You don’t recognize the value of an Everbridge system until things go bad – bad like a class 5 hurricane is closing in on your warehouse, or a tsunami descending upon your town, or an active shooter roaming the streets outside one of your coffee stores.  The headlines scuttling past you on the TV don’t […]

Every few years, I parachute into the cybersecurity space and conclude my tour bewildered by the expanse of technology and reminded of familiar plotlines.  There are new focal points and different players occupying the Magic Quadrant, but the basic script remains the same, with analysts and management teams touting arcane feature advantages, speculating on impending […]

Prior to their July 2008 merger, Sirius and XM were locked in a bloody Betamax/VHS-like standards war: each company operated its own satellite constellation and broadcasted on separate frequencies; each had its own radio to receive and digitize signals; each spent extravagant sums marketing their services and mirror imaging the other’s content – Sirius had […]

“A lot of guys watch Bruce Lee movies. Doesn’t mean they can do karate.” – Bobby Axelrod (Showtime series Billions) If I were pitching this stock as a short 9 years ago, here’s what I would have said: Align’s main product, an expensive orthodontic appliance called Invisalign, is a joke.  Rendered in plastic, easily replicable, […]

One Clayton Christensen point that I’ve harped on several times before is that as integrated structures within a value chain disaggregate into their modular components, new points of integration emerge to sweep value.  In the context of public cloud infrastructure and the range of tools and apps flourishing on top, you might think of solutions […]

Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) Intercontinental’s multifaceted data and exchange platform began as an electricity marketplace, founded in 2000 by current CEO Jeffrey Sprecher with the backing of two investment banks and seeded by volume from energy majors Shell, Total, and British Petroleum (the collapse of Enron, the dominant electricity broker at the time, fortuitously diverted a […]

Workday’s commanding position in enterprise HCM partly traces back to the design choices it made at the very start.  At the time, behind most enterprise software products were long bodies of code interacting with huge relational databases (columns and rows that store customer data) made up of thousands of tables.  The complexity of the application […]

You’re a middle manager at the branch office of a vast multinational.  And you need an armful of binders for your team.  Would it occur to you that a procurement manager at HQ has negotiated discounted rates through Office Max?  Even if it did, would you know how to order against that contract?  Do you […]