In The Commentary Box

This month we ask a select panel of experts what type of companies will rule the IT roost. They had some ideas.

Will software companies become the new utilities? Will utilities become the new telcos? Are the carriers about to become the new service providers? Is storage the new rock and roll? Is rock and roll the new comedy? Is purple the new black? Enough already.

We asked Ned Gilder, our far seeing IT guru (yes, the one who burst on the scene in 1999 with his seminal report Nobody Told Me There'd Be a Year 2000) and his panel of experts to make sense of the future.

Gilder
They used to say the IT industry is in a constant state of churn. That's not true any more. These days experts agree it's in a constant state of flux. For now, at least. But what can we expect in the future? Is everything we hold dear really being turned on its head?

What changes can we expect? Let's start with someone who's lucky enough to work for a company that's experiencing massive sales growth, which has deluded him into thinking he's some kind of business guru.

Randall Palmer Stevens, marketing manager, Joopiner
There's no doubt that telcos are the new utilities. The latest WorldCom marketing campaign illustrates how deeply society is being transformed. 'I was born into a new generation' say an assortment of enlightened customers in advertising that's proved equally effective across magazines, TV and the internet. Cross media advertising, and they didn't feel the need to alter the message at all. Born into a new generation, eh? As opposed to the traditional outdated mode of delivery, when babies were born into an old generation. Which must have been disconcerting. Pretty powerful stuff.

Albert Prescott, chairman of Hosana Exaltica! (formerly Preston and District Sewage and Pipe Works)
Utility companies are the new nuisance callers. We carried out holistic research among our customer base and discovered that customers are fed up with researchers phoning them up all the time.

Another amazing discovery is this: If you make a product, and it works, people tend to come back for more. This amazing piece of research has turned all the traditional thinking about customer relationship management on its head. Up until this point, the conventional wisdom was that, by amassing information about customers, we could constantly phone them up and try to upsell and cross sell products. We're constantly asking our customer base questions. Like: "If we could structure questions cunningly enough, could you be tricked into saying yes to them? How often? And would you like to buy some financial services from your traditional gas supply monopolist?"

Geoff McIness, marketing guru, author of Re-Inventing the Deal (and I'll Chuck in the Wheel For Nothing)
Customers are the new clients. Still with me? Companies are going to become more customer-centric. That's my revolutionary idea. Yes, that's right, they're going to concentrate on the people that buy things off them. You see, up until now, they've concentrated on other things.

CRM is now being used to prevent customer churn where once companies might have relied on old-fashioned methods of defending their customer base, like improving the service.

Customer loyalty will be an increasingly pivotal battle in the war for survival. Remember how they warned that, if you fail to deliver, the competition is only a mouse click away? Happy days. It's much more brutal than that now. The next dot-com failure might be a mouse click away, because anyone whose clumsy enough to use a mouse is clearly a loser. The real competitors are only a hot key away. For the moment.

Neil Smidgely, analyst, The Hambeton Group
Market intelligence is the new advertising. As a market analyst, I have to have deep roots in the vendor and end user camps. That's how I make my living.

For example, the software behemoth Macrosoft may approach me and say: "Can you conduct an independent piece of research on the need for voice recognition software?" They'll hardly bother to mention, of course, that the end result will be used as part of a marketing campaign surrounding the launch of VoiceWare 2.0. Neither do they keep repeating that there's plenty more lucrative work where that came from, if my research data pleases them. So I have a happy working relationship with the vendors and I know exactly where they stand.

Similarly, I go to great lengths to reach an understanding with the end users. They often say to me: "Why are you asking me all these curiously loaded questions?" But, at the end of the day, I always come away with the results I was looking for.

So, if you're asking me for the next big thing in IT, I'd have to say this: I conducted an independent study recently for a big storage area networking company, and came to the conclusion that, by the end of 2002, the UK market will be worth sixteen trillion dollars. And anyone without a storage area network will be in the third world.

...to be continued...

Stay tuned for the next debate in which we ask: are women the new men?
And is there no end to the rhetorical question?