If you look at our Thought Leadership Finder, you’ll see Intellyx maintains articles, collateral and vendor briefs under more than 100 different technology categories, and we keep adding more all of the time.
Unlike the big analyst firms that need to assign their analysts to cover specific technology ‘buckets’ that they can then categorize vendors into, at Intellyx, we’ve declared ourselves a ‘No-Bucket Zone.’
The reason is not simple. Savvy enterprise technology customers never have a shopping list of software categories they set out to buy. They are seeking new ways to enable digital transformation, and solve problems so they can change and grow.
While the process may eventually result in a short list of vendors (or open source alternatives) to fulfill a specific need, more often than not, the categorization regime of any technology bucketing will have holes in it.
Why would a technology buyer look in the bucket?
It’s hard being a technology buyer. You have to maintain a list of business needs, and somehow match that up with the rather arbitrary technology buckets provided by the market. But without having them, how would you define what you need?
“Buckets are useful for comparison once you’ve identified a technology that solves your problem,” says my Intellyx analyst colleague Eric Newcomer, also a former Chief Architect at Credit Suisse and Citigroup. “They are not really useful when you’re trying to figure out whether or not a given product meets your requirements, since the requirements tend to be specific to your organization.”
“What you want to do is look at the product on its own, and then if it sounds like it might be a solution, you check it out with a deep dive and usually a PoC or a pilot to confirm it works as stated. You are typically starting with the vendor’s own positioning and collateral, not with the analyst placement in a bucket.”
By this buyer’s reasoning, checking the bucket is more of an afterthought or a data point to include in a recommendation to adopt—but it isn’t part of validating the product.
The real question is whether the product meets your requirements and solves your problem. You don’t have a bucket of a problem, you have a specific set of requirements and a specific problem to solve.
How can vendors escape the bucket?
When you are a technology vendor, if you can’t be a leader in the big bucket you are in, perhaps it would be better to be in a smaller bucket, or no bucket at all.
As a marketer, I found myself in a big bucket around 2006 at iTKO. At the time, we were an automated testing vendor for SOA/web services and enterprise Java applications, which put our startup in the shadow of testing gorillas like Mercury and Rational.
We had a really fast back-end testing tool, LISA, that could directly invoke JMS and message buses and SOAP, where most of the changes worth testing really happened. But we couldn’t even get on the radar of analysts, when compared to the more extensive feature sets of front-end testing suites, code analysis tools and the like.
We started realizing we were in the wrong bucket after talking to a software industry customer. His team was able to set up and run a successful 1000 user load test with our tool, great—but now that it was done, he didn’t plan to do another test anytime soon.
Was there something wrong with our tool? No. “It’s just too much trouble to set up the whole test responder environment again,” he said. They needed a simulated test environment, more than our testing tool. Thus, we started to invent our own bucket with Service Virtualization (or SV).
Sadly, we never fully escaped into cooler new buckets like cloud development or DevOps, largely because our big analyst teams were already assigned to cover testing. But with the help of some innovative smaller analysts, we were able to hold our own within a much smaller SV bucket, even getting some competitors to swim with us in there.
After all, no vendor wants to have a bucket all to themselves.
What are we supposed to do about AI?
The advent of artificial intelligence is set to disrupt the whole bucket landscape again. Much like all major motion pictures over the past decade suddenly became superhero movies, at least half of the vendors we talk to are positioning AI prominently in their messages, and “AI washing” their existing solutions from a shiny new bucket.
A mature vendor in IT Operations Management can thus become “AI Ops,” and a process optimization vendor can add a few algorithms and become “AI-driven process optimization.”
Even if they are two entirely different spaces, why wouldn’t any vendor aspire to take advantage of the situation?
Call me crazy, but it really doesn’t bother me at all. If the AI-washing of everything just pits more holes in the old technology buckets, that’s probably a net positive. Customers will need to look beyond the labels to understand exactly how the solution fits their business needs.
The Intellyx Take
The old analyst model of categorizing technology into ‘buckets’ you need to fill will never carry water.
As Eric Newcomer said, “Buckets aren’t going to help, and they can even be a distraction. You end up going through the description of the bucket category and trying to match your requirements to that, instead of to the specific product you’re evaluating. This exercise can waste a lot of time that is better spent on evaluating the product itself.”
Now, the world doesn’t move to the beat of just one drum. What might be right for you, may not be right for some. When the world never seems to be living up to your dreams, it’s time you started finding out what everything is all about.
At Intellyx, we entered the ‘No-Bucket Zone’ to connect the dots across the entire enterprise architecture and center your research on business value.
Copyright ©2024 Intellyx B.V. Intellyx is an industry analysis and advisory firm focused on enterprise digital transformation. Covering every angle of enterprise IT from mainframes to artificial intelligence, our broad focus across technologies allows business executives and IT professionals to connect the dots among disruptive trends. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer. No AI chatbot was used to write this article. Image credit: Adobe Express Image.
