Top 5 Influential IT Vendors: Then, Now and Bob Evans

I came across an interesting article in one of my favorite trade rags this morning. The author (Bob Evans) is attempting to identify the 10 most "influential" IT vendors. A word of warning: this article only contains five, so it's a bit of a teaser. Of course, it's a very bad teaser since he identifies his top five. So here they are:

5. Google
4. Oracle
3. Facebook
2. Apple
1. IBM

I believe Mr. Evans's (can I call him Bob?) intention is to get away from the notion that enterprise IT is the only game, or the most influential force, in town. In fact, the choices he makes seem to indicate very strongly that he believes IT is being driven by consumer technology, unless you need a database or some analytics.

So as a bit of an exercise, I asked myself if I could harken back to the glory days of October 2000, a mere ten months after the world did not disappear in a puff of Y2K inspired techno-smoke. Who would I have identified as the most influential IT vendors back then? So here's my retro 5:

5. Citrix
4. Sun
3. Dell
2. Quantum
1. Microsoft

I don't suppose there are any surprises there except maybe Quantum, but at the time they were pioneering NAS devices, and we were 100% bought in to that concept, especially since the devices had multiprotocol support (NFS and CIFS) and seemed to offer the possibility of hundreds of megabytes of space!

So were any of these companies ultimately influential? Let's take them one at a time.

Citrix:

They certainly looked like a sure thing back in 2000. This company seemed to have the answer for managing the distribution of applications through large enterprises with minimum staff. Pretty soon we would all be using thin clients and have our profiles living in what we called then "the network" and we insist now on calling "the private cloud".

Of course, it didn't quite turn out that way. PCs became so cheap that they competed directly with the thin clients. Management software for desktops matured in a hurry, substantially reducing the cost of maintaining a PC-based client. Users liked that they could download and run Webshots without taking out a server, or incurring the wrath of some network administrator. Citrix became a bit of a niche player, at least in my mind, handling situations where low bandwidth connections made ICA the best way to deliver information across a network. The company remains viable, but I don't really think of it as influential. I think by 2004, its star had clearly faded.

Sun:

I suppose Sun is the only company on both Bob Evans's list in 2010 and my list in 2000, sort of. Sun's vision of the network computer, its high performance servers, its chip technology and Java programming language seemed to make them a shoe-in for big influence.

This also doesn't seem to have panned out. Linux came along and simply killed Sun. Without the resources to become IBM, and without the truncheon-wielding lack of scruples to become Microsoft, Sun died on vine. I believe the Oracle buy-out will do wonders to revive some of the technology because I believe strongly in Larry Ellison's vision of the integrated application stack, especially as that stack becomes more and more transparent to all but the largest of datacenter managers who will be delivering cloud services, not hardware.

Dell:

What can you say about Dell? I think I actually got this one right, but it seems that it has done Dell no good at all. Dell's excellence in supply chain management has led to many imitators. No one who is selling commodity IT gear in any kind of volume can afford not to study Dell and what they have done.

Of course, it seems that once everyone learned these lessons, Dell was simply unable to compete. The lesson in my mind is that in the end, technology companies need to be in the business of selling technology. Reducing costs, providing user-friendly interfaces, these are important, but at the end of the day, what we all seem to want from our IT vendors is IT stuff. I suppose this shouldn't be a surprise, but it sort of is.

Quantum:

Well, if it means anything, I had to make sure that Quantum still exists as an independent company before writing this paragraph. They do. And I believe they are probably viable or perhaps even profitable. But I don't believe they were ever a serious player in the NAS market, even though they were delivering the technology extremely well in 2000. This was just too juicy of a proposition not to attract some serious venture capital as well as the big companies with lots to spend on R&D. Along came EMC and NetApp, and Quantum became a footnote.

Microsoft:

Who can deny their influence? They are, after all, a monopoly and have leveraged that monopoly both legally and illegally to extend their reach and grasp. I think I got this one right.

But MS also provides the perfect segue into my list of the five most influential vendors in 2010. Like MS in 2000, these are the companies I believe I cannot ignore. Their ideas matter, even if their futures may be limited.

5. BMC

The future of systems administration and network management will belong to the company that can develop systems to manage hybrid clouds. The key is the ability to switch cloud vendors for near zero cost. BMC has the right strategy and a technology lead that I believe it will exploit over the next few years to truly become the cloud management standard bearer. I believe their tools are the ones that will provide the pattern for all others to follow.

4. Salesforce.com

I like Facebook as much as the next guy, but Salesforce.com I believe is and will be significantly more influential. The model they have developed for the delivery of a key business application is the model of the future. Think of the APIs they provide, the integrations they make easy, their clever partnership with Google Apps. This is a company that has a clear strategy, an innovative model and an ability to execute.

3. Apple

Bob Evans and I agree on this one. Apple is the arbiter of IT chic, like it or not.

2. Cisco

I am really not sure how Cisco failed to make Evans's list. All these cloud services, and IP telephony connections require converged networks with massive bandwidth. Who provides the gear that makes this happen? Cisco does. But will they influence technology? Of course they will; the same way that the Pennsylvania Turnpike influences which gas stations get to sell drivers gasoline. This is not even taking into account their UCS and collaboration initiatives, which I believe are light years ahead of HP and Microsoft at this point. My one concern is that Cisco will cease to be the (more or less) benign dictator that they have been for the past five years or so. If they choose the Microsoft path (i.e., exploiting customers rather than helping customers) then they risk their influence. Companies and people will always find a way not to give their lunch money to the bully. Even if it means getting beat up a few times, they find a new way.

1. VMWare

Another amazing omission in my mind. I believe that VMWare will not just build but DEFINE the private cloud over the next three years. They are the only ones who can reasonably play in this space.

So that's my list. Let's hope I manage to do better than I would have in 2000.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Immediately after I published my previous post, my Internet connection at home went down. And it still has not returned. So as I finished writing my love letter to technology, I was left at the altar. Now I am once again glad I am a serious geek so I can quickly get past the "please reboot your router" phase of the tech support process. So much for being a happy user.

When Did Technology Become Fun Again?

A funny thing happened while I sat in my troglodyte cave working with cost models, business cases and service descriptions. Technology became fun again. I am not exactly sure when this happened. If past experience holds true, I would say I am about two years behind the curve. I plan to aggressively make up for lost time.

I keep asking myself, "What has changed?". Looking at the technology industry landscape, I would have to say that virtually nothing has changed. With one rather significant exception, everything that I am discovering in terms of technology has existed for years. Facebook, blogs, Sharepoint, RSS, the web, certainly nothing new there. So as Morrisey famously asked, "Has the world changed or have I changed?"

Moz, I guess it's me.

But the change is a little hard to see. I mean, I am still the same cynical curmudgeon that I was six months ago. I still have (roughly) the same job. I've moved to Malaysia, but I hardly see Kuala Lumpur as the vanguard of the technology revolution, even for someone as far behind the times as me.

I've given this some serious thought and I have come to a couple of conclusions. The first reason why I believe I am enjoying technology once again is because I am being encouraged professionally. It's not part of my job description, certainly, but the new management has been pushing me to see what new technologies can bring to the table, rather than focusing on the purely bottom line investigations that I have been working on for the last two years or so. Some of this is probably because changes in economic conditions have allowed the siege mentality of most large companies to ease a bit, but I think "management" (you know who you are) deserves much of the credit.

Another reason I am enjoying technology more is the significant exception I mentioned above: my iPad. This feels like something the Jetsons or the guys on the Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey should have. For every minor annoyance (why should I pay $0.99 to open zipped files?) there are 10,000 revelatory moments (for instance, the fact that I can type is blog on the thing...comfortably). It is a nice piece of technology that is fun to use, even when I am answering my work email with it.

But I think the most important reason that I am enjoying technology again is because I am much more of a user than I used to be. I am accustomed to being the administrator, and let's face it, that is sometimes no fun at all. I had gotten to the point when I could not tell you about most of the technologies I dealt with day-to-day. Everything looked like a box in a PowerPoint presentation.

I remember when I was a kid seeing a teeter-totter and being utterly fascinated. The principles of leverage and balance made me stare and think for long periods of time. But I don't think I ever actually got on one. It looked kind of scary to use, but I still wanted to know how it worked. I think IT became like that for me. I'm not 100% sure what happened, but now I am a user, and I am really enjoying it. I think the most important thing to hang onto at your work is a sense of play. Even if the toys are cool, I think we all get bored if we don't actually take them out and play with them for a bit.

I'm sure this will pass, and eventually I will get bored again, but for now, I am enjoying every second of it.

Seeing Around Corners

Every Friday, the Sports and Recreation Committee at my office sponsors a tennis game. I'm not very good, but in an attempt to get some exercise and to become part of the social scene at the office, I hitch a ride with a fellow player and make my way out on to the courts.

What I always seem to forget is that I am old. Two hours of tennis in the Malaysian heat is generally more than I can deal with. I am sitting on my couch in pain, waiting for my 10:30pm teleconference to begin.

Pain focuses the mind, and I was thinking about what I believe is the greatest compliment I can give a colleague. I think the rarest of skills is the skill of "seeing around corners." I am linking probably the single most influential article I have ever read, entitled "Seeing Around Corners", which is ostensibly about artificial communities, but I think there is a deeper message here. I'll let you figure out what it is.

http://bit.ly/9T23Hp

Let's hope this is fair use.....

Do nine men interpret? Nine men I nod.

Late night, but I leave with a link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nej4xJe4Tdg

Dan