Daily Archives: February 6, 2009
The (temporary) death of premium
We’re in the midst of a fascinating discontinuity in IT purchasing patterns. Even the dot-com crash didn’t cause this kind of disruption. Practically everyone is scrambling to save money immediately, and some organizations are looking at long-term belt-tightening.
The most obvious immediate impact is that buyer tolerance for paying a premium is rapidly diminishing. Quality is suddenly being eyed with greater objectivity, as businesses stop feeling like they need to have “the best” and start actively considering what services and service levels they really need and can cost-justify. It doesn’t matter (enough) if they love their current vendor and feel they’re getting excellent value for the money. It’s about absolute dollar amounts and aligning spend with needs rather than want-to-haves. Risks are being taken in the name of the bottom line.
We’re hiring a European emerging services analyst!
Gartner is hiring! Here’s the formal job posting: Research Director, Emerging Enterprise Network Services, Europe. (Or you can go to Gartner Careers and search for req 7705BR.)
Informally, here’s the scoop:
My team is looking for a European counterpart for me — someone who will be European-based, European-focused, and cover Internet infrastructure services and other emerging network services. That means following hosting, colocation, content delivery networks, cloud computing, the Internet bandwidth market, and so on. There’s a global element to this position, too, and this analyst will also deal with non-region-specific issues.
The right candidate is probably currently a senior product manager; a senior manager or director in a technical operations, product engineering, or sales engineering organization; or a senior technical evangelist. (Or they’re an analyst at one of our competitors.) They almost certainly have a background working for an ISP, carrier, Web hoster, data center outsourcer, IT consultancy with a specialization in data centers or networks, CDN, or other Internet-centric company.
This is your chance to influence the evolution of an entire industry, at a critical juncture in time. You’ll get to work with smart, self-motivated people across a wide variety of topic areas, advise executives at vendors as well as end-user organizations, and really dive into the things that interest you and our clients.
Feel free to drop me a line if you want to hear more.
CloudPundit: Massive-Scale Computing 