Tom Kucharvy
Tom Kucharvy is a 30-year IT industry analyst veteran with an impressive record of anticipating trends—and helping clients drive and prepare for industry-shaping change. Whether or not you agree with Tom’s out-of-the-box thinking, his analysis will open your eyes to new possibilities.
Tom attributes much of his out-of-the-box thinking to his unusual background for an industry analyst. He has an undergraduate degree in philosophy and graduate degrees in law, business and one inter-disciplinary master’s degree that combined work in international business, law, political science and economics. After practicing law for five years (including driving one case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court—which was lost 5:4), he entered the IT industry. Though his career, he shunned the technological fascination and specialization of many of his colleagues to focus on solutions marketing and partnering strategies.
In 1984, Tom founded and managed Summit Strategies, Inc.— a market strategy firm that helped IT industry marketing and strategy executives anticipate key IT industry inflection points and engineer fundamental market transitions. These transitions included the revolutionary growth and maturation of the PC and other standard architectures, the emergence of Unix and Windows as enterprise operating environments, the emergence of IT as a service, the increasingly strategic role of IT consulting and managed services, the role of SOA in reengineering business processes and the offshoring of increasingly strategic, increasingly conceptual services. He became a Senior Vice President at Ovum Inc. upon Ovum’s acquisition of Summit Strategies in 2006. He left Ovum at the end of 2008 to start this new venture.
Over the past few years, Tom has focused on issues including the:
- Globalization of the IT services industry and how offshore providers and offshore arms of Western providers are migrating rapidly up the value chain, from manual to process-driven left-brain, to innovative right-brain services;
- Rise of India, China and other emerging countries as global economic powers in general and specifically as providers of and markets for technology products and services;
- Strategies by which different types of IT vendors are attempting to capitalize on emerging country markets, labor forces and politico-economic conditions;
- Ways in which SOA will transform business process design, improve business agility and lead to a blurring of the traditional lines between software developers and services firms; and
- Emergence and dynamics of the broad “Green Tech” industry.
Tom Kucharvy is now bringing his unique “business value” perspective and commitment to Beyond IT.