Dennis Howlett (one of the Irregular Enterprise folks at Zdnet.com) takes an end-of-year look at the enterprise software landscape through the lens of the Wikileaks controversy:The dislocation that cloud computing has caused established vendors is opening up a new window of opportunity for buyers to assess the value they get from solutions. Even our most sensitive data seems destined to go into cloud based solutions. Among these vendors, we often see far more openness than is usually associated with software suppliers. Open pricing is the norm, public support sites are springing up and vendor managed but not controlled blogs are becoming commonplace.

I regularly receive email telling me where one or other cloud vendor is doing well or failing. At times I wonder whether the people sending these emails are looking for them to become part of the public discourse. I doubt that I am alone. Howlett includes SAP and Oracle in his post as he wonders whether what we've seen happen with Wikileaks might occur within the software industry: WikiLeaks has shone a public light on issues that many might have suspected but few could prove. Regardless of your feelings about that organization we are seeing some uncomfortable truths that will surely demand action that make governments more accountable. The enterprise apps business is not so different. What matters now is how the enterprise vendors respond. Tip of the hat to Dennis Howlett and the folks at Zdnet!

WikiLeaks lessons for enterprise software vendors
Dennis Howlett | 15 December 2010
www.zdnet.com/blog/howlett/wikileaks-les...ontent=Google+Reader

I wish this discussion wasn't couched as a Wikileaks response, but it's an important one regardless. Thanks for the link to Howlett's post - it's thoughtful and relevant, a reminder of why the enterprise software community looks to the Enterprise Irregular blog community, rather than the major analyst firms (or IT press, for that matter) for insight into the segment.

Howlett closes his post by saying:

"As we think about what the New Year might bring, my hope is that vendors of all stripes will seek to be more open, more transparent and disclosing. Experience to date suggests that when that path is followed, buyers feel far better informed, empowered and willing to give the benefit of the doubt when things inevitably go wrong."

I believe he's right with respect to the impact of openness, but I'm not sure the community is going to follow Howlett's direction. In fact, I've seen only occasional evidence of a commitment to transparency since taking over as the network-wide CCO for IT in Canada in October. Here's an observation from earlier in Howlett's post, remarking on a situation that unfortunately (much too) common:

"We get invited to conferences, are schmoozed and boozed, fed some pat line and then report as though that is the sum and substance."

When I took over as CCO for IT in Canada, this was my "welcome to the industry" moment - the realization that vendors have found it very cost-effective to essentially bribe journalists with travel and parties, in exchange for rapid but shallow coverage of their orchestrated events. This represents a challenging balance for IT journalists: one the one hand, it's at least sometimes true that access to announcements and global executives is important to the news cycle; on the other, many of these trips are merely PR exercises, and even when they aren't, well-thought-out analyses take time (which cuts into our editors' availability for additional junkets), and might prompt the trip-givers to focus their attention on more compliant correspondents, limiting access for those who are more critical (or even balanced) in their approach.

In the end, there is plain and simple too much information - and too few outlets for that information - for Wikileaks to be repeated on any scale in the IT industry, much less the Canadian IT industry. To add to Howlett's hope, though, I'd like to believe that we can continue to raise the standard of IT insight in Canada in 2011 - with the help of the vendors, as he says, but also of the broader community of buyers, managers, developers, deployers, and resellers who have their own insights into "the truth" of how technology helps us to realize business objectives.

Good points, Michael.

I think the better members of the IT press do try to dig out the story behind the story when they can. However many, especially juniors, are handicapped by their lack of real world knowledge of the subject.

As both IT pro and journalist, I've found that sometimes announcements that have my fellow media hopping up and down with excitement make me yawn, and some totally unsexy announcements get me excited because I see their utility in the corporate or consumer world. Media need that perspective.

One example: companies with vested interests (they make money off those who fall for the stories) are really pushing Internet TV and movies. Cheapskate me has been grumping all along about the bandwidth costs - most Canadian ISPs have data caps, and charge a lot for overages. That's rarely mentioned in stories about Internet TV or Internet-connected televisions and such. And many consumers I've spoken to are totally oblivious to the fact that their online movie addiction is whacking their Internet bandwidth.