Thursday, January 23, 2003

Regis, What's Up? http://www.mckenna-group.com/ For 10 days now (or so it seems), the site's been down. Has the down turn finally hit the mother of all hi-tech marketing shops? 12:59:47 PM    comment []

McBride is, dare I say, En Fuego? US National team member, Brian McBride, is making quite a splash in the English Premier League, scoring 3 goals in his first 2 matches. His "double" on Saturday enabled Everton to top Sunderland, 2-1: http://soccernet.espn.go.com/report?id=54649&;cc=5901 The current Everton manager actually managed McBride in Dec. 2001 at Preston North End in Div. 1, prior to McBride's blot clot issues. Great to see McBride making such a huge impact. His efforts have given Everton's chances for Euro competition (in 2003-04) a big boost. "C'Mon, you boys in white!"   12:45:35 PM    comment []

There Goes Another One Giga Group was purchased by Forrester earlier this week for $51 Million (http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20030121S0005) More consolidation in the IT analyst space. Interesting to see how much fusion they get out of this. Giga is much more enterprise focused, so in theory, it should be a good fit. But Forrester paid a pretty nice premium, given that Giga was trading below $2 at the time ($4.75/share was the buy price). Interesting factoid: W.R. Hambrecht and Gideon Gartner owned approx. 1/3 of Giga at the time of the sale.   12:41:06 PM    comment []

What's Different this time around? I was posed an intriuging (and difficult) question this morning at breakfast. The topic was Services Management, which is one that, let's face it, I am quite fond of: http://www.stencilgroup.com/ideas_scope_200206wsmgt.html The inquiry from a friend in the venture community asked, "What's different in services management than say portals?"  Now that the market leader in portals got picked up for a song late last year (http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/021029/datu058_1.html), what does this say for WS Management? The "devil's advocate" argues that if it's all about standards, then IBM, BEA, et all will have some LCD-functionality in their stack that will suffice for most users. At this point, the Big Boys Portal offering is nothing to get excited about, but companies were no longer willing to pay a premium for portal functionality.  Will WS Mgmt suffer the same fate? Stay tuned.   12:34:49 PM    comment []