Tag Archive for 'foldera'

Hardware company gets SaaSy? Morphing business models

Published by Ben Kepes on July 25, 2008 in Business, Efficiency, IT, SaaS and Strategy. 0 Comments

Interesting news that Microsoft president of its Platform and Services division Kevin Johnson is leaving the company. Apparently he’s heading over to become CEO of Juniper Networks, the manufacturer of networking hardware. As Om reports, this hire, and some other recent ones, point to a shift in strategy for Juniper.

So what’s the relevance for a blog that talks about SaaS? As a commenter reminded us, "expensive routers are nothing more than software wrapped in expensive hardware". So it’s natural that Juniper would want a CEO with software experience.

There is also some rumour that Juniper is considering offering SaaS apps for network management/QoS. Excellent - hardware plus services - H+S

Now all this is really interesting for those in the network management industry, but even more interesting is to see how flexible even big businesses are becoming in terms of there strategies. Now only yesterday I lambasted Foldera for it’s bizarre turn-on-a-dime strategy shift, but this Juniper shift, if it eventuates, is a smart move.

It’s about finding core competencies and augmenting the scope of those competencies - if you make network hardware, which includes some smart embedded software, it’s a smart and obvious move to introduce some external software offerings that both add to the existing offerings, leverage off the successes of the existing offerings and simultaneously provide some discrete diversified revenue opportunities. Nice move - watch this space.

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Corporate reinvention

Published by Ben Kepes on July 24, 2008 in Business, Design, Governance, IT and Strategy. 2 Comments

Mauricio posted about Foldera’s metamorphosis from a developer of web-based collaboration tools into one that creates "high speed, high density carrier grade Ethernet switches" (whatever those are!)

Hmmmm - well I see the crossover there - one is physical, one virtual. One hardware, one software - come to think of it the only commonality between the two businesses is that they’re both in a space that has been done to death - so you could say that Foldera is retaining its true direction which is to be a "me too" player.

The incredible thing about all of this is that every day I come across absolutely fantastic business ideas that go nowhere because their powerpoint presentation isn’t up to spec, or they don’t know a second cousin of the father-in-law of Sergey Brin’s pedicurist. It’s criminal that companies like this get the time of day, let-alone funding.

The fact is that Foldera should be deadpool - it has achieved, is achieving and will achieve bugger all other than to stroke the ego of it’s new Charirman, President and CEO (busy guy isn’t he?) Jim Fiedler who Foldera says is;

an experienced and respected leader in the telecom industry, with vast experience in running early and mid-stage telecom networking and services companies [whose] experience and contacts within the industry will provide exceptional leadership into the future

What utter rot - I’ll go out on a limb here by saying that this emperor is looking decidedly naked.

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