Alas Poor Ludo We Knew You Well

A couple of Fridays ago marked the end of an mini-era for me – Ludovic Le Forestier left IBM to join Oracle.

Ludovic has been my key contact in IBM Systems and Technology Group (STG) since I became an analyst seven years ago (that is a scary thought). He was an asset that perhaps wasn’t fully appreciated by the organisation.

Ludovic is a strategic thinker, as well as being someone that gets things done. Not a world class administrator perhaps, but one thing you really need from an analyst relations person is internal advocacy – with Ludovic that’s exactly what we got. The fact is he made a difference-helping to foster what I will loosely dub the European analyst mainframe club – a group of analysts that cover IBM’s legacy systems technologies and regularly published research reports on the subject.

Ludovic is good at budgeting for publications and encouraging you to write them. Sounds like what anyone in AR does, right? Wrong. Often in this business you go to a briefing on a subject and the vendor evidently hasn’t thought about published outcomes. That doesn’t happen at events Ludovic runs.

While RedMonk is not a commisioned white paper company, Ludovic nudged me continually, with an elbow here or wisecrack there, to get things done that might interest his internal clients.

I call Ludovic a strategist partly because he understands which way the wind is blowing in the European analyst scene, as small firms continually coalesce and recalibrate in the post Meta era. He encourages loose federations and alliances-and he is one of the few AR people I can think of to get representatives from four different analyst firms to contribute to one publication – in the shape of his mainframe for dummies report. He encouraged us to be more competitive by being less competitive.

Ludovic is always willing to put a new voice forward, particularly one that focuses on context, which brings us to another area where Ludovic helped blaze some trails: blogging.

The use of blogs in corporate marketing generally, and analyst relations specifically, is new, an art rather than a science at this point in time. Its far from clear how new patterns of influence and collaboration are going to shake out.

Many vendors want something for nothing in the new world. Hey blog about us but we won’t pay you… OK then – well then we’ll choose what to blog about, and it may not be what you were hoping for. It couldn’t really work any other way.

But Ludovic was instrumental in turning my question: Where Are All The Mainframe Bloggers? around. Within a few months of writing the piece IBM created Mainframe Blog, to which I am un unpaid contributor. Does Ludovic deserve all the credit? Of course not – the blog wouldn’t have happened without the efforts of people like David Berger, Will Runyon and Tim Washer. But Ludovic was there too – cajoling, encouraging and getting it.

Mainframe blog is now getting attention from the top of the STG tree- System z General Manager Jim Stallings now cites the blog in many of his presentations. Live blogging about z from an industry analyst conference-that’s something genuinely new.

If memory serves me correctly it was Ludovic that asked me whether I could suggest some bloggers from other firms that might contribute. Step forward Peter Armstrong of BMC. Being more competitive by being less competitive again-this time from IBM. The content would always be more attractive if it supported some tension, and allowed for different voices. Blogs that read like corporate marketing vehicles usually don’t work. I like to think Mainframe Blog doesn’t, although Bob Hoey throws in the odd sales pitch.. 😉

Maybe a lack of killer intinct was part of the problem: Ludovic isn’t the most obviously competitive guy around. He has a somewhat lackadaisical air that could be misconstrued as a lack of seriousness. I also wonder whether Ludo might have been better thought of within IBM if he shaved more often. It’s the small things, right? Its also true that Ludovic is an easy mark for comedy – his relationship with analysts such as Joyce Becknell, Ian Bramley, Tony Lock, Clive Longbottom and myself is close enough that it allowed us to take the mickey out of him. But no one should confuse humour with a lack of respect. Ludovic was always on top of IBM’s content material, and knew what would make a good angle. At the recent IBM SOA event I met some American analysts that also spoke highly of Ludo.

The highest compliment I can pay him is that I think its likely within a few months Ludovic has some of the aforementioned analysts writing about Oracle strategies. Llikely few of us have done much with the firm before, because its not the easiest to work with if you’re not Big 2. On the other hand, Ludovic may not fit in in Oracle’s more controlling corporate comms environment. We shall see.

If it was me I would have him an offer he couldn’t refuse.