INPUT

My wife and I founded INPUT in November 1974 after I spent 10 years in programming and systems development in the UK and USA. I had just finished working for Quantum Science Corporation that was a computer technology research and forecasting company where I ran a small group looking at software and data processing services. Their focus was on hardware whereas I believed the future was in software and services, so I left and started INPUT. To me the computer was like the engine in a car; completely useless unless there was a framework (software), driver, and destination (application).

My first client was Computer Sciences Corporation for whom I did a $300 quick survey of rates companies were charging for systems analysts. I found that there was a real need for independent, objective data on the industry that at the time was about $10 billion dollars worldwide. Depending on how and what you count, it is now between USD1 and 1 ½ trillion. The impact on all segments of our society is greater than that.

Vendors and buyers wanted to know what was going to happen and what was the competition going to be.

The independent vendors themselves were quite small; the leading independents ADP, EDS and CSC, were all about $200 million. Software Products companies were much smaller. There were various units of aerospace companies, telephone companies, accounting firms, manufacturers and banks that made the competitive landscape rather unique and complicated. In the computer vendors, software and services were something you gave away to sell hardware; an attitude that eventually killed most of them off. My first presentation at IBM’s HQ in Armonk was in the basement next to the heating equipment.

Our first year I spent doing custom studies and a couple of multiclient studies one of which got picked up and publicized by the Wall Street Journal. I hired my first employee (she still works with me on various projects) and moved out of my basement/garage in Menlo Park to Welch Road in Palo Alto.

We grew quickly and started two subscription services. One looking at the market for computer software and services in the US and the other the vendors offering them. The Market Analysis service was and remained our basic product and provided 5-year forecasts of the three main components of the Computer (later Information) Services (IS) industry (Software Products, Professional Services and Processing Services). As time went on and the markets grew, we constantly disaggregated these components; for example, Software Products into Systems Software and Applications Software and then each of these into further discrete categories.

There are basic requirements for reliable forecasting; clear definitions, a strong research base in buyers, vendors and third parties (tripods are stable) and reconciliation (what did we forecast would happen and what did happen).

Another principle was to use gender neutral terms (‘they’ and ‘their’ rather than ‘he’ and ‘his’). It really annoyed me to read anything that used the male gender and at the end said it applied to male and female gender terms!).

We provided our clients with what we called DIK; Data was the results of the surveys we carried out, Information was our analysis and forecasts, Knowledge was what we thought vendors as a group or individually should do. If a client did not like the K they could use the I and D; if they did not like the K and I they could still use the D. Initially I planned just to provide the D and I as I felt vendors knew better than we did how to use it. But our clients started to ask for the K; what did INPUT think they should do!

Our competition was primarily IDC and to a lesser extent Auerbach and a few other companies all of whom focused on hardware. We used to say IDC was a mile wide and an inch deep whereas we were totally focused on software and services.

We grew fast and were in the Inc 50. We added a service for buyers of computers including residual values of IBM mainframes that was a big issue at the time. Subsequently Gideon Gartner formed Gartner and picked this up as part of his service. For a while we competed with him in the buyer business, but his resources were far greater than ours as he used outside funding while we were self- funded. We dropped out to focus on the vendor market.

Through the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s we expanded geographically in Europe, Asia and North America. A key reason was that software and services are geographically sensitive whereas an Intel chip, printer or a computer are the same everywhere. This fragmentation of the market requirements made it difficult to scale.

During the ‘90s Gartner started to focus more on our area hiring our people and becoming a tougher competitor. I also recognized that the industry sales and marketing (including market research) processes were changing significantly mainly because of the Internet.

Early in the ‘90s we forecast that there would be 250 million people on the Internet by 2000; we also predicted it would change industry structures. In 1995 we abandoned print delivery of our products. I believed we did not need a headquarters as we could run a company like ours as a set of related entities remotely.  My wife and I moved out of California in 1996 to operate INPUT from a small office and our home. A little ahead of our time!

I tried to change INPUT’s focus from Market Research in our clients to Marketing whose budget was orders of magnitude greater. I felt buyers could be far better informed in the future through use of the Internet and our role would be to help that process. This would impact the Sales function in our clients that would be our ultimate target and whose budget was greater again. Marketing would help buyers ‘buy’ as opposed to helping in house Sales ‘sell’ in the old-fashioned way. In the late ‘90s we started to shift our deliverables to Buyer’s Guides.

Unfortunately, the old business went down faster than we hoped, and the new business took off more slowly. I had planned that the change would take 3 years and cost us $3 million but tried to do it in one year at a $1million. We had a difficult set of conditions that resulted in our closing all our offices over a two-year period except one in the Washington D.C area that served US Federal Government technology vendors. This business was a Sales/Marketing oriented one that we had started in the ‘80s because a group of our customers demanded it. It was the model for what I hoped INPUT would become.

In 2001/2 we cut the company down to 11 people and one office. We still carried out market research and forecasting of the federal government IT market (about $100 billion a year at the time) but stopped all other market research. OMB would call us each year to get our data on the federal government IT spend!

The main product of the Washington office was a set of data bases on government procurements, starting well before the RFP stage. Over the next 10 years we grew the business to over 250 people and over 1,000 vendor clients. It was and still is a wonderful business that required a lot less travel and much less reliance on highly paid analysts.

In 2010 I was approaching my 70^th birthday and my wife asked me if I wanted to carry on doing this for the rest of my life. I took the hint, and we sold the company in late 2010 to one of our clients.

I thoroughly enjoyed the two phases of INPUT for very different reasons. In the first phase, 1974 to 2000, I was the spokesman for the company and involved in fascinating projects; should Andersen Consulting separate from Arthur Andersen, what should IBM do about Facilities (Resource) Management, how could X build a $1 billion business from scratch using acquisitions (answer buy A, B, and C – the initials of 3 companies), what should GMISCA buy, what should IBM do (start serving the consumer directly – answer ‘No -it would interfere with our clients business’), should DEC get into the Services business like IBM, should Cap Gemini get into systems integration and systems operations, should BT build a separate system integration business, should ADP go international, and many more questions like that.

I met wonderful people all around the world who had a great impact on the industry. People like Steve Shirley, Roger Graham, John Leighfield and Barney Gibbens in the UK. We worked with the trade associations (ADAPSO/ITAA in the US, the CSA in the UK, etc.) to establish the credibility of the industry and promote its benefits. We went from the basement to the Boardroom at IBM and similar companies.

In the second phase, I was more of a mentor to a wonderful bunch of young people. We grew the 11 staff professionally; we hired graduates and trained them in our culture and processes.  The person who ran the company was someone we had hired in the mid-‘80s out of College. We minimized hiring outside experts. We did have a high turnover but that was because our clients kept hiring our people. That was OK by us as they became another set of advocates in our clients. I would tell each intake that our purpose was to make them more valuable if and when they left INPUT than when they joined. Many who did leave came back after a few years.

Our Board, executive and general staff were well gender balanced; because they were right for the job not because it was PC.

One of the reasons I tried to ensure that a copy of every report went into our repository is that I knew we had the privilege of being involved in one of the great human revolutions. Not all the documents we produced are in the inputicenter data base but most of them are.

The hard copy of the reports as well as the electronic version are now with the Stanford University History Department in California. The company still exists with a different name (a mistake in my opinion as I am told it would be impossible to register the name INPUT in the US now) and I get occasional reports on its continued success.