Solutions in search of a problem

I’ll never forget the first time I was confronted by a vendor dutifully informing me of “the real problem.” As a newcomer to IT journalism in the mid-1990s, I started to think it must take a miracle for the average IT shop to keep its servers running.

Pitch after pitch carried some lengthy explanation of a problem that had just been discovered in the labs. Without this vendors’ totally unique server, middleware, or business continuity solution, the entire IT world was bound to come to a crashing halt.

The classic sales pitch has not changed too much since then: Identify the IT headache, then prescribe the drugs. Step three for customers remains “haggle over money;” for journalists, it’s “argue over believability.”

However, there are two important differences for vendors between those heady days and now. Firstly, a unique convergence of technologies and business factors has permanently given enterprises the upper hand. Long live the buyers’ market.

One of the unexpected consequences of the downturn is that IT decision makers have become really good at shrugging their shoulders and saying “no” largely because of the reality of tight IT budgets.

Technologies such as open source and XML underscore the fact that viable, competing choices, while not overly abundant, are certainly available.

A great case in point is the battle between IBM, HP, and Sun over the next generation of intelligent, data-center-driven networked computing. The technologies are promising and also similar in many respects, but hands up: Are you still confused about exactly what problem they are solving?

Until last week, Sun had only offered a vague explanation of the problems addressed by its networked computing environment, known as N1. Steve MacKay, Sun’s vice president of N1 shed some light on the subject in an interview with InfoWorld. “A lot of customers are looking very anxiously for people who can come and solve the 80 percent of their problem, which is how much it’s costing to operate this stuff,” he said.

Long-term costs lead me to my second point: IT’s upfront costs keep falling. Computer Associates’ CEO Sanjay Kumar told InfoWorld that customers are increasingly replacing Unix servers with Linux. “[One customer was] able to increase the power of their servers four times, [and] they were able to cut the cost to one-fifth,” he said.

Upfront costs are also falling because you can choose the method of procurement that suits your style. In addition to the innovation offered by hosted CRM companies, ASPs are on the verge of revival because companies such as Microsoft and Computer Associates are hatching plans to deliver applications in both hosted and client-based models.

Of course, cost is not always the biggest consideration. But even if your IT budget is starting to inch upwards, that poker face should remain the same. You’ve tasted the good life where vendors sweat over every sale, so pleading poverty will not only help the balance sheet but will also maintain the pressure on vendors to innovate and keep the total cost of IT in check.