Category Archives: Market Trends

Trends in various markets

Appliance Apocalypse

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The days of appliances for software distribution are numbered. I have held suspicions about the long-term viability of appliances, which for the uninitiated are servers shipped to customers with software suites pre-installed. As servers became commodities and thus a minor part of the total cost of deploying a solution, many bright vendors realized that they could make customers happier (less deployment work) and reduce tech support expense (fewer customer deployment mistakes) by bundling everything on a box that could be racked, powered-up and added to the local network.  This also generated a great deal of customer good will through rapid success with the product, which in turn generated good buzz, more recognition, more sales, etc. Appliances however predated mass acceptance of virtualization and clouds, which have removed much of the value add of appliances. Even small organization rack all new servers with virtualization installed. The reasons for doing so are … Continue reading →

Openly Mobile

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The mobile handset market tipping point has arrived, and it is a wonderful thing to watch. In very short order (relatively speaking) the mobile market has seen: Google/Android advance a Linux mobile operating system Symbian convert to Open Source Motorola release Eclipse-based mobile development tools Verizon open its network to certifiable devices not sold by Verizon Wi-Fi handsets are now commonly sold by network carriers, eliminating some data network revenues In short, the mobile market has opened up and this trend will accelerate (which is seemingly impossible, but I never bet against an avalanche). Two dominate forces are causing this to happen: competition and customer resentment. In a rare moment of governmental lucidity, regulatory agencies in charge of frequency allocations made sure that no company could monopolize the cellular industry. This came as a huge surprise to AT&T who is unaccustomed to real competition, and it showed in their perpetual … Continue reading →

SaaS Surprises

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Who would have thought Oracle would lead the SaaS market. Not that I hold perfect confidence in the source of these numbers, but a report at venture capital focused SandHill.com shows Oracle at the #1 slot for companies using and considering vendors for SaaS deployments. In fact, top-shelf companies fill the top shelves of the SaaS vendor list. Oracle, SAP, Microsoft are all players. The early-advantage entry — SalesForce.com — scores a trailing 11% compared to Oracle’s 16% and Microsoft’s 14%. Sarah Friar — the Goldman Sachs analyst who wrote this report — tells me that the focus of the survey was at the application level. I would have automatically believed her numbers had  databases and infrastructure management tools been included. But focused on applications, Oracle’s dominance caught me by surprise. This spells bad news for SaaSy start-ups. Mature markets are dominated by an average of three vendors. This is … Continue reading →

Sinking Satyam

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I recently gave a talk at the Software Licensing and Marketing (SLAM) conference where I painted a dower and gloomy picture for technology marketing this and next year. Seems I may have been overly optimistic. Though not yet officially proclaimed, we are in a recession. If my wet cocktail napkin math is any good, we will in this recession for quite some time — well into next year. Oddly though, in the earliest quarters of this recession some multi-national tech companies (Oracle, IBM, etc.) reported amazingly good sales growth. And this will be a short lived phenomenon as the recession spreads. Dig into their numbers. For example, IBM recently reported an 11% sales growth. But if you subtract the effects of the falling U.S. dollar, IBM’s sales grew a mere 4%. Granted, any real growth in the early part of a recession is a Good Thingâ„¢. But for an industry … Continue reading →

Oracle Roars

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You have to give Larry Ellison credit. When he makes up his mind to do something, he’ll take on the biggest and the baddest in order to win. He faced down the Federal government when he acquired most of the competitors in the ERP market in one massive gulp. And he swallowed them with very little apparent corporate indigestion. Now Larry has set his sight on the king of SaaS and arguably of CRM, pointing both barrels on SalesForce.com. Given my first encounter with SalesForce tech support this morning, I find myself on the verge of urging Ellison on. Aside from being a hosted offering based upon the bones of Seibel CRM, there is little newsworthy about the product itself except for the integration of some social media flavored features. For example, any object in the data (a contact’s name for example) can have a “sticky note” slapped on it, … Continue reading →

Flashback

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An alleged friend of mine reminded me of the TRS-80, the first computer I ever owned outright. He mentioned that old machine while I was talking to him on my cell phone. So I decided to look-up the specifications of the TRS-80 and my cell phone, and show how much computing technology has changed in 30 years.   TRS-80 HTC 8925 Delta Processor 1.7 Mhz 400 Mhz 5882% Memory 4 KB 125 MB 3125000% Video Rez 128 x 48 240 x 320 1250% Footprint 16" x 8" 4.4" x 2.3" 8% Price (1978 dollars) $599 $162 27% Datacom None GSM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB Now imagine where we will be in 2038.

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Commoditized Consolidation

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I have written often about how the technology industry is commoditizing itself. I have also written about how consolidation is an inevitable process in every industry. Now we see how the two work together and create what some might view as the End of Days (of course those same people had apocalyptic visions when Microsoft announced NT). The big news of the day, week, month, and thus far the entire year is that Sun Micro (of all people) is buying MySQL for a cool billion dollars. So much for Mister Mickos growing rich slowly. This takes the world’s most popular DBMS (in terms of number of installations) and gives it a global sales and support team. Not bad for a hardware company. (The wisdom of forfeitting 8% of Sun’s current market capitalization is suspect however — you can buy a lot of offshore programmer time for a bill) MySQL, like … Continue reading →