deal architect

More on Rebates

Cingular sent my son a text message it had received the rebate form for his new phone. Neat.

But the message says it would take the payment 10-12 weeks to process. New age company. Old age processes. Angioplasty candidate.

Update: Zoli points to another process which is broken in telecommunication vendors - their call center service.  Is that not like their "show room"?

Going Private

One of my 2006 predictions was private equity firms would target a number of services firms like CSC.

But as this BusinessWeek cover story describes private equity is targeting a number of industries in a huge way around the world and attracting heavyweights like Jack Welch, ex GE and Lou Gerstner, ex IBM. In an interview, Lou explains two drivers for private equity- too much capacity in every industry and the need to restructure. And the fact that technology is fundamentally changing every industry. Which may explain why Lou and Vivek Paul, ex Wipro are being recruited by private equity firms.

In the US, Sarbanes Oxley is actually encouraging more companies to consider going private. Talk about unintended consequences.

Talking about private money - in technology, venture capitalists have traditionally played a role in early stages. Bill Burnham argues that hedge funds may be moving in to the VC space. One reason - fewer public companies to invest in! Another unintended consequence...

Update: Forbes weighs in with a cautionary article on private equity.

ACM on Offshoring

Steve Lohr of The New York Times summarizes a lengthy report issued by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) on offshoring.

The report (executive summary here)  by a task force from around the world does not break too much new ground. But it validates that the noise about offshoring job loss is exaggerated as I wrote here and that the West needs to keep moving up the value chain.

"The global competition has gotten tougher and we have to run faster," said Moshe Y. Vardi, co-chair of the study group and a computer scientist at Rice University. "But the notion that information technology jobs are disappearing is just nonsense. The data don't bear that out."

The ACM task force was mostly made up of academics. The general consensus is they are hostile to President Bush. Compare the  summary points from the report to those from his recent State of the Union speech.  Cut from the same cloth.

Poor, Rich Gartner

Gene Hall of Gartner must feel like there is a hit out for him. Two weeks ago InformationWeek put him on its cover - with the title "Can you trust this man?"  James Governor starts a flurry of blog chatter summarized in this ARmadgeddon post. I wrote about Gartner issues in this post.

The talk is about Gartner's independence and innovation. Gene has been focused on the other i - income. He was brought in to an entity which was poised to cross $ 1 billion in revenues before the turn of the century, and it may finally do so next year (2005 revenues were $ 989m). He has an organization with gross margins in the 50s (research is even richer in the 60s) and can barely make money (net income has been less than 3% last few years) primarily because it spends a whopping 40% of income on sales and marketing.

From what I hear he wants to expand the sales force to go more after the middle market. Lots of white space there, and his ADP background should help Gartner focus on what ADP called the "heartland" customer.  The heartland is not as interested in innovation. It wants well packaged, affordable offerings. In consulting, the direction is actually to go the other way and bring in a lot more ex Big 5 senior consultants, focus on larger customers and increase the deal size.  Big 5 types who learned to build large practices around Oracle or SAP are not as focused on independence. They are focused on revenues where sales and marketing cost 20% or less.

So ask Wall Street the InformationWeek question - Can you trust this man?. The stock just hit its 52 week high (in fact may have been a 52 month high).

Innovation and Independence come way below Income on Wall Street.

Place Shifting: Apple brings Vegas Home

Alex Ostrovsky was at home paying 99c to download a song on iTunes - and he hit a jackpot as New York Times describes. It was the billionth download from the site (in just 3 years) - and Apple went Cha-Ching!

"Open" Routers and Analysis

Om Malik talks about the open source challenge to Cisco, Juniper and other networking equipment providers - at one fifth the price in some cases. He does not mention the coming Chinese competition.

James Governor talks about the open source analyst phenomenon at 30% cheaper than Gartner and IDC. He does not even mention the coming Indian competition.

As I wrote in the Discipline of Market Leaders : "Most tech leaders want 50, 70, 90% margins. In the new world, that is not the discipline expected of market leaders. It is indiscipline that attracts a new breed of disciplined players."

Technology Innovation and Knowledge Networks

I have written before about IBM's innovative Electronic Workplace.  SAP has been investing heavily in its own knowledge and collaboration networks as Jeff Nolan writes using more contemporary blogs and wikis. It is good to see these tech vendors innovate internally - as we know quite often the shoemaker's children get the torn shoes.

As the Call Center Turns

TV shows in India about working in call centers. Doctors recommending working at call centers as a cure for insomnia. BusinessWeek reports on the human (and inhuman) angles of the call center industry.

"Open" Servers?

Courtesy of Sadagopan I saw Jonathan Schwartz of Sun offering  his $ 5,000 Niagara servers for free* It this the hardware version of open source?

* if you write a blog that fairly assesses the machine's performance (positively or negatively). Read his blog for more fine print, fill out forms etc, but a gerat offer - and smart for Sun to allow real customers to test drive the servers before committing.

Mashup creativity

Dan Farber reports from MashupCamp. How can you not be impressed?

Still want to budget $ 10+ million for your Fusion or SAP SOA upgrade? Hire some of these kids before Accenture or Infosys does - at a fraction of the likely cost.