Posts Tagged ‘strategy’
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
Last week, some of my friends felt a sense of loss when they typed “www.sun.com” into their browsers and wound up on Oracle’s home page. Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems took all 9 months to complete – as long as conceiving and delivering a baby – but it did mark the end of an era.
Sun Microsystems, which was founded in 1982 by Scott McNealy, Bill Joy, Andreas Bechtolsheim, and Vinod Khosla, was once upon a time a leader in the computing world. During the Internet boom more than two decades ago, Sun made the servers which powered that boom. Those were the good old days. (more…)
Tags: acquisition, Business, merger, strategy
Posted in Business | Comments Off
Saturday, January 2nd, 2010
The year 2009 saw many tech companies, big and small, being sold, acquired or going into extinction. Most of these are / were due to the global economic crisis, diminishing demand for product, or ripple effects of a scandal, mismanagement and strategic missteps.
In the beginning of 2009, Nortel went through a slow and painful dismantling since it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January. (more…)
Tags: acquisition, Business, merger, strategy
Posted in Business | Comments Off
Monday, November 30th, 2009
Generally, a Product Manager’s primary responsibility is to analyze the market, competitors, customers, external environment, lead and plan activities related to a specific product or product line. Product, is usually referring to any form of products or services.
There are too many textbooks available in the market that touches on marketing management, strategy or even business management. But most of what we learned from books as well as from business schools are general introductions to marketing management or high-level strategic concepts, but not the how to perform day-to-day responsibilities of owning and managing a product or product line.
(more…)
Tags: Business, Consumers, Marketing, Product, Product Management, strategy
Posted in Business | Comments Off
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
Verizon Business will launch an Asia-Pacific data centre for its computing as a service (CaaS) customers in the region and to address issues of latency, security and compliance.
Ray McQuillan, principal consultant at Verizon Business Global Services, could not name the location for the data centre, but said that it would launch in Q1 of the next calendar year.
“We know that the global coverage – and moving nodes over into the Asia-Pacific – is something on the calendar currently for 2010,” he said. “Right now the CaaS offer is available across the globe, but in terms of having a local presence in Asia-Pacific we have one Europe, one in the US, and another in APAC. That is something the market has been asking for and we have it on our roadmap.”
(more…)
Tags: APAC, Business, Cloud Computing, Data Center, strategy
Posted in Cloud Computing, Data Center Facility | Comments Off
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
Over the past years, Telecom carriers and service providers have suffered economic pressures, competition, churn and declining revenue. As they grapple to find ways to improve their ARPU from their core services, many in the Telco industry are attempting to diversify into broader business and consumer value-added services, moving beyond the increasingly commoditized telephone and Internet access. Many of them are planning to or are already expanding aggressively into the “Cloud” space.
(more…)
Tags: Business, Cloud Computing, Consumers, Emerging trends, services, strategy, Virtualization
Posted in Business, Cloud Computing | Comments Off
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
This has not been a good year. Numbers aren’t looking good. Weakening demand. Customer churn. Reduction in force. Those who were not affected by layoffs will have a much heavier workload. With the amount of bad news, how does one inspire their workers?
According to staffing, career and crisis communications pros, openness, honesty and empathy are absolutely essential and go a long way.
(more…)
Tags: Cost, leadership, management, strategy
Posted in Business | Comments Off
Sunday, November 8th, 2009
Larry Dignan wrote on his blog about Data Center design 101, but his knowledge about the data center essentially boils down to one word: Money. Larry attended two Gartner IT Symposium presentations to learn more about data center designs and shared his views about why companies are building new data centers and how the vendors are “killing each other to be the data center king“.
In his blog post, he shared what he had learned, which are: (more…)
Tags: Consulting, Data Center, Density, Efficiency, Emerging trends, strategy
Posted in Data Center Facility, Going Green | Comments Off
Thursday, November 5th, 2009
I’m scheduled to speak at a Sun briefing event entitled “Turn Obstacles into Opportunities” in Jakarta on Nov 24th. The agenda will be about achieving efficiency and maximizing ROA (Return on Assets) through future-proofing data centers, consolidation, virtualization of IT environment to maximize utilization and improve efficiency.
In business terms, ROA is defined as an indicator of how profitable a company is in relative to its total assets. In other words, ROA measures how efficient a company’s management is at using its assets to generate earnings.
Taking this into the IT perspective, most of the time, IT is viewed as a cost and most of the time, IT is leveraging on technology assets to enable and support the business. Maximizing efficiency, utilization of technology assets or being able to support the critical business functions with less assets are ways to achieve ROA in the IT context.
I hope to share some of these insights with our Indonesian friends and clients during this event. See you all there!
Tags: Consolidation, Efficiency, strategy, Virtualization
Posted in Business, Consolidation & Virtualization, Miscellaneous | Comments Off
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
Sun Tzu’s Art of War is a Chinese military treatise that was written in the 6th century BC, during the Spring and Autumn period. Composed of 13 chapters, each of which is devoted to one aspect of warfare, it is said to be the definitive work on military strategies and tactics of its time, and still one of the basic texts.
This book is one of the oldest and most successful books on military strategy. It has had an influence on Eastern military thinking, business tactics, and beyond. Sun Tzu suggested the importance of positioning in strategy and that position is affected both by objective conditions in the physical environment and the subjective opinions of competitive actors in that environment. He thought that strategy was not planning in the sense of working through an established list, but rather that it requires quick and appropriate responses to changing conditions. Planning works in a controlled environment, but in a changing environment, competing plans collide, creating unexpected situations.
(more…)
Tags: Business, Military, strategy
Posted in Business | Comments Off
Saturday, October 3rd, 2009
I had the privilege to join Sun’s Chief Privacy Officer, who is also our Chief Governance Officer for Cloud Computing, in meetings with some government InfoComm authority folks. The subject of the meetings were Governance for Cloud Computing.
Overall, I thought she did well in covering the key and important points across areas such as legislation / laws and the jurisdictional territories, Standards, data classifications / categories, how to maintain data privacy and security across its lifecycle, IP (Intellectual Property) of third party contents, license rights, policing rights, etc. The message she brought to the table is that at the end of the day, businesses needs to manage an acceptable equilibrium between gaining the business agility, cost advantages and empowering their business to leverage on available Cloud services, and the acceptable or tolerated level of risks by the business. It was not an easy subject to talk about (especially in an hour duration).
(more…)
Tags: Cloud Computing, Consumers, data privacy, Governance, Producers, protection, Security, services, strategy
Posted in Cloud Computing, Governance, Security | Comments Off
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
Marine mammals like dolphins breathe just like us. But while humans can breathe even when our conscious mind is asleep, dolphins are equipped with a voluntary respiratory system and therefore must keep part of their brain alert to trigger each breath. To avoid drowning, it is crucial that marine mammals retain control of their blowhole, which is a flap of skin that opens and closes under the dolphin’s voluntary control. Although still a matter of discussion, most researchers feel that in order to breathe, a dolphin must be conscious and alert to recognize that its blowhole is at the surface. So, how does a dolphin sleep?
The bottlenose dolphin sleeps by shutting down only half of its brain, along with the opposite eye. The other half of the brain stays awake at a low level of alertness. This attentive side is used to watch for predators, obstacles and other animals. It also signals when to rise to the surface for a fresh breath of air. After approximately two hours, the animal will reverse this process, resting the active side of the brain and awaking the rested half. This pattern is often called cat-napping.
So, applying the same concept on data center facilities, how do we maintain and service the critical infrastructure components in our data centers without reducing the number of capacity units required to support the data center?
(more…)
Tags: Data Center, Operations, protection, PUE, strategy
Posted in Data Center Facility, Service Management | Comments Off
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
I have just published an article on the definition of Infrastructure Consolidation, business drivers, key success factors, inhibitors, and recommended approach in such a project. The way I view such a transformation is to holistically address not just the technology aspect, but the processes, people as well as the organizational barriers or politics too.
Read more about this article here.
Tags: Cloud Computing, Consolidation, Enterprise Architecture, ITIL, Service Management, services, strategy, Virtualization
Posted in Consolidation & Virtualization, Service Management | Comments Off
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
We all know that in the world we live in, water exists in 3 forms – liquid, gas and solid. Water vapor refers to the gas form of water and it is produced from evaporation or boiling of liquid water. Liquid water starts to boil when its vapor pressure reaches its surrounding pressure. 
Below is a graph plotting the relationship of water vapor pressure versus temperature. Note that at the normal boiling point of 100°C, the vapor pressure equals the standard atmospheric pressure of 760 Torr or 101.325 kPa (approximately 7.5 Torr per kPa), and that is where evaporative cooling takes place (water turning into gas form takes a part of the heat with it). Anyway, enough of boring details…
So, what is the significance of water vapor in the context of data centers? Well, we first need to understand two terms – relative humidity and dew point.
(more…)
Tags: Air Management, Data Center, humidity, protection, RH, strategy, Temperature
Posted in Data Center Facility | Comments Off
Monday, September 21st, 2009
London’s Cass Business School recently released a research which highlights the perils facing executives tempted to use the financial crisis to buy struggling rivals, or distressed companies, at apparently bargain prices. The study looked at almost 3,000 acquisitions of distressed or insolvent companies, across various industries, over the past quarter century, from 1984 to 2008. It found acquirers who bought distressed or insolvent companies suffered a lower or deteriorating return on equity (ROE) in the three years after the deal, and the buyers underperformed those who bought healthy firms. The other aspect which the research found was that these deals involving distressed or insolvent companies tends to complete significantly faster, hence putting extra pressure on management teams. The ill-fated acquisitions of imperilled banks Merrill Lynch and HBOS by Bank of America (BAC.N) and Lloyds (LLOY.L), are recent high-profile examples.
As highlighted in my earlier post, M&A drivers could be for expanding customer base, market share, top line growth, new market entry, or to eliminate a competitor. There are also two other reasons that drives M&A, which are to build competence as well as to make a significant changes to the business model. Examples of these are like Scandent, Intelenet (a joint venture of HDFC and Barclays), and Wipro (who acquired Spectramind, Nerve Wire and Quantech to augment their competency).
(more…)
Tags: acquisition, Customer acquisition, Customer retention, merger, strategy
Posted in Business | Comments Off
Sunday, September 20th, 2009
Selecting the site for a new data center facility is both a business and technology decision. The selection process is a very important step as the outcome, once decided and finalized, is seldom reversible once the design and construction begins.
So, what are the factors to consider in selecting a site? It depends on many factors and the following are 10 of the factors to consider: (more…)
Tags: Data Center, strategy
Posted in Data Center Facility | Comments Off
Saturday, September 19th, 2009
The term M&A (short for Merger & Acquisition) is a corporate strategy which envisages management of processes related to selling, buying and combining one or more businesses for a common cause. The common causes could be to aid, finance or assist a business to grow faster or perhaps even for a non-performing business to exit. Regardless of good times or bad times, the demands from stakeholders on businesses are always in one direction – increasing growth. In an economic downturn with declining demands and a competitive landscape, it is becoming increasingly challenging to maintain a consistent growth rate which are expected from businesses. Although not all businesses heading into M&A are in search of an answer to their stakeholders in lieu of organic growth, there are a number which are turning to M&A to grow their market share, revenue, economies of scale, expand their market or customer base or to eliminate the competition.
In H1 of 2009, the European M&A market had 1,530 deals (worth Euro 130 billion), and in North America, M&A activities have picked up in the Pharmaceuticals, Medical & Biotech sector where it has hit the US$174 billion mark (accounting for 42% of overall value of deals in North America). From January to July 2009, Greater China accounted for 42.6% of the total M&A deal in Asia Pacific region, and 34.7% in deal volume, which is a significant increase from the same period in 2008. Asia, ex Japan, recorded at least 250 deals in H1 2009, worth more than US$173 billion. (source: mergermarket) (more…)
Tags: acquisition, Customer acquisition, merger, strategy
Posted in Business | Comments Off
