Two interesting news items that could require action from many Gartner clients.
On the mobile software front Antenna’s rumoured acquisition of Dexterra was officially announced yesterday. This is partly a consequence of economic conditions which are making life harder for some mobile software players, and partly the inevitable consolidation of a market containing too many vendors. This won’t be the last acquisition in the mobile software space. I expect further significant changes in the vendor landscape of packaged mobile applications and MEAPs over the next year. In the meantime if you’re a Dexterra customer Bill Clark and Mike King have written a first take with some initial advice, and if you need more details call them. This illustrates what I wrote when Antenna absorbed Vettro in November of last year, choosing a mobile software vendor is often a difficult decision that trades off strategic safety for time to market.
Before you sign any purchase orders this year remember one generic principle that’s especially useful in difficult economic times and isn’t limited to the mobile software space. Before you buy any technology from a small or medium sized vendor make sure you know how you’d disentangle yourself from that decision if it became necessary.
The US IRS is proposing to clamp down on employee’s personal use of corporate mobiles suggesting that it should be taxed as a benefit. In the US personal use of corporate mobiles has theoretically always been a taxable benefit, but the complexity of calculating its value and collecting the tax means it hasn’t been enforced. However I guess the IRS is now looking for new income to pay for those stimulus funds. The proposal has generated opposition from both corporates and the telecomms industry, and I sympathise with them. If the IRS goes ahead with this, one consequence is that more people will carry two mobiles in working hours, a corporate one and a personal one. No-one likes doing this, so the one that will get left at home at the end of they day is the corporate device. This leaves corporations with two options, neither of which is nice. Either accept lower service levels because you can no longer contact people easily outside working hours, or accept lots more personal devices being used for corporate purposes like mobile email (with all the management, support and security pain that implies). My guess is the cost of the second option would far exceed any additional revenue the IRS would collect.
Part of the problem here is that the IRS is stuck in a nineteenth century time warp where they believe that it’s still possible to clearly separate personal and work activities.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Bob Apollo // Jun 25, 2009 at 8:59 am
Having worked for both Antenna and Dexterra (and with many of the other players in the space), I think the merger is a classic example of the tortoise catching the hare. The rumour that the acquisition price was less than the most recent Dexterra investment round, and less than a fifth of the cumulative investment to date highlights the risks involved to those who fund start-up technology firms.
In retrospect, Dexterra were only ever going to explode or implode – no likelihood of a comfortable steady state middle age for them. The market still has too many vendors. There will be more consolidation to come, and more discomfort for many of those who had invested in these companies, and quite likely a lot of vendor-customer disentangling to do.
2 Nick Jones // Jun 25, 2009 at 10:24 am
Good points indeed Bob. Investors usually know when they’re taking a risk but I suspect many of the customers don’t. IMHO it wouldn’t be a bad idea if people were forced to state how they planned to disentangle themselves before they signed any purchase orders.
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