Posts Tagged ‘analysts’

Forecast: Patchy Cloud and a little unsettled at times

Thursday, March 25th, 2010 Posted by Andy

We work in such a fast paced industry don’t we! Well, don’t we? Where others have the 7 year itch, we have a 3 year rip and replace culture. Yeah, baby. The only certainty is change. C’mon! He who, through sheer lack of testosterone, hesitates, is lost. Bring… it… on.

So it came as a bit of a surprise to bump into some bloke the other day, who has built a £30 million business by  supplying slightly used Newbridge TDM gear to all of those circuit switched networks out there that ought not to still exist. Did he need any marketing support? Nope – too bloody busy selling the stuff.  Good margins too.

To cap a shocking seven days, Analysys Mason has now come out (do you suppose they told their parents first?)  and stated that Cloud computing will probably follow a ‘hybrid’ model.

Hybrid is a tech swear word, used on those occasions when the punter turns out to be not as gullible as our industry had first assumed. It means, bugger it, that the paradigm isn’t going to shift over night.  Maybe not even by a week next Tuesday.  The punter wants to place an each way bet: a tenner on the favourite and two fivers on the twelve-to-one hopeful.

In the case of Cloud computing, it means that the punter is not planning to place all of their most critical computing resources in a facility that they can’t see or touch; with a provider that they don’t really know; in a jurisdiction that they don’t fully understand. The pussies.

Instead, they want to keep a good dollop of computing power under their desks – or at least under their control. They’ll place another dollop, perhaps for disaster recovery and continuity purposes, in the Cloud. Or maybe shift the dollops around a bit, as their demand for computing power varies.

There you go: hybrid Cloud. The real surprise is that it’s taken this long for the industry to work this out. We had hybrid packet and circuit switched networks in the 90’s. We had hybrid TDM and IP voice networks in the Noughties. Ferrari has just launched a hybrid petrol-electric sports car…

Wasn’t this kind of evitable?

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Washing dirty kimonos in public

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 Posted by Mark

The golden rules of dinner party etiquette are to avoid talking about politics or religion.  Indeed, simply sitting there eating your food, occasionally complimenting your hosts and nodding attentively, will certainly win you more success than blurting out your dearest and more extreme dislikes and affinities.

Social media is the mother and father of all dinner parties; a seemingly never-ending social occasion with the promise of business opportunity at every turn.  Should things like politics and religion be off-limits here too?  And if the safest option is to just be a wallflower, how will anyone ever understand anything about you, your business, your value?

The success of your chosen approach rests on your powers of self-control.  Are you confident about sharing your observations and frustrations in the most appropriate manner, or are you over-confident?   Is your contribution to ‘the debate’ constructive or destructive?  Are you skilful enough with language to avoid misrepresenting yourself in the heat of the moment with comments and actions that are near-impossible to erase?  Can you overcome the temptation to say any old rubbish?

I would be the last person to advocate ‘playing it safe’ as a communications strategy, whether for an individual or an organisation.  Giving the perception of blandness does not sell.   However, apparent bigotry sells even less.   

‘Opening the kimino’ was what many IT marketers used to say to describe the corporate aspiration of being more transparent and communicative with journalists, analysts and investors, back in the age of web 1.0.  Open yours as much as you dare, but always leave a little to the imagination.

Mark

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Heresy and Harakiri

Monday, January 11th, 2010 Posted by Dev

Back in 1966, John Lennon’s comment about the Beatles being ‘bigger than Jesus’ caused an almighty controversy, dividing opinion and threatening to turn many US fans against the most successful pop band ever.  As it turned out, the suicidal PR disaster was actually a PR coup in disguise, as the comment became a symbol of the anti-establishment revolution which defined the decade.

Such a comment today would be unlikely to bat many eyelids, but the heresy I’m about to suggest here would – to an IT audience – make Lennon’s look like hymn practice.  Here goes:

“I’d take everything Gartner predicts with a pinch of salt if I were you.”

Shocking I know.  I may as well collect my P45 right now.  But here’s why I said it…  Friends and colleagues who work for US-based technology vendors often (secretly) complain that Gartner does not correctly categorise or even understand its products.  This is particularly the case with ‘disruptive’ technologies which have the capability to rationalize or revolutionise established working practices.  But you know what?  Typically they have to go along with it anyway.  In fact many of these vendors have and will completely realign their entire product strategy according to what the likes of Gartner and other influential analyst firms think, even though this thinking is patently incorrect, and even though end-customers are disproving them in their tens of thousands. 

In today’s straightened times, it seems everyone goes along with this and cannot summon the temerity to question it.  The consensus is that Gartner are very good at reflecting what has happened, but are not good at anticipating or accepting whatever’s new right now.  No one ever got fired for buying Cisco or Microsoft.  Is the same true of Gartner? 
Last week’s announcement that Gartner was acquiring Burton Group bolsters the overwhelming strength of this behemoth.  They may be too big to ignore, but nothing should ever be too important to ever be wrong.

Dev

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