I spent last week visiting Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland and got to do it all: a few keynotes, multiple press briefings, and -- best of all -- quality time with customers and partners.
My usual trick on these timezone-warping trips is to not try and adjust to the time zone. This time, I ended up getting my internal clock turned around in just enough time so I could come back to the US and do it all over again.
As I write this, I'm in a jet-lagged brain fog. Not fun.
The good news? As with any trip, I learned a few new things that I wanted to share with you.
No, This Is Not A Travelogue
I'm not going to comment on the weather, or the food, or any of that -- other than the Pope was in town the day I arrived (as well as a few hundred thousand well-wishers) making things very colorful.
I used my current deck ("Thriving In The Information Economy") for the keynotes. It's based on a popular series of posts talking about some of the new challenges we're all facing in this new information economy, and what EMC and others are doing about it.
The more I travel, the more I realize that IT problems are pretty much the same everywhere, with a few local wrinkles. What's really interesting to me are the unqiue approaches people come up with.
It's All About The Cloud
EMC was running several big-tent customer events (EMC Inform), and the theme was "cloud".
Sure, the enterprise cloud offerings are rather limited today, but there's wide agreement that there will be more choices in the future, and it's not to early to start thinking about what it all might mean. And, fortunately, we have a fairly evolved point of view on the topic.
They got me on video being interviewed on the cloud topic by CRN Australia. If you watch carefully, you can see the unseemly effects of advanced sleep deprivation ...
Later on, we were all part of a press panel on the topic. The best part was meeting an EMC partner who was really doing "cloud", and not just talking about it. If you're curious, pop over to Infoplex's website, and see their cloud storage offerings.
The gentleman who's their product manager (Michael) was a wealth of information on how they did it successfully. One key aspect was their network integration strength: they made their cloud services appear "local" to their IT customers. Another nugget is that, while they had a good handle on their costs, they didn't go cheap, unlike some cloud services.
I guess their offering is pretty popular -- they seem to be supply-constrained (too many customers!) rather than demand-constrained -- and that's a great problem to have.
A Unique Network Situation
It's obvious to me now, but I learned that bandwidth providers in ANZ are in a relatively unique situation. Bandwidth within the country is reasonable, but that pipe to the outside world -- well, it's a constraint.
As a result, I found much stronger interest in content caching solutions (e.g. "cloud storage") from the local telco operators than usual. Anytime they could cache a popular item (say, popular videos) on their side of the sippy straw, it'd be a win. Now, lots of thorny ramifications in doing that, and it's not clear that it'd be worth the trouble, but it was worth exploring to more than a few people.
Telcos In Turmoil
More reinforcement for my perception that the telecommunications business is going through a painful seismic shift. How they used to make money won't be how they're going to make money.
And no one is really 100% sure on how they're going to make money.
This "profitability per subscriber" issue becomes even more poignant in markets with sharp boundaries (e.g. an island continent) and relatively stable market shares. You can't just go out and easily get new customers -- you have to figure out how to make your existing ones consume more.
And, let's face it, there's only so much content you can view, songs you can download, shiny devices you can buy, etc. before you run into some hard limits on per-customer revenue. I was in Sydney when they launched the iPhone 3G -- complete with long lines at the Apple store -- and none of the telcos I met with were particularly excited by the strategic dynamics of that particular situation.
I was able to bring along EMC's collected thoughts on emergent business models in telco -- both consumer and enterprise -- and had a number of fun discussions about different ways of looking at the problem. I'm sure we've just begun exploring this fascinating topic.
Service Providers, Outsourcers and System Integrators
I have absolutely no hard statistics to back this up, but it felt that far more IT was being delivered through these models than is being sold directly to IT shops. I haven't quite figured out why that might be, but almost every direct customer I met was using some sort of delivery service for over 50% of their IT.
And they seemed quite happy about it. I wondered if I was looking at a regional anomoly -- or the future?
And, Oh Yes, The Wine ...
The folks from Australia and New Zealand are quite proud of their wine, and rightly so. Everywhere I went, I was urged to try one wine or another.
Based on my extensive market research, I can categorically conclude that there is no bad wine whatsoever in ANZ. Or bad food for that matter ...
However, more research is definitely called for ...
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