Archive for May, 2010
Tax season is behind us (at least for most of us) and we can all give a sigh of relief… but can we? This year, getting my taxes organized and handing them to my accountant seemed to be more difficult than usual. Fortunately for me, the Federal Government gave certain areas that were dealing with flooding a small extension that allowed me to find the time to pass my taxes into my accountant.
Once that task was completed, I was able to relax except for the fact I now had one day to get back into the accountant’s office and sign the documents for them to send to the IRS.
Shocker! So let me get this straight…. A leader in the B2B Gateway, MFT, and Integration Provider markets gets acquired and the leading analysts firms in the universe reduce it to an apps in the Cloud story???? SMH. Let’s peel away just one layer of the onion… Just one layer, no analysis needed on this one.
Companies with investments in Connect:Direct and/ or Connect:Enterprise have to think long and hard about continuing their reliance on the NDM protocol. We aren’t talking about just two or three companies, we are talking about thousands of financial, manufacturing, healthcare and telecomm companies. So we need some advice on this one…
The growth and evolution of the managed file transfer industry continues to be a blessing for Ipswitch and our partners.
The acquisition of Sterling Commerce by IBM (article) presents an opportunity for both companies’ customers and prospects to reexamine their challenges around advanced file services. Proprietary technologies and protocols such as Connect: Direct and Network Data Mover (NDM) are inefficient, expensive and difficult to manage. Yet many companies continue to pay excessive licensing and maintenance fees because the cost and effort to replace these technologies have, until now, seemed as expensive. Furthermore, some partners and ecosystems insist on the usage of legacy file transfer technology because alternatives did not seem to be available.
To some folks this is just a flash banner on a website, amongst the many marketing messages that you typically find on a technology provider’s dot com website.
“IBM acquires Sterling Commerce from AT&T for $1.4B”.
For many customers it means reconsidering 30 year old technology that enables many mission critical processes. When something like this happens, in my past life at Gartner I would be required to write 3 paragraphs: what happened, my analysis and what should customers do. And I had to be politically correct because all three companies were important customers to Gartner. I could give thoughtful analysis but I had to produce multiple caveats to indemnify myself and Gartner. ( Hey it’s a decent business model!)
PCI audit regulations around scope continue to drive the need for people to segment their networks, applications and often, their equipment. At Ipswitch, we often see new enterprise customers fed up with their monolithic legacy systems coming to us with a “tactical” need to segment.
Typically, these customers leave a large number of existing transfers on their legacy system to begin with (a 10-1 ratio of legacy to new connections is not uncommon), and some try-and-buy a MOVEit system at that point. However, others get hooked on the idea of a more flexible, more relevant system and end up with a strategy to migrate all partner connections to MOVEit over a period of 12-18 months, even as they use MOVEit to completely address their short-term PCI segmentation needs.
