In a consulting world dominated by vendor interests, fearless buyer advocates are thin on the ground. Vinnie Mirchandani is one such who successfully made the transition from PwC consultant through to Gartner analyst and now as CEO of Deal Architect Inc. I first knew of Vinnie when he was at Gartner. In those days, Gartner analysts commanded fear and respect in equal measure. Vinnie was always the 'growling tiger' in the corner, ever ready to fearlessly tell industry captains why they sucked and what they needed to do about it. That didn't always earn Vinnie a cheery 'hello' but it made him a great source of information about how the applications software industry works.
More recently, Vinnie was one of the founding fathers of the three year old Enterprise Irregulars group of industry pundits, analysts and commentators. Vinnie knows where a lot of the industry skeletons are buried. You'll often find him telling a humorous story about this or that company using facts culled from his encyclopedic memory. Apart from providing invaluable insights into industry practices and outsourcing advice on his Deal Architect blog, Vinnie loves the disruptive world of cloud computing and SaaS, showcasing some of the best of what he finds on his New Florence blog. He is never shy of explaining to his readers how the SaaS world can disrupt accepted truths and norms, exploding enterprise applications myths along the way.
In 2009, Vinnie started a series on people in technology he's come to know centered around their hobbies and how technology fits into that equation. It demonstrates a very human side of the industry we rarely see.
Deal Architect – Vinnie’s blog on industry disruption and economics. New Florence. New Renaissance. – Vinnie’s blog on technology innovation and impact on how we work, play and live.
Dennis Howlett has been providing comment and analysis on enterprise software since 1991 in a variety of European trade and professional journals including CFO Magazine, The Economist and Information Week. He currently writes a well read blog for ZDNet.
Contributions
Video:Forcasting Fisticuffs - Predicting the Cloud in 2010 - January 2010
There have been many predictions regarding the future of technology and the cloud. To make sense of the myriad of forecasts and create clarity Appirio invited leading thinkers to battle it out. Dennis Howlett of Irregular Enterprise, The Deal Architect Vinnie Mirchandani, Phil Wainewright from Procullux Ventures, and Narinder Singh of Appirio give competing views of what's really going to happen with the cloud in 2010. Moderated by Ryan Nichols of Appirio.
Article: The "Cloud Pioneers": The (Cloud) Bastards say, Welcome - April 2009
The Deal Architect, Vinnie Mirchandani, invites cloud pioneers to respond to the Open Cloud Manifesto. They share what they've learned in delivering cloud services, not just white papers, at price points that IBM and most in the list of vendors supporting its manifesto will struggle mightily to come close to. Part 1: Marc Benioff, CEO at Salesforce.com Part 2: Timothy Chou, Author of Cloud Part 3: Chris Barbin, CEO at Appirio Part 4: Jeff Kaplan, THINKstrategies Part 5: Dan Druker, SVP, Marketing & Business Development at Intacct Part 6: Eric Dirst, CIO at DeVry Part 7: Michael Lamoureux, Sourcing Innovation Part 8: Bob Warfield, EVP Products at Helpstream Part 9: Laef Olson, CIO at RightNow Technologies Part 10: Jeremy Roach, CEO at Coda
Vinnie Mirchandani