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Jason Stamper's Blog
Enterprise IT and other ramblings from Jason Stamper, the editor of Computer Business Review (CBR) magazine.
100 most influential tech vendors: you have to be kidding
May 13, 2008
Today the analyst firm Aberdeen Group announced its list of the 100 most influential technology vendors for 2008. It’s bizarre. The full list, courtesy of Aberdeen, is below. And maybe you can’t blame the analyst firm for what respondents told them, but it certainly seems to me that respondents lost sight of the “business influence” element, and just picked their favourite or most familiar brands.
So here are a few ‘bizarrelights’:
+ Check Point, one of the most profitable security players (latest quarterly revenue $191.6m), is only in at number 100, below companies I have hardly heard of.
+ Apple is at number 16 – remember Aberdeen looked for “the Top 100 organizations that excelled at providing value to the business community”. How many enterprises have Apple investments that put Apple’s influence above the next 84 companies in the list?
+ Skype is at number 55 – how many companies see the influence of Skype in their enterprise? Skype is more influential in the enterprise than Symantec? NetApp? Informatica? Do me a favour.
+ Vonage is at 68. See Skype above.
+ Google is only at number 11, behind salesforce.com [salesforce.com latest quarterly revenue $217m, Google latest quarterly revenue $5.2bn. And don’t even start on the fact Google is less relevant in the enterprise, because not only do they have numerous enterprise offerings these days but their influence on consumers has affected the IT expectations of nearly every employee in any company.]
+ Ariba is at number 38 (revenue in latest quarter $80.5m), above people like CA (latest quarterly results $1.1bn), Tata, Novell, BMC, Progress and many more.
Now while I understand that people’s perception of influence is not the same as these companies’ actual success or lack of it, the size of the discrepancy between perceived influence and actual results – and the more sales a company has, the more customers they must have and the more investment those companies are making in their products – is pretty astonishing, in my view.
But that’s the fun thing about this kind of list: it is enlightening, surprising and infuriating in equal measure. Hit continue reading to see the full list of the Top 100 and more...
BlackBerry Bold: RIM’s iPhone killer?
May 12, 2008
The latest device from Research in Motion has more than a passing resemblance to the Apple iPhone, with the obvious addition of a QWERTY keyboard. But does it have what it takes to attack Apple's successful iPhone?
The 20 most useless British gadgets of all time?
April 30, 2008
A new survey has identified "Britain's Most Useless Gadgets", and there are a fair few surprises -- not least that some of the entries aren't British, or, to my mind, useless.
Anyway, how can it be a definitive list if it doesn't include Sir Clive Sinclair's electric vehicle of the 80s, the C5? The C5 had a range between charges as low as six miles, and you had to pedal to get it to go up hills. Little wonder Sinclair Vehicles ended up bankrupt.
Maybe an electric vehicle is not considered a gadget though? How are you defining gadget? Wikipedia says, "A gadget is a device that has a useful specific practical purpose and function. Gadgets tend to be more unusual or cleverly designed than normal technology. In some circles the distinction between a gadget and a gizmo is that a gizmo has moving parts, whereas a gadget need not have them." Ah, so the C5 is more a gizmo than a gadget.
Surprisingly, there weren't many products that are technology or IT-related. The highest ranking techno-gadget, indeed, is the Sony MiniDisc player, ranked as the fourteenth most useless gadget. I must say I was a bit thrown by that one, too.
First off, it's not a British product yet the survey says it sought to find "Britain's Most Useless Gadgets", and secondly, I can't quite see why it is such a useless product.
It may not be easy to buy the latest albums on MiniDisc, it's true, and you could argue the technology has been made obsolete by the iPod and its ilk. But the fourteenth most useless gadget? More useless, according to the survey, than egg slicers, electric tin openers and towel warmers?
I might have to start a MiniDisc supporters club in protest, although I would feel something of a fraud as I confess I have never been the proud owner of a MiniDisc (though if I had, I would have been very, very proud, and not kept thinking what a useless gadget it was, honest).
Besides, a MiniDisc player has moving parts, so doesn't that make it a gizmo, and not a gadget?
Anyway, what was the most useless gadget according to the survey?...
De-dupe becoming part of storage fabric?
April 23, 2008
When I met Brian Biles, co-founder and VP product management of storage de-duplication vendor Data Domain a few weeks back, I asked how long it will be before de-duplication technologies simply become part of workaday storage arrays.
“Long term, de-dupe is likely to become a storage fundamental, for all areas of storage,” Biles told me. It may be sooner than that...
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