SOA filling the Gaps

Many years ago I listened to a presentation by an analyst (I do not remember his name). The presentation includes an analogy comparing IT products vendors to shops: big companies with multiple products lines – supermarkets, medium size companies with few products lines – groceries and small companies – kiosks. According to the analysis groceries compete directly with supermarkets and therefore their long term survival is questionable because of supermarkets advantages due to their size. In addition they are acquisition targets for supermarkets. Unlike groceries, kiosks are Niche Players and therefore are not acquisition targets and are positioned better than supermarkets in their special niche. For example, who will wait in a supermarket queue for buying bubblegum? It was easy to find example of small niche software vendors to illustrate this analogy. The only product distributed by Syncsort was a SORT utility. Syncsort competed successfully with vendors like IBM , HP an...

I n a previous post I asked the same question about Microsoft and predicted that the probability that at least three of the four leading SOA Echo Systems vendors, including Microsoft, will survive in the next ten years is high. I planed additional posts on other potential Long Term survival candidates. HP 's intend to acquire EDS changed my plan, so this post topic is HP's EDS acquisition. I would have predicted before the intended acquisition, that the probability that HP will survive until 2018 is high due to its dominance of the high volume Printer s market and its position in other hardware markets ( Servers , Storage , and PCs ) and Network and System Management (HP OpenView ). For a long time HP tried to expand its business lines beyond hardware. Acquisition of a J2EE Application Server company resulted in BEA WebLogic as the preferred Application Server used by HP. It failed to acquire Price Waterhouse Coopers and few years afterwards acquired Mercury and fe...

This post includes my Web 2.0 presentation which is the source for my Web 2.0 for Dummies posts. Web 2.0 Presentation

P robably many of the readers of this post will read it because of the title. Provocative titles such as:" IT does not Matter" ( Nicholas G. Carr , MIT ), "The End of Corporate Computing"(Nicholas G Carr, MIT), "The End of the IT Department" (Neil MacDonald, Gartner Group) attract readers attention and sometimes trigger emotional reactions. By using provocative title you can make sure that your opinion and your arguments are read, noticed and commented at. Many readers are probably sure that Microsoft will be a dominant market player on 2018; however my opinion is that the probability for scenario of that kind is less than 100%. Let's go back in time to 1989. If someone would have written an article (no Blogs and Posts on that time) titled: Will DEC survive until 1999? And explain why DEC will not survive, he would have been mocked. Dec was the second or third largest IT vendor in the market. In the 90ths IT business model was changed fro...