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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As expected, cloud computing is entering a price war phase, with Amazon and now Microsoft dropping prices recently. In this case, MSFT lowered prices for Office365 and for Azure only online storage costs. This marketplace has all the indicators of a classic technology cycle. Every week we are seeing press releases about new cloud capacity coming on-line; and suppliers of all categories are striving full speed to embrace this model in some way. What’s justifying all of this investment? A large part is the prospect of increasing customer lock-in. While CFO’s are enticed with the idea of variable cost structures, the cloud suppliers are ...
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Another dust-up in the news lately regarding a service called “OnLive” offering a full Win7 / Office experience to iPad users. It seems pretty clear that what customers really want is the Windows / Office experience on any platform, anywhere, and streaming (“VDI” by some definitions) seems like a reasonable way to do that. But, Microsoft prohibits that, at least in the way that OnLive implemented it. They are so serious about getting the word out that Joe Matz, Worldwide VP for licensing, posted a blog entry calling out OnLive by name: ...
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Microsoft is offering a new add-on option to Premier Support Agreements, called “Cloud Vantage Services.” The offering appears to be designed to address the most common customer concerns about Office365. For early-adopter customers, a service such as Cloud Vantage could serve to reduce the risk of adopting Office 365, smooth the transition and help the organization manage the change to a different way of infrastructure delivery. But this service also is an acknowledgement that “all at once” Office365 adoption is fraught with risk. Further, Microsoft has traditionally left this type of hands-on integration work to Partners. Even the PDF ...
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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 ...
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