Open Source Weblog

CBR’s take on the latest Open Source news.

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...

Continue reading "100 most influential tech vendors: you have to be kidding"

Posted by Jason Stamper at 04:31 PM | Comments (0)

 

Virtualisation CEO says virtualisation is becoming commodity
May 12, 2008

I caught up with the CEO of virtualisation and data centre automation player, Parallels, recently. What an interview it was.

The Russian-born co-founder of SWsoft, which changed its name to Parallels in December last year, is not one to stick to the marketing script, which is always refreshing in a CEO. But what Serguei Beloussov had to say about virtualisation, which still accounts for over 50% of the firm’s revenue, surprised even me.

“I don’t believe that the product category of virtualization will survive longer term,” he told me. “Users don’t want infrastructure, they want applications.”

Beloussov: mad as a hatter or just ridiculously honest?

Continue reading "Virtualisation CEO says virtualisation is becoming commodity"

Posted by Jason Stamper at 04:02 PM | Comments (1)