The Houston Astros used to be my favorite baseball team. I don’t mean today’s Astros, who are fine, btw, or even the solid clubs of the Jeff Bagwell/Craig Biggio era. I’m talking the Alan Ashby-Cesar Cedeño-Luis (not Albert) Pujols Astros. (Still have my vintage Astros jersey with full-body wraparound stripes and giant star.) Year after year those Astros had arguably the best pitching staff in baseball, anchored by fireballer and strikeout king Nolan Ryan. Game after game they would either shut out the other team or give up a run or two—and lost a lot more games than they should because too often the Astros’ batting order couldn’t hit its way out of a paper bag (OK, the infield).

Employers and clients, we can hit home runs for you, but only if you put us in the game. (Gag me before I cliché again, but segues are not always pretty.)

Quick reality check for we, the providers. We are in a results-oriented business, and no one who works here should expect to get paid if we don’t deliver the goods. I also have zero patience for the pricey prima donna model formerly favored by some: T&E by the ton to wine and dine clients or discuss internal strategy, then farm out the heavy lifting to juniors/interns. Plus in today’s crushing global economy, many companies are forced to cut costs to the bone just to try to survive. They see us as an expense, and the last thing they can afford right now is another expense.

Yet there comes a point when I survey the war-torn landscape and say to you, valued clients: Either you’re in business or not. If you are, the best thing you can do is create a new revenue stream and harvest more revenue from your existing customer base. Maybe you’re not sure where your market is going or how its needs are changing. Your existing competitors are expanding their offerings and you’re not sure how to keep up. A huge new competitor is hungrily eying your competitive space—and you.

Like the Astros of yesteryear, you can’t merely defend your way out of this one. To win the game you have to score, too.

Here’s the good news: We have plenty of good hitters in our dugout. So stop shrinking back in fear of today’s grim business climate and instead go on the offensive to attack the marketplace. Stake your claim. I know many markets are fading; practice revenue replacement by growing your business into new areas. We’ll start by tricking out your website as the commerce combustion engine it needs to be, rapidly upping your page rankings and putting in place a plan for ongoing organic growth. We’ll drop in an e-commerce shopping cart if that’s appropriate to your business, rich Internet apps and connectivity to all the web places you need to be. We’ll protect your brand in the digital age by locking up all relevant domains so those who set off to find you don’t find competitors instead. We’ll have a universe of web venues happily backlinking to you for maximum site rank and most importantly business value. We’ll use Google and other hosted or installed apps to optimize and monitor your site and traffic, break out formerly-stagnant content into reader-ready, FeedBurnered feeds—including some I’ll guarantee you haven’t thought of no matter how well you know your company—and launch choice new chunks of online real estate that will clarify what I mean when I say your core website is only the beginning. We’ll launch your own blogs and online newsrooms and do SEO-optimized blog entries on others. We’ll create social media news releases, use Salesforce.com to build out and execute sophisticated drip marketing campaigns, turn to others like Constant Contact when we need to blast your message to more than 1,000 prospects a day, and get you cinema-savvy with your own viral videos. We’ll advertise with Google AdWords and other opportunities that make good (ad) sense.

Client forums, virtual tradeshow presence and a myriad of other business-building online best practices await.

One of my earlier entries spoke of a company that chose to ignore social media and leave its website painfully non-optimized. Another talked about re-engineering ourselves as better practitioners of the interactive arts to change the game. A third shared strategies that have helped the interactive-averse see the light. Before I close this entry, let’s close that loop with a quick note about what we as interactive marketers need from you.

First, it would help if you don’t demand $1,000 of guaranteed instant results for every dollar you spend with us. When I hear those who write the checks talk about dabbling in interactive and pulling the plug if they don’t witness a miracle in a month or two, I want to remind them it’s more like planting a field and reaping a bountiful harvest—but not tomorrow! I also want to ask: When you bought that new phone system, did you threaten to rip it out if inbound sales call volume didn’t quadruple? Do you fire the sales force every six months if sales don’t improve? (OK, some of you do.) Do you demand X dollars in revenue for every radio spot or never advertise again? You just spent a couple of thousand dollars to outsource a telemarketing campaign and you didn’t even get a guaranteed minimum number of “completes” or leads. How’d that work out for you?

Second, appreciate that interactive is the gift that keeps on giving 24/7. The new models deployed by the denizens of the digital age mean that a lot of the infrastructure we can use to build this out for you is either low-cost or free. The main cost to you is for our expertise helping you navigate it all, cost-effectively and to maximum effect. Many of us—not all, but many—are worth it.

Finally, stop thinking of interactive as a fancy, fluttering banner at the stadium that you can’t quite read from where you’re sitting. Interactive is fast becoming the field of play. Or, to nudge it back over to our leadoff analogy: The diamond.

Batter up.

Two MarketBLOG entries ago we presented a company that, despite our best efforts, remains intent on not optimizing its website to drive revenue generation and retention, let alone use social media in pursuit of those business-building (or -saving) goals. The next took responsibility for being unable to book it on the oceangoing voyage many perceive social media to be. Today’s entry shows how when we succeed in moving companies to the third stage of AIDA [remember?]—desire, in this case the desire for a better site—they are actually primed to set sail.

How? Well, the journey begins with the larger question of structure and getting down to core essentials: Which pages and content should even appear on your site? Our own site contains an About YOU page that speaks to who we can help, specifically by title, and how. At Visionael we helped establish that company’s vertical marketing, alliance partner and solution selling programs, then structured the site around them. Something I’ve done for companies and would like to see more of, especially if your company or client offers either installed software or software as a service (SaaS), are on-site password-protected software exploration portals. (Please note I didn’t say software demos.) You want “viral marketing”? This is one little-known way to create it. Likely aimed at industry/technology analysts but of course available to whomever you choose, this is a great way to bring technorati into the tent fast. They are long accustomed to being marketed to (or at) about world-beating, groundbreaking solutions that turn out to be vaporware desperately pieced together on the fly by professional services teams, or that overhang the market so far they don’t even exist yet. Anything you can do to make your software and systems real to them—and not as in “real on the screen in a carefully-controlled tradeshow demo,” but as a living, breathing entity they can touch and test the limits of, on their own time and at their own pace—will make them friends if not for life then at least for years. It also makes them feel like they’re a part of the action and they will make Herculean efforts to get ahead of the curve and help take your story (and product) to market.

Now: Anchors aweigh. The company serving as the basis for this multi-part series has five distinct, continuously-updated information streams that it claims to want customers and prospects to see, yet contrary to purpose are being piled on top of each other, three clicks below the home page, on the company’s news page. Its people are merrily cranking out monthly/weekly/daily product updates; “our take” snippets about market developments; updates on federal legislation that are core to the firm’s business; the firm’s own monthly newsletter; and news releases, or white papers/positioning papers announced with a news release.

If you have a client with multiple information streams such as these, show it how the best way to spotlight the benefits it delivers to its customers, not to mention the good work of its people, is not by clutching all of this tightly on its core website but by unleashing it interactively. Only two of these streams are what most clients would normally think of as news, yet by opening our minds and considering all five as newsworthy we transform them from another layer of site sediment to dynamic content carrying the company flag to the far corners of the web. Note also that until this sentence I have yet to type the word “blog,” yet my platform of choice for zapping this content instantly across the Internet is a blogging platform, like WordPress (which is what we use), TypePad or Blogger. Each info-stream has a separate feed and anyone can subscribe to it, so when you put out news or other content they’re not waiting for it to hit their inbox—and to fight for their attention with everything else that’s already in there—but instead seeing it instantly in their news reader(s).

At this point we’ve eased a company across the transom to social media, perhaps without them fully realizing it. We’ve led the steed to water and it’s beginning to imbibe. Best of all, far from some nefarious purpose or slick sales pitch, it’s actually good for them! For starters, these blogging platforms are built from the ground up for interactivity with RSS feeds, search and a raft of other helpful widgets, features and linkages already on board. The next benefit I really appreciate is the way these platform providers “market,” feature and otherwise make your site accessible to everyone else on the planet who also has a site hosted on that platform. For example, go to the WordPress home page and you find featured sites, “hot posts,” most popular tags and PollDaddy ratings and polls, and proactively rather than platform-delivered you can search the universe of WordPress sites by topic and keyword. You can also do a quick non-directed search whereby WordPress pops up sites at random for you to consider.

Of course these blogging platforms wisely do not try to cover the earth, Sherwin Williams-style, by themselves. Just as Qualcomm generated a “wireless industry” (?) in our San Diego home metro and every day seemingly brings a new wave of iPhone apps ashore, you have at your fingertips a multitude of useful partner apps and widgets to customize these blogging platforms. I love (Google) FeedBurner because of the way it lets us condition a feed and make it completely user-ready for everyone to receive, so instead of merely pushing news and other information to the masses you’re encouraging them to subscribe to your feeds. On sites we launch you can do that via the top 20+ most popular feed readers and stream the content not in boring mainframe-style text but exactly as it appears on the page including embedded links, graphics and animations.

At this point we are still relatively close to shore. Next time we’ll talk about navigating some of the major sea lanes of interactive marketing and social media that can send wave after wave of new business prospects, opinion leaders and other desired/desirable visitors to your site.

My previous entry in this space talked about a company rejecting pretty much every weapon in the interactive arsenal…then wondering why instead of growing the business, since around 2000 it’s been trading dollars, winning just enough new business every year to offset churn.

It’s not the path we would choose. It seems clear that resource-strapped companies of the 10-person variety would be the first to drink from the Internet’s potential fountain of life. Yet I accept responsibility for being unable to make the light bulb go on for them, and it got me thinking more broadly about how we as researchers and marketers need to approach the market if we want to help companies flip the switch on the extraordinary business-building energy that is interactive/digital marketing.

So taking a cue from the words of Jodie Foster as Special Agent Starling in the flick The Silence of the Lambs, we turn the spotlight on ourselves.

A new breed of companies has sprung up to serve as tour guides to the wild, wonderful web. Some are traditional agencies who went bust and are reborn as “interactive marketers.” Other agencies are hanging in there but recognize the Internet bullet train is leaving the cyberstation, so they’re wisely looking to launch or enhance their interactive practices. Others are former IT service providers whose clients are no longer willing to pay hefty outsourcing fees for point-a-finger-at-the-client service but are willing to pay someone to take them to the web. So presto: They’re now masters of the web!

The mistake I see people making, especially those in the last group, is the notion that everything that happened before 2009 is now worthless. “Traditional is dead.” That clients—many of whom are just getting comfortable with not merely talking about the web but actually using it to help drive and retain business—are losers if they don’t cancel everything else and turn their marketing budget over lock, stock and barrel to one of these firms to spend it all on interactive.

When I say “just getting comfortable,” what do I mean? According to research conducted recently by Management Executives Networking Group, Alterian, Burson-Marsteller and our own firm:

• Two-thirds of marketers characterized themselves as social media beginners
• 80% said social media is not integrated with their core marketing
• 20% define their websites as “basic” and “not central” to their marketing strategies
• Fewer than 15% of F500 companies have a blog

Can you say “greenfield,” boys and girls? Sure. I knew you could.

Yet these lush fields must be carefully cultivated to produce a bountiful harvest. We still have a long way to go to convince many of the value of interactive. The things they’re asking me for indicate they are still less intent on the oceangoing voyage many of them perceive social media to be and more focused on the content and clarity of the sparkling pool in their own backyard. Even marketing executives whose websites clearly are light-years away from what I would expect from technology companies in 2009 know to ask for on-page optimization. For A-B and multivariate testing. They know about Google Optimizer. They know “Google AdWords.” They often don’t know about the installed optimizers some of us were working with before Optimizer was a gleam in Google’s eye, like Click Tracks (now owned by Lyris|HQ) or WebTrends.

That’s OK. They know what they want: Big results from their website. So let’s optimize those sites. Make their Google page rankings and Alexa site rank soar. Get bounce rates down and traffic flowing, page-to-page and in-page.

All of this is about preparing the landing zone. Next time I’ll propose some ways to wheel them, even if haltingly, to the launch pad.

  

Mark Mortensen was just named Senior Analyst at Analysys Mason, a firm that has now made two high-profile acquisitions in less than a year. First, as reported here and blogged here, Analysys Mason acquired OSS Observer. Now it has snagged Mortensen, and these moves combined constitute a blockbuster of sorts in the communications “theatre.”

Most recently Mortensen served as SVP marketing and product management at VPIsystems, where as analyzed here, he introduced integrated capacity & network planning to the market; as adjunct faculty member at UMass Lowell; and as president, Mortensen Consulting Group LLC, where he has been consulting to communications software and hardware companies. Yet he is best known for his previous achievements at some of the preeminent hardware and software companies in the communications market.

People often talk about building a rock-solid foundation in business and life. Mortensen’s career redefines the term. Building on an educational background that includes Yale and USC, for the better part of two decades he held positions including department head, director and the coolest job title I’ve heard of in ages–management systems chief scientist–at remote outposts you may have heard of such as AT&T, AT&T Bell Laboratories and Lucent (yes, when it was still just Lucent). I first encountered Mark in his role as CMO and senior VP product management at Granite Systems. At the time I was helping put CommTech on the map and eventually be acquired by ADC Telecommunications, and helping Visionael raise millions in venture capital to live to fight another day, but what I was really doing was helping those companies compete with Granite, and Mark. At Granite he was responsible for all marketing, product management, acquisition and partnering activities, and it seemed as if every other day you’d learn of some new alliance, product innovation, speaking engagement or lucrative contract win by Granite. “Do you believe that Mortensen? He’s at it again,” we’d say, while secretly wishing he was “at it again” for us.

Working harder and smarter than the competition paid off for Granite when long-running market leader Telcordia acquired it and Mortensen earned another you-don’t-see-that-every-day title, VP elementive strategy & realization, at Telcordia. There he was responsible for overall product strategy at a pivotal moment in the company’s storied history, putting a little Xng in the giant’s step as it evolved its technology (and mindset) to manage next-generation networks.

Assembling so much talent under one brand makes Analysys Mason a leader in research & analysis of the OSS/BSS market and perhaps, especially given Mortensen’s background, communications networking and services as well. One thing is for certain: Analysys Mason sure can pick ‘em.

 

I’m pretty sure the cast of characters it took to port our older daughter’s mobile phone number from AT&T to Verizon over the holidays resembled the NASA team portrayed in Apollo 13. I know for certain the level of tension in our household and several retail locations rivaled that of the movie. And as hard as our daughter worked to tie the warring factions together and make it all happen over the 26-hour ordeal, I’m expecting a union card and her first paycheck to emanate from Communications Workers of America Local 101 any day now.

Some of the stars of this saga are those at Verizon who sold me the phone and said to “Have your daughter come in and we’ll take care of the port in about a half-hour,” then upon her arrival at the store tried to shoo her away with a notepad full of phone numbers and instructions…until she reported having already jumped through those same hoops only to be repeatedly bounced from the system. There were Verizon people who distinguished themselves in a positive way, such as the young woman at the store who reportedly “Called her boyfriend who works at an AT&T store, and called in favors” to get this done. There is one who shall live in infamy in our household evermore for yelling at our daughter when in desperation she called for help. First place in that hall of shame goes to the AT&T person who threatened, “If you do not give me the correct password right this second this port is not going to happen.” (Ever? Sometime during the Obama administration?) In our industry, as in all industries, there are still people whose neural synapses do not make the connection between the customer and their paychecks. Restoring a bit of our faith in humanity was the young man at Verizon who, at Hour 26 of Emergency Service Only On AT&T And No Service At All Yet On Verizon, walked my daughter through a lengthy phone sequence that seemed more worthy of top-secret clearance to NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) than porting a number from one carrier to another.

Call me naïve in the ways of the wild world, but I don’t think this is what any of us had in mind as “the state of the art” in our business more than a decade after the Telecommunications Act (U.S., 1996). I fondly remember talking to publications such as Telephony and (now-defunct) tele.com back then about our OSS research and hearing, I am certain, prairie wind and tumbleweeds on the other end of the line. Then I would hit them with, “Don’t think of it as OSS; think of OSS as the reason why you can now switch phone carriers and take your phone number with you,” at which point their ears would perk up and OSS would finally get some well-deserved ink.

Yes, that was about porting numbers in the wireline environment and today we’re talking about porting numbers from one wireless operator to another, but should it really take “a cast of thousands” and a full-court press by the customer–who, btw, is paying for the privilege–to pull this off at the dawn of 2009? If so, I say it is a slap in the face to countless vendors, service provider engineers, systems integrators, industry bodies such as the TM Forum and regulators such as the FCC, and to the billions of dollars, euros, yen and other currencies that have been expended to “automate” carrier-to-carrier processes across every world region since ‘96.

If anyone thinks all of this customer/retail/customer service manual interaction is a good and reasonable outcome, I think readers would love to learn why. I know I would. After hearing so much talk in our business about “zero-touch” service provisioning and activation, then experiencing this port between two of our nation’s largest wireless service providers, all I can think of is Dennis Miller’s memorable quip about his take on photos of Publisher’s Clearinghouse winners: “And you thought there were a lot of zeroes in the PRIZE.”

…and mercy mild, all God’s service providers and enterprise IT shops reconciled.

To be sure, there is plenty of disharmony and cutthroat competition in the networking, software and telecommunications industries–and in all industries–and unless our Creator were to suddenly begin to endow us all with a quite different set of characteristics, it will always be thus. Yet especially during this holiday season it is encouraging to see groups that have previously been best characterized as “warring factions” learning from each other and (dare I say it) working together.

You’ll recognize the battle lines. In one corner: Telcos, turning up their noses at or running away from anything that looks like an “enterprise” solution because carrier networks require industrial-strength systems that can scale to handle tens of millions of concurrent subscribers and users, plus hundreds or thousands of concurrent carrier employee and contractor users. In other words, doing what most enterprise management systems are simply not equipped to do. In another corner: Enterprise IT groups, looking down their noses at the alleged Neanderthals in the carrier space with their non-standard, one-shot, get-it-done-somehow-and-ask-questions-later approaches to managing their networks. In yet another: Cable broadband providers, without decades of “legacy systems” and legacy organizations to wrestle with, for whom OSS/BSS, if it had any meaning at all, had been simply and only about getting out the bills each month.

It is good to see the extent to which a lot of this is changing. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), launched by the U.K.’s Office of Government Commerce (OGC) to address the management of IT infrastructure, development and operations, and at first adopted solely by enterprise IT users, is now being followed religiously by many service providers. Version 2 of ITIL contained 10 books and Version 3 has consolidated those into five: Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continual Service Improvement. ITILv3 links IT service strategies to customer value, and addresses service development and supporting processes, service design/delivery/control and other aspects such as measurement, reporting and service level management (SLM). Moreover, the use of the term “service” does not mean v3 is intended as a manifesto for service providers but reflects the broader and quite welcome reality that even enterprise IT operations are being run more and more not on a best-efforts basis but as “internal service providers” whose internal “subscribers” are every bit as important, not to mention vocal, as their external counterparts.

Naturally the TM Forum has a major role, perhaps the lead role, to play in all of this. Of course its Enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM), Next-Generation OSS (NGOSS) and Shared/Information Data model (SID) are now akin to passages from the Bible for virtually every knowledgeable professional in the service provider community. Although its focus today is on enabling digital commerce, the fact remains that no organization in history (with apologies to AT&T Bell Laboratories, and Bellcore during Sanjiv Ahuja’s tenure) has ever had the breadth and depth of technological know-how and experience the TM Forum can bring to bear on any network management issue. And the enterprise market is not only noticing but marching to the Forum’s tune in mapping out its own strategies. In our research we make a point of asking where leaders are getting their information and taking their cues from, and in many cases now the first acronym out of enterprise users’ mouths is “eTOM.” Or, fun for those of us with a deeper heritage in this market: “FCAPS” (the old fault-configuration-accounting-performance-security management model).

The vendor community has seen these synergies for some time and has been readying itself for the moment when customers would see the light. By virtue of its acquisition of MetaSolv and others, Oracle, whose roots are clearly (and still) in enterprise, has vaulted into a leading position in the OSS/BSS market and is mentioned by a number of our research respondents, along with OSS market leader Amdocs, as the kind of large one-stop-shop they’d like to do business with going forward.

Speaking of Amdocs, its move into cable broadband through its acquisition of Jacobs Rimell, and the more recent acquisition of Ceon by Convergys, may do many things, but one thing both moves do is to validate the vision of the market leader in broadband service fulfillment, Sigma Systems. Sigma’s All Play and other offerings are built from the ground up to address not one service but as the name implies, all services. While the rest of the market catches up–and as we have written in this space, the fact that Sigma doesn’t already count more telcos as customers tells us a number of them still don’t get it–Sigma is doubling down on its existing cable broadband customer base by providing a lot more than service fulfillment, having moved into many areas including programming distribution and subscriber interaction. Which in years past was the kind of thing addressed by vendors such as Probita and, more recently, on a limited basis by cable equipment suppliers like Scientific-Atlanta, now part of Cisco Systems.

The market is opening its collective mind in another way: To using hosted software, software-as-a-service (SaaS) or managed services instead of the same old high-upfront-cost installed systems. OSS/BSS leaders at two of the largest operators in APAC have told us they never want to buy another piece of software in their careers, they want OSS/BSS to be part of a managed services solution. That appears to offer substantial opportunity for IBBS and IMI Mobile, which already compete in OSS/BSS with managed services offerings, and HCL, which currently does not–but which is one of the world’s largest IT service providers and, we believe, its #1 managed service provider (MSP) as well as the #1 computer manufacturer in India.

As I alluded to at the outset, in the midst of all of this synergy, human nature still rears its sometimes ugly head. And so in fall 2008 we saw a donnybrook in the always red-hot (?) least-cost routing sector. Telarix filed suit against Vero Systems, which was in the process of being acquired by Teoco, upon which Vero filed a countersuit against Telarix and a merry little entry popped up on the Vero site, still there as I type these words on 19 December 2008 that read, “Telarix files meritless lawsuit against Vero Systems. Click here for the latest information.” Happily, all’s well that ends well and as announced on the Teoco website, “Telarix, Teoco and Teoco’s wholly-owned subsidiary Vero Systems have reached a complete settlement. All claims and counter-claims in the case have been dismissed with prejudice and without any admission of liability by any party.” Just in time for the holidays!

And while Tim McElligott and I both receive positive email traffic about these blogs, we also hear from those who are happy enough if mentioned in a positive light but react to other thoughts about their companies and markets as if the photo at the top of the B/OSS Insider blog is a remarkably good likeness of the devil. That’s OK. (And who knows: They could be right…) This space is not for sale, our charter is to talk about what we know and analyze what we see and hopefully provide insights that help you in your business. During my time at Gartner one week stands out: Gave a five-hour in-the-round strategy talk for Ahuja (now head of Orange, at that time head of software for Bellcore) and his 15 top lieutenants in the months preceding Bellcore’s acquisition by SAIC. Saw one company pay Gartner handsomely to use some of my verbiage on its website. Saw another announce its intentions to sue Gartner because it did not like some critical comments we had about its body of work. I figured that particular week struck just about the right balance.

Before I close, let me tick off several more interest groups with this simple wish: Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

Open letter to Che Anderson at Avant Force, makers of the Avant Browser:

You have a serious image problem! I operate my own self-built website, and every time I make any change I bench-test the site on the most popular browsers:

• Avant by AvantForce
• Chrome by Google
• Firefox by Mozilla
• Internet Explorer by Microsoft 
• Opera by Opera Software
• Orca by Avant, based on the Firefox codebase
• Safari by Apple

Avant is the only one, and I mean the ONLY one, that captures every detail of every single page perfectly, identically to Internet Explorer. The difference is, Avant is light-years faster (OK, hyperbole but I’m using it to make a point) and easier to use. Avant by default auto-opens new tabs at all the right times while you’re searching so you’re not endlessly hunting back to your starting point or wrestling with a balloon arch of multiple windows as you may with other browsers. Its Save Screen/Page/Region as Picture feature makes it simple and instantaneous to save a picture file of anything on any page, so much so that when I have a page save where quality is critical, I let Avant’s JPG-making functionality fight it out with Acrobat Professional and may the best program win. (It’s a fairly even competition at this point in the season.)  As someone who does focused backups (all working files and critical application ingredients), not full-machine backups, I appreciate things like two-click backup of bookmarks: File > Export bookmarks. This thing offers “too many features to list” and just about all of it, including tab-opening and other basics of life, is customizable.

How do the rest stack up? Of course there’s IE, the standby shipped on virtually every PC for at least the past decade and, to its credit, the only other one that hits the mark on page accuracy every time. Yet the best of the rest is Safari. Apple claims it is “lightning fast,” but after hearing that claim by others (particularly about several versions of Firefox) and being sorely disappointed, I didn’t know what to expect. WOW. Safari is scary fast, so fast that the sensation I’ve had when going back and forth between Safari and other browsers borders on the first time I tried high speed Internet and then had to drop back to dialup at a location that didn’t have a high speed link. It is that dramatic.

So far there is only one thing I don’t like about Safari, and I absolutely hate this: It won’t sort your bookmarks, which is something I badly wanted to do right after importing them from Avant. “If you want to move a bookmark, drag it to its new location,” says the helpful text, but fooling Safari into letting you drag folders, for example, to their rightful alpha locations is a nightmare and I had to craft a strategy to work around this. Which, given Safari’s extraordinary performance in every other way, is beyond ridiculous. Maybe “stupendously stupid” covers it. The other reason: Much like American Express, Safari isn’t accepted everywhere you go. For example, I tried to use Safari to make some changes to my site in GoDaddy and a popup told me Safari is not compatible with GoDaddy. Tried Safari here on WordPress and the machine went into a molasses-like slowdown. Of course, there’s nothing to stop you on most open web searches and it’s probably fine for most sites, so I recommend Safari for most of what you need to do on the web.

My testing consistently shows Chrome to be the next most accurate, then Firefox and finally Opera, but each plays its own little tricks with some pages, “misrepresenting” graphical images and layouts. After working perfectly since earlier in 2008, sometime in November, Chrome–alone among those we test–suddenly needed refused to load the Flash  plugin it suddenly needed to play the nine Flash videos that grace our site. I couldn’t believe it, sent a note to our pals at Google, got no response, and admittedly not in the interest of science, quit testing Chrome. I guess the holiday spirit hit me in early December, I decided to give Chrome one last shot in 2008…and miraculously it loaded the Flash plugin. Chrome is back!

Many sing the praises of Opera, and the usual refrain is about how fast it is. It is fairly fast, to the point that we’ve found diehard/hardcore Firefox users posting helpful hints on user communities that read, “Here’s how to make Firefox as fast as Opera” and recommending some creative workarounds to pull this off. Fascinating to me, because I’ve basically relaunched our website over the past two months, we test all browsers every time (except for my spat with Chrome), which means I’ve tested our site in Opera maybe 50 times in that span…and I learned exactly what makes Opera so fast: It uses the last/old cache for pages instead of reloading. When we bench-test each browser, Opera and Opera alone requires a refresh to actually see our current changes. In our tests Safari is faster than every other browser including Opera, and it “comes by its speed honestly”: No refresh to show current changes. Which makes me wonder: If I use Opera, for how many pages out there am I seeing up-to-the-minute content? Am I seeing older content, like when we on Earth “see stars” we are actually seeing “old starlight” that left those stars light-years ago?

The Orca browser is an interesting story. As I mentioned earlier, Avant Force crafted Orca on the Firefox codebase, which is why it naturally bears a striking resemblance to its predecessor with small differences, such as where Firefox inserts yellow into the fill-in fields on forms–a great feature that, although I have no data on this yet, must boost response–while Orca and most other browsers do not.

All of which is why I am constantly amazed, no, at this point angry, to see all the “technorati” and “intelligentsia” blogging and in the news recommending other browsers, particularly Firefox and now Chrome, and never once mentioning Avant. I see well-meaning tech articles analyzing/comparing browsers that pretty consistently compare IE-Firefox-Opera, now Chrome and sometimes Safari. Or user feedback forms with checkboxes for the other four-to-five, not Avant and no “write-in blank” on the ballot.

In a way it reminds me of the music industry, where too many critics seem to have a broad five-note range of favorites consisting of the Stones, Led Zep, Prince, Britney Spears and Madonna. As George Burns used to famously say: “It’s been done.” These are the kind of critics for whom incredibly gifted acts like Chevelle, Disturbed, Dark New Day, Anastacia and a thousand others effectively do not exist. The kind who think a multi-party democracy is just great as long as you only and ever vote for one party and within that party, a shortlist of overexposed stars.

What do we do about this, Che? You’re clearly being shut out by forces of ignorance, finance, groupthink or all three. Maybe we should begin a sincere, bona fide effort to build the Avant brand worldwide. I predict that within 18 months you could be holding the reins to the world’s #1 browser and be able to build on that for any moneymaking ventures you like including global recognition of Avant Search.

Call me. Or link to me. The world owes itself the ultimate browsing experience. Let’s give it to them.

While some of the largest players such as IBM and Accenture have provided a service delivery platform or two (IBM for Sprint and India’s Bharti Airtel, Accenture for Turkcell), a strike force of small independent software vendors (ISVs) has been crafting and deploying SDPs for broadband operators. And some of IBM and Accenture’s fellow heavyweights not only have taken notice but have taken out their checkbooks to bring some of that upstart-developed goodness home for the holidays.

In early October, Convergys, formerly known as Cincinnati Bell Information Systems (CBIS) and a long-standing leader first in customer care & billing and more recently in (customer) “relationship management,” announced it is acquiring Ceon. As discussed earlier in this space, Ceon has been one of the capable competitors to Sigma Systems in the broadband service fulfillment market with its Ceon Product Control Center. Convergys is combining this tempting new fare with its Infinys platform and serving it up as Convergys Enterprise Product Management Solutions. The offer is designed to help service providers more effectively manage product lifecycles across all network domains, shortening time to market for new convergent offers and hiking quality while reducing the cost of managing a large product portfolio-or in its words, to “construct, manage and deploy a layered catalog that includes the full technical and commercial definition of products and services.” At least one service provider, ice.net, formerly known as Nordisk Mobiltelefon and still known that way if you go by its URL, has deployed the new system.

Earlier in 2008 another capable competitor to Sigma became another acquired competitor. After a string of other acquisitions, B/OSS kingpin Amdocs took its most important step toward becoming a broadband-ready provider by acquiring JacobsRimell. Integrating the service fulfillment mini-mite into its software suite means Amdocs, like Convergys, now has a CRM+SDP one-two punch for delivering and managing converged services.

Also in 2008 another Sigma nemesis, Axiom, was acquired by Comptel to position Comptel to capitalize on the converging IP service trend, and to leverage Axiom’s strong market presence in EMEA and APAC, spurred partly by the ISV’s partnerships with systems integrators such as Atos Origin and TietoEnator. At the time of the acquisition Axiom had 35 customers including BT, Telecom New Zealand and Singtel.

Which begs the question: When all around it are being snapped up by bigger fish, why does Sigma remain as the only ISV that matters in the broadband SDP space, almost resolutely so? (C-COR, which at one point spiked a blip on the radar, is now playing a post-acquisition supporting role inside broadband equipment provider Arris Interactive. Sigma itself took another competitor, Alopa, out of the market by acquiring its broadband software assets in 2006.) Maybe Sigma has a bad taste in its mouth from its last venture into life-as-the-acquired: In 2002 it was bought by broadband equipment manufacturer Liberate in that company’s attempt to emulate the hardware + software machinations being tried at that time by its colleagues in the telecom equipment sector including Lucent and Nortel. Then, when Liberate ran afoul of regulators and heads began to roll out of the executive suite, Sigma was “liberated” to resume life as an ISV. Or maybe there’s a lingering market perception that Sigma is something of a one-note regional player itself, in that all of its customers save one (Telus) are cable MSOs and the vast majority are located in North America.

I predict that as the ADP (acquisition delivery platform) continues to accelerate the consolidation of smaller firms with great technology into larger players we’ll soon be talking about a new corporate address for Sigma to call home. Does the word “soon” build the ultimate fudge factor into that statement? Absolutely. After all, it’s the holidays.