CIOs ally to beat software firms
Published: 30 Apr 2004 10:30 BST
Get a group of chief information officers in a room and you're bound to hear some griping.
After all, CIOs have a lot to be grumpy about these days, what with their budgets under constant scrutiny, local tech talent as scarce as ever, and wily software suppliers always finding ways to bleed companies dry.
It's the last item in this list -- frustration over the power that software companies wield over their corporate customers -- that's occupied Andrew Black for the past three years. In 2001, Black, the CIO of graduation memorabilia maker Jostens, emerged from a particularly spirited gripe session determined to make a change.
Black banded together with a group of like-minded peers at Best Buy, Cargill, and Medtronic in a grassroots effort to resist the software industry's ills -- its arbitrary upgrade cycles, feature-bloat, and incompatibility headaches.
The result, officially launched last month, is a corporate software buyer's co-op. Avalanche Corporate Technology Cooperative, as the group is called, takes inspiration from the open-source movement and applies a focus on business tools and applications. Black likens it to a "gated community," where members trade and improve upon one another's programs. With a cost of admission of $30,000 (£16,957) a year, it's likely to stay rather exclusive.
So far Avalanche has a handful of members clustered in the Minneapolis area but hopes to branch out to hundreds of companies across the country. Black, who spent his childhood on a Minnesota farm, explained to ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com how farming co-ops may have influenced his vision and why he thinks Avalanche is an idea whose time has come.
How does Avalanche work exactly?
The basic idea is to improve IT effectiveness by collaborating or sharing intellectual property. So you, a corporation, would join Avalanche and for a $30,000 per-year fee, you would have access to a repository that stores that intellectual property.
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