Software
VMware’s ‘West Coast Offense’
Posted on January 13, 2010 |
VMware’s purchase of Yahoo’s Zimbra e-mail software shows how VMware, under a management team led by former Microsoft executives, continues to diversify in the face of competition from their former employer.
Zimbra, which has more than 55 million users, lets VMware sell Web-based e-mail and calendar software that’s used by companies including H&R Block, Bechtel, and General Electric’s India division for use by their own workers. Internet Service Providers including Comcast and NTT Communications also offer Zimbra e-mail to their subscribers.
The acquisition, VMware’s second in five months, continues its trajectory toward building a portfolio of software that’s broader than the virtualization software for servers that’s propelled the company to a projected $1.97 billion in 2009 sales, according to a Bloomberg News estimate. Last August, VMware paid $420 million to buy SpringSource, a maker of programming tools for Java developers.
VMware hopes to use its programming tools and the new Zimbra e-mail software to create additional demand for its core virtualization software, which improves the efficiency of computer servers, says Chief Operating Officer Tod Nielsen. “We view this as a first step toward moving up the stack” toward more software applications.
Nielsen, VMware Chief Executive Paul Maritz, and Executive Vice-President Richard McAniff are all former executives at Microsoft, whose Windows Server products compete with VMware’s software. VMware is employing a strategy similar to the one Microsoft used to dominate the desktop computing market, adding software applications that can create demand for an underlying system. “Paul and I learned the West Coast offense,” says Nielsen. “We’re now at a new team, and there are some plays that work well.”
Ellison’s Impatience Over Sun
Posted on September 23, 2009 |
Toward the end of Larry Ellison’s freewheeling talk in San Jose on Sept. 21, host Ed Zander got into a spat with a fellow in the back of the room who insisted he wanted to ask Ellison two questions, not the allotted one. By the time the hotel ballroom looked back, they realized the dogged questioner was none other than Sun Microsystems chairman Scott McNealy.
“Do you have any idea what future ex-chairmen can do?” McNealy, dressed in old jeans and a blue T-shirt, asked Ellison, who was on stage being interviewed by Zander, who once served as Sun’s president. (McNealy’s second question was about hockey’s San Jose Sharks).
The ex-chairman line got some laughs from the audience, but Ellison also made clear during his talk that he, too, wants some fast answers about the fate of Oracle’s $7.4 billion bid to acquire Sun. The deal, announced in April, has now dragged on for five months as the European Union conducts an antitrust probe into Oracle’s potential power in the database market as a result of buying Sun.
Sun is losing $100 million a month “so we’d like to get this thing done,” Ellison said. “The longer this takes, the more money Sun is going to lose.”
Ellison, being interviewed on stage at the Fairmont hotel by Zander, who was also once Motorola's CEO, held forth on his vision for making Oracle as powerful a company as IBM was in the ‘60s, said he’d work at Oracle at least another five years, and skewered the tech industry’s embrace of the term ‘cloud computing’ as marketing fluff.
Apres Mint, Intuit Must Freshen its Brands
Posted on September 16, 2009 |
Now that it’s bought Mint.com to spruce up its personal finance software, Intuit needs to protect a place in the market for its aging Quicken brand. It's got to do that without making Mint seem stale.
Much of the attention on Intuit’s $170 million acquisition of online personal finance software maker Mint on Sept. 14 focused on how Intuit will use Mint’s site to attract a younger generation of customers who don’t cotton to PC software or tedious data entry. The deal was also a big win for First Round Capital, an early venture backer of Mint.
Intuit Chief Executive Brad Smith says Mint is a template for what personal finance software should look like: simple to set up, accessible anywhere there’s a Web browser, and designed to put money back in consumers’ pockets by spotting ways they can save on common expenses. “They were not only a potential challenge for us, but a real inspiration,” he says. “We had taken our eye off the personal finance portion of the business. We hadn’t stopped to imagine what personal finance software could look like for the next generation of consumers.”
Intuit executives say Mint will lead its efforts to attract new customers to personal finance software. “The question is whether the full-blown Quicken product still has a place in the market,” says Forrester Research analyst Emmett Higdon. “Quicken as a brand doesn’t resonate” with younger users, he says. “They say, ‘That’s my father’s way of managing my money.’”
Mint, popular with consumers in their twenties and thirties, claims 40% of its users are women. That’s a different audience than Quicken, whose average user is “over 40 and male," Intuit says.
But Intuit isn’t forsaking the market for PC and Mac software. Baby boomers like the comfort of storing their data on a home computer, and the company sells about 1 million copies of desktop Quicken each year, according to Smith. A new Windows version of Quicken is due by early November, and a long-delayed new Mac version next February. Though Intuit doesn’t break out Quicken sales, at $40 to $50 a copy, 1 million units a year isn’t chump change. About half those sales come to new users who haven’t tried Quicken before, according to Smith. “There’s still value there,” he says.
To make Quicken more attractive, Intuit plans to overhaul its Quicken Online site to become a place where users can quickly check snapshots of their financial life, for example how an investment portfolio’s performing, through a Web browser or mobile phone. For Quicken users, the Web will become a place to get new functions that make the desktop product more useful.
Smith, who used to market Pepsi and Seven-Up, says the trick is to imbue the Mint and Quicken brands with “personalities” so customers can readily tell them apart, much the way avid TV watchers distinguish among HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax.
Mint CEO Aaron Patzer, who plans to join Intuit to manage its personal finance products, says the company will likely brand Mint.com along the lines of “Mint from Intuit” or “Mint from the makers of Quicken.” Yet Mint’s users are praying Intuit doesn’t mess with their beloved site. Some say they’ll quit using Mint now that Intuit owns it.
For Smith to revitalize Intuit’s personal finance franchise, he’ll need to make sure Mint fans’ negative associations with the 26-year-old Quicken brand don’t hold back the company’s march to the future.
Clearing the Clouds from VMware’s Road Map
Posted on August 31, 2009 |
VMware eased into its annual conference in San Francisco on Aug. 31 with a few small announcements about cost savings and industry partnerships. The spotlight now turns to Chief Executive Paul Maritz, who will give a Sept. 1 keynote address and press conference that will be VMWorld’s center of attention.
Maritz, who took over as CEO a little more than a year ago, has a big job before him: To sell VMware’s story about what’s next on its product road map at a time when Microsoft is making inroads into the market for virtualization software. The task is especially important given some confusion about what products VMware has in the hopper
Companies use virtualization software to make their servers more efficient and save on hardware costs, and VMware has grown to $1.9 billion in annual sales by grabbing leadership in that market. Now, it’s fighting Microsoft and others to control other aspects of companies’ data center operations, including the tools they use to manage applications, servers, and other hardware.
Last fall, VMware was talking up what it described as future “virtual data center operating system" software to help companies manage servers, disk drives, networking devices, and applications. Now, it’s playing down that sales pitch.
The so-called ‘VDC-OS’ “was more of a concept than software,” chief operating officer Tod Nielsen said in a recent interview. The company was using the term to describe future capabilities of its flagship vSphere software, he says. Bogomil Balansky, VMware’s vice-president of product marketing, says “we’ve bandied around a lot of different terms for what to call this piece of software.” A better way to think about VMware’s roadmap is that future versions of vSphere will let companies schedule computing jobs on virtualized hardware, and will let software applications perform faster and more reliably, he adds.
Getting the branding right will be key as customers look for more help cutting IT costs during what’s still a tight environment for technology budgets. VMware, a hyper-growth story only a few years ago, is expanding more slowly than it was during companies’ pre-recession buying binge on virtualization software; sales were flat in the second quarter. “It’s hard to know what [percentage] this company will grow in recovery,” says Jeffries & Co. research analyst Katherine Egbert, who recently downgraded VMware’s stock to “underperform.”
How to Avail a Good Online Technical Support
Posted on June 24, 2009 |
Every computer savvy is well acquainted with frequent technical problems in a PC and knows what ill effect these problems can bring to the system. That's why there is a thing called technical or technical support which allows people with a non technical background to get their PC fixed at anytime.
