Brian Roy’s Blog

Mitel acquires Inter-Tel

Friday, April 27th, 2007 | Vendors, VoIP | Comments

Big doings in the SMB VoIP equipment manufacturers space today. Mitel has aquired Inter-Tel for approximately 723 million dollars.

The merger creates a market leader in the U.S. and U.K. SMB IP communications markets with anticipated revenues of over $800 million, twice those of Mitel today. It combines the strength of the two companies in the IP communications market, providing increased scale to extend market share in the SMB sector and expand into the large business IP communications market.

Full Story Here

The critical attribute of Innovative Organizations is not Innovation…

Friday, April 27th, 2007 | Emerging Technology Practice, Innovation | Comments

Ok… so the title of the post is deliberately inflammatory. But now that I’ve got your attention.

Innovation (the act) does not make a successful innovative organization.

The truth is there are more innovations that never see the light of day or that die an early death - or stagnate without investment - for one simple reason:

The failure to be able to recognize the innovations that you keep and the ones you should kill - and the guts to act decisively on that information.

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Adobe Open Sources (parts of) Flex

Thursday, April 26th, 2007 | Ajax, RIA | Comments

Adobe announced last night that they are open sourcing big parts of Flex (scoop by Robert Scoble).

You can see the video interview on Scoble’s blog for detail.

Link to Scoble’s Blog Entry

There are two ways to look at this announcement:

1) Adobe is using this as ammunition in it’s war with Microsoft… Specifically to attack Silverlight prior to release.

2) Adobe is refining their business model in this space to focus on Rich Internet Application platforms (Media Server, Apollo) and less on the revenue generated from the developer tools.

While I love the anti-Microsoft hype as much as the next guy… having an understanding of Adobe’s business practices leads me to believe this is more about a refinement of the business model and less a reaction to Silverlight.

Open Source Software != Free

Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 | OSS | Comments

Information Week released a story yesterday which details Google’s recent contribution to MySQL.

What I find interesting about this is that it points to how Open Source isn’t free… as a matter of fact it requires an investment model similar in kind (but not magnitude) to any “Packaged Enterprise Application”.

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High-Tech Outsourcing is a symptom of the growth of the segment…

Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Comments

A business week article published today provides further evidence that High-Tech outsourcing is more about the growth of the High-Tech industry and scarce resources than any other single factor.

The findings counter concerns—sometimes voiced by opponents of outsourcing—that high-tech jobs are being sent overseas.

There's plenty of domestic demand for a host of IT jobs, says Katherine Spencer Lee, executive director of Robert Half Technology, an IT staffing company headquartered in Menlo Park, Calif. On average, it is taking 56 days to fill full-time IT positions, she says. Firms that want IT managers are looking at an even longer search—about 87 days. And the wait is only getting longer.

Having said that… there are still many companies that see that as an opportunity to commoditize the lowest level engineering resources.

The goal should be to create the highest level of skilled engineering graduates here in the US, but all indicators are that we are falling woefully behind the rest of the world.

For my part I'll be working with Arizona State University via the Distributed and Enterprise Application Consortium to ignite the same level of excitement about the engineering that goes into creating YouTube and MySpace as users already have about using the service.