Marketing Perspective

What's in a Name? or The Medium is the Message! As many of you noticed, we changed our "look and feel" in the last issue. For those of you who missed it, here's our story. Five years ago our Internet Acceleration newsletter started with a distribution list of 200 of our unsuspecting friends. It evolved over the years and today we're pleased to say that our subscription list is just about 7,000 names and we think that there are actually a few people that actually read some of it. Proving one more time that you can teach old dogs new tricks, and finally succumbing to the relentless whining from our true digirati friends, we're going 21st century with a new format, new name (Infrastructure 2.1) and a blog repository www.infrastructure2-1.com. The price remains the same. Fetch Spot! (tell us what you think).

Virtualization Gone Wild: Peter had a chance to spend a couple of days at VMWorld, the VMWare users' group. We've been following VMWare for about three years now and in fact Peter has been to all three of these meetings watching the crowd grow from 1,200 to 3,000 and this year 7,000. This isn't quite up to what Microsoft draws but a lot of geeks in one place at one time. VMWare has clearly tapped an interesting vein with technology that gives geeks a strong reason to get out of bed and get to work, like Java, but unlike Java also creates a large software business (VMWare's current run rate is around $800M/year!). Virtual appliances were the big news (see other story and new IRG report), there was a vibrant analyst meeting held, and Peter had a chance to eat dinner with Mendel Rosenblum, Chief Scientist, founder, Stanford CS Prof, and Diane Greene's other half (Diane is the CEO and the speaker in the picture). Not bad for a couple of non-virtual days in LA. ^ Back to top

New Service Offering: Having perfected the notion of Advisory Services (our core product offering, "that service that you need if you don't have it" to paraphrase Yogi) we thought we would broaden the offering to "Consentory" Services. Peter followed up the VMWare meeting by presiding over his younger sister's wedding in La Jolla. We're told it was a great success so anyone out there who needs to be married, just holler. ^ Back to top

Appliances Gone Virtual: We've been tracking virtualization for almost all of the modern period (it's important to remember that it was first used commercially 40 years ago!) and it finally jumped directly in our bailiwick with the big bang emergence of virtual appliances as a key topic at the VMWorld meeting. We've finished a pretty comprehensive overview and analysis report for our clients (sorry you hangers on…). In brief, virtualizing appliances are a natural evolution in terms of providing system functionality with minimal hassle. For an existing VMWare ESX customer virtual appliances make sense (for example Zeus' load balancing virtual appliances) but VMWare's price structure is really only suitable for expensive physical infrastructures and wouldn't work as it stands for moving an image onto the kind of inexpensive server typically used for appliances. Interested? jkatsaros@irg-intl.com. ^ Back to top

"WAAS Up?" -- That's the title of our recent report focusing on the WAN infrastructure market, now that Cisco has introduced its WAAS (Wide-Area Application Services) product line to the market. This report, WAAS Up? Cisco Fleshes out its WAN Offering, contrasts the different WAN strategies of both Cisco and Microsoft and the directions that customers may choose from. Interested?-- jkatsaros@irg-intl.com. ^ Back to top

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Exchange 2007 Draws First Blood -- Although Exchange 2007 hasn't yet been released its potential impact has already had an effect as seen by Motorola's recent announcement of its plans to acquire Good Technology. Exchange 2007 addresses and improves on much of the functionality that previously was left to Exchange ecosystem vendors and mobile messaging is high on the list. Early on when describing Exchange 2007 features Microsoft had one of those "read my lips" moments by declaring "no need for third party mobile gateways" (because they don't scale well and end up causing lots of operational problems). After receiving over $200M in venture funding and despite it's operating a sort of Silicon Valley money laundering business through its Palm handset business (two of Palm's board of directors were VC's who also were on Good's board and whose firms owned 15% of Good when they inked their deal and became one of Palm's largest distributors) it had to be clear that Good's differentiation lay mostly in its advanced synchronization functionality provided through its gateways so that when mobile device makers like Palm and Nokia became Activesync licensees you could see that Good's differentiation didn't have much more runway left. It's hard to imagine how this can be much help to Motorola other than getting a customer list of Palm users to convert, but since they didn't announce an acquisition price we're assuming that it didn't cost much. We were somewhat skeptical when Good's CEO Danny Shader declared "2005 will be the year of the wireless application" which never really materialized the way he imagined. Looks like 2006 didn't either. ^ Back to top

Exchange 2007 Coming Soon -- We recently announced our recent study covering the upcoming launch of Exchange 2007 and its potential impact on the e-mail market. For those of you in the e-mail eco-system, this new product launch can be good news, bad news or both. This is the first of several reports that we'll be doing on Exchange 2007. Interested?-- jkatsaros@irg-intl.com. ^ Back to top

The Cisco Kids: Pro sports and new stadiums are usually as close as we can get to raw greed and commercialism, and from this dismally low standard what Cisco and the "Oakland" Athletics announced was quite remarkable. Oakland has been understandably looking for a new stadium (the Coliseum isn't as bad as Candlestick but it's not a nice ball park) and Cisco holds an option on a nice piece of land in Fremont that they leased during the bubble when adding 3,000,000 square feet of office space sounded much better. We understand that's how everything started but it has gone ever so much farther. Cisco has agreed to make the land available for a new stadium and concluded a substantial sponsorship arrangement but that's just the beginning. Collectively Cisco and the A's seem intent on building an amazing technology demonstration stadium (we've suggested it be named Grubb Field to honor Cisco's Chief Demonstration Officer) and also to build something that will really contribute to the local and regional community. This means being able to buy tickets and hot dogs with your phone, putting your own pictures up on the big display, as well as a residential and business development around the park that fits in. Maybe the A's will blow their budget by hiring Bonds as a DH but for now this looks like the most interesting new technology venue we've seen by a long shot. The press conference (available on the A's Website) is worth watching. ^ Back to top

Has Cisco Gone Soft? If you watch TV at all you've probably seen some of Cisco's new, elegant and touchy-feely ads that talk about the "Human Network." When this new campaign was launched it was noted that Cisco would be spending of the order of $100M including a new logo, a new Website and the Human Network to boot. Our impression is that Cisco wouldn't change a bottled water supplier without a quantified justification, so we wondered churlishly how the hell Cisco was going to justify $100M of their hard won cash to support an elementary school stare-down between the UK and Tibet (one of the TV ads). Our request to Skip MacAskill, Cisco's charming King of all Analysts, resulted in a wonderful discussion with Marilyn Mersereau, Cisco's VP of Corporate Marketing (who took over from Keith Fox who ran the function during the dot com boom days). It was great to finally meet Marilyn who came to Cisco from Coke via IBM. She explained that they too had been surprised by the scope of Cisco's brand and reputation ("Cisco customers really gave Cisco permission to use this much broader kind of branding"). Marilyn answered the specific question by saying that Cisco uses standard measures of Brand Equity (the part of market cap that can be attributed to brand) and that such a campaign can be evaluated from this perspective. She also added, perhaps as a side note aimed more at Mr. Chambers, that $100M isn't a lot of money for Cisco in absolute terms given how much cash they generate every month and the money spent for acquisitions. It was really interesting to see how Cisco ties this altogether into a coherent and well-managed whole. So no, Cisco hasn't gone soft or even "jumped the shark" to use my favorite recently discovered phrase. ^ Back to top