Oh! for the simple life of an Irish farmer. I am sure their days are filled with livelihood-threatening TLAs (three letter acronyms) like BSE, FMD and even the CAP. But they have one great asset on their side. By dint of many years tending the herd or tilling the soil, they know, using only their noses, what is suitable for spreading on the fields or what should be buried as far away as possible from the domestic well.
If only IT managers (and techno scribes) had a similar acute sense organ to sort out the residue of the IT industry! Analysts are no help. It is well documented that analyst bandwidth is correlated to pecuniary involvement with vendors. I am not being so churlish as to suggest pay-for-play is the rule. However, relationships are extremely cosy-enough to disguise wafts of stench that any Irish fieldhand would otherwise have little trouble identifying.
Even when a member of the analyst community rises up on his or her hind legs and declaims the sorrowful state of an entire product line or strategy, they often get it wrong. Recently a powerful screed penned by a prominent greybeard bemoaned the poor fit between available and aggressively marketed technology and the needs of the non-agrarian business sector.
The thrust of his argument was that IT strategy is upside down because big IT businesses know nowt about their customer’s business issues. Instead they seek to sell what is on their shelves as a balm for all ailments. Bushwah sez my nose!
It is not the case that the best funded and technically adept marketing organisations on the planet have singled out Irish businesses to bilk with bogus solutions that ill fit their needs. One has only to enquire one step further to appreciate the true bouquet and its source.
How do you think that those off-the-peg solutions came to be on-the-peg in the first place? The backroom boys in those self-same ‘omnipotent’ marketing teams spend a lot of time and effort divining just what is going wrong in business and leading their technical bods, sometimes kicking and screaming, in the direction of building something that will fly off the shelves instead of growing roots in a warehouse. They talk to users; they listen to users; they spy on their competitors; they rummage around their technology closets looking for a good fit.
They are merely human and sometimes expediency entangles the best of intentions. And we know that they lie 😉 However, a second line of enquiry also negates allegations of wilful mis-selling. How are we to characterise the competence of the IT management and corporate management that actually buys the damn stuff? While the best IT sales teams sell as hard as their cunning allows, somebody at the end user’s company has to draft and approve the purchase order. Ye are not all knaves!
I’ll bet that some are gullible and others have their pretty head turned by conference invites to Balearics, golfing in Marrakech or a barrel of Guinness but by and large most of the IT managers and CIOs that I have met will cheerfully accept the lavish inducements proffered and then make the best decision they can.
‘Thanks for the executive box at the Stadio Flaminio to watch the Italians get a taste of Murphy’s best (the one that does not come cold with a creamy head on it) but your offering is more than what we need now. We are going to go with an interim, less expensive solution that will be quicker to implement. If that ramps up nicely we will be back in a year’s time to re-evaluate your products which does the best for the company’s IT strategy and leaves open the possibility of a seat at Euro 2004 😉
Today’s IT industry would not exist if off-the-shelf products couldn’t maintain a place in the market. The previous era of IT practice relied on custom-coded solutions by the mainframe priesthood that were finished months or years after the well-researched request was initiated. That just simply would not work at today’s business pace. The only way to deal with the constant change in business opportunities, confounding legislation and the ebb and flow of commerce is to tailor a general-purpose package to suit idiosyncratic needs.
This does not mean that the assorted bandwagons of client/server computing, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), web services, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) or BPR (Business Process Re-engineering) are slovenly attempts to foist warped solutions on the unwary. IT managers must be intimately aware of their own business equations for correct application of any of the above.
Profit has always equalled revenues minus expenses in any business text I have ever opened. Some businesses can get a good crack from enhancing revenues by customer retention and others need a good dose of expense containment. Any business gets results from doing both. It’s YOUR priority call, not some smarmy BMW-driving, Rolex-wearing, Gucci-shod IT huckster’s! You can’t abrogate total responsibility for knowing your needs nor can you hide behind an ignorance of the features, functions and implementation gotchas of the trumpeted IT fix du jour.
Against this charge to ‘Know thyself’ you have the tools to evaluate Sun’s latest technology bonanza. Once upon a time it was Scott McNeely, Sun’s CEO, that told me himself: ‘A road apple (horse turd) is a road apple even if you put whipped cream on it.’ May the Bard forgive him. But Irish farmers and good Irish IT managers know just what he means.
Under the banner of Network Computing 03 Sun has released a bevy of servers, software, services and assorted workstation kitchen sinks that it feels are just what a broad swath of business needs in today’s razor-edged yet tepid business environment. There are some benchmark world records to decipher, the delayed arrival of its multi-architecture SunFire Blade servers to applaud, the appearance of SAN StorEdge products for the explosion in data volume not seen since the first milliseconds following the Big Bang, and a grab bag of systems management products and services. And an old strategy with some new twists.
Sun put the dot in dotcom, doncha know? However, the demise of dotcom as the wunderkind of business models has left Sun just a bit exposed. There is an all-pervading sense of meanness in IT buyers these days. Call it pre-war jitters, post-Millennium bug hangover, or whatever, there is a marked reluctance to splash out on new, faster, bigger and a focus on extracting value from current IT investments. Anything new had better be cheap!
In a world where commodity-commuting suppliers with consummate customer connection (like Dell) or those with broad and deep IT consultancy arms (like IBM) are doing well, Sun has hit a thin patch. Revenues are down and customers are looking askance at the company that seems to be only slowly moving towards commodity computing, begrudgingly getting on the Linux bandwagon and still flogging the Solaris for Intel platforms which, based on past sales, might have had its life support terminated years ago without lifting a customer eyebrow.
According to the NY Times, weather.com ran on 80 Sun servers two years ago. Today, gone are the lilac boxes, replaced with 123 Intel-based Linux servers. Weather.com says it saved $2.3 million in hardware and found that maintenance costs were lower, too. Adding insult to injury, Google, founded by one of Sun’s original gang of three, runs on Intel/Linux.
Sun’s hardly secret plan is to use its Unix-like Solaris operating system to retain old customers and spawn growth in new markets. Following the path once trod by SCO, Sun is bundling more useful software into its OS instead of adding it as extra cost options. Sun’s second thrust is to renew yet again the push to promote Solaris on Intel-based computers to displace the dreaded Windows and offer a more-professional-than-Linux alternative. It claims that it has been hiding Solaris’ stellar fire under a bushel and that everyone sees it as a hardware company first and not the team of belligerently brilliant software engineers (pointing emphatically at Java) that Sun itself knows it really is.
It is an argument that holds water, aside from the odd spill, and makes one eager to witness the execution of Sun’s plans. In the process of making its business bigger, Sun is taking on Microsoft, Intel, IBM, HP, the Linux horde and a lot of others. Its challenge is to out innovate them all and beat the low prices that the others are capable of forging based on economics of scale that are not available to Sun.
After ridiculing it for a long time, Sun now wants to leverage on the rise of Linux that it reads as an acceptance to consider non-Microsoft software. Sun seems afire with the commitment to offer Solaris on Sun Intel servers for less than Intel machines running Microsoft’s server software. Sun may be underestimating the new found enthusiasm and momentum for Linux that is also vexing Microsoft. But a good offence is almost as good as a good defence, eh?
It’s a close call whether Scott McNeely or Ireland’s other child of the Diaspora, US Secretary of State Colin Powell, is the most bellicose. Sun is not sparing in its criticism of business decisions that lead companies down the Wintel route instead of Sunwards. However, the outspoken critic of Microsoft’s lock ins will need to placate many that think the worst lock ins are available from companies that do both the microprocessor and the operating software. There is little disputing that some of the brightest minds in the IT industry park their SUVs and sports coupes in Sun’s Mountain View car park. Diligent sniffing of its last offering will be required to discern if this fresh load of Sun products would do better promoting the rose garden.
28/04/2003
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