Social Networking and the Common Enterprise

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I recently spent some time IMing with a reporter about social networking in the corporate world – how businesses can reap great rewards, what potential landmines to watch for – and then I thought, “Hey… what’s in this for me? Why should she be the only one to fill up some blank space with my keen observations?” So here’s the gist of it…

Social networking is a huge opportunity for companies of all sizes to give customers a view of their company and culture. It’s a long-term marketing strategy that’s also low-cost and very efficient. If companies can get customers to identify with their brand, it becomes the ‘cool’ choice for their target market. The more customers identify with the company/brand, the less price-sensitive they become; they are buying the product for reasons other than strictly price, and they’ll leap hurdles to maintain their brand loyalty. And these committed ‘real world’ customers are the best salespeople a company can have – each one influences his/her entire social circle. People tend to put more faith into a recommendation from a friend or family member than they do in an ad or website from the company.

However, it’s got to be a soft sell. An obvious sales pitch is the wrong approach. Your corporate Facebook can’t be like a Sham Wow commercial. That won’t engage potential customers. At best, they’ll ignore it; at worst, they’ll laugh at it and gleefully heap scorn on your company and brand.

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Financial Modeling & Analytics: Sin or Salvation?

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An interesting story in a recent Business Week, with the apt title “Financial Models Must Be Clean and Simple” discusses financial modeling in light of the economic meltdown. Along the way, it presents a good explanation of CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations – read: bundles of toxic mortgages) and how they work. For the uninitiated, it’s a good entry point into understanding what the hell happened and why the turmoil will continue through at least the mid-term future.

What was interesting to me was the discussion about how financial modeling works, and how it failed. The authors correctly point out that modeling is extremely useful in the scientific world – indispensable, in fact. But modeling physical phenomena is very much different from modeling human behavior – which is essentially what financial models are designed to do. In the physical world, there are rules. We may not know the rules or exactly how they work, but they are consistent for the most part. Contrast that to the human world, where results hinge on the actions of governments, financial institutions, and masses of individuals – none of whom react in a strictly rational manner. Or, more precisely, they react in manners that are rational to them, but that rationality is definitely a product of their own world view.

Wall Street firms have long spent their money acquiring the best scientific brains they could find. When I was in graduate school (University of Chicago Graduate School of Business), some of the most highly sought-after candidates were people who had deep math skills in hard sciences (physics, biology, etc.). While I was sweating out grades in the finance classes, these folks were reading magazines and just waiting around for the math to get hard enough to hold their interest. When they found their homes in the financial capitals of the world, their skills were immediately put to use in building models to figure out the behavior of hideously complicated financial instruments under a wide variety of economic conditions. It takes a lot of computing power to do this, but it also takes a lot of brains to figure out and test the data interrelationships and to make the models sing.

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The Cure for Hope™

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Things suck. Investors in your startup are scuttling away faster than cockroaches under a flashlight, you’ve mortgaged everything except the dog, and your fed-up spouse is taking half of what’s left and moving to Reno. You’ve laid off most of…

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Dinosaurs Still Roaming Earth

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A whole lot of people (830,000 to be exact) would be forced to find another way to line their birdcages, train their puppies, and wrap their fish if the New York Times takes seriously this observation by Nicholas Carlson of…

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4Q’07 Unix Vendor Preference Survey

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Beaverton, OR – April 17, 2008 – Enterprise customers see the Unix server market as almost dead heat between IBM and Hewlett-Packard, narrowly favoring IBM over HP on technology factors but slightly preferring HP on system quality and data center…

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HP, IBM Top Green Picks by x86 Enterprise Customers

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Beaverton, OR – November 19, 2007 – As server vendors increasingly pitch the ‘green’ attributes of their systems, customers are listening and evaluating the competing claims. In a recent survey by Gabriel Consulting Group (GCG), customers rated Hewlett Packard and IBM ahead of competitors in terms of how well their systems utilized energy and data center floor space.

GCG’s semiannual x86 Server Vendor Preference Survey poses a comprehensive battery of questions to hands-on IT customers that shed light on their perceptions about vendor offerings and services. These data center managers, architects, and administrators also address particular issues such as virtualization, purchasing plans, and IT trends.

Highlights from the ‘x86 Vendor Power/ Cooling/ Floorspace Report Card’ section of the survey: 

  • 23% of survey respondents rated HP x86 systems most energy efficient, with IBM at 20%, Sun Microsystems at 19%, and Dell garnering 17% of the vote.
  • IBM and HP tied at 22% for most thermal efficient systems. Sun and Dell trailed at 16% and 11% respectively.
  • HP also notched a win in best utilization of server room floor space with 25% of the vote. IBM grabbed second place with 19%, Sun third at 16%, and Dell fourth at 12%.
  • IBM took top honors in power monitoring and management, data center design and advisory services, and was rated as the vendor best able to improve facilities utilization in future products.
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Data Centers Feeling Facilities Pain

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Beaverton, OR – November 19, 2007 – Recent industry focus on the need to ‘go green’ isn’t just hype; a solid majority of x86 data center personnel are highly concerned about energy consumption, cooling capacity, and floor space, according to a survey conducted by Gabriel Consulting Group (GCG). 

GCG’s semiannual x86 Server Vendor Preference Survey poses a comprehensive battery of questions to hands-on IT customers that shed light on their perceptions about vendor offerings and services. These data center managers, architects, and administrators also address particular issues such as virtualization, purchasing plans, and IT trends.

Some highlights from the ‘Power/ Cooling/ Floorspace’ section of the survey:

  • 30% of survey respondents report that they are rapidly running out of electrical capacity.
  • Nearly 1/3 say that cooling capacity has become a major concern for them.
  • Data center floor space is the most critical issue of all; 42% are “rapidly running out.”
  • More than 55% of survey respondents report that their server purchases are “heavily influenced” by power, cooling, and floor space concerns.
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For x86-Based Servers, Big is In

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Beaverton, OR – November 9, 2007 – Enterprise customers purchasing  x86-based servers will be buying larger systems in the future, according to a survey conducted by Gabriel Consulting Group (GCG). 

Some highlights from the ‘Buying Trends’ section of the survey:

·         Almost half of the survey participants indicated that they will be buying ‘fewer’ or ‘many fewer’ single-socket servers; only 8% plan to purchase ‘more’ or ‘many more’.

·         About 75% of respondents will continue or increase their purchases of multi-processor servers.

o        75% plan to purchase dual-socket systems in the near future;

o        72% say that quad-socket systems are in their near-term plans;

o        64% indicate that they will be purchasing or strongly considering greater-than-four-socket x86 servers in the near future.

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Survey: Intel Ahead of AMD on Server Customer Loyalty

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Beaverton, OR – November 9, 2007 – Intel brand server processors enjoy higher levels of loyalty among enterprise x86 customers than rival AMD, although system purchases are largely influenced by vendor brand and other non-processor factors, according to a survey conducted by Gabriel Consulting Group (GCG).

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Press Release: 2Q’07 x86 Vendor Preference Survey

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Beaverton, OR – October 1, 2007 – Enterprise customers see the x86 server market as a two-horse race between IBM and Hewlett-Packard, narrowly favoring IBM over HP on x86 server technology, but preferring HP on product quality and customer support criteria, according to a survey conducted by Gabriel Consulting Group (GCG). The two other major x86 server vendors, Sun Microsystems and Dell Inc., placed third and fourth respectively.

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