Back in March 1991, Stewart Alsop, a venture-capitalist and editor of InfoWorld said, “I predict that the last mainframe will be unplugged on March 15th, 1996”. Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20, so we know now, this could not be further from the truth. The mainframe is not only ‘not’ a dinosaur, it may be the single most important technology in the financial services industry, running almost every large Bank and Insurance Company’s back end system in the world. Still today, seemingly only the mainframe can handle the performance requirements & reliability demands of these challenging operating environments and support the sheer volume of ...
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There is a famous saying in the United States that exclaims, “Remember the Alamo!”. This was used as a battle cry for the State of Texas fighting for independence from Mexico in 1836, after a severely outnumbered band of Texans all lost their lives to the Mexican Army at The Alamo. Their memory lived on as soldiers shouted this war cry in the battles to come until the end of the Mexican-American war in 1848. While no lives were lost in this battle, February 16th 2017 may be the day where we will coin a new phrase: “Remember Diageo!”. SAP has now won what is considered by many to be a landmark decision in London that will have serious ...
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Planning ahead with tech suppliers can be daunting and time consuming, especially if you don't rely on the suppliers themselves and the consultant firms that take money from them for all your information. For many however, escaping from the Technology Cartel is difficult. Back in May, we wrote about: Oracle - Fiscal year ended May, and often the renewal cycle is the best time to change terms Microsoft - Fiscal year ended June, biggest month for license renewals and new license deals Cisco - Fiscal year ended July, best time of year to review Cisco estate for M&S optimization and more And now - its SAP's turn - fiscal year ending ...
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As the Founder of NET(net), I’ve had the privilege of working with world class clients all over the world, in virtually all industries and geographies. I’ve also had the honor of knowing many "rock star" client executives, including management scholars from ivy-league schools, engineers from MIT, and their staff that’s as sharp as any well trained Special Forces unit. Over the years, I’ve learned many things from working with these exceptional organizations and I hope the feeling is mutual. But as a wise person once said, ‘the biggest room in the house, is the room for improvement’. There is one compelling issue that all these talented ...
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Many clients are either buying more Oracle licenses, or renewing their Oracle maintenance service and support agreements this month (May - Oracle’s Fiscal Year-end), and continue to be dismayed at how difficult it is to cost optimize their Oracle estate. Because it is such a dark science that contains highly confidential information, the secrets of cost optimization are highly protected. Most clients either believe they are getting a pretty good deal or they’re not, but they have no real way to benchmark their agreement to the market. For most Oracle customers, the best options are to evaluate general market averages which doesn’t really ...
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Timing as they say, is everything. Nowhere is this more evident than in the strategic technology supplier arena. When most of your budget is consumed by less than 10 suppliers, knowing everything there is to know about them is critical. Most of our client’s don’t have time to be experts on every one of them, but that’s ok…that’s why we’re here and it’s what we do. We’ve outlined in a short summary below, what your organization needs to be looking out for right now. With many of these strategic suppliers, the window of time is small but the opportunities are great, to drive value and cost savings for 2016 and beyond. Oracle May is the Fiscal ...
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About 3 years ago, Ms. Virginia (Ginni) Rometty took over as the new CEO for IBM, and it has been anything but smooth sailing for her, the Company, IBM's customers, the technology market, and perhaps most importantly, the IBM shareholders. Since March 14, 2013 IBM has suffered through 11 consecutive quarters of poor performance. At the start of that time, IBM’s stock price was $215.80 per share. IBM stock has now fallen to $122.59 per share as of 22 January, a 43% reduction in value. Back in 2012, when Ginni Rometty first took over, I was one of the first (if not the only) to predict that Ginni Rometty would fail as the new CEO of IBM, and ...
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Salesforce.com is massively expensive at scale. In fact, our compre hensive study of over 20 leading customer relationship management (CRM) software providers again reveals that Salesforce.com has the highest total cost of ownership (TCO) in the market, meaning that Salesforce.com is quite simply the most expensive way you can furnish your organization with CRM software. A super majority of clients are economically sub-optimized in their Salesforce.com investments. At NET(net), we have seen very serious problems with the commercial arrangements (among other areas). In fact, due to our extensive work in this area, we have developed the ...
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The State of the Enterprise CRM Market Salesforce.com continues to be the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software market leader with around a 20% share by the end of 2015. SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft have all stabilized over the last several years, but SAP and Oracle are showing signs of a steady decline at the expense of the other CRM providers. Of the “Big Four” CRM suppliers, Salesforce.com remains the clear front runner in 2016, and due to the relatively unimpressive results from the other challengers, we believe Salesforce.com will remain at the top this year as well. To make matters worse for SAP and Oracle, the industry trend ...
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Top 10 Reasons Why the Dell EMC Merger is DOA The $67 billion Dell purchase of EMC is the largest technology deal in history -- dwarfing other major deals, but unfortunately, we think it’s too late for these two former tech titans. The writing is on the wall as they say – or in modern terms, the writing is in the cloud. After analyzing the possible scenarios of what this deal means to our clients, we can find nothing that addresses the fundamental and underlying problem both these firms face, in what is an almost certain long term decline brought on in large part from the insurgency of cloud companies. NET(net) believes this Dell EMC Merger ...
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