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Jason Stamper's Blog: May 2008 Archives
Sinequa says Microsoft buying Fast is a boon
May 30, 2008
I caught up with French enterprise search start-up Sinequa recently in London, where it opened an office in December. Over a rather fine breakfast at the popular Villandry Restaurant, I quizzed the firm's new UK country manager Colin Hadden about life, the universe and everything.
Hadden said Microsoft’s acquisition of Norwegian enterprise search player Fast can only be good for its own business, because it means one fewer enterprise search specialists to compete with: “It’s one less European competitor, and it also helps to vindicate this market,” he said.
He noted that Microsoft’s acquisition of Fast – the Redmond-based firm paid $1.2bn for Fast in January this year – will help to generate additional column inches in the press about enterprise search, and is also as he put it, “an admission [by Microsoft] that they couldn’t build this themselves – that enterprise search is not an easy thing to build.”
But won’t Microsoft quickly move to make the Fast technology part of its SharePoint platform, thereby helping to commoditise the search market, just as it intends to commoditise the virtualization market by making it part of Windows Server?
“My belief is that if Microsoft could package Fast, make it as quick to implement as people require, and offer it as a free part of SharePoint Server, that would be quite destructive for us,” said Hadden. “But there are a lot of ‘ifs’ in that statement. The fact they are buying Fast also shows they realize that enterprise search is hard to do well.”
Sinequa came out of an academic project in France in the early Nineties, and even today most of its customers are based in its native market. But it says it’s growing fast (no pun intended), prompting it to open its UK office in London last December.
The firm says it added over 40 new customers last year. It says it’s profitable, multiplied in size by five times between 2004 and 2007, and had a growth rate of over 80% during the last two years... [click Continue Reading below for more on this entry]...
Hadden: opted for eggs on toast at our breakfast meeting. I went for a bacon sarnie.
ASG On Verge of Massive BSM Acquisition
May 28, 2008
I caught up with Allen Systems Group (ASG) founder and CEO Arthur Allen recently, and he told me his firm is on the verge of the largest acquisition in its history.
"We're already in negotiations to do another acquisition, of a company with sales in the region of $250m to $275m annually," Allen told me.
ASG is one of the largest privately-owned software companies in the world, and during its 22-year history it has made over 30 acquisitions. With its roots in mainframe performance management products, the company evolved into systems management, and now puts itself in the business service management (BSM) camp.
Allen is not yet ready to disclose the name of the company it is in negotiations to acquire, not least because the firm in question is publicly held, and listed on Nasdaq...
Compuware 2.0? Led Zeppelin? Am I dreaming?
May 16, 2008
I don’t mean to be cruel, but I do have to wonder what went through Compuware’s mind this month when it announced it is transforming itself into Compuware 2.0. With the new tagline for the company, “We make IT rock around the world”, you would be forgiven for thinking the firm thinks it is the new Apple or Nintendo, not a firm that does mainframe software, application and IT service management, IT portfolio management and services. The company has even chosen a set of guitar plectrums to jazz up its new logo.
I’m all for companies reinventing themselves. I greatly enjoyed it when E.piphany, after years successfully riding the dot-com hype in the CRM market in the late nineties, eventually dropped the dot to become plain old Epiphany. At its peak it bought Octane for $3.2bn. By July 2003 it was bought by SSA, its quarterly loss of $9.4m out of all proportion with its sales of just $22m, dot or no dot.
But visit Compuware’s site www.wemakeitrockaroundtheworld.com and you will see what I mean: it’s all a bit full on. Comparisons with Led Zeppelin. Guitars. Mucho rock and/or roll.
Worse still, the company seems more downbeat about its former self than it has any right to be. COO Bob Paul is featured saying that, “We have limited brand equity outside our client base and our corporate identity is frankly none existent.” Having survived to reach its 35th anniversary this year, and with over 23,000 customers including 80% of the Fortune 500, does it really matter if it’s only well known by its own customers?
I’m hoping to talk to Bob Paul next month to find out what Compuware 2.0 really means, and to find out whose idea it was to make guitar plectrums part of the company’s new identity. Rock on.
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?
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