Popular Topics Outnumber BitPipe Contributors

It's 705 to 181 for white papers less than a year old

Of all the high-tech companies that have published white papers since October 2005, I counted 181 that have posted white papers to BitPipe in the 705 topics the site lists as most popular. BitPipe is the aggregator of IT thought leadership owned by TechTarget. It describes itself as "the Web's leading online information source for IT professionals who need technology white papers ...."

You can find these companies and topics under "Market Intelligence" on the BitPipe sitemap. I have listed them in a single table on my own website.

The table was compiled the second week of October by inspecting the titles and authors appearing in each of the 705 topics. The information is freely available to anyone looking at the BitPipe website.

Compared to the universe of IT firms, 181 is a small number. In fact, it is only about one-quarter the size of the number of "most popular" topics (a subset of all BitPipe topics). Nor does this fraction reflect the lopsided contribution of a handful of companies whose papers appear over and over again under multiple topics and sub-topics. If you took out the top 10 companies (in terms of number of white paper listings) you would reduce the number of companies by less than 6%. But you would reduce the number of recent white paper listings by over two-thirds.

It's not just the names of companies that repeat; many of the same titles repeat under different subtopics, and many of the same subtopics repeat under several different topics. The result is a "perceptual multiplier effect" that makes 181 feel big. Compounding the effect is the high degree of granularity in the choice of topics and subtopics -- many of which BitPipe differentiates by merely adding qualifiers like "system," "software," and "service" to the same root.

This maze makes white papers hard to find -- which may help explain why more companies are not represented. You don't know what all the choices are until you drill down into all potentially relevant silos and when you do drill down in one it's easy to forget what choices you had in others. At least as an alternative, why not provide a simple list of all companies and all topics? Also, why not allow for compound searches by right clicking on multiple companies and topics in drop down menus? Finally, why not make topics less granular? Serious researchers will still look at both "system" and "software" versions of a topic anyway just to make sure they have covered all the bases. Why put users through all that work?

One other observation: when BitPipe says that there are no documents in a topic, there usually are documents -- which you will miss if you do not click on the topic anyway.

No doubt more companies would write white papers if they felt they could get more of an audience -- and a return on their investment. Making white papers easier to find would help.

Two-Thirds of Tech Companies Don't Do Case Studies

Only one-third write white papers. Over half do neither case studies nor white papers.

My survey of high-tech company websites this week reveals that:

• 31% have white papers
• 36% have case studies
• 56% have neither cases nor white papers

The survey looked at the websites of 100 companies randomly selected from all U.S. firms with 50-999 employees in the CorpTech database in the following categories: computer hardware, computer software, telecommunications and Internet. The sampling error is plus or minus 9%. I actually sampled 120 and threw out 20 that were not appropriate -- for example, the firms might have gone out of business or CorpTech had mislabeled their industries.

(Attention marketers: there were 7007 firms in this particular CorpTech download -- so if you extrapolate that out, i.e., 20 bad names for every 100 good ones, it comes to 5600 firms, or significantly fewer than what you might have expected.)

I wasn't completely surprised by the survey's results. I did a similar survey of tech companies in Massachusetts and New Hampshire about five years ago and found that only about 40% did case histories.

This obviously raises a lot of questions about why tech companies don't showcase either their successes or their thinking more than they do. One thing is clear -- the market for writing services should be a lot more efficient. Many companies are not getting served because of barriers either real or perceived.

McKinsey Revisits IT's Shopping List

"… these two adoption trends indicate that a technology architecture transformation is beginning to take shape …."

--McKinsey & Company

When McKinsey & Company published its IT Shopping List at the beginning of the year, I noted that two items - virtualization and web services -- did not rank near the top of most CIOs' shopping lists.

The most popular items were more established technologies like ERP, VoIP, business intelligence, and security. That's true even though McKinsey and almost everyone else acknowledge virtualization and web services are the next big things.

Perhaps sensing the disconnect, McKinsey focuses squarely on virtualization and web services in its latest technology article. The authors are Kishore Kanakamedala, Vasantha Krishnakanthan, and Roger P. Roberts.

Citing data from the earlier survey, McKinsey reports that 86% of CIOs "cited progress" in "server consolidation" and that virtualization is the "next natural move." As for software as service, 38% of CIOs said they plan "to use the software as service approach during the next 12 months." In addition, "few companies are using software as a service in systems ... that need a lot of tailoring or customization."

Translation -- companies are starting to put their toes in the water on both the virtualization and the web services fronts. A major implementation of either would still, however, be a major news headline or feature story in most IT trade publications. To use the phrasing of my earlier post -- not all high-tech is equal and where you sit on the innovation cycle reflects to what extent you are a net consumer or investor of innovation. Virtualization and web services are still net consumers of investment dollars -- i.e., adoption sucks up more cash then it gives back near term. So adoption is slow in an era of flat IT budgets. The money to pay for those investments must come from efficiencies gained from the relative "cash cows" of innovation like ERP — technologies on which companies are much more willing to spend money.