Note to Microsoft: join up sales & marketing!
If MS really wants to be seen as a credible enterprise technology supplier it's going to have to work a lot harder than it has done in the production of the recent Office ads, now showing pretty much everywhere on billboards/TV as far as I can tell.
In case you haven't seen them, they depict groups of supposedly professional businesspeople (these are the people who fund purchases of Office, btw) as bumbling dinosaurs. Hmm. (Tim Bray gives a bit more of a prosaic response
here.)
But from Microsoft's point of view this should be seen as a double whammy: not only do the ads insult the very people that will likely help to drive sales (never a good idea, but unfortunately more common than it should be) - but there's a whole group of people at MS doing great work with customers, demonstrating the business value of "information worker" technology. These people really get it, and are helping customers to see how they can use productivity and collaboration tools to really make their businesses more productive and responsive. These ads are completely counterproductive. MS says that its new focus is on "demonstrating business value" of its technology to "business decision makers" but these ads just demean them and misunderstand the challenge.
MS Scorecard here: 1/10. Must try harder.
Attachmate and WRQ to merge
On April 18th the investment group that purchased leading legacy integration tools provider WRQ in 2004, announced that it had reached agreement to buy the only other sizeable independent legacy integration vendor in the industry, Attachmate.
That the newly-acquired WRQ should be “taken shopping” by its new owners should have surprised no-one: no investment group worth its salt would have been happy to just try and help WRQ grow organically, and this market has already seen significant degrees of vendor consolidation (just in the past few months, Neon Systems has bought ClientSoft and InnerAccess; and Software AG has bought Sabratec). But it is a bit surprising that the investment group would go straight to the only other “large” independent legacy integration tools company in existence, and look to combine the two.
A great many company combinations of this nature do ultimately fail to deliver value, either to investors or to customers (anyone who needs evidence of this should speak to veteran industry analyst
Richard Holway). What’s absolutely crucial for success, is that the investors realise that principally, the value of the combined company will continue to be founded on its ability to serve its existing very large base of customers extremely well. “Attachmate-WRQ” will not be, for some time at least, a company able to launch itself out into virgin market territory. Moreover a great many companies are already customers of both Attachmate and WRQ.
Our advice to customers of Attachmate and/or WRQ: make real efforts to engage with the new company once the merger is complete, and make your expectations and interests clear. Be open with the company about your plans, and invite them to jointly explain how they will be able to help. If they can’t tell you a coherent story, it’s time to turn up the heat.
Adobe buys Macromedia
Just a quick post to comment on the acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe,
announced today.
Not too long ago (between 2000 and 2002) the companies seemed to be spending most of their time slapping lawsuits on each other. Back then, Adobe was seriously keen to attack Macromedia's growing market share in web authoring - and it looked as if it may have had a chance. But in the past couple of years Macromedia has emerged as a major powerhouse and technology innovator, and the usability of its tools has propelled it to a dominant position in the area of online content authoring. Dreamweaver, Flash, Flash Lite, Flex, Contribute... all these are indispensable parts of today's online content experience.
Of course Adobe is still king when it comes to high-end creative design tools, and also in its ownership of the technology which powers the now-ubiquitous PDF. The result is that many online creative professionals now see the two companies' suites as largely complementary, but market-leading in their own areas.
It's clear that the acquisition makes sense for Adobe, which still hankers after the kinds of capability that Macromedia demonstrates. But Macromedia is turning in excellent financial performances and its new products are proving very popular, particularly with enterprise customers - signs which show that it could have continued to grow well as an independent entity, I think. So the big question in my mind is - what's in it for Macromedia?
Killer app for Sun in identity management?
When Sun announced its acquisition of Waveset Technologies in November 2003, I was more than a little sceptical, given the company’s chequered history when it comes to software acquisitions (remember what happened to NetDynamics, Kiva, Forte, etc?).
Last week I had the opportunity to get an update on Sun’s identity management business from Sara Gates, VP of Identity Management Marketing, and Don Bowen, Director of Directory Services. It seems my initial scepticism was misguided.
With Waveset, Sun clearly sought to plug a gap in its identity management portfolio with the acquisition of well-respected user management and provisioning technology. But whereas Sun has historically adopted a technology-first approach to such acquisitions, leading to significant re-engineering and loss of key personnel from the acquired company, this time it tried something different. Instead, the company adopted a market-first approach, which culminated in a dedicated identity management business unit with full P&L responsibility, with Waveset personnel in the driving seat across sales, R&D, marketing etc.
It seems to me that this is due in no small part to the management and political skills of the Waveset team. The fact that Sun’s software marketing across the board is now run by the former president and founder of Waveset, and that identity management is the number two growth and investment area for Sun’s software business (behind only Solaris), provide testament to this.
Within three months of the finalisation of the acquisition, the combined portfolio of 8 products had been rationalised to 3. The products were launched three months later, in June 2004, and by the end of the year the business unit had doubled revenues across the identity management portfolio. The existence of the a dedicated identity management salesforce and the cultivation of a number of effective partnerships with systems integrators such as Pricewaterhouse Coopers and Accenture – contrasting once again with the history of Sun’s software business – has undoubtedly contributed to this success, complementing the market-led approach following the acquisition.
Identity management is potentially a great focus for Sun, because the technology is the foundation for business infrastructure that is truly driven by the increasing level of internetworking. If “the network is the computer”, then identity management is what makes the computer a mature, trustable proposition. The Waveset folks really get this: they see that the emergence of highly distributed and heterogeneous service-based IT architectures requires an approach to authorisation, authentication and access control that breaks down historical application-centric stovepiped solutions. Identity management must be delivered as a set of similarly distributed, interoperable services.
I don’t think it’s all going to be plain sailing for Sun though. Despite the success of the acquisition to date and a clear vision for the future, the identity management business unit will have to work hard to exploit these emerging opportunities. In the period since the Waveset acquisition many of the pure-play identity management players have been acquired: TruLogica and SelectAccess by HP; Netegrity by CA, Calendra and OpenNetwork by BMC; and, most recently Oblix by Oracle. Enterprises are looking to consolidate the number of vendors they deal with and as a result may well prefer to acquire identity management as part of a broader systems management/software infrastructure/enterprise application solution. Sun lacks credible solutions in these areas and so its identity management business unit is operating largely as a pure-play.
Techno-determinism alert! Shhh - nobody mention 4GLs...
I was on a conference call with some representatives from IBM last night, where they were talking about
professional services offerings aiming to help customers "implement SOAs" (I'm not even going to get started on how that phrase sounds all wrong to me - that's something for later). One of the supposed benefits of the result of these services, we were told, will be that "business people are able to compose services into new applications, extend existing services, and so on".
Woah! Hold on. Is IBM sure about this? I've heard this before - and it wasn't true then. Has anything changed in the meantime? I don't think so.
Back in the early 1990s when I was working for what was once known as a "big 6" consulting firm, my best friend was working for Oracle as a consultant. On a number of occasions he tried to convince me that Oracle's CASE tools and "4GL" (or "fourth generation language") would mean the end of the corporate programmer: business software development would be done either by ISVs like Oracle - or by business analysts within enterprises. I didn't believe him - or Larry Ellison's hype - then, and I still don't believe it now. Oh, and excuse me, but wasn't this also supposed to be an outcome of COBOL - in the 1970s? Business analysts doing all the work?
So I have a nervousness when people say such things - because they have a habit of transforming from nuggets casually tossed-about marketing-speak into that most dangerous of things: "received wisdom". And by the way, the resurgence of this thinking isn't just coming from web services and SOA - but also from other material I've read concerning, for example, Microsoft's very interesting work on
software factories and domain-specific languages.
Saying that technology riffs like SOA or innovations like software factories will lead to businesspeople getting intimately involved in development of IT systems, looks to me like a potentially dangerous example of what Ovum analyst
Gary Barnett calls "techno-determinism" - the (sometimes arrogant) technology-centred assumption that just because a technology exists to make something technically feasible, that's what will happen.
All these things are "good medicine" (just as 4GLs were and still are, by the way) - they lead to software tooling environments in which the flexibility to create anything and everything, is consciously traded-off against more productivity within a particular context - which is just what you sometimes need. But software technology availability alone does not, and never will, drive significant change in the way that people within companies work with software - and that's what is required if we are to really ensure that businesspeople play active roles in specifying and developing systems to support business goals. Businesspeople can and should be involved in software development and integration work, and there are some areas which are more amenable for them to be involved in than others. But business involvement requires something far harder than technology invention - the will from all sides (within both business and IT organisations) to drive and support organisational and cultural change.
