Richard Sykes

HP is taking on a new shape in line with CEO Meg Whitman’s five-year recovery plan. But will the changes be radical enough to win the business of the new breed of IT buyer?

I have written previously about HP’s $6 billion write-down of its $14 billion acquisition of EDS. My argument was the need for business focus on commoditised infrastructual services in the cloud, in a competitive landscape thus defined by the Amazon Elastic Cloud. read more

Software vendors can't simply rebrand their offerings as 'cloud-based' - Becoming an SaaS, IaaS or PaaS supplier demands a fundamental re-engineering of the business

According to Wikipedia, a polemic is a contentious argument that is intended to establish the truth of a specific belief and the falsity of the contrary belief. I am sufficiently concerned about certain current aspects of the business development of the cloud to polemicise on the matter. read more

Cloud adoption is still waiting for its Big Bang moment. Could private equity give enterprises, governments and their CIOs the freedom to overhaul their vendor models?

The marketing message for January's Cloud Expo Europe 2013 at Olympia was 'Unlock the Cloud'. I spent my first day at the Expo chairing the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) Knowledge Network Theatre, and most of the second visiting exhibitors’ stands. read more

Startups stir up software testing

Europe's annual meeting of software testers, EuroSTAR, revealed a raft of startup companies riding the wave of change in an industry undergoing great transformation read more

Branding Bangladesh

Bangladesh should stop comparing its ICT industry with that of its bigger neighbour. Its outsourced offerings are on a much smaller scale but are no less innovative for it read more

Continental shift to encourage cloud take-up

SMEs are adopting cloud solutions with great success, but large-scale delivery is being held up by concerns over standards and security. The EC is picking up the mantle read more

Reflections from the CIO Summit 2012

Vendors should cut back on investment in aggressive marketing, and invest instead in listener/learners who can capture the richness of customer experience with the vendor’s product or service, and put that learning to work read more

HP failed to chose the right business model and understand the world we now live in

This August’s announcement of HP’s $8bn write-off against the $14bn paid to acquire EDS in 2008 is shattering news. read more

London Olympic opening ceremony shows CIOs and business leaders that radical new landscapes are part and parcel of British life, history and future

We need to pull back from the work of the PR and marketing folk. read more

Delivering services through the cloud is technically easy. Making a success of it requires deep domain-specific experience that may not exist on vendors’ executives

Building a contemporary technology vendor that delivers with a parallel competitive elegance to the engineering marvels across the globe, requires both that mark of genius and those underlying resources of deep experience to draw on read more

Vendors must recognise that it's their informed user base, not their technology, that drives change, and that their role is merely to listen, engage and enable

The time is now ripe for a determined drive to disenfranchise the IT industry from its conviction that its role is to drive change, and enfranchise the wider user community to creatively take the wheel read more

Profits abound for vendors able to secure integrated business-assured platforms

Dependable platforms are key to the continued growth of cloud-served software, and opportunities abound for vendors able to provide secure integrated platforms read more