Nothing to Declare

… flying to Munich, to give a presentation for Embarcadero. I hope my travel is a little more successful than the last time I went to Germany.

I’m conscious of a couple of things as I set out to write this, what I hope will be short, entry. First - there is an ongoing debate about the nature of the analyst business, and the credibility of the analysts themselves. Second - many of the people who come to this site have no clue what I do as a day job. I hope to hit both birds with this single stone.

It all starts with buying and selling of Information Technology (IT). There are three kinds of product in IT, which are:

• - commodity items, where a product has been simplified (I use the term guardedly, I don’t mean it is now simple) and packaged to such an extent that it can be sold off the shelf. Examples include PDAs, office software packages, hard disks and so on.
• - solution components, where a product can still be packaged, but it doesn’t serve much purpose on its own. Examples are databases, blade servers, storage arrays and so on.
• - IT solutions, where often-complex combinations of products are packaged and configured to meet often-complex demands. Examples include some of the enterprise applications, storage area networks, enterprise management software and so on.

End-user organisations of all sizes frequently need help, both in deciding what to buy, and what impact their procurement choices may have on their business. That’s where IT analysts fit in. Their primary role is to keep tabs on what technologies are available, what they can be used for and what constraints they impose. Based on this understanding, IT analysts can also offer advice to vendors - the IBMs and Microsofts of this world, to help determine what technologies are more appropriate for which audiences, and indeed where they should be investing their research, development and marketing dollars.

Within this blanket description, there can be a number of sub-types of analysts. End user companies do not require analyst reports on commodity products, for example. For commodity products, analysis is more vendor focused and tends to be oriented more around market research - which countries or regions are buying which products, from whom. Such information can be used to drive advertising and sales campaigns, but the “understanding” work is already done.

For solution components, analysis is done proportionately for both end users and for vendors. Very few organisations need to know what a database is, for example, but a guide to who sells what kinds of databases, and what features are present, is useful to both sides. End users can use such information to produce a shortlist of vendors, and vendors can use it to keep an eye on the competition - or indeed to promote their product as “best in class”.

For IT solutions however, analysis (whether paid for by vendor or end user) tends to be more focused on end user businesses. White papers can explain the ramifications of technology types, or help organisations understand what are the business problems to be solved - this kind of report is often supported by focused market research, for example to help understand which product features give the most benefit, or which issues are the most important to be solved. Longer reports can be produced, explainng the solution area and providing information about which vendors provide products to support the solution concerned.

There are a number of other categories. Some analyst firms choose to focus on specific areas, such as security or data management; other consider only their local regions. Some companies focus on service providers, or consultancy firms, or particular industries. Some are actually end-user consultancies that perform some analysis, and advise vendors almost as a spin-off benefit of their end user knowledge. Still others are market research organisations that specialise in IT, and so on.

When done right, IT analysis can be enormously beneficial to both sides. However there are some potentially major hurdles to be overcome. Not least, the analyst can play an highly influential role in some major buying decisions - either in terms of quantity (at the commodity end of the scale) or deal size (at the IT solution end of the scale). Influence can be direct, indirect or obscure and untraceable - if I was a strong advocate of hosted applications, for example, I might well attract the attention of hosted application vendors to promote the advantages of their products over in-house applications.

Quite rightly, then, analysts should be subjected to considerable scrutiny. Not least, there is a requirement for transparency - any formal analyst recommendation should only be served with equal helpings of context (”who does this apply to, under what circumstances”) and justification. This goes for the simplest of quotes, up to the most detailed of reports - even if the context and justification are not included for space reasons, they must be in some way available.

A second issue comes from the very nature of analysts to be “market makers”. The analyst’s job is to articulate the strengths and weaknesses of what are sometimes very new technology areas. One way to do this is to define the area concerned, generally by naming it in some way: in doing so, advertantly or otherwise, the analyst firm creates a market for that product. This was a reasonable approach in the past, when the majority of software applications were custom coded and most IT purchases were of solution components. These days however, we are in a very different playing field - IT refuses to be pinned down in the same way. SOA, for example, offers a terribly important set of principles that any IT shop should apply, but it does not map onto any set of products in particular.

Trouble is, IT marketing in some ways depends on this need to classify products, and some analyst firms fall into the same trap - areas such as Identity Management, for example, are impossible to characterise in this way. Some analyst firms still insist in trying to apply the old models to these new technology areas, but this just plays into the hands of vendor marketing departments who can then jump on board the bandwagon. However, given the fact that most products can only partially fit the definitions, the main result is confusion on all sides. Disparagingly one could refer to this as bandwagoneering - only in most cases, the wheels fall off the wagon almost the moment it is set off down the hill.

Finally, the vendor’s requirement for analysts is very different from that of the end users. Ultimately vendors are answerable to their shareholders, and they exist primarily to make money out of IT sales. End users require analysts to help them get the best value out of IT, to make their businesses run better. In the fast-moving game of IT, sometimes the end-user requirement for business value has been subordinated to the vendor requirement to make money. I’m not saying that analysts have been directly complicit in this, though of course this is what market research is for. What I would say is that sometimes, the analyst industry as a whole hasn’t always been as vocal as it could have been to protect against it.

I believe it is the combination of these issues that has led to the credibility, relevance and independence of analysts to be called into question. I agree that change is necessary - but I wouldn’t level the finger at any particular firm. Instead I would argue that the IT industry as a whole needs to change its marketing tactics, that the analyst industry needs some new models to help itself help its end user customers, and that finally that these end user customers need to be more demanding of their advisors. All of these things are happening, perhaps a little too slowly for my liking. I don’t believe the final answer lies wholly in blogs, or in open source research, though these are highly valid options, and indeed may be the necessary catalysts for change. Blogging is indeed rocking the foundations of analysis - indeed in some cases there can be a fine line between the two.

Meanwhile, there is some very good work being done by analysts across the globe. Perhaps now is the time to get back to basics, to assess what services IT analysts should provide, to whom, and how. The jury’s out and the only thing I know for certain is that it won’t be me that makes the final decision. I watch, and analyse, with interest.

Here’s a concept that came up in conversation with Cisco a year or so ago, and which popped back into my consciousness due to the closing remarks of this week’s, always-a-winner Round-Up:

“And finally - a challenge for you. Dashing about in central
London, trying to find somewhere from which to file this
newsletter, the Round-Up managed to walk for a full 15 minutes
without finding a Starbucks. Can you beat that?”

Well, in all honesty, yes I can - finding WiFi in central London has been a nightmare, that is until I found that I could sit next to the window in the Oxford Street Borders cafe and hook into a (legal) free signal. Even when you can find a kosher link, there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to connect; if you get disconnected it’ll probably think you’re still logged in. Etc, etc.

But to the point. At the moment let’s face it, we feel hooked into the cyberstream only when we’re in front of a computer. When we’re out and about, we’re reduced to looking at the Web and our emails through a cloudy porthole, with voice access to the few people we’ve actually remembered to load onto our SIMs. A level of mobility we have, perhaps - in that we can be found wherever we are, and some form of communication can be made. True mobility however, the kind that service providers and app vendors (think: mobile video, or mobile CRM) are trying to push, will not really be possible until  there is some critical level of access, for a critical number of people, in a critical number of ways.

Until there is ubiquity of connections, connectedness can only ever be sporadic. Connectedness - the feeling of joining in, the ability to link to thousands of applications and services in a way that we want, is still a distant dream for the mobile user (though realistically, they’re probably dreaming of other things right now). Laptop users can experience a level of mobility as they bounce from coffee shop to coffee shop, but even this is a long way from the what we’d need - you have to stop, sit down, switch on and connect before anything can happen, it’s hardly seamless.

Now, this may come across as a rant, but it isn’t meant to be. The point is, that when ubiquity is cracked, then we really can get on with mobility. The City of London experiement is one to watch or Google’s San Francisco plan. I particularly like the Google plan, with its two-tier service plan (free at lower speeds) - it fits with the “Wireless Pavement” idea I’ve been advocating for a while. The wireless pavement (sidewalk, guys) is the idea that it costs to lay a pavement, but it is delivered at a municipal level, for free because we all recognise the spin-off benefits. Neither do you pay to go in a mall, but these are enormously expensive to run. Of course you do pay, but not directly - you pay for a shirt, or a coffee, or a lampstand, and a cut from that goes towards the cost of the building, pavement, whatever! I must blog all that - perhaps I just did!

We digress. The lack of ubiquitous access is currently a bottleneck on progress, caused I suspect largely by incumbent service providers not wanting to release their traditional grip on the cost of access. They’re like the toll keepers of old, forcing everyone to travel down their own, pot-holed routes. The network is being forced wide open as we speak, and I fully expect this to lead to the nirvana of ubiquitous, seamless access, which in turn will lead to a whole raft of new innovation, new ways of connecting, new ways of doing things. I believe this is where connectedness will get really interesting, as the online and offline worlds, the voice and data networks merge.

Why should I get all excited about this? Because for a start, it is unexplored territory. I don’t know what will be the apps and services that rock people’s boats, or in what combination - all that chatter about location-sensitive services was largely driven as a revenue opportunity for the SP’s - there may be something in it but I’m not convinced it’s the “killer app”, or indeed whether there will be a killer app at all (though it would have been useful to know where a pertol station was, on more than one occasion!)I see “microwave oven” innovation - unique compinations of functionality that give whole new ways of doing things. The mashup applied to the PDA, perhaps. The opportunities are global - James has ranted on more than one occasion about the lack of innovation in Europe, but let’s remember that both the mobile and the open source revolutions started in Scandinavia.

Here’s one thought of how things might go - applied to the lowly address book. Add Plaxo-like updating, RSS-like feeds, Google maps, GPS and a reasonably powered PDA and the address book becomes a dynamic hub, changing in real time. The possibilities are endless - suddenly you can find out all the parties you haven’t been invited to, for example… perhaps we should leave that one there!

It’s not the critic who counts…

Great little post on the MWD blog, about egosystem vs ecosystem

I’m still getting the hang of what should go here and what should go there - basically if it has a personal spin it goes here, and a corporate stuff goes there. I would imagine James, Stephen and Cote would argue that blogs should be individual, while Dale and Helen would say there’s more of a role for the multi-user blog - I think that there should be a place for both. Tom’s first law, of course.

I really need to sort out my categories.

Never trust anything to humans.

Everyone, as Tom Cruise once said about his now ex-wife Nicole Kidman, “is absolutely right.” Apparently, saying these words is the best way to prevent an argument, or at least resolve one. And while it doesn’t seem to have worked for our Tom (though perhaps it worked better for Nicole, whose own thought was, “finally I can start wearing high heels again,”) I have to say that when it comes to what’s going on in the collaborative technology space right now, he has a point.

What exactly is going on? Nobody’s sure, but one thing is certain - there’s certainly a lot of people talking about it. “Markets are about conversations,” announced the Cluetrain manifesto and several other pundits before then (not least my old boss, Robin Bloor, when he wrote about the electronic silk route in 1998 and before). With the advent of the blog of course, there appears to be more people talking about these things than ever. In May last year, Jonathan Schwartz wrote about what he termed the Participation Age on his own blog , and there can be no greater demonstration of this concept than the fact that its all being talked about on the blogs of others. The blog is a cultural phenomenon, for sure. But is it the end, or just the beginning?

There are still plenty of people who have never even heard of blogs. “You shoud have a blog, ” I said to my ex-colleague and business dynamics guru Roger Davies. “A blog?” he said, “What’s that?”

Now, I’m not dragging my good friend Roger through the slurry of the blogosphere in order to show him as some kind of luddite; exactly the opposite. The fact is, there’s a massive number of supposedly, highly connected people out there, who have never heard of blogs. Another old colleague Clive Longbottom makes the following point in a recent column for Silicon.com:

“Blogging is on the increase - at least the number of people who write blogs is growing. Our research shows that blog readership is still miniscule, and is moving more towards community-of-interest style usage.” 

If we consider Tom’s first law - that everyone is right - we arrive at a conundrum. The bloggers are right, that there is something very exciting going on, and yet the non-blog-reading community is also right. Jonathan Schwartz and Clive Longbottom are equally correct to say we are in a new age of participation, and yet the majority are not participating.

To square this circle, we need remember only that the blog is a symptom, not a cause. The fundamental principle behind participation is the act of engagement, of joining in. Blogging for like minded types is no different to SMS text messaging for teenagers - each went, or is going through a similar growth curve, and blogging will no doubt find its level. People can argue about signal to noise ratios and claim to be the first to notice the clutter, but what they fail to do is remember that much conversation serves no purpose whatsoever - us Brits will talk about the weather for example, quite happily, for hours sometimes. Markets are indeed about conversations, but conversations are primarily about relationships and how these can be nutured, sometimes over a period of years.

This principle of joining in is of primary importance. With blogging, as with SMS, each provided a new mechanism that was appropriate for a certain type of conversation. The barriers to joining were lowered to the point where a large enough number of people could engage, and - lo and behold - they did, and are. Call it an application of Metcalfe’s Law. In other words, blogging isn’t an answer, it’s a mechanism. So are all these other “declarative living” tools that are springing up, for sharing preferences, photos, books and so on. They’re mechanisms, each appropriate to its audience.

Joining in is nothing by itself, however - unless all we want to do is talk about the weather. People join conversations for a purpose, in business as in leisure. Sometimes that purpose (one suspects, the vast majority of teenage texts) may be to support the growth of the relationships concerned, be they one to one or within the group. Ultimately there has to be a higher purpose than participation itself. I suspect we shall see a continued evolution of blogs, from the individual and observational type blogs to community-oriented, news-based entities. However blogs will never cut it in their current form for anything other than providing an online mouthpiece; for multi-user, project oriented interaction to take place on the same scale as blogging, other mechanisms will be required, which are still to be developed.

How do I know this? Simple - because its happened before, and because of the same premise that people use when talking about technologies that pre-date blogs by decades. “Blogs are nothing new,” they say, citing Newsgroups for example, or even uucp-based forums, which both provided an appropriate transport for the capability we have with blogging today. In the same way that Hypercard pre-dated the Web, but didn’t quite reach global phenomenon status, similarly cyberspace is littered with failed projects for collaborative working. “Failure” is a harsh term - all are successful in their own way, but none has achieved that elusive “de facto” status.

I believe that both the blog and SMS are like prophets of old, forecasting greater things to come. We are still waiting for the real hero of the piece - the globally agreed standard for collaborative working. When we have this, then can the age of participation truly begin.

Are there any contenders? Undoubtedly - but therein lies another post.

Following James’s tips on briefing IT industry analysts, here’s some of my own from the archives - a bit rusty, but applicable.

Wordpress has moved from the version I’m on (1.something) to 2.something - it was 2.0 but there were so many bugs in the initial release that a new release was issued some days later. Eager to experience the benefits of the upgraded version and in the name of research and growing my understanding of what’s out there, I’m going to take the plunge over the next few weeks and upgrade. I expect one of several outcomes:

- it all goes horribly wrong, and I shall be left with a gaping hole where my Web site used to be
- it all happens as smoothly as manure sliding off a well-oiled shovel
- something in between

I will of course be backing everything up, but even that offers no guarantees in my experience. Oh well, all part of the fun.

As I was looking at the Wordpress site the other day, I noticed that Wordpress was now hosting accounts - for free I think. Strange - on the basis that I would have paid, I would have charged. There’s a business model (if anyone asks how to make money out of free online software, hosting has to be the first answer - but not if everyone gives it away). As a side note, its “powered by Automattic”, a spin-off company from Wordpress that claims on its front page, “Blogging is too hard.” Insightful… but anyway. There were a couple of Wordpress hosts at the time I set up this site, but I didn’t know either and doing it myself seemed to be the best option. Now I’m not so sure - after all if it’s good enough for Scoble its good enough for me (how much influence does this guy have?)

There’s still some things to do in blogging that currently pass me by - tagging for example, trackbacks and so on. I hope that Wordpress 2.something will offer a suitable base for my continued education. I also notice - this is as much a bookbark as anything - that Yahoo seems to rapidly be hoovering up some of the better blog-related companies, Flickr and the like, and has forged partnerships with both Wordpress and Moveable Type. To inner-circle bloggers this will be nothing new, but to mere initiates like me, its very interesting particulalry given that Google still hasn’t really got its own blogging act together.

In the meantime, anyone know of any better RSS readers than Pluck for IE (which seems to have wheedled its way back onto one of my machines) and Sage for Firefox? I’ve tried a few and they’re all either too primitive or too buggy for my liking.

All networking sites are created equal, but some are more equal than others. Myspace for example, seems to be rapidly becoming the port of call for musicians and bands. I know of a few bands that are up already (I’ll dig them out and list them), Simon Apple (I think) and John Wesley for example, and a music producer recently said to me “you can find them on Myspace” in the same way that you might talk about the best parties. Fish has just announced a Myspace presence as well.

Sort of repeats the theme that its all about community, methinks.