If you think the magic quadrant has something to do with either someone who spends too much time at the gym, or something that is part of Mordor, then you’ve had a life well spent. The rest of us have to listen to Gartner coming out with their lovely 2 x 2 matrices awash with products and suppliers on them, the upper right quadrant being all magical, yet two years behind what is currently happening.
In fact, Gartner as well respected by investors as they are, are often not the pinnacle of research as you’d expect. In most instances their research is over two years old and in the IT industry, this can often be a whole generation of technology…
Indeed, those of us frustrated that there is a Samsung S4 on the way after just getting a S3 will no doubt agree that any analysis that is measured in years and not months is fairly useless in the fast-paced world of IT. Also, Gartner often fails to recognise new entrants to the market, the real innovators and game-changers.
I’m not saying there is anything hugely wrong with what they do, it’s a good, safe system for assisting investors, however my background in Technology and Innovation Management has got me more interested in radical and disruptive innovation. The type of innovation that takes a marketplace, (no matter how you wish to draw the borders around such a market) and completely decimates it and creates a new one of its own. The product that creates a completely new market and renders its competitors obsolete bestows upon its creators, owners and investors a competitive advantage – even if just for a short while, whilst the competition catches up.
To me, these are the interesting things in technology. I will give you a cliché example, Apple have had a lot in recent years, but the iPod is probably the best – before then we still had MiniDisc players, portable compact disc players and the like. After the iPod, everyone wanted their music digital and for a while there was only one real player in the market and that was Apple.
In the world of Unleashed, we have partnered with a number of companies in the new area of infrastructure hyperconvergence – perhaps not as radical or as ‘sexy’ as the iPod, the move to homogenised infrastructure building blocks is very much going to change the world of virtualisation, storage and servers moving forward.
Gartner of course, don’t currently recognise this and traditional vendors are still categorised as leaders, challengers, visionaries and niche players buy Gartner, and the new guys – Simplivity, Nutanix and Scale Computing are nowhere to be scene – as yet!
The great thing is, at Unleashed, we don’t give investment advice – I tend to leave that to others who are far better insured! But we do give technology advice, our whole portfolio is filled with suppliers that don’t fit in the boxes of most analysts (yet) we choose suppliers that are innovative, cost effective and ultimately simple in how they work – indeed, simplicity is one of our key factors in choosing a product. We listen to your problems and discuss solutions.
If you feel that you’ve reached an impasse with traditional technology, that you can’t reach the expense of top named brands or it’s time simply to change how you do things, then we’d love a chat – it doesn’t cost you a thing, we’re not the pushy types and if we come out to see you, we’ll even bring the biscuits (provided you make the tea!). 0161 871 8730
