Walter Adamson
Why PR and social media don’t mix – Qantas culture #fail
A Qantas spokeswoman said there was "no suggestion it's come from our aircraft". That's PR. At the same time, no actually quite a way ahead of that time, Facebook readers already knew that the engine that exploded and fell into Indonesian houses and parks was…
2 hidden gems in Dell’s acquisition of Boomi
We used to talk about the dot-com boom, now Dell's doing a dot-cloud Boomi. The purchase of Boomi is smart, and puts Dell in a strong position in the cloud integration space, and in particular the cloud data integration space which I think is...
Storm clouds on the horizon for vendors
Every analyst firm is predicting massive increases in sales for hardware and software "stuff" going into so-called "private clouds": IDC predicts server revenues driven by the private-cloud market will grow from $2.6bn to $5.7bn in 2014; IDC also analysed that total private cloud revenues will…
Conservative business backs National Broadband Network for innovation
Business lobbyists the Australian Industry Group (AIG) have just released their Innovation Report. Business votes conservative in Australia. True to form one of our best known if not most admired businessmen (although I admire him a lot, as a visionary and wealth creator) Rupert...
Office365 and Partners – crisis = danger plus opportunity
Folk etymology has it that the Chinese character for crisis 危机 is a combination of "danger" plus "opportunity". Linguists point out that this is incorrect, but its popularity lives on in speakers' repertoires because it's a convenient and perhaps exotic segue. Now, perhaps the combination...
What Microsoft thinks of IBM’s Cloud offers – not much!
Whenever you hear Microsoft's Bob Muglia speak you realise that he is a very smart guy. I guess you need to be as president of the nearly $15 billion Server and Tools Division of Microsoft. Muglia controls key data center products like Windows Server,...
Facebook Credits – 5 things you should know
Whether you're playing FarmVille, FishVille, or PetVille, you probably use Facebook Credits - the virtual currency launched June 2010 (but the program as a whole is still in beta). Facebook last Thursday announced it is expanding this program to include more payment options and...
Sticky start to Vaseline’s 140th Anniversary promotion
By accident I came across a promotion for Vaseline's "140th birthday". It's a product owned by Unilever - a company which boasts 1H2010 sales of €21.9 billion, "underlying volume growth 6.6%, underlying sales growth 3.8% and underlying price growth (2.6)%, underlying operating margin up 30bps...
Average business application launched with $1 million technical debt
In what I found to be a fascinating result the CAST Center for Quantitative Research reported on its Worldwide Application Software Quality Study - (CAST is a provider of software analysis and measurement solutions). Bill Curtis, CAST’s chief scientist and senior vice president of...
Getting Screwed by Scribd – why I am deleting my account
I liked Scribd and their recent upgrade including the addition of more social networking features are all welcome, even if the rendering on Chrome often comes out screwed up. I'd tell them about it but that's where the trouble starts - support, or lack...
Ego battle obscures Oracle’s real Cloud Shift with Amazon
Although Oracle's "Cloud" Exalogic announcement has received waves of coverage (see some below) the more interesting innovation for Oracle and Cloud seems to have gone relatively unnoticed. Egos clash in Larry's Oracle locker room Oracle's Exalogic box: Cloud washing at its best? While Exalogic returned…
Banks behaving bravely – ASB Bank’s FaceBranch
ASB Bank's Facebranch, said to be "the first 'Virtual Branch' application of its kind to be launched by a bank on Facebook", isn't especially interesting to me for its Facebook functionality but rather for its fronting up to the usual corporate fears of social...
Channel opportunities for Cloud services
As Jeffrey Kaplan has said "one of the misconceptions of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and broader cloud computing market is that these new Web-based services will disintermediate the channel because of their simpler, more user-friendly solutions, and direct sales and delivery business models." It's true that...
Next Generation Data Center – 4 years forward 3 years behind
I attended an Oracle "Next Generation Data centre Summit", because I was interested to see how Oracle presented their SUN acquisition, and to see how they positioned Cloud given that Larry Ellison is often represented as being a Cloud sceptic. Oracle now presents itself as...
Cloud plus on-premise vendors best placed for SMB SaaS opportunity
AMI Partners recently reported that the greatest growth in Cloud/SaaS for SMBs would be in email/messaging, online storage and backup, and document management/collaboration solutions. They made the point that the Cloud plus on-premise vendors are best placed to take advantage of this shift,...
IBM’s social media skills initiative for partners
IBM is often ranked in the top 50 of US companies in terms of social media savviness, but like most companies which sell indirect that savviness does not necessarily translate down through the channel. This means that channel partners are actually missing the opportunity to...
Cloud disruption gains momentum driven by lower costs and greater simplicity
The Cloud is the biggest disruptive force to hit the IT industry for the last 20 years; and by the way that's why it's not "the same" as using AMS as an online service bureau 20 years ago although for some bizarre reason...
GM and social media – a new day and a “new GM”
Connie Burke, Communications Manager of Social Media at GM, gave a good interview in CIO Zone and explained something of GM's commitment to social media and the impact it's having on staff and customers. In a nutshell my take was that there were two main...
Starbucks, ask a simple question get 10,000 answers!
It's astounding that when Starbucks asked on Facebook "How long is your drink order?" they had nearly 2,000 answers per hour for the first 5 hours, and about the same number of "Likes". It only represents about 0.1% of their amazing fan base of...
Cloud, 3rd generation outsourcing and what it means
Virtual Ark Executive CEO & President Marty Gauvin recently described Cloud Computing as the 3rd Generation of outsourcing, and it's a useful way of looking at it. Marty called the 1st generation "your mess for less" which is an apt description and pinpoints how...