As the year comes to a close, how has the Cambridge technology consulting business fit in with Novells software business?
The broader trend, of course, is there is a convergence of products and services into solutions. A lot of people don’t understand how that all occurred, and my view of that is products are becoming commodities. It started with the dot-com era, when CEOs were told–by what they read in the paper–that the dot-coms were going to put the brick-and-mortar companies out of business. And you can’t be a CEO of a company, have that kind of stuff being said, and not pay attention to it. I think CEOs really did pay attention to it and tried to figure out what this new thing called the Internet was all about. Did CEOs really understand about the technology? As a result of all that, though, CEOs don’t really care about technology. They don’t care about the bits and bytes, how fast one (piece of technology) is versus the other. All they really care about is what’s the solution and what am I going to get for what amount of dollars–what’s the ROI (return on investment)? That helped to commoditize th
