Our competitors are also colleagues. Together we are raising the profile of this industry. There is huge potential for us and our clients to tap into. The barriers to entry for new comers are very high.
Q: Do you see any changes on the market in terms of requirements?
A: Well the big change we have seen is the emergence of Microsoft Enterprise products. We have been traditionally UNIX focused, with some Linux, however as mentioned, we will always engineer a solution in accordance with our clients’ needs, Only logical, we have implemented and deployed also a Microsoft solution – E.g. IHK Cologne. Indeed, as we speak, we are in the middle of a rather large project which will for now remain unnamed. The case study will be released in due course.
Also we see a lot of interest in the implementation of open operating systems within system z platforms. We have completed a project with AHOLD in the Netherlands, whereby a major logistics application was migrated from the Mainframe to a UNIX partition upon this hardware. A very cost effective solution.
Yes, often we have partners who themselves are competitors. This is very common in this business, and again we all have a mutual interest in raising the profile of the industry. We ourselves still have that same drive towards delivering to our clients what they want. This has always been the main success ingredient, and will remain so. I guess I want to say we are impartial.
Q: How this influenced on the service delivery and product development?
A: Traditionally and engineering to order business, finds themselves with a very comprehensive product portfolio. Can however lead to deployment issues due to the myriad of options. We decided some years back to involve our R & D in deployment with a view to creating intuitive deployment interfaces and tools. This is reaping great rewards as turn around times are decreasing…..even if, we keep moving the target due to the engineering of more and more solutions.
Q: What is your current position of this market and which big players to you work with?
A: This is sometimes a funny market. Partners become competitors and competitors become partners. Our industry has proven time and time again, that client needs are more important than any competitive stance. We work with our competitors and they with us.
We work also with the big boys like HP, Accenture, Microsoft and of course IBM themselves.
Q: What is the main differentiation between you amongst other players on the market ?
A:Again, we have respect for those we consider to be genuine competitors and I know we all benefit from each other’s successes. We have a very detailed product SWOT analysis which uses with 60 different metrics to help determine where we stand. These are divided into categories such as product, tools, features, technology coverage and commercial model. We employ a scoring system, to determine how we compare, the results of which are most satisfying.
First and foremost we use this for market segmentation and for our product development roadmap. Yes, it often occurs that we reference this during client and partner processes.
To things really show up;
- The feature and technology coverage of our proprietary suite and the relationships we have with vendors of niche features makes our solution very comprehensive. Plus the technology we own has been developed by us, as such we know it very well.
- We have to address our presence in different regions. Our newly formed partner development organization is working on this.
Q: How big is the market? When will it be saturated
A: Well we can go into statistics. One reads 80% of all transactions are conducted on Mainframe, or increase in data requirements means capacities are growing by between 30 – 40% each year.
There are other similar statistics in circulation, which indicate the sheer scale and size of the market. Also the presence of the big players like Microsoft, HP Oracle and of course the very clear defensive activities of IBM are a clear indication.
Again, within our industry it is not about focusing on the competitor, it is about increasing the size of the market. There is plenty to go around for the foreseeable future.
