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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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 ...
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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 ...
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Microsoft continues its market consolidation with price increases (and more to come). Who is surprised? In recent weeks, many Microsoft customers have felt outraged and blind-sided by Microsoft’s price increases and licensing changes for SQL Server and the System Center suite of management tools. Sadly, Microsoft’s actions are predictable, and consistent with their past behavior. NET(net) has long advised its clients that Microsoft’s long-term product bundling strategies are designed to help weaker products gain market share and adoption, until sufficient critical mass is reached that Microsoft can reap profits by raising prices and ...
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If there is one thing we’ve learned over the years in networking, it is not to underestimate the evolution of network capacity requirements over time or the complexity of managing the core networks that power our data centers. Thankfully we have a networking technology in Ethernet that has kept in step with our networking performance requirements, from the game changing 10Mb Ethernet 10BaseT, effectively replacing coax and token-ring networks in the 90s, to talk today of applications that will fill the emerging standard of 100Gb Ethernet. But is it a fit for every networking purpose, such as a replacement for Fibre Channel (FC) for instance ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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