A change in tone for my blog today. This story with links is more to do with Corporate Social Responsibility than Customer Experience. It just happens to be what's on my mind right now...
If customers don't trust your company, it's bound to be bad for business. The FEER blog points to a noodle shop in Hong Kong, which is seeking to reassure customers by printing expiry dates on the noodles themselves.
But how does one deal with a collapse of trust in an entire country? Whenever a new scare threatens Chinese exports, we hear about new legislation, increased inspections, and draconian punishments. But it seems that the underlying problems are endemic and can't be easily rooted out.
I hosted a dinner last night at Forrester's Business and Technology Leadership Forum here in Orlando. Great discussion with 12 CIOs, several CMOs, and a vendor CEO. When we weren't passionately debating politics, we spent time compiling recession strategies -- the best ways of riding out a potential economic slowdown.
We're racing to the end of the quarter, when deadlines for research loom. That's why I haven't been blogging much for the last week or two. I'm currently working on multiple documents:
Product management's role in Agile development
Product management's role in SaaS
What our clients are asking about Agile development, and what these questions mean
Using "serious gaming" to elicit product requirements (co-authoring with TJ Keitt)
As soon as this workload subsides, I'll be posting on a normal schedule again.
Today, Cisco announced their intention to acquire Jabber, a major player in enterprise instant messaging. On the heals of Cisco's acquisition of PostPath for email, it's becoming clear that Cisco is really serious about collaboration. Not only are they serious, but they are begining to execute on a very compelling strategy. Some of the more interesting aspects of this move:
Jabber continues to fill out Cisco's collaboration portfolio by adding secure instant messaging and persistent chat. Now, they have their established position in unified communications, voice conferencing, telepresence and WebEx web conferencing and email, instant messaging and persistent chat coming on line. If Cisco can drive deep integration across all of these components and do it at a reasonable price point, there will be real value in the bundle.
Jabber is well positioned for cloud deployment. Their core differentiator has long been massive scalability with a design goal of serving millions, rather than thousands of users. If you want to take on market leaders Microsoft and IBM, you need to identify and exploit a market disruption. Cloud-based collaboration could be just the disruption Cisco needs. Massive scalability helps a lot.
Quickly: Forrester predicts a technology slowdown lasting three to four quarters, driven by an expected mild recession.
Forrester uses its extensive primary research with consumers, large companies, and vendors to continually forecast tech spending and the health of the overall economy. Here's what we're seeing.
The financial services sector (investment banks, regional banks, local banks, mutual fund companies, hedge funds, securities firms, credit card issuers, etc.) represents about 18% of the US IT market. The Wall Street portion (Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America,Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, et al.) is approximately a third of that, or about 6% of total U.S. IT spending. The troubled firms (Lehman, Merrill, Bear Stearns, AIG, Fannie, Freddie) represent only 2% of IT spending -- this is the portion most in danger of being cut.
One of the unfortunate legacies of management software is the still-too-universal force of exoneration as a purchase rationale. When the “blame game” kicks in, we turn to our management tools in an attempt to gather evidence that will exonerate us from blame. This is a dangerous, yet pervasive element of IT culture that must be exterminated. Perpetuation of these insidious forces will threaten the very viability of the entire organization.
IT has long been the scapegoat for everything that goes wrong in the company, and quite frankly, we deserve much of this unsavory scrutiny. The way we’ve run IT is more characteristic of sloppiness than disciplined execution. Such an atmosphere is destructive to the entire organization and this destruction is obvious to many business leaders. They will take action to remedy the situation, action that will prove disastrous for those who fail to demonstrate progress toward discipline.
VMware and Citrix want to be your cloud infrastructure provider. The competing virtual infrastructure makers announced dueling cloud initiatives this week aimed at providing xSPs with simple to deploy and buy cloud computing platforms that come from very different angles and may serve to bifurcate the mid to small market service provider space.
Citrix Cloud Center (abbreviated as C3, a nice homage to cloud pioneer Amazon Web Services' S3 cloud service) gives xSPs a portfolio of tools for automating virtual machine deployment, movement, and SLA management. It bundles together their XenServer Virtual Infrastructure, Netscaler application switch, WANScaler access gateway and bandwidth optimizer, and the forthcoming Workflow Studio for application self-provisioning and admin orchestration.
Consistently rated as one of the most popular features of Forrester Events, one-on-one meetings give you the opportunity to discuss the unique technology issues facing your organization with Forrester analysts. Business & Technology Leadership Forum attendees may schedule up to two 20-minute one-on-one meetings with the Forrester analysts of their choice, depending on availability. Registered attendees will be able to schedule one-on-one meetings starting on Monday September 15, 2008. Book early!
Consistently rated as one of the most popular features of Forrester Events, one-on-one meetings give you the opportunity to discuss the unique technology issues facing your organization with Forrester analysts. Business & Technology Leadership Forum attendees may schedule up to two 20-minute one-on-one meetings with the Forrester analysts of their choice, depending on availability. Registered attendees will be able to schedule one-on-one meetings starting on Monday September 15, 2008. Book early!
VMware and Citrix want to be your cloud infrastructure provider. The competing virtual infrastructure makers announced dueling cloud initiatives this week aimed at providing xSPs with simple to deploy and buy 
