One of the Biggest Mistakes Enterprise Startups Make
The era of VCs investing in successful consumer Internet startups such as eBay led to a belief system that seemed to permeate many enterprise software startups that hiring sales or implementation people was a bad thing. “We want low-touch or zero-touch businesses” was the mantra. I believe it’s flawed. While I have some sympathy with [...]
2004-2011 financial analysis: Non-traditional SI (Indian players and IBM)
Yesterday I published my financial analysis of 4 traditional system integrators: Accenture, Atos Origin, Capgemini and Logica. In a conversation I got asked why IBM wasn’t on the list, and my answer was somewhere along the line of “it’s not a pure player”. Also, I hadn’t published my Indian friends yet, so here are another [...]
Traditional system integrators 2004-2011 financials
Traditionally, 31st of March is the date that all my favourite system integrators (SI) have released their annual report for the previous year. Oddly, however, I’ve seen some strange changes this year – for the first time. I could -and will- even say that traditions have been broken with I had to look hard and [...]
The SI is dead. Long live the Supplier Integrator
Have we reached peak SI is a splendid post by Peter Evans Greenwood about the changing IT world. On one side of the boxing ring there is the traditional system integrator, on the other side there is a multitude of change agents: Business taking back budget for IT spend from local IT On-demand and on-time [...]
The apprentice- master model
Jon Reed made the following statement on Twitter: Marin accused Deloitte of using project as “a trial-and-error training ground” for junior consultants. Panelists: please react #focuserprt My answer: very common Growth. How do you grow people from skill A to skill B? The eternal question. For we are struggling with that question in our personal [...]
Ask not what your company can do for you, …?
John F Kennedy to me was one of the finest presidents of the US. Shot and killed before I was even born, but still. During his inaugural address on January 20th 1961, one of his now famous quotes was: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for [...]
Real Profitability Part III: Indian players
Part III and second-to-last of this series, at least this one will be the last one with lists of figures In the first I gave you the Big Three (Google, Microsoft and Apple) and Four (Oracle, SAP, IBM and HP) and there was a big difference between them. Where the Big Three make an operating [...]
