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 ...
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Has Ballmer’s regime sneakily turned Microsoft from the starry-eyed tech dreamers that Gates left, into flinty-eyed bloodsuckers now? As the stock brokerage commercials say, past performance is no guarantee of the future... but what else do we have to go on? So let's review some Microsoft history: After establishing market dominance with DOS (a story that itself is full of questionable business tactics), Microsoft quickly realized the value of bundling products together in order to claim market share and crowd out competitors. Microsoft introduced Office in 1990, the same year that the US Federal Trade Commission began an investigation into ...
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Competition is good for the consumer and in enterprise networking, it almost always leads to better deals for our clients. However, there continues to be a love affair with Cisco gear, both on the edge and the core that makes the job of introducing a legitimate competitive threat difficult. Cisco has great gear in most cases, particularly in the core, but at what price? Cisco is consistently more expensive apples to apples, with legitimate lower cost options from Brocade (including legacy Foundry), Juniper and Huawei, as the most notable examples, with comparable functionality that meets most enterprises’ need. Sure, there might be some ...
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Outsourcing has changed over the past few years and three things NET(net) is seeing in the market are: 1) A significant increase in the levels of client dissatisfaction with their outsourcing agreements 2) A focus on smaller, more manageable, strategic, multi-sourcing agreements with more specialized suppliers 3) Because of these and other factors, we have seen a tripling of the volume of outsourcing deals while overall outsourcing spend has not significantly increased. So, what does all this mean to you? It means that outsourcing has become more complex and more focused at the same time. Companies are moving away from large, monolithic ...
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Clients are constantly asking NET(net) about the cloud. They largely think it offers some benefits in terms of lower cost, quicker deployments, and higher subscription based elasticity. In a recent client survey, just over 80% of clients believed that these were the top 3 benefits of ‘moving to the cloud’. Clients also consistently express concerns about the cloud as well, and like the advantages, it comes down largely to three reasons. In this same survey, clients suggested that they were mostly concerned with security, virtualization, and wrongful data exposure. What’s really interesting, is that while the concerns are largely all good ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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Big Shocker: Microsoft is once again raising prices. Starting July 1, Microsoft’s raising substantially the prices it will be charging its UK business customers for software and services. Those clients with Enterprise Agreements (EAs) have seen a 25.7% price increase. Clients that contract with Microsoft under the Select or the Select Plus licensing model have seen a 24.6% price increase. Those clients that utilize Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud based offering have seen a 21% price increase. Those clients who have a Service Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA), or an Open Value or an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) agreement, have seen the ...
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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 ...
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