* Network management company successes and failures
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After returning from a very nice, long holiday season, it occurred to me that I had more office cleaning to do, which inevitably means revisiting files that haven’t been accessed recently (electronic and otherwise). Among these were many companies no longer active in the market. And so it occurred to me that while there are a lot of pointers I might give management vendors on how to succeed, there are at least just as many I could share on how to fail. For you in IT, if you see these signs cropping up among provider/ suppliers – you can consider the following points a litmus test to help you separate the alkalinity of peace of mind from the acidity of concern.
I selected 12 companies to brood over (time of year I guess), seven of which have disappeared. They span the fields of network management, application management, broad systems and network management, security, and services plus tools. The companies that remain appear to be hanging on, or have morphed into a new business, or collapsed into a core business outside this market. As taken from this list, here are a few pointers on how to fail:
* Grand vision/ small company: OK, I am all for vision and sad to say there’s generally not enough high quality vision in our market or in any segment of the economy – or anywhere else for that matter. But while having a grand vision can be a good place to start even if the company is small, execution demands care and focus. A building plan should be in place vs. relying on the engineering, intellect, aesthetic, and the excellence of the program to carry the day. In our market, at least, where deployment stakes and time to value count a lot, big visions with little underneath will very quickly fail.
* Too much product complexity: Product complexity leads to long deployments and to stretched company resources. Not all “big visions” demand product complexity – and sometimes rather small, banal visions have generated huge product complexity – so these two items are really separate. You in IT have already been stung (time and again) by too much product complexity, and are rightly ready to rebel. So this is another sure way to fail.
* Hesitation to go forward and execute: While I have seen an opposite problem at some companies (first hand) with that also fatal sequence – “fire, ready, aim” – some of the companies I looked at had sat on seemingly philosophical dilemmas that froze action way too long. If you in IT keep finding that the vendor consistently answers tangible requests with lengthy philosophical digressions it’s definitely time to switch horses.
* Deflating to a niche: While big visions from small companies can lead to failures, some of the companies here made a mid-course correction to go, so to speak, from the sublime to the ridiculous – from selling versatile, flexible solutions to a tool that answered a value prop so tiny that it actually took more time to explain than the bigger vision. Customers like you went from cautious interest to a “who cares?” or worse “are you crazy?” pretty much overnight.
* Small vision, small gains: A few of these companies, and most of those are still holding on, have worked towards a small vision involving a combination of cost and value that works, but that just barely works. And here, they may be well beyond a niche tool set, but the vision for their business model is “tiny,” and the value to you the buyer is easily lost in the shuffle of new technologies and new innovators with more compelling propositions.
* Magic box syndrome (or a failure to integrate): In a few cases, the tool sets had a lot going for them, but were packaged and designed so that they forced you as buyers to make an all or nothing decision – either trust everything they told you about the “box” they were selling, or else just say “no.” When faced with a situation where there was no meaningful integration capability combined with a strategic dependency, almost all of you, rightly, just said “no.”
* No interest in the management market per se: Two of the failures, one in particular, were in other businesses and thought they could do something in this management marketplace purely as a kind of sideline. So, for instance, if you bought their nice adapter cards (a fictitious example here), how about some nice anomaly detection software thrown in? You also said “no” to this, which was easy, because the value proposition most likely never reached your ears.
* Too incomplete to be valuable: A few of these vendors developed what I call “tool kits masking as products.” And while they were tool kits that could prove useful, they never really found a home. Some of you have shown real interest in these kinds of capabilities, but when you’re left too much on your own to figure out what to do – most of you realize that life is short and executive patience is even shorter.
* Investors throw away a good thing: Yes, the infamous investor community has had its hand in more than a few of these failures, taking in one case a product that had proven success and completely giving up on it – for reasons purely internal to their own priorities. While you in IT generally don’t get to know the investors behind the companies you buy from, I’ve seen it happen. And if it’s a strategic investment, it’s at least worth a check.
* Don’t really care: This example is of a company that is still in business and happily so. It also remains an innovator, however, it doesn’t appear on anyone’s product tracking list and isn’t selling anything but services. So did it fail? In this case, maybe not. But as a kind of self-sustaining laboratory in itself, it remains a rare breed of innovator.
Drop me a line and let me know what you would add to this list.
