The 2011 Cynic Measures His Predictions - Tony Greenberg-RampRate

A friend of mine in the research industry used to give out little postitnotes to trainee analysts that said quotbe wrong boldlyquot Her reasoning amp8211 If you are bold and right you will be hailed as a prophet If you39re wrong most likely the crowd will have moved on by the time your prediction fizzles But accountability for our past advice is a core value here at RampRate so we have to see how we did on our 2011 predictions amp8211 and see just how well our crystal ball was working By our count we have 4 hits 2 partial hits 1 miss and 3 TBDs that won39t be known until later What do you thinkamp1601 Everything that39s old will be new again We predicted that the main technology splashes in 2011 will be retreads The year was a bit short on new fads compared to 2010 with most of the top tech items like new tablet PCs and phones being evolutionary rather than revolutionary The one true innovation that we got to participate in amp8212 the purely electric car amp8212 is however a classic reprise The very first electric cars held speed records and went head to head with the internal combustion and steam engine in the industry39s early days only to be trounced by cheap gas With several major manufacturers massproducing allelectric cars the old electric car is new again making this prediction a hitamp1602 Markets will stay irrational longer than companies stay solvent Although the year was a busy one for data center and telecom MampampA activity most acquisitions were hardly fire sales And while there were 9 telecom bankruptcies for the year the only ones that made it into the top 20 were in satellite communications That said bets on rapidly rising data center prices did not pay off as RampRate customers typically saw material perkilowatt cost decreases in their renewals and greenfield projects This leaves the prospect of further shakeout down the road and a partial hit for the prediction3 A large firm will overpay to jump on a bandwagon While most of this prediction covers 201213 there are several examples of clouddata center acquisitions that start off on the hype path such as Verizon39s purchase of Terremark at 54x annual revenue and a 35 premium vs market and CenturyLink39s Savvis purchase at 32x revenue and an 11 premium vs market prices which would have been a 53 premium had it been bought at the same time as Terremark Time Warner39s purchase of NaviSite albeit at a smaller 19x revenue multiplier completes the trio We wish these folks all the best but the prediction still stands as TBD4 More CDNs will be built and fail Dan Rayburn39s list of current and former CDNs keeps growing However two of the main exitsamp8211 Cotendo and Voxel amp8211 could be considered successes And Tata39s pickup of BitGravity in January is at least a salvaging of a mediocre situation So this one will be a missamp8230for now Some catastrophes like Amazon Web Services failed for customers but not financially for Amazon5 More peering disputes will be recast as net neutrality As predicted Netflix CEO Reed Hastings elevated this issue to headline levels by publicly lobbying Congress for a better deal for its provider Level 3 Others such as Global Crossing and Voxel followed suit leaving a harried ATampampT and a cable providers39 industry group pleading with the FCC to decide on the issue Regardless of the outcome the prediction is a hit6 The media industry will step into another content rights PR nightmare Ah where to start Should it be the inability to sell Hulu amp8212 the one digital property that the media industry nurtured to prominence amp8212 due to content rights issues My favorite suitor was Amazon Or with getting half the Internet to mobilize against the SOPA and PIPA legislation Or yet another singleplayer game rendered inoperable by remote server failure amp8212 but only for legitimate users A clear hit7 A top exec or politician will demonstrate technology cluelessness matched only by their influence on the industry This year39s Ted Stevens memorial award goes to the many sponsors of SOPA and PIPA with special mention for Mel Watt Damp8211NC and Maxine Waters Damp8211CA8 Security restrictions will cripple productivity without actually improving security Without another WikiLeaks scandal to stir the pot the pace of silly securitymeasure adoption has been slow With the UK government actually moving to more rather than less sanity on allowing open source software we were about to label the prediction a big miss But between proposals to build a whole separate secure internet and contributing to LA39s inability to migrate to Google apps the FBI salvaged a partial hit for us on crippling government productivity for the sake of security aspirations destined to fail due to simple social engineering9 Analysts will invent a new acronym destined to melt away by 2013 It39s altogether too easy to say that an acronym or buzzword will fade away It39s a bit harder to say which one will Will quotgamificationquot join quotprotailquot forecast in 2008 to be a 15B industry by 2012 and was nonexistent by 2011 in the dustbin Or will it be underperformance of a hyped segment like the cloud computing service PaaS joining data loss prevention39s failure to deliver 2B in 2012 as forecast in 2008 832M in 2015 as forecast more recently We39ll rate this one as incomplete for now I certainly hope this silly word quotcloudquot gets contained or it will be the greenwash term of the decade10 Something big will be lost in waves of hype This one won39t be final until 2018 but Gartner has some guesses Then again most of their guesses from 2009 either stayed in the same place on the curve or disappeared as predicted by number 9 IncompleteSo all told we didn39t do badly certainly not compared with other prognosticators of more wobbly consistency and clarity Only one outright miss and three others that will take a while more to fully determine That leaves us batting more or less 600 with prospects for further improvement That39s enough to get into the Pundit Hall of Fame presuming of course than any other pundit actually bothered to look back at what they used to predict would happen before things actually did happenUp next predictions for 2012As CEO of RampRate Sourcing Advisors and DeepStrat Tony Greenberg has been an idea generator transforming perceptions and industries since he was 17 Under Greenberg39s leadership for more than a decade RampRate has radically changed how IT services are purchased creating actionable datadriven sourcing information that has saved tens of millions of dollars and thousands of hours of headaches for major clients in entertainment Internet services finance media and video games DeepStrat a spinoff from RampRate39s strategic research arm focuses on growthadvisory services for companies in the digital media value chain particularly in mergers ampamp acquisitions rampups and funding plansRead all Tony39s MediaBizBloggers commentaries at Only Time Buys TrustCheck us out on Facebook at MediaBizBloggerscomFollow our Twitter updates MediaBizBloggerThe opinions and points of view expressed in this commentary are exclusively the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaBizBloggerscom management or associated bloggers MediaBizBloggers is an open thought leadership platform and readers may share their comments and opinions in response to all commentaries

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