Enterprise Opportunity

by yuval on 24/02/2010

Software vendors to the enterprise spectrum of companies seem huge and daunting, and they are, unfortunately for them it means they are too big to wish to notice smaller tasks or out of the core product expansions.
The way product vendors work is in high scale mode filtering the noise to get the important stuff, and they are correct about working this way, there are too many people involved in projects to be able to notice every single complaint and request.
But this filtering also opens the market to the smaller players,
Imaging a little kid eating a cracker, the main bites go in but there are lots of crums left over. our Enterprise software vendor is probably more efficiant but there are still opportunities.
The opportunities can be vast and have many shapes and forms but they are there.
Some of the opportunities i am expose to are in the partnership and expertise areas.

  1. Complete solutions.
  2. Supplement software.
  3. Bridging Gaps between solutions.
  4. Supplementary products and solutions.

These have been the gaps always you are probably saying.
You are right, but these days the vendors had to cut most of their people to keep afloat at the recession.
Usually the first to go are the people interacting with clients since no clients paid their salary they became a liability.
The clients had their own issues and have released their people, thus in greater need for solutions or services.
The outcome from these actions is an increase in these gaps and many opportunities are not addressed due to the understaffing .

But you don’t want to be another “Partner” or a service provider do you?
If you do then go and do that and stop wasting your time, you need to make the most of now since partners always stuff up and get the boot.
If you don, you need to identify the opportunity in creating supplementary products or services.
There are 4 scenarios to these gaps.

  1. The vendor is missing completely the market needs and is there only because he was there or he is the safest bet (no one got fires for buying IBM).
  2. The vendors product is ok but there are a lot of features and twaking to do to get it working.
  3. The vendor product is great but there are some features and integration points missing.
  4. The vendor product is perfect. there is side business to be made.

The Vendor is missing the market needs completely, this one is simple, make a product that is better in the market vertical you found the problem in and make it hard for other partners to penetrate.
The vendors product is OK, look at how you can create installation processes, visual configuration aids, addons and plugins that make the product complete, try to start within a vertical.
The vendors product is great or perfect leaves you less to deal with the product and more to enhance it, create enhancements or complimentary products like tracking and recommendations.

There are a few more unexplored solutions like hosting of major Enterprise products and reselling them as a hosted service, WCM market will be a good starting point.

In my mind there are so many points where you can become a player in the Enterprise market and be successful because you are small and very hungry.
The barriers of entry have been dropped due to the wish to lower the cost of external resources and current project, this is the best time to act.

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iGotIt the Apple path with #iPad

by yuval on 30/01/2010

The new Apple iPad was titled the new way to produce content.
But that seemed a bit far fetch considering the configuration and hardware spec, no camera for instance.
Everyone quickly realized that this tool is for consuming content, lots of types of rich media will be the biggest segment.
Yes it has the potential of a book reader but lets face it, LED display is not good for book reading its good for movie watching.
looking at all the information around i think we missed the big picture.
Apple business path is missing in most of the talks and the focus is on the purchasers and what will you be able to do with iPad or the ways it will be delivered.
Apple in my opinion is looking for the new iPhone trick.
if you are not aware of the iPhone trick i will elaborate a bit, when the iPhone came out Apple bundled it with a store, the application store, this step was based on the success of the iTunes store when the iPod ruled the world.
The business move was to diminish the telephones company to a mere pipe supplying Apples content to the Apple hardware, the traditional way was that the phone company sold you the content and not the phone manufacturer. Apple turn the table and AT&T were pissed, they now lost a big margin and have to upgrade the hardware to support the traffic, but they got loads of money for that data traffic.

Nokia tried and failed the iPhone trick with the Nokia Store, it never soared to the heights of the App Store, my quick guess is that they were not strict about the production of software and the location of its sales to their store like Apple did and that doomed the store as useless.

iPad is looking like the second try of Apple over the Networks, after the failure of the Apple TV Steve jobs probably wondered how to get his way in controlling another retail channel.
iTunes is a great platform to support the purcahse/rental of movies but it never had the hardware counterpart to elevate it up to the level of a network.
There were always movies/tv shows to be purchased out of the iTunes store but this has never been a big segment of the store.
last year apple sold around 3 billion songs compared with the mere 5 million videos.

iPad will change this, its the best video mobile device, big 9.7 inches LED backlit display, 10 hours of watching video and 16-64GB of storage.
The video interface is great.
The price is reasonable.
What else can you wish for?

You probably could but this is not the place… talk to Steve and while you at it remind him the MacBook Pro update.

Lets hope that the networks wont find out that most of their grays anatomy/desperate housewifes fans got the iPad and are buying the show from the iTunes Store now and loving it.

A few things to make this a true success will be to introduce subscriptions to the iTunes store like you have in your local cable company. this will be the nail in the coffin for both the networks and the Tivos out there.

This second take on the networks makes AT&T smile ( scream is more like it ), Steve Jobs promise for more traffic then they can dream of is just around the corner.

I have to also correct my standing over the iPad, i though this is another MacBook Air flop but i think its not going to be that.
As for the flash support, enough was said but my 2c on the subject are that its not relevant for a media tablet and that the performance/heat that will be produced by supporting flash will render te iPad useless. taking into an affect the business plan i just thought of i think it makes sense not to support flash as it is not going to support the business.

There is another option for the video distribution and that is YouTube with a premium flavor, it could happen though apple are too centric to let it happen.

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a few good thoughts about the #iPad

January 28, 2010

I have joined the crowd and bashed the iPad on my twitter, i guess i had to let off the steam for the silence in the MacBook Pro front.
I was waiting for a new release to get me one but i guess i will get it later if at all.
Back to the iPad.
The iPad is [...]

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The saga continues with the labor government #nocleanfeed #openinternet

December 16, 2009

Looking at the news it seems that all parts of the Australian society are crying against this proposal to make Australia the first modern country in the world who stepped back from democracy.
The proposal has been so tightly coupled to child abuse that when earlier tonight an article from computer world citing Child protection group [...]

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Australia gives a green go to the internet censurship plan #nocleanfeed #openinternet

December 16, 2009

Yesterday the Australian government announced it will go ahead with its plans to mandate the Australian ISP’s to censure the internet based on a black list.
The green light was given after a small scale a “live” field pilot has been done with a few ISP’s, most of them small, on a very small segment of [...]

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#Ommwriter it really is useull

December 2, 2009

Working on the Omm Writer, is it that productive? it seems to disable all of the interface and allow you to look only at the written word.
At first i did not believe how this could influence my work.
But this trial got me to believe that my work can improve!
Seen the words hand from the [...]

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A quick thought about Startup BarCamp. #startupbcs

November 24, 2009

First and fore most i want to thank the organizers and the participants for an inspiring and motivating day.
I have arrived late to the event and only was through the second half of the day but got very good presenters and some interesting people who have put their heart and information out for the [...]

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What we have here is a failure to communicate. #Enterprise2 growing hiccups

November 23, 2009

A new problem arrised while working with a new group over the same issues, departmental security enforcement filter the success of Enterprise 2.0 communication tools

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Goverment 2.0 Is the audiance ready? #oahack

November 9, 2009

After thought from the Open Australia Hackfest on the accessibility of data.

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What went wrong? #fixwcm!

November 4, 2009

Inspired by the twitter tag #fixwcm i was pondering about the CMS sickness and what is the methods i see to cure that.

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