMorgan and BankOne will bring back in-house ” a wide variety of core technology functions” previously outsourced in a 2002 deal with IBM. The deal, valued at $5B, was originally struck between JPMorgan and IBM and was one of the first ‘on demand’ contracts, but was made less strategic when JPM acquired BankOne, which has spent heavily ($1b) on its own technology infrastructure and skills.

“It’s in our better interest to manage and control this,” Mr. Adams (JP Morgan Chase CIO) said yesterday, speaking of the outsourced IBM operations. A statement from the companies also noted the postmerger size of J.P. Morgan, saying the bank “now has the significant scale” needed to do the job itself. The companies spent several months discussing the issue, including considering a hybrid approach that would bring some of the operations back to the bank, leaving some with IBM. That idea ultimately didn’t work out.

The companies said about 4,000 IBM employees and contractors would be transferred to J.P. Morgan, starting in January. Many of those same workers had made the transfer in the other direction when the deal was begun. The arrangement, which covered infrastructure from data centers and help desks to voice and data networks, was to have run for seven years and was pegged at more than $5 billion.

Information Week notes that this flows from the do-it-yourself-in-house ethos of Jamie Dimon, now head of the combined entity. In 2002, while heading BankOne, he broke a similar outsourcing contract with IBM and AT&T, saying that their “outsourcing experience ‘hadn’t worked out’ and that henceforth it needed to ‘control its own destiny.’”

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

New phones put world in palm of the hand | CNET News.com

by eleanor on 15 Sep 2004 @ 11:44 am in Mobility   ++

CNET News.comgives a good overview
of the current state of conflicting standards and handsets that are trying to bridge the gap. “New phones are bridging a major standards gap between the world’s cellular carriers, which could ease mobile communications for globetrotters and send upheavals through the wireless industry.”

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

Enterprise-Asset-Management: forecast for growth

by eleanor on @ 11:05 am in Enterprise IT   ++

InformationWeek reports that the ARC Advisory Group released a report on 13 Sept that “pegs the worldwide market for enterprise-asset management for software and services at $1.7 billion and estimates it will reach $2.1 billion in 2008, growing at a 4.4% cumulative annual growth rate.” Noting that “software license sales have declined a bit, customer-service requirements have risen”, ARC Advisory suggests that especially in the mature North American and European markets, “customers are looking for help adopting best practices to drive continuous improvement.”

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

“Adaptive Enterprise” campaign to make way for “Grid” campaign?

by eleanor on @ 10:52 am in Emergent   ++

HP’s Adaptive Enterprise marketing is something I haven’t thought to be very keen: very vague and short on specific business benefits. CNET News.com reports
that “Hewlett-Packard on Tuesday tried to revitalize its sagging data storage division by announcing new products and plans centered on the idea of a storage ‘grid.’” Whether and how this will relate, supercede, or co-exist with the push around Adaptive Enterprise will play out over the next few months.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

Overview of changing IT Services hiring

by eleanor on @ 10:19 am in Enterprise IT   ++

News.com ted discusseshow hiring in the IT Services market is changing, including comments about practices at Accenture, BearingPoint, IBM, HP, DiamondCluster
But services employers these days want more than the programming chops of unemployed software developers–they’re looking for business smarts as well.
The theme was combination of technical and business acumen.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

Oracle ruling news analyses

by eleanor on @ 8:24 am in Enterprise IT   ++

This posts collects analysis pieces around the Oracle antitrust case:

• CNET news :Oracle ruling highlights complexity of market

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

IBM open sources 2 chunks of speech-recognition code

by eleanor on 14 Sep 2004 @ 7:03 pm in Emergent | Mobility | Open Source   ++

The New York Times has a piece entitled Speech Code From I.B.M. to Become Open Source, where they report IBM is donating two separate blocks of code related to speech recognition to open source groups. “IBM is donating code that it estimates cost the company $10 million to develop. One collection of speech software for handling basic words for dates, time and locations, like cities and states, will go to the Apache Software Foundation. The company is also contributing speech-editing tools to a second open-source group, the Eclipse Foundation.”
The article continues to give additonal insight into IBM’s motivations for this gift. “”We’re trying to spur the industry around open standards to get more and more speech application development,” said Steven A. Mills, the senior vice president in charge of I.B.M.’s software business. “Our code contribution is about getting that ecosystem going. If that happens, we think it will bring more business opportunities to I.B.M.”
This is development is important because it will speed development of technologies to bridge the important gap preventing voice from being effective input to systems and a mode of interaction. Speech recognition and processing still have a long way to go and a huge variety in specific applications. Open source development excels in applications where a high degree of customization and tweaking are important: we’ll see the value when open source developers start hacking to bring speech recognition to such wide ranging things as hobbyist (home electronics), improved usability for the blind, and as well as general interactions with devices.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

IT Services Unprofitable for CGEY

by eleanor on 13 Sep 2004 @ 6:42 pm in Enterprise IT   ++

Information Week reports:

For the first six months of 2004, Capgemini reported a net loss of $164.7 million, compared with a $109.8 million loss during the same period a year ago. The company says the loss stems in part from cost overruns associated with IT-services contracts signed in 2001 and 2002. The company also blamed poor performance in its North American operations, where revenue fell 22% in the first half.

To shore up its bottom line, Capgemini says it plans to sell unprofitable assets valued at $488 million. The company wouldn’t say which assets will be divested or when they would be put up for bid.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback