Expand Expunged
- Posted On: Tuesday, January 24th, 2012
- Post Categories: Blog
Expand are gone. I would say acquired by Riverbed, but what Riverbed seem to have acquired is the ability to tell the Expand customers they have a year to migrate to Riverbed. The Expand technology itself appears to be going into the Riverbed trashcan. That includes the Hive technology which was the only WAN Optimization offering to resemble our CLAN capabilities to any degree. We were due to go head-to-head with Hive in customer trials and now find ourselves in solo proof of concept. We’re a little disappointed – we relished the opportunity to do the comparison.
While my New Year’s resolutions weren’t meant to be taken too seriously, I’ve seen several predictions that are indeed serious but to my mind, seriously wrong. For example the prediction that Microsoft Office products are coming to the end of their life. This claim is based on the notion that there is a wave of technologists whose lives revolve around twitter, facebook, gmail, tumblr, wordpress, etc, and for whom full-on office products are of no interest. I’ve previously admitted to an aversion to facebook (I disabled my account last week to avoid having to ignore further requests to befriend people) but I think I can set that disdain to one side and still judge the claim on its merits. Could I live without Word? – well sort-of, Wordpad would do until it came to customer documentation and other customer facing communications. Could I live without PowerPoint? No. While PowerPoint is almost a byword for time-wasting meetings and boredom, there is still an almost daily requirement to communicate information in the “show and tell” format, and if not PowerPoint, then a wannabe PowerPoint is required. Could I live without Excel? No: no-one in an operations or financial role can live without it. In fact I make frequent use of it for sizing, estimating, analysing product performance, forecasting. Can you do that with twitter or tumblr? Of course not. And lastly Outlook. Well it’s the centre of my world. Other email/calendar/task organiser products are available but they’re not as good. If money was tight I might opt for open source alternatives but I really can’t see office apps disappearing in my working lifetime.
And lastly a little story that made me chuckle. I’ll leave out names just in case. Large IT company holds its annual sales rally in one of the usual off-season resorts. Late night drinking ensues in various expensive places. A younger less experienced guy is tagging along with the old hands and decides to order a round of mojitos at an eye-watering cost. When he gets the bill he winces but says cheerfully “well at least I can expense it”. He doesn’t realise he’s sitting next to the CFO who reaches across, takes the receipt, pops it in his mouth, chews, swallows and says “I don’t think so”.
Replify Accelerator 4. 1 ships next week – I’ll give an update on content shortly.