Category Archives: Markets

Markets

SaaS Survives

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We may be in a recession, but SalesForce.com has decided not to participate. Last week SalesForce submitted financial reports covering the three deepest months of the current downturn. From February through April, SalesForce saw their revenues rise 23% and their net income nearly double, climbing 92%. They also announced that SalesForce is the U.S. economy and that Marc Benioff would ascend to the papal throne. Defying economic gravity is considered a miracle on Sandhill Road. We should not be surprised by this quarter’s occurrence. When in recession, companies and consumers alike reduce risk while attempting to expand opportunity. SaaS offers a reduction in risk for implementing a CRM system. Since SalesForce is currently absconding with nearly 10% of all CRM revenues and is thus the undisputed heavyweight of the SaaS CRM industry, 3,900 new customers instinctively turned to them in early 2009. Another angle is that in tough economic eras … Continue reading →

Segmenting Inside

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Once in a great while you see a company doing what would be sane in other markets, but might be a Herculean improbability in their own. Yes, this has to do with the Linux market. Specifically this has to do with the embedded Linux market, a realm so fragmented that ‘chaos’ is too polite a description. It is also one of Linux’s silent success stories. Odds are that you are within five feet of one or more devices that have embedded Linux inside. Glancing about my office I count three (a printer, a router, and a cell phone, though I suspect the hub and print server at Linux-based as well). The embedded Linux market is fragmented along several vectors. The primary vector of discord is the application. Router makers and printer makers and cell phone makers have different interest and needs with embedded Linux. A while back my neighbors at … Continue reading →

Open Assaults

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IBM knows how to club competitors. Using Open Source for the betterment of your products is well understood. Using Open Source to grind your competitors face into the dirt is more of an art. Yet when done well it accomplishes the primary objective of competitive marketing – attacking your opponent’s strengths. For technology marketing tyros reading this, understand that attacking your competitors weaknesses is a losing game. Weaknesses are typically marginal worries to consumers. If your competitor’s weakness were serious then they would have never become a competitor. Even if the weaknesses were important, they can be corrected and thus your assaults will be short lived. Attacking their strengths however is to eat their souls. Your competitor’s strengths are what made them successful. Any time you can assault their strengths you attack the very foundation of their prosperity. Successfully making their strength into a weakness will do more harm than … Continue reading →

Opening Clouds

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Where is your cloud and how do you manage it? I toss that question at an occasional CIO and get borderline lucid answers. Most don’t yet use clouds but lust after them. Others leverage public clouds for non-privileged and mission-uncritical work. A scant few have cobbled together their own private clouds (p-clouds). P-clouds and rentable clouds are as similar to Sherman tanks and kangaroos. The promise of agile clouds is that you would be able to establish your own internal p-cloud and extended it ad hoc to external, rented cloud resources. Currently this requires either a significant amount of home grown engineering or adherence to one or another public clouds tools and management protocols. Either approach is anathema to IT. All radical growth spurts in IT technologies have occurred when open standards were popularized. UNIX killed MPE, VMS and other also-rans. Likewise Linux is slowly killing proprietary UNIX and blocking … Continue reading →

Blue Sunrise

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I openly speculated last January about who might buy Sun Microsystems since investors were trading shares for Sun’s cash value and little more. This morning Internet cables were buzzing over IBM’s alleged discussions to buy Sun for about double the current share price. If the rumors are true this will go down in the annals of the technology market as one of the great milestones, and perhaps not a good one. IBM is if nothing a shrewd entity. Outside of Congress, making a $6B investment is not trivial for anyone and IBM will certainly invest more wisely than the set of currently elected simpletons. Yet doubling the going price for all shares of Sun is a seemingly extravagant gambit and indicates that IBM sees something of value that the market does not, and they want to keep competitors away. What does IBM want to acquire? When walking down Sun’s product … Continue reading →

Virtual Position

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When I read rumors that Oracle is buying one of our former clients I wonder what we did right. Long ago and in the earliest phase of their interesting existence, we consulted to Virtual Iron. We helped with event management, presentations and removing kinks from their messaging when Virtual Iron was vending a lost cause. In those long ago days, Virtual Iron was selling sophisticated virtualization systems that not only let you divide one big server into many smaller servers (what most buyers perceive as virtualization) but they could glue several servers together via Infiniband switches and thus make many small servers look like one huge box. They were a few tiny steps away from private cloud computing, though they did not know it nor was there an industry buzz word to propel their value proposition. Virtual Iron was in what I call the ‘bottleneck bypass business’, which is always … Continue reading →

Partly Cloudy

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In recent conversations with industry activist and profiteers, I have concluded that there is a hole in one market and another market that is morphing from maturity. I sat with Robert Eve, the marketing VP at Composite Computing, during a recent IDC briefing. Composite is in the data virtualization business, making seemingly endless pools of unrelated data more usable. We mutually concluded that the advent of certain technologies (commodity hardware, exponentially expanding bandwidth, cloud computing) combined with near real-time business pressures will reduce or eliminate traditional extract, transform and load (ETL) operations. Things are moving fast in business and computing technology is changing data center options. If you are opening a business or already have one then you need SalonTouch spa software. Speed will overrule other decisions. Not everyone believes this trend.  I exchanged email with Bill Hewitt, the CEO at Kalido. His company — which lives in the more … Continue reading →