My travels throughout the IT industry over the past month brought me up against two very different companies at very different stages of their development, but each with big plans for the future.
The first was Google, the new darlings of technology-stock watchers, whose youthful billionaire founders were in Dublin to open its new European headquarters. The second was BMC Software, of whom the average person in the street might ask: ‘Who?’
Each company represents a different face of the IT industry. Google is known to everybody who is currently surfing the Internet. Its search engine is for many the default way to look for information now. So much so that it has produced a new verb ‘To google’ for the modern vernacular in a way that other search engines never did. When did you ever hear everybody say that they were ‘Yahoo-ing’ or ‘Altavista-ing’ for something?
BMC’s forte, on the other hand, is systems management software. It is well known to those who administer heavyweight IT installations, typically built around mainframe computers. It’s all worthy stuff, but not the sort to set the pulses racing.
Our tour around Dublin’s GooglePlex, while waiting to listen to its founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, was something of a trip back in time, if only about five years. The chill-out room, with its brightly coloured bean bags and plastic seating, the promise of the games consoles and wide-screen TVs that would be installed when the building is finished, the youthful casually dressed workers and
the tales of how many of them are dollar millionaires based on the stock they hold in their own company—all so 1990s. For a moment you might have thought you were back in the certainty of the dot.com boom before it all went bad.
This was reinforced when the formal proceedings got underway. No interviews with the hoi-polloi press for Sergey and Larry. Instead, there was a fake ‘Questions & Answers’ session with celebrity interviewer John Bowman, which allowed the assembled throng to admire Brin’s strange spring-heeled footwear and to listen to tales of how exciting it is to be an Internet billionaire.
Later, the local press got to meet some less senior management who spoke vaguely of ‘R&D projects’ without wanting to be drawn on what direction these research initiatives were likely to take, or what sort of products they were likely to produce.
Clearly, Google wants to position itself in the public’s perception as one of those wacky optimistic ‘New Economy’ companies whose success is based on the brain power and vision of a few technical geniuses and whose prospects in these pioneering times are unimaginable. We’ve been here before.
Which is not to say that Google is completely fluffy. Its website is one of the most familiar in the world. Its ability to tie relevant advertisements to the subjects about which visitors are enquiring has the potential to turn it into a new breed of media heavyweight whose fortune is founded on that mostfundamental of media
propositions: that advertising follows an audience. If every computer user in the world is visiting your page and telling you what they want to know about, and you can immediately place them before a paid advertiser, your fortune is made.
BMC, whom I met in Paris, comes from another era, but it is also intent in making some waves in the rather more tightly confined market in which it operates. It deals in systems management software, an area dominated as of now by some of the world’s largest IT companies like IBM, with Tivoli; HP with OpenView and Computer Associates with Unicenter.
However, it is also a market that is hugely fragmented, with dozens of tiny companies offering some sort of management tool to help you perform backups, monitor network traffic or application performance, partition and provision disk drives and keep an eye on vital pieces of hardware.
BMC’s CEO, Bob Beauchamp, related to me a typical headache suffered by one of his larger customers who has to deal with ‘two OS vendors, two server vendors, one ERP vendor, one CRM vendor and 52 systems management vendors.’ It’s a market that is ripe for consolidation and BMC is intent on doing just that. ‘We want to do to the systems management market what SAP did to ERP,’ he said.
The sense being that what SAP brought to its customers was a consistent view of a range of modules that customers could select according to their needs and integrate to best serve their business requirements.
Which, in a sense, is what the likes of Tivoli and Unicenter already offer, but Beauchamp insists that dependence of both these larger rivals on ‘framework’ architectures to deliver integrated systems management imposes a significant overhead on customers’ infrastructure. Instead, he says, BMC’s software, based on a common data model and workflow engine, is particularly well suited to enabling specialist companies provide systems management services to customers via service level agreements which, in these days of outsourcing and concentrating on core competencies, is an attractive proposition for many people.
The company has been in acquisitive mode over the past few years buying up the likes of Marimba, for its configuration and change-management technology; and Remedy for its service-desk technology in the past two years alone.
None of this will make BMC become a household name in the way that Google has, but if its strategy is successful, it could have a major effect on a systems-management software sector that is probably due for some consolidation.
I’ll be Googling to see how it all pans out.
06/12/04</p>
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers