Links for February 2nd through February 4th

A little something extra…

One of my friends in PR recently asked me what for the general outline I expect to see in an analyst briefing. For all the briefings I get, there’s a pretty standard outline to start with:

• History of company – but keep it brief: we don’t care too much. And when it comes to the team, as all that fine print says, “past performance is no guarantee of its future success.”
• The technology itself – while knowing the “problem” and your “solution” is good, we’re pretty damn interested in what the actual gorp is itself.
• Why people buy it, or will buy it – named references if possible.
• Why it’s better than the past and existing offerings – it better be a better mouse trap, or a trap catches an animal that’s never been trapped before.
• Go-to-market strategy – direct, partners, resellers, over web, field sales force, or mix and match! We want to hear how the company is going to make money so it can become a stable company instead of a flash in the pan that sucked funding dry.
• Road-map and next strategy.

On a the topic of dealing with analysts, you might also be interested in my aptly titled “Dealing With Analysts” presentation from 2008: I tried to give a pretty frank overview of what tech companies should be looking to accomplish when working with, or at least “encountering” industry analysts.

The Links

• Oracle-Sun: The Java community speaks
• Vodafone Data Income Breaks The Billion Barrier
  Mobile revenue of £7.2 billion (a 3.2% decline). How's the iPhone fit in? "Currently around three-quarters of iPhone subscribers are current users upgrading; the rest are new customers." Retention and new customers, but mostly retention.
• Cloud Culture
  Uh-oh, the non-technical people are getting all crazy about "cloud" = "pony."
• The Art And Science Of The Email Signature
• India's outsourcing exports to hit $50 billion in 2010
• Opscode Announces John Willis as New Vice President of Training & Services | Virtualization Journal
• Salesforce.com Raises the Stakes for Enterprise Cloud Computing Platforms with New Force.com Visual Process Manager – salesforce.com
  Salesforce getting into BPM?
• Casino banks on social networking, mobile technology and virtualization
  Brief write-up of one casino's IT shop.
• SAP's enterprise collaboration tool entering public beta – Network World
  It's like Google Wave, but it actually does stuff. Seriously though, from what I've seen so far, it looks like it might actually be useful. Have to check on pricing and the way SAP encourages and grows the community around it.
• Rival analyst firm tries to lure Gartner/Burton Group customers
  EMA offers free access to Burton customers as Burton gets merged into Gartner. No love lost between small analyst firms and Gartner, it seems. PS: RedMonk content is always free 😉
• SpendMatters: IBM Takes the CDI/EMPI Initiative with its Initiate Acquisition
• Google Plans Store for Online Business Software – WSJ.com
  You gotta love how much of a darling Google is: yeah, we might be releasing some app store thing, details later; dude, it'll let you import contacts! In all seriousness, it will be interesting to see what comes out. Hopefully there's an AppEngine angle – like, making it easy to use AppEngine as the PaaS backend for Google Apps. We'll see if Google strategy operates at that level of intra-company cooperation.
• Unified Communications Experts : IBM Panasonic “Win” = Keeping a Notes Customer
  Casting doubt on those big Lotus wins.
• Microsoft and IBM cloud collab claims deflated
  "It's about the total size of the pie," the same IBM spokesman claimed. "The IBM collaboration segment overall is either holding or gaining market share in each of its submarkets against the competition. The problem is the whole pie is shrinking. Microsoft is losing more seats than IBM is."
• A Rant About Women
  Well, this is a weird post.
• Modern procrastination
  "Laziness in a white collar job has nothing to do with avoiding hard physical labor. “Who wants to help me move this box!” Instead, it has to do with avoiding difficult (and apparently risky) intellectual labor."
• IBM to Acquire Initiate Systems
  "…a market leader in data integrity software for information sharing among healthcare and government organizations. Initiate's software helps healthcare clients work more intelligently and efficiently with timely access to patient and clinical data. It also enables governments to share information across multiple agencies to better serve citizens."
• Virtual Bridge’s mission: virtual Windows
• Tim Armstrong’s First Earnings Call: “Fragmentation Is Our Friend”
• BMC Software Reshapes Enterprise IT Service Management with Launch of Remedy ITSM On Demand – BMC Software
  Remedy moving to the cloud, it seems. Got a briefing lined up on this, so hopefully I'll know more soon.
• Will FOSS Jump Into the iPad Fray?
• Integration Key Component of Oracle's Market Strategy
• IT players in motion
  Nice take on the vendor musical chairs thing.
• CapMetro getting $24M for 'bus that looks like a train'
  Yay?

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.