The Daily Network Monitor

As Americans, we rarely live without the goods and services we desire. For years, we have heard experts like Alan Greenspan warn that when countries outside of the United States see rapid growing living standards; their currencies will appreciate against ours in parallel. For those of you who are Warren Buffet fans, he was right again. In 2002, Buffet began to purchase foreign currencies, betting on their appreciation versus the dollar. Even a wealthy country like the United States will eventually run out of steam after its citizens spend excessive dollars on foreign produced goods.

Further, once countries like China acquire dollars though the $700 billion US trade deficit, they will begin to dump the dollars once they suspect its valuation is in jeopardy. A country like China, which holds over $1 trillion dollars, has great power in the interconnected global economy, if it begins dumping dollars in favor of Euros thus pushing the dollar to lower levels.

For lots of software companies, the weakening dollar and weakening economy will lead to headaches in meeting growth and profitability objectives. Ironically, these companies tend to be US market centric with a bias or mis-understanding of what being a global company means. In contrast, international software companies find unseen benefits in dark clouds and the current economic status is a perfect example. Global markets offer growth, risk mitigation and excitement but you need to choose wisely. For example, it is unlikely a market like Australia with a population of 20 million people will balance a slowed US economy entirely but it is probable that a select list markets will offer opportunity to supplement the decline in US markets.

Further, being global does not mean you need local representation in every country though that decision is highly dependent on product characteristics like price, complexity and training to name a few. For those that build easy to use products like WhatsUp Gold, the internet and the ecommerce business process offer great opportunity for revenue and profitability enhancements.

I had them all with me tonight – Information Week, CIO, Redmond, eWeek and Network World. Not surprisingly, the world of technology continues to be a world of contradictions and that’s a good thing. Ever since we all witnessed the battles on the airwaves 10 years ago between Cisco (promoting the paperless office) and Xerox and Canon promoting the highest, fastest volume outputs of paper and we in technology took a side that contradicted a colleagues comment or belief – continuing our debates over coffee, beer and long inescapable air flights.

Enter the time machine and here we are 10 + years later and a world of new contradictions.

The jury is still out on SOA. Proponents argue that a distributed, nimble set of web services that replace large monolithic systems is the future. Proponents claim the economies of scale, re-use and distributed network friendly design poses huge benefits for adopters. Yet, the early poll and interview results are uncovering hosts of problems that are frustrating the heck out of CIO and subordinates. Application performance, application reliability and security are all questions and issues in need of a solution.

The jury is in on Virtualization and the ruling looks like guilty for all. We (I) am committed to virtualization like no ones business. Yet, I am reading tonight that the early adopters have already begun to uncover the pitfalls and it would be best to look to third party management companies when deploying a virtualized environment. I cannot say this is a contradiction in pure form but it fits my blog so give me a little break here.

Last, the story that made my night. MIT on Thursday morning will unveil a new working forum whose goal is to expand Kerberos to wireless technologies. Isn’t Kerberos dead? I guess Kerberos really does have 3 heads, I mean lives.

I often debate with friends in the IT industry on the merits of chasing business in the SMB. Lots of friends agree that the growth in the SMB sector continues to be strong but they argue that re-designing existing products for SMB’s has proven to be less than a profitable venture. I disagree with the entire rationale for reasons that might not appear to be obvious.

The reason most ventures have been unprofitable has little to do with the market and more to do with the philosophy of 99.9% of companies who try to push down complexity to SMB’s with new packaging. SMB thrive on easy to use yet effective solutions for complex environments. Vendors who service that market with dedication are profitable. Those that just repackage complexity with a simple title end up failing and end up going back to the enterprise to sell.

When will the vendors learn?