Interesting advice to CIOs, although not surprising to us at TIBCO, analyst Dennis Gaughan heavily criticized IBM and Oracle for relying on maintaining profit margins rather than trying to better serve their customers through innovation. At a Gartner Symposium, he said “IBM pitches itself as a thought leader with marketing campaigns such as ‘Smarter Planet’… [but] focused on contract negotiation – understanding the terms and variability of what is licensed, what is negotiable, whether multi-year discounts are available, and whether the CIO can leverage a large IT spend to get a good deal. The number one question is: how do you avoid being managed by IBM?”
If you consider that IBM’s software is based on a code-centric philosophy that has trouble competing with more modern event-driven alternatives, with their lack of focus on anything but generating accounts, this paints a pretty dismal picture of their infrastructure software approach (even though they are known–albeit self imposed through ad dollars–for being “smart”).
Gaughan didn’t mince words about Oracle either: “’Oracle’s marketing phrase is ‘engineered systems to work together.’ But it should be ‘engineered systems to buy together.’ It’s a bundling on paper, not in the architecture…maintenance accounts for 92 percent of Oracle’s profitability – and they won’t do anything to disrupt that maintenance stream… Maintenance isn’t a guarantee of future investment.” ITNews added that “Oracle’s strategy does make sense for customers in highly profitable, volume businesses.”
Food for thought for any CIO, or IT manager investing in new infrastructure projects indeed.
