Slashdot Mirror
Big Blue's Software Spending Spree
abb_road writes "IBM has gone on an aggressive acquisitions spree for document management packages in the past three weeks, spending more than $2 billion to pick up two companies. The companies, Webify and FileNet, are expected to become part of IBM's Information on Demand strategy. The acquisitions point to a larger industry trend: a focus on software for unified corporate data management. From the article: 'It's a crucial time to jockey for most-valuable-software-provider status, because companies want to buy more from fewer players, and they're tired of buying stand-alone pieces of software like customer-relationship management that don't fix real-world business problems. The new message to software vendors: Fix my call centers, don't just sell me a product. As a result, the lines are starting to blur between software companies that offer, say, Internet security, databases, and tools to manage nearly every part of the business. So, too, are the lines between service companies and software companies.'"
Don't even think of telling me that IBM are buying customers or market share! It's painfully obvious that the market is overvalued.
Dealing with the IBM rep is bad enough but now we will have to deal with them pushing their new products when I just want answers about the product I just bought from them. The only thing worse than this is when they "synergize" their sales force. I recently had a Symantec sales rep come in to discuss their Symantec Security Information Manager product and they sent a sales rep from Veritas. The only thing he could tell me was Veritas would make a great backup system. I had to tell him we already use Tivoli just tell me about the SIM product. Well you know sales people they don't take no for an answer until you kick them out the door. Well I am doing ranting.
"Anything tastes good if you deep fry it."
The big question is, how is this all going to integrate? IBM already has it's own document management system that competes against FileNet in a lot of areas. So, is one going to go away? Or perhaps they'll continue to sell both and basically bring their credibility down for both. Not only that, but with FileNet phasing out one of their products and forcing their user base to upgrade, will FileNet lose a lot of their base because they don't trust that it will be around much longer? There are a lot of questions without much of an answer. Sure one hell of an impulse buy.
It seems to me that computers are progressively becoming less and less about computing, and more and more about simply storing and communicating data. A long time ago, IBM bought out Lotus software. Lotus became famous based on 1-2-3. It was the "killer app" that sold tons of DOS machines -- and oriented heavily toward doing computation. I'm not sure if IBM even still sells 1-2-3 or anything derived from it -- the big Lotus-derived products are Notes and Domino (I.e. storing and communicating data, not doing actual computing). In fact, you hardly hear about spreadsheets any more. Excel works, and a lot of people use it, but it doesn't seem to be a "killer app" for much of anybody anymore -- I'm pretty sure I haven't heard of anybody buying a machine to run it (or any other spreadsheet) in years.
Now acquisitions (and new development) seem to be oriented almost entirely toward storing and communicating data, not toward doing any actual computing. The same seems to be happening in software development as well. Languages for doing real computation, like FORTRAN and Matlab are almost universally seen as boring and passe. Even languages like C++ oriented kind of halfway toward computation seem to be viewed as a whole less less than exciting, anyway. What's hot are things like Ruby on Rails. Of course, you can write computational code in Ruby if you want to, but I'm pretty sure nearly nobody uses Ruby to do things like matrix multiplication -- they use it for Rails, to set up web sites that talk to databases (storing and communicating data).
In fairness, I suppose I should add that there are still a few "big things" oriented heavily toward real computation -- Folding@home and Seti@home for a couple of obvious ones -- and BOINC has a number of less obvious/well-known ones as well. Clearly computation isn't entirely dead and gone or anything like that.
I'm a little uncertain what this emphasis on simply storing and communicating data really means though. Was most computing that involved real computation really just a fad, and people were doing it primarily because it was new and different? Is the current emphasis on data storage and communication really just a fad, and people will care a lot less about it in a few years? Is it a matter of the "computing" parts of things mostly being cured problems, so they're less apparent, even though they're really as important as ever?
I suppose for this to be a proper comment, I should have a strong opinion to express about it, but I really don't -- at least for me it's almost entirely an open question.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
IBM bought Cloudscape, which years later they released as Derby. Eclipse is a well designed product, but in effect they bought the developers who designed it (OTI, years ago admittedly, and they seem to work as a separate unit).
In fact, IBM has bought most of their major products (Notes, etc) that I know of (I have no idea about the history of the mainframe stuff &c).
This is all probably better than the "not invented here" syndrome, I would except that focused start ups are more keen to innovate, particularly on vertical apps, than workers in a giant company like IBM.
Wow, I wish I worked for your company. With mine, it's more like: Our sales are down; let's eliminate our Marketing department to save costs. (Actually happened.) We're still not bringing in enough money (surprise); let's move half the downstairs people upstairs, and half the upstairs people downstairs so they can communicate better. (Happens twice a year.) Our computers aren't running fast enough; let's put some more software on them to speed them up... as long as you can find a magic freeware speeder-upper program that will make an eight-year-old Pentium 3 run AutoCAD 2006 effectively. (Shockingly little exaggeration.)
*sigh* Two more weeks of this place... then freedom!
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
It seems to me that the F/OSS phenomenon is largely responsible for this shift. Think back to Cygnus, ISC, and other companies like them. For that matter, the early Red Hat years seem to fit that description, as well. Value-added service on top of a GPL'd stack is far from uncommon, these days, and often makes for a rather reasonable business strategy.
Couple that with IBM's grand (and expensive) ongoing experiment with gnu/linux, and this sort of observation is hardly surprising. It will be interesting to see what tech from these recent acquisitions make their way out into the F/OSS community at large.
When I grow up, I want to have Christopher Walken hair.