Steven Zolman

Sep. 24,2012

This month, NET(net), the market leading IT Investment Optimization firm, is celebrating its 10-year anniversary. This is a meaningful milestone considering only 2 out of 100 companies make it to 10 years. It all started with a simple but brilliant business model crafted by NET(net)’s Founder and CEO, Steven Zolman. Steve’s mission for NET(net) was and is to be the premier source of IT supplier market intelligence to help our global clients optimize their IT investments, agreements, and relationships with key technology suppliers. Reflecting on the last 10 years, it has been an amazing run advocating for our client’s needs and creating ...

Steven Zolman

Jul. 23,2012

Much has changed since our first detailed analysis of the talent management markets back in 2008. The software oligopoly of SAP and Oracle have significantly changed their views from their previous position that HR software was best served up as part of a monolithic software suite that was on premise in their customer’s data centers to now offering cloud solutions through SuccessFactors and Taleo by acquisitions, respectively. Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison is sort of infamous for his outright dismissal of the cloud, only to later capitulate on his earlier provocative statements and launch Oracle high into the cloud with both arms up as most ...

Steven Zolman

Jul. 23,2012

In talks with clients, industry analysts, company insiders, investors and others, everyone seems to agree that Steve Ballmer has done a terrible job as Microsoft’s CEO. Mr. Ballmer says he plans to retire in 2018, but with lukewarm support from the board, damaged credibility with partners, lost trust with employees, and constant outside criticism - it’s unclear if he can hold on that long. While leading Microsoft through a time when some of the most innovative and spectacular technology advances occurred (e-readers, cloud computing, social networking, smartphones, tablets, and consumer stores just to name a few), Microsoft has failed to ...

Steven Zolman

Jun. 18,2012

As a global company, NET(net) works with many clients in virtually all geographies and industries. In the process, we have the ability to see and federate market intelligence that no one company could possibly see on its own. This federated market intelligence becomes extremely valuable as we see trends in industries or geographies, or with particular suppliers or even with particular technologies. When NET(net) sees these changing market conditions, we leverage this market currency to provide our clients with market leading strategies to unlock and harness more value. One of the emerging opportunities for market arbitrage is to leverage ...

Steven Zolman

Jun. 18,2012

Organic Contracting vs. Traditional Contracts What is Organic Contracting? Fresh Healthy and Growing Evolving with a changing future Used to make organizations more effective at working together Traditional Contracts Stale Artifacts of the relationship Relics of the originating transaction Used to form polarizing positions for disputes and litigation Which do you prefer? Most client organizations have difficulty effectively managing their supply chains in a way that maximizes both economic and strategic value, and most supplier organizations have difficulty developing, and sometimes even retaining their existing customers. One technology ...

Steven Zolman

May. 16,2012

Note: Updates to this article linked below... IBM’s first female CEO, Virginia “Ginni” Rometty, is in after Sam Palmisano parachutes out with $127 million, but not until he leaves a wake of wreckage in his trail. Ginni will have big challenges to overcome if she is to be successful leading IBM, and in this blog, I will outline the Top 10 Reasons Why Ginni Rometty Will Fail as IBM’s new CEO. 1. IBM Forgot Who They Were. The “M” in IBM is for Machines. Machines for International Businesses; that is who IBM was. Who is IBM today? Somewhere along the way, IBM figured out that it was much cheaper to sell services than it was to produce goods, and ...

Steven Zolman

Apr. 24,2012

Many of our clients continue to be furious about their inability to effectively manage the economic value of their ongoing support costs for major software platforms like SAP and Oracle. Clients are often frustrated that as they deploy and consume the technology, integrate it into their environment, develop a center of excellence for maintaining the value of the ongoing solution, and as their support calls go down, and the critical nature of their support needs diminish, their annual maintenance costs continue to go up, year after year. During the past several years, many clients have taken a closer look at these costs, and among other ...

Steven Zolman

Mar. 23,2012

You hear it all the time… Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), but what does it really mean? How is it really defined? What is the difference between IaaS, and PaaS, and SaaS? How does it differ to what we have done before? Well, I think all those questions and more are answered with the following graphic. If you start with the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) stack, you see that a supplier provides networking, storage, servers and virtualization, while you manage the platform and the application. If you then move up to Platform as a Service (PaaS), you see that in addition to ...

Steven Zolman

Mar. 23,2012

Suppliers offering software as a service (SaaS) solutions via ‘cloud’ computing, enable clients to pay a subscription for access to the software rather than making huge capital investments in software licenses and infrastructure, as well as the accompanying costs for systems integration services that often are 3 to 5 times of the originating investment. It’s quite clear that SAP and Oracle are now taking a much greater interest in this market. Perhaps the event that memorializes this interest most convincingly is the recent acquisitions of employee performance management SaaS providers, SuccessFactors by SAP and Taleo by Oracle. In stark ...

Steven Zolman

Jan. 30,2012

At the end of November, 2011, Oracle reported its Fiscal Q2 results, and for only the 2nd time in the last 5 years, reported a sequential reduction in annual maintenance income. See chart below: This is a significant development, mostly because of how Oracle charges for maintenance. When Oracle sells software licenses, it also includes the first year of annual maintenance at 22% of the net license value – and there is no option to ‘unbundle’ and not pay the first year maintenance charge. So, if Oracle sells $2 billion of software in a given quarter (which it roughly did in Q2 of Fiscal Year 2012), that means Oracle would also gain $440M in ...