Gregor Petri

Not too long ago, it took even the most successful entrepreneurs several centuries or at least decades to reach a valuation of a billion and thus become a member of the exclusive Billionaire Boys Club*. Families like the Rothschilds, the Waltons or the Brenninkmeijers have indeed built up impressive capital wealth, but because it took them several generations, it often became quite diluted among brothers, sons, daughters, nieces, and even third-degree-nephews. With the advent of first: IT, then the Internet and now the cloud, that time frame has rapidly shrunk. Today companies with as little as 50 or even 13 employees reached valuations where reputable companies and world-renowned artists can only dream of. This acceleration is even more poignant when we look at applications in the heart the nexus of Social, Mobile, Cloud and Analytics (SMAC), such as Instagram , T... (more)

Tune into the Cloud

In the cloud lock-in is often a greater concern than lock-out*, but both should be top of mind for organizations looking to deploy cloud seriously, or better said, for organizations that want to deploy cloud for serious business. Lock-in is the phenomenon that it is often difficult (lengthy and expensive) for user organizations to switch suppliers, often because after some time the software becomes so closely linked with the way the organization works that saying goodbye to the vendor becomes virtualy impossible. It is no coincidence that there are only two industries (IT vendor... (more)

How many CEO's to screw in a lightbulb

Is it just me or has the CEO title recently fallen pray to title inflation? More and more companies seem to find economies of scale in appointing CEO’s by the dozen, one per division, one per continent or even one per country. It used to be pretty clear that if you had a meeting with the CEO, you spoke to the guy in charge (back then in most cases it actually was a guy, although recently – especially in tech – we saw more and more gals in the top CEO position). The CEO was the one person where all the different reporting lines of modern matrix management came together and who cou... (more)

Nick Carr's 2003 Rules for IT Management: An Open Nerve?

If an article, 10 years after its initial publication date, is featured in several look backs, reviews, Q&As and still gathers reactions and emotional analysis, it can be concluded it must have struck a chord - or in this case - more an open nerve. In May 2003*, the Harvard Business Review published "IT Doesn't Matter" , an article by then still largely unknown editor "at large" Nicholas Carr. The premise of the article was that infrastructure has a diminishing impact on competitiveness and that IT was infrastructure (although Carr in the recent Q&A seems to indicate he meant IT In... (more)

Vendor Lock-in and Cloud Computing

IT vendor lock-in is as old as the IT industry itself. Some may even argue that lock-in is unavoidable when using any IT solution, regardless of whether we use it “on premise” or “as a service”. To determine whether this is the case, we examine traditional lock-in and the to-be-expected impact of cloud computing. Vendor lock-in is seen as one of the potential drawbacks of cloud computing. One of Gartner’s research analysts recently published a scenario where lock-in and standards even surpass security as the biggest objection to cloud computing. Despite efforts like Open Systems... (more)