My post on Tuesday suggesting that Oracle, IBM, Cisco Systems, and Microsoft are the last remaining big (software) ecosystem vendors caused a stir. "But what about EMC, Hewlett-Packard, SAP, Adobe Systems, Symantec, and...X?" came the flustered responses.
HP's public-relations firm even took the time to send me this plug for HP's software business:
IT management software is critical for enterprises to keep up with the continuous pace of technology change and growing business requirements. As the leading IT management software vendor (according to Gartner, Forrester, and IDC), HP's software solutions helps customers manage IT like a supply chain that is aligned to the needs of the business, and makes sure they spend money on all the right things that will deliver the most value to the business.
Let's assume that's true. It still doesn't answer the underlying premise of my original post: identifying the most relevant, broad-based software vendors in the market, the ones with hefty ambitions and product portfolios to complement them.
HP has a strong IT management portfolio, as well as some content management software, among other software assets. But it doesn't come close to approximating the breadth and depth of what I deem the Big Four ecosystem players. Nor does EMC or Symantec.
Having $1 billion in software sales doesn't make you a Big Four, disruptive-software vendor. Vision and ambition also factor in.
With this in mind, the big software vendors that are dramatically changing the face of software include Oracle, IBM, Cisco, and Microsoft. Other software vendors may be relevant in their markets (who could discount SAP in the enterprise resource-planning market, even despite its earnings disappointment?), but they aren't changing the face of the software landscape.
Except, perhaps, Red Hat, which today lacks in the size, depth, and breadth categories but arguably makes up for these in the ambition department. Or, on that score, perhaps Google and Salesforce.com should make their way onto the list?
However you assemble the list, it's clear that it grows smaller by the day. Within a year, I think that we'll see SAP in the hands of one of the Big Four (Microsoft, perhaps?), and we may even see Red Hat factoring into an ecosystem vendor's product strategy, rather than crafting a go-it-alone open-source story.
Which vendors are most relevant to you? If you disagree with my list, please let me know why. Who should be on the list that isn't, and who should be off?
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Somehow, CIO.com's Shane O'Neill divines that Apple's customers are dumping it in droves now that the global recession has kicked in. His evidence? A 6-percent retail sales drop in January compared to January 2008, according to NPD Group:
Apple, welcome to Earth in 2009, where premium pricing doesn't cut it anymore...We live in a time where cheap is trumping cool, and probably will until this economy turns around. That's bad news for Apple, which has no Netbook (that we know of).
This is a bold statement to make on one month's worth of data, especially when he also cites data from Hewlett-Packard, which endured a 13 percent drop in laptop revenue in its most recent quarter. Cheap(er) laptops are selling even less than Apple's.
This is the evidence that Apple is in retreat and that customers refuse to pay a premium for its quality? That its rivals are hurting even worse, as they try to sell their cheaper machines? I'm not seeing it.
The reality is that Apple already does have a "low end" Internet device to offer the market. It's called the iPhone. No, it doesn't offer a full computing experience, but then, neither do Netbooks.
The difference in the iPhone's favor, however, is that it comes with a host of applications unavailable on Windows- or Linux-based Netbooks: the App Store. True, most of these applications rarely get used after customers kick the tires on them, as CNET reports, but that's the magic: the applications are so cheap, they're disposable.
The real question for me will be whether Apple ever condescends to market the iPhone as a Netbook-type device: a comparable price tag with a nearly limitless (and cheap) application potential. I don't think that it will, and I don't think that it should.
I use a Mac for the same reason that I used to swear by IBM ThinkPads: quality. The quality was and is worth the price.
Now that I have an operating system that matches the quality of the hardware, I'll gladly pay for it. However, I'm not rushing out to buy anything right now, and I'm not alone, which is why both PC and Mac sales will continue to slide--but not in equal proportions.
I suspect that the recession will continue to hurt PC vendors more than Apple, because the PC vendors have little with which to differentiate themselves. Customers looking to buy a machine are going to increasingly look to the Mac, even in these hard times, because the Mac delivers value that exceeds its price tag.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
Microsoft may get a lot of grief for its patent strategy, but IBM carries the biggest patent portfolio by far. In fact, Big Blue has acquired more patents than any other company on the planet for the last 16 years running.
This is particularly interesting when you discover, as The Wall Street Journal recently did, that Hewlett-Packard, one of IBM's fiercest competitors, is actually slowing its patent applications. In HP's words, its emphasis now is on patent quality, not quantity:
HP was once trying to compete with IBM as the most prolific patent producer...But after Chief Executive Mark Hurd arrived at HP in 2005, the Palo Alto, Calif., company spent less time and money filing new patents as the CEO strove to make HP more efficient, said Kevin Light, a deputy general counsel and vice president for intellectual property at HP.
HP has been focusing on "the quality of the patents that we seek, as opposed to the quantity," Mr. Light said. As a result, he added, HP is seeking broad patents that relate directly to its main businesses, avoiding the costs of filing patents that may relate to more specific processes....HP seems to be keeping secret certain innovations, especially in its services division, rather than filing patents.
This strategy is a far cry from IBM's position, which has been to seek a wide array of patents on just about everything, some of which have been downright silly, like its patent on, wait for it, patent trolling. Or how about the patent on offshoring?
That said, IBM has also been generous in granting patent protections to open-source projects. I just wish that more companies would follow HP's lead: either limit your patent ambitions or stop seeking them altogether. However, in our world of patent lawsuits, that's probably not going to happen, as companies feel the need to build up a defensive patent portfolio.
Hewlett-Packard has opted to become the last of the major computer OEMs to ship an integrated Linux desktop. Beyond the standard OpenOffice and other Linux desktop fare, HP has thrown in a modified version of Mozilla's Firefox browser, though after reading through ZDNet's description I can't fathom why I or anyone else should care about this "value-added" HP-specific Firefox.
I'm glad to see Novell's Suse Linux find a home on HP's SMB-focused machines. But I wish we could just move on from these now routine fits and starts with the Linux desktop. Nobody cares anymore, people. The game has moved on beyond the desktop bits.
Back in 2005 I and others were saying that the desktop is the wrong game for Linux to be playing. More recently, the top Linux desktop player, Canonical's Ubuntu, has clearly set its sights beyond aping Microsoft's 20th-century interface to computing.
For those of you cheering this HP news, take a hint from Ubuntu: the battle long ago moved beyond getting limited distribution with a hardware OEM that makes and will continue to make the vast majority of its revenue from pushing Windows machines...until Google and other cloud players finally upend the entire market.
The company to be watching on the desktop is Google, not Novell, Red Hat, etc. The Linux desktop is already winning. It just happens to run in Google data centers, not your fancy new Suse-powered HP computer.
On October 13, 2008, Hewlett-Packard (HP) sent a complaint to an open-source competitor, GroundWork, asking GroundWork to stop revealing HP's "confidential" pricing. I have posted the letter below. What HP isn't correcting is GroundWork's contention that HP's IT monitoring software is considerably more expensive than that of its open-source competition.
Does HP think its pricing is really a secret? It's publicly available at GSA Advantage (albeit most GSA pricing actually reflects discounting of roughly 10 percent). Guess what? HP software costs a lot of money. Is anyone surprised?
GroundWork has been highlighting its cost advantages over HP's Operations Manager and Network Node Manager offerings for some time, declaring an 82-percent cost advantage over HP's products. This isn't news.
So why is HP sending letters to GroundWork (and InformationWeek, which hosted a webinar on the subject), demanding that its pricing be buried? According to a source familiar with the matter, it was apparently GroundWork's live webcast (registration here) on September 30, 2008, which roughly a dozen HP employees attended, that seriously rankled HP.
Why? Perhaps because the data presented starkly reveals just how pricey software like HP's can be.
... Read more
Embedded in the news that Hewlett-Packard plans to cut 24,600 jobs from its roster in an effort to make its EDS acquisition work, was this interesting tidbit from its call with analysts, as ZDNet captured:
One of the things HP says it wants to offer with its portfolio of offerings--across the board in hardware, software and now services--is flexibility in meeting the customer's demand. CIOs today are dealing with...big issues (like) needing to flip that spending ratio to less on maintenance and more on innovation...And there are choices on how to do it: buy it from HP or let HP do it for you, executives said.
Very cheeky. Though HP makes quite a bit of money from software, its real business going forward is hardware and services. In HP's mind, this means "innovation," and the more of that innovation bought from HP, the better.
In the mind of the CTO and CIO, however, innovation may actually mean open source.
I agree that enterprises should spend less money on licensing and more on tailoring software to specific enterprise needs. Where perhaps I disagree with HP, however, is on the most efficient route to get there. Open source is tailor-made for this sort of value proposition, but HP has traditionally paid more lip service to open source (beyond Linux) than it has actually done anything.
If HP is truly interested in enterprise innovation, let it commit its significant resources to deploying services and hardware around open-source software. No more licensing waste with ever-increasing maintenance fees born of lock-in to a proprietary platform. Just pure value to the customer.
How about that, HP?
It has been years since I've had to use a Windows PC, having spent several years on the Mac (with minor bouts of Linux along the way). Today, however, I'm suddenly envious of my friends who haul around those monstrously ugly HP and Dell machines.
Why? Twenty-four hour battery life on the HP EliteBook 6930p, as ZDNet reports. Twenty-four hours!!! One battery. Dell was no slouch either with a 19-hour battery.
My MacBook Pro? Maybe three hours if I baby it. When I travel internationally I carry a BatteryGeek extended-life battery that gets me another eight to ten hours, but it's really heavy, making it a bit of a chore to lug around.
To get 24 hours out of the HP laptop requires a host of fortuitous events (special "Ultra Capacity Battery," updated Intel graphics driver, SSD drive, special LED display, etc.), but I'd happily pay extra and jump through hoops to get this kind of battery life from my MacBook Pro. Happily.
Heck, I already paid something like $500 to $800 for my lug-along extended-life battery for my Mac. Paying extra for something that would break my bank but not my back...? Done.
According to a recent IDC report highlighted by ZDNet, Linux is booming. At just 9.4 percent of the overall server market in terms of revenue in 2007, Linux has now climbed to 13.4 percent of the overall server market, with Unix at 7.7 percent and Windows at 36.5 percent. If Linux server vendors want to continue to grow, at some point they're going to have to come to grips with Windows, rather than eating into the low-hanging Unix fruit.
The big winner in the quarter was IBM, with 33.2 percent of the market. Hewlett-Packard is not far behind, but is moving the wrong way on market share:
(Credit:
IDC)
Despite the healthy 6.4 percent growth in the overall server market, however, IDC suggests a softening in the server market, as The Wall Street Journal points out:
...(T)he growth came, in part, because manufacturers cut prices on popular product lines. That worries IDC because cutting prices is how companies typically react when faced with softening demand. With economic conditions showing few signs of improvement, price cuts "are a concern, as they may foreshadow a slowdown in market demand," said Matt Eastwood, an IDC group vice president.
Perhaps this softening is one reason that while Linux server growth topped 10 percent, Unix only grew 7.7 percent and Windows struggled to achieve 1.7 percent growth. I actually would have expected a stronger showing from Windows but then, HP, IBM, and Dell all have a vested interest in getting out of Redmond's shadow. Linux points the way to greater independence.
It will be instructive to see if Linux server growth will continue to outpace the rest of the market and, in particular, Windows server growth. In a down economy, Linux may find its direction is up, up, and away. Red Hat and Novell will be the beneficiaries, and perhaps a bit more Ubuntu?.
Open source has become so commonplace, about the only time that one sees press releases around it is when a company releases all or a significant chunk of its software under an open-source license. The other time is when a company new to open source releases code, and wants to tell the world that slowly but surely it is getting a clue.
All of which makes HP's announcement that it is contributing its Tru64 Advanced File System (AdvFS) to the Linux community a bit puzzling. It's a significant contribution, yes, but it's not as if HP hasn't been contributing actively to the Linux community for years. Why the press release?
It's not the sort of announcement that IBM would make. If you read through IBM's open source-related press releases of the past few years, you won't find this sort of announcement, despite IBM's heavy involvement in Linux and other communities. So why did HP feel compelled to announced the AdvFS contribution?
It's a bit gauche, really. Everyone already knows that HP is a significant contributor to Linux. Why flaunt it?
(Credit:
Matt Asay)
Karl Paetzel, part of HP's Enterprise Storage and Server Division and part of HP's growing open-source business. As he noted in his opening remarks, HP has realized more than $10 billion in open source-related revenue in the past few years.
- Customers have far more FOSS than they realize.
- Customers have far more FOSS license obligations than they realize.
On Point #2, Karl noted that a big issue derives from embedded licenses. OpenOffice, for example, may be licensed under the GPL, but there are hundreds (thousands?) of packages within that program that carry other open-source licenses. HP has therefore developed its FOSSology tool to help it manage internally used open-source code, but more recently to help its customers (and the broader community).
I was fortunate to work with HP back in my Novell days on open-source issues. Novell used HP as its model for an open source review board. I particularly like how HP doesn't crimp open-source adoption by shutting down downloads. Rather, it evaluates open-source usage at the point of distribution/release. It therefore gives its employees room to experiment.
Tools like this, marketed correctly, help to broaden open-source adoption. Marketed incorrectly (as "safe ways to use risky software"), they're unproductive. I think HP is going about it in the right way.
