Big fish eating little fish

Much has been told of the massive amount of value that is lost in the ever changing world of mergers and acquisitions - 75% failure is what I have seen reported. But when it happens to a supplier of your technology it can be quite devastating.

A story was released today in The Register that demonstrates the ugly side of the coin. A month ago Oracle purchased a company called "Virtual Iron" who were a lean and mean competitor to the VMware juggernaut and whose products were available in New Zealand. The usual fanfare was pushed out through the PR channels - "With the addition of Virtual Iron, Oracle expects to enable customers to more dynamically manage their server capacity and optimize their power consumption."

I can just see the warm and fuzzy messages going out through the channel ensuring that customers' investments were safe......and then Oracle pull the plug. OK so there are promises to consolidate the customers into their virtualisation solutions in the future but that'll take time and no doubt require a really scary upgrade.

Another set of IT users left high and dry on the sand bank of M&A!

This tale has a bigger impact on the industry than we think because if you are the person making the decision you have to consider the risk of committing to a smaller player in the market and their ability to support you in the future.

Sadly, if you follow this through to it's eventual conclusion you end back at....."Nobody got fired for buying IBM."....again!

Now let me just check has Oracle acquired another company recently........?

One of my favourite words....

Ah yes hubris. I discovered this word while I was working for the world's largest silicon chip manufacturer - funny that. The freedictionary describes it as: "Overbearing pride or presumption; arrogance" but it is usually assigned to the view of the world taken by corporations. And what better demonstrators of this than companies in the IT world.

A really good example of hubris is the "new and exciting" launch of Telecom's XT network here in New Zealand. This product has hit the streets here with a fabulously expensive advertising campaign using a rather weird looking Hamster from Top Gear.

What I love about these campaigns is their outright assumption that the services they are delivering with their "new" product are unique.

We've been roaming around the world seamlessly with one phone for a number of years, we've been using high speed networks for a few, in fact TC's early CDMA network was pretty fast anyway. We've been able to choose the latest phones from all the manufacturers in the world and, more importantly, we haven't had to add our contacts in every time we get a new handset.

So why all the fanfare for something we already have.....because their arrogance presumes that we have never seen it before.

Makes you wonder eh?

This is why you should never trust brochures, the reason somebody is telling you that they have a unique service is because you are the only person listening. If you're looking for something new it is your duty to challenge that statement and look beyond - you may be pleasantly surprised.

If you want a shock start looking around at open source software software or cloud computing services - a wild and wonderful world!

Now where was I?

Well I'm back...the mission was nowhere near accomplished "House of Cards" is a big book but such a good read I bought a copy. Who said libraries were bad for book sales?

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It might get quiet around here for the next four weeks!

Just a quick apology to all my smiling readers, that my blogging may come to a temporary halt.

Auckland library have just delivered me a brand new copy of "House of Cards - How Wall Street's Gamblers Broke Capitalism" by William D. Cohan. It's 450 pages of close typed wonderment describing the recent collapse of society as we know it.

Putting the link in I noticed that the American tag line is "A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street" I assume a less anarchic version for our friends on the other side of the Pacific. Hubris is one of my favourite words and seems to be a watchword for the corporations that we deal with in our industry.

Anyway it is very interesting reading so I'm storing up things to write about and will be back soon.