‘The Most Wonderful Time of the Year’ is a popular holiday song and was written by Edward Pola and George Wyle in 1963. It was popularized in North America by singer Andy Williams that same year on his television show by the same name. However, we didn’t have to do much research to learn that the inspiration for that song had nothing to do with the 4th quarter for most business leaders and their respective companies. Anecdotally, we believe most business leaders might say it’s the most *stressful* time of the year, especially for publicly traded companies – most of whom have their fiscal year end aligned with the calendar year end of ...
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Like a party no one wanted to go to, the COVID pandemic dragged many IT Executives into (over) spending on technology that was not planned for. In the frenetic pace to ‘keep the lights on’, expenditures were made without the scrutiny they may have normally received pre-COVID. Supporting all the work from anywhere (WFA) initiatives including conferencing, PCs, and remote access software and hardware were all added to the mission critical initiatives already underway, like digital transformation and cloud migrations siphoning money away from those other priorities. As you start planning for your 2022 budgets, you may just now be realizing and ...
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The news is rife lately with security breaches and ransomware attacks. The U.S. company Colonial Pipeline was among one of the high profile cases given the impact on business and consumers across the country. There have been several others such as JBS USA food processor, Ireland’s HSE (Health Service Executive) which manages health care system, Acer and many, many more. As an NBC news item recently put it, Cyber Security staff are barely hanging on and not able to keep up with the barrage of attacks. Its clear that for the short term, the opportunities for criminals to make vast sums of money are simply too good to resist and will likely ...
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Cloud is an integral part of almost every company's strategic technology portfolio. As legacy migrations continue and cloud spend increases across every industry, its never been more critical to understand both your specific cloud investments, and the suppliers (AWS) that drive them. Only those that fully understand these market dynamics will enjoy the competitive advantage that comes with informed insight. Conversely, those who fail to comprehend their waste, overspend and the market dynamics behind it, are doomed to escalating spend, blown budgets, and lagging transformation efforts. Below we give you that market insight, updates on AWS as ...
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The IT landscape in Financial Services is changing rapidly. Regardless if they want to be industry leaders, fast followers of reactors, the ever-spreading cost base for Financial Services Companies leaves less budget available for capital investments in new technology, driving a vicious cycle of increased operating cost. In the drive to enact transformational change, Financial Services Companies should seek out the benefit from low hanging fruit to reduce current Opex. According to a PwC Global FinTech survey, 81% of CEOs are concerned about the speed of technology change, which is more than any other industry sector. Thousands of startups ...
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The end of year mania is underway as sales professionals from some of the largest tech companies on the planet try to capture and fill their Q4 quota. When such a substantial portion of a sales rep’s income rests on their ability to separate company dollars from your budget, it’s no wonder we often witness such unbridled aggression this time of year. It can be personally traumatic for salespeople as they sit in their weekly (sometimes daily) sales meetings with their respective teams, while management tears apart their sales opportunities and deals often in front of their peers with questions like: What is the status of deal x/update on ...
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If you are like me, you have been receiving an avalanche of email notifications from every company you’ve ever done business with letting you know how they are responding to the Covid-19 crisis. Did I really need to know how my auto mechanic is responding to the epidemic? Probably not at the top of my list. However, if you can get through the noise, there have been some legitimate offers to help companies support their teams and customers through the crisis. Most of these offers are in the form of free services and software for an extended period of time (30-60-90 days and more). Below, we’ve compiled a list of twenty-three companies and ...
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‘The Most Wonderful Time of the Year’ is a popular holiday song and was written by Edward Pola and George Wyle in 1963. It was popularized in North America by singer Andy Williams that same year on his television show by the same name. However, we didn’t have to do much research to learn that the inspiration for that song had nothing to do with the 4th quarter for most business leaders and their respective companies. Anecdotally, we believe most business leaders might say it’s the most *stressful* time of the year, especially for publicly traded companies – most of whom have their fiscal year end aligned with the calendar year end of ...
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Over the past 16 years, we’ve seen almost every way possible for an organization to lose value in their technology supplier arrangements, agreements, and relationships. Sometimes these situations arise from external forces that leave little in the way of options like mergers, acquisitions, or litigation. Many times, however, we find that organizations could have improved if only they had a few key insights. If a company is willing to take the necessary steps to acknowledge where they have shortcomings in information, expertise, and experience, they could avoid many of these pitfalls. It’s difficult to know what you don’t know, and as a ...
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The latest casualty in what some consider the emerging trade showdown between the USA and China has come in the form of ZTE, who has announced they have ceased ‘major operations’. On April 16th, 2018, the U.S. Department of Commerce banned American companies from exporting parts to ZTE. Given that 25%+ of the components that make up ZTE equipment comes from U.S. manufacturers, ZTE was forced to shut down its production lines. While most people are aware that ZTE manufactures mobile handsets, most were not fully aware that the bulk of their revenue comes from telecom exchange, optical transmission, and other tier one communications equipment. ...
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