deal architect

More Innovation

On the New Florence blog

Unsung Technologies

Replacing wires between chips with laser beams

Souping up the Asus

Who says big ideas are rare?

Innovative Financial Technology

Google Ocean?

OPEC: Organization of Programming and Engineering Countries

I am reading this NY Times article about Japan's “rikei banare” or it's youth's "flight from science". In the US, we called it "MBA disease" as more students opted for banking, legal and consulting careers. This combined with Japan's low birth rate is going to force it to rely much more on Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese engineering and computer science talent.

Even though it is one of the largest industrial nations, Japan has historically been a relatively closed economy when it comes to foreign labor - traditional wariness of the "gaijin". Clearly that is changing.

So are many European countries who have similarly low birth rates. They will be competing for the same global technical talent the US today has had much easier access to. But in our current mood against immigration and foreign trade we are slowly losing - even mocking - that competitive advantage.

Can you foresee a scenario like we face with oil today - too many countries chasing after pools of resources thousands of miles away?

Weekend Stuff: Everything about aviation is SL-O-O-O-W

Think the TSA lines, and assorted mechanical and weather delays are the reason air trips take longer than a few years ago? Of course they are, but even if we re-engineered those down dramatically, there's other slow news.

Even scheduled trip times have gone up as congestion on the ground and in the air conspire whereas aviation technology has not evolved commercial flight speeds much. As this USA Today article describes "The analysis shows that the average flight in 2007 traveled at the slowest rate in 20 years — about 342 mph, which includes time spent flying and taxiing. In 1998, the average speed was 358 mph."

And even Southwest, which leads the industry with 25 minute turnarounds on the ground, has slowed down. It used to have a 10 minute turnaround.

Weekend Stuff: Every cloud has a silver lining

I have written before how my 11 character last name gets mangled. So I am corresponding with Jennifer Sricharoenchaikit at the PR firm, Blanc and Otus.

I have heard every extra alphabet causes an exponential increase in name mangling  - so I ask her about her 17 characters.

She helpfully includes a phonetic guide in her email signature block :

"see - chair - on - chai -kit"

and loves what her name does to tele-marketers. It either intimidates them or if they persist and stutter, it's a nice filter for her to hang up.

May be I should extend my name to MonsiuerSheikMirchandaniSan :)

HP-EDS: the theories

It has been interesting to read commentary about HP-EDS and the theories about why, when, who

Hypothesis 1: It is a two horse race now - IBM and HP

Even after the acquisition, IBM and HP Services together will still be less than 15% of the global outsourcing and systems integration market.  There are tens of niches in outsourcing from desk side management to WAN services to application management to BPO - not to mention various geographic, vertical and SME niches. While EDS will make HP stronger in many of these niches, global telcos, offshore players, VARs, regional specialists continue to grow nicely in many of these.  HP will still not be number 1,2 or 3 in many of these niches.

Hypothesis 2: Services are inherently "low margin" - this will be Mark Hurd's Waterloo.

Look at well run Indian services firms in particular. Gross margins in mid 40s and reasonable SG&A - which make them almost as profitable as many software vendors. Executed well, this could be Mark's biggest impact on HP.

Hypothesis 3 - It's about the Data Center

I wrote last month about the opportunity in Data Center Makeovers. But while HP has done a nice job with its own internal DC consolidation, that does not mean it can build a major practice around it. Besides it's about way more than consolidation. It's about green, virtualization, remote diagnostics and more, and frankly much of the recent innovation in DCs has come from Google, Microsoft and amazon, not the outsourcing industry. If anything, the persistence of outsourcers to keep milking older data centers may partly be contributing to an energy crisis.

Will Dan Farber take over for Mike Wallace?

CBS is acquiring CNET.

With technology becoming so mainstream in every walk of life and Mike Wallace retiring, the timing is right for Dan Farber to step in and interview Larry, Mark, Sam...

No not Zuckerberg - they already had him on 60 minutes. The other Mark in the news this week. Be nice to see some enterprise focus in a mainstream media platform.

Update: Dan complains to me he is not THAT old :)

Skipping Alpha

The Industry Standard lists 25" non-A list" blogs it likes ...Deal Architect is one of them.

Thanks, Richi and Ian for the recognition.

And importantly - continued thanks to my readers and sponsors for supporting the blog.

One clarification: We don't just pick on IBM or telcos.  This blog is about disruption so all kinds of technology category leaders - - from HP to Accenture to Cisco to SAP get some love from this blog. Especially when they are being un-disruptive - being staid or continuing to defend their out-of-whack TCO/ROI ratios. 

And when they do something new and exciting, each one of them also gets fair mention on our twin blog which focuses on innovation - New Florence. New Renaissance.

Update: Fellow EI, Zoli also made the list. Congrats! If you have not read him, you really should - his sarcasm is much more biting:)

Something's amiss here

While I would also classify salesforce.com, RIM and Google as some of the "most influential" technology companies, something's not right if TCO and product functionality account for 85% of the score in this Aberdeen listing of top 100 most influential vendors.

That would stack at the top larger vendors with larger revenues (and related customer TCO) and those with most enterprise wide reach ...yet AT&T, Accenture and many others show much lower.

What am I missing?

More Innovation

On the New Florence blog

"Secure your ID" Day

The most published author in the history of  the planet

Restoring Mondrian's classic

Google Artist Themes

Laptops as earthquake sensors

The best of InterOp

The Real Deal: James Taylor on Raising your Enterprise Application IQ

This continues a series of guest columns from practitioners and bloggers I respect. The category - The Real Deal describes them well.

James Taylor is co-founder of Smart(enough)Systems and co-author of a book with the same name.

"While almost anyone who has to use one of today’s typical enterprise applications probably has a long list of things that are wrong with their particular application, there is at least one thing that is common to almost all of them: they are dumb. Now that’s a pretty strong statement but think about it. A typical enterprise application, whether custom or packaged, let’s you put in data, stores it for you and regurgitates it when you ask nicely. 

Such an application relies entirely on people for any intelligence, for any decision making. This reliance:

• Limits straight through processing in any but the simplest processes.
• Means that 24x7 operations require 24x7 staffing.
• Reduces the ROI of event processing or business activity monitoring

More than anything, it means that none of the data in these systems is being used to improve their response to your customers, suppliers or partners. The data simply gets stored and then shows up in reports – past behavior and results do not inform the next transaction. And if your data is not being used to improve your operations then you are failing to use one of your most important assets – the unique visibility you have into your own business. Traditional BI approaches are focused on delivering insight to knowledge workers – they are not going to work for automated systems or high-volume, operational transactions.

Fortunately there is a well established path to improving the value of enterprise applications and taking more advantage of your data. This approach is known as Enterprise Decision Management (or Business Decision Management or just Decision Management). Here’s a definition:

Enterprise Decision Management is an approach for automating and improving high-volume operational decisions. Focusing on operational decisions, it develops decision services using business rules to automate those decisions, adds analytic insight to these services using predictive analytics and allows for the ongoing improvements of decision-making through adaptive control and optimization.

Identifying the critical operational decisions that inform, personalize, target and control the transactions within your enterprise applications can make those applications smarter – not intelligent, but smart enough to be useful. Instead of offering every customer the same price, your application can take a pricing decision. Instead of telling a customer someone will get back to them, your website can determine the risks and tiers for a policy and underwrite it. Instead of adding a generic cross-sell offer to the call script, your call center application can customize the script to maximize the value of this conversation with this customer. Instead of an account manager starting their day finding a message that a delayed shipment might upset a key customer, your system can re-route deliveries across customers to minimize the cost impact based on service level agreements. And so on.

When you focus on these decisions there is a way to add insight from your data. The pricing model can be based on an optimization model that uses historical trends, the underwriting decision can use risk scorecards that turn past behavior into future probabilities, the cross-sell can use data-driven segmentation to target customers. Suddenly the data you have can be put to work making your operations smarter.

The technology to do this exists today. Not only are there a number of decisioning platforms, there is a strong market for business rules management systems, plenty of data mining and predictive analytic tools, optimization products and growing integration between them. Processing power, data storage and virtualization, integration technologies and SOA have all helped make this approach cost effective and practical. 

It’s time to end the era of dumb applications and start making your computers do more of the work."

Read James's blog at http://www.smartenoughsystems.com/wp

Dave Duffield: Man in a hurry

Workday is starting to sign up large companies - Flextronics and Chiquita - for its SaaS HR.

Over 18 months ago, when his Workday product was barely ready Dave Duffield asked me to introduce him to some of my bigger clients - to balance the many smaller ones his SaaS product would instinctively be attractive to. He was already thinking 3 years out. Dave has been a good friend over the years. So I did. And for various reasons - mostly because they were not in the HR replacement cycle - they gave Dave an audience but were not ready.

Dave let me know what a poor salesperson I was :)

If you have met Dave, you know he is genial, very untypical of a tech zillionaire.  Someone who strives hard to live up to his initials - DAD. Still gets nervous before a speech. But underneath it all, there is a competitive streak.

Someday soon, I am sure I will find myself negotiating for a client against him. I am bracing myself for another load of what a poor salesman I am for losing him some leverage in the negotiation:)

Astronomical!

“The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is 5p. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that's 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 5p each, that's £374.49 per MB - or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs.” 

a Space Scientist at U. of Leicester

I cannot wait to see his analysis comparing mobile roaming charges to even further transmissions from NASA's Mars explorer, Spirit.

Don't build it and they will still come

Phil Wainewright writes about Coda's decision to use salesforce.com's SaaS platform rather than building their own.

As I have written before there is a hypocritical streak in many technology vendors. While they expect their customers to buy not build, within their own cultures there is mostly NIH - if they do not build it, it cannot work.

Needed: More Salmon

When exactly did the tech industry risk/reward curve get so warped?

Usually the more risk you take, the more your rewards.  Dan Farber's talk with Larry Ellison comes down to "let smaller companies do the harder, riskier work". Not just blaming Oracle - with the possible exception of Apple, Cisco, Intel and parts of Microsoft, most large tech vendors are all about letting others do the innovation.

They are like bears just waiting for salmon at the end of their epic, upstream ride home. Problem is we have way too many bears right now.

International roaming charges: $693 per business trip!

Courtesy of Brian Sommer, I saw this study by Harris Interactive that the average US employee spends $ 693 in international roaming calls on an overseas trip. Initially I was cynical because it is sponsored by Brightroam which sells an alternate SIM card. But the more I looked at the sample size and composition the more believable the number looks.

Adjusted for taxes that only buys 100 to 400 minutes depending on what part of the world the trip is - not unreasonable usage for say a week's trip with an employee checking voice mail, taking an occasional call from the home office, calling families etc. And frankly, data roaming is also expensive so number of minutes used for calling may be even less.

Before you choke on your sake and scream at your employees, blame yourself. For allowing providers like AT&T to charge prices of up to $ 4.99 a minute from some countries. You should scream at the EU for capping their own telco roaming costs but letting US providers get away with no caps. You should scream at device manufacturers like Apple for not allowing for unlocked SIM on the iPhone.

And only then should you should scream at your employees for not using Skype, for not renting a local mobile when they are overseas, for not using a local SIM card etc.

So scream a lot. Just not while you are mobile roaming overseas:)

More in New Florence

On the innovation blog

More LARTE

The College Tour goes high-tech

Shake it like a Polaroid Picture

Unsung Technologies

Replacing wires between chips with laser beams

Souping up the Asus

HP-EDS?

HP could use a better services arm - while it has some marquee clients like P&G, it is inconsistent in most outsourcing deals. EDS could use a layer of cover. The company which just about defined outsourcing has been running hard to stay even - flat growth over the last decade. So, at a macro level the potential combination announced today makes sense. Actually mouth watering at a price of just 0.5 EDS revenues for a blue chip client base. (HP is trading at 1.2x)

But EDS is not Accenture or PwC (which IBM acquired) or TCS or Infosys. Its major strength is still in infrastructure outsourcing (though it has been growing its application and BPO capabilities nicely). HP's outsourcing is similarly more skewed towards infrastructure. So, it is a scale play. But the timing is risky because infrastructure outsourcing is being challenged by data center consolidations, a secular decline in processing, storage and network charges and emergence of utility and cloud computing models. Not the world either EDS or HP grew up in. Talking about world - HP's hardware business has seen significant success in a number of emerging economies - running that infrastructure as a service does offer some unique opportunities.

Unlike Microsoft, HP does not not have lots of cash-on-hand. Only about $ 10 bn. If I was Mark Hurd, I would spend $ 5 bn towards a smaller infrastructure player like ACS (or even better one with footprint in emerging markets) and spend the rest (plans to spend $ 12 bn on EDS) on a BPO and an application outsourcing play. In fact around infrastructure, I would think even smaller and buy a cloud computing player and use HP's vast channel to build market on top of it.

But I am not Mark Hurd. If I was, I would get my print ink at a huge discount :)

Update: read more of my perspectives here

Update: Computerworld summarizes other perspectives on the combination

Telecommuting Trends

Hush - don't tell my boss, but it is 10.30 Monday morning and I am on my exercise bike watching TV -  Gerri Willis of CNN talks about telecommuting.

I remember Verizon pitching telecommuting to clients as a buffer against an avian flu epidemic a couple of years ago. Did not help. But gas at $ 4 a gallon just might. But as Gerri counsels - present it from an employer's perspective. Don't demand it. Offer to see more local customers. And only ask for it 2-3 days a week. And assure your employer about your home comm's infrastructure. Larry Dignan has more on the topic.

Of course, I am biased on the topic. Since Gartner (reluctantly) allowed me 13 years ago, I have had a home office. Back then remote workers got  a first generation multi-function copier. And an additional line for dial up access to the network. We have come a long way since then. JetBlue's work at home reservation agents and Offshore firms delivering 75 to 80% of work from thousands of miles away are proof of that.

I can tell you all about the joys and the drawbacks of telecommuting - odd hours, proximity to fridge, kids and dogs saying hello at awkward times, and no office water cooler influence :)

Of course, my commuting with Gartner also significantly increased my air travel. A pattern which I have not successfully managed to break years later. So to me the big excitement is around telepresence technologies. Especially since there is already starting to be disruptive alternatives to Cisco's lofty expectations.

The China Quake

I learned about the major earthquake in Western China from Scoble who posted about it ahead of most news media. New Scientist recently had an article that I wrote about on the New Florence blog titled Emergency 2.0 - about how social media is trumping traditional information sources when it comes to disasters.

But this is not about bragging about Twitter.

It is nice to see the Chinese leaders immediately declare an "all-out" relief effort. Contrast this to what the Myanmar leaders have been doing with their disaster and some would argue how badly we handled Katrina.

"Generational Archaeology"

My mind was still buzzing with the Tom Brokaw generational speech I wrote about here, when I saw Karen Beaman's post about multi-generational talentforce. While you can argue about her generational classifications, it occurred to me an archaeologist would be fascinated to find the layers of generations in companies as people in the West work longer, and younger employees find more opportunities as companies "onshore" more. You can see the huge differences (not just related to party affiliation) of Obama and McCain - and they are only 27 years apart. In some companies, the gap between oldest and youngest employees can be 50 years.

While there are clear HR management challenges in managing these layers it affects several other disciplines. We also have IT, product design, marketing opportunities and challenges - as the younger crowd comes with different expectations of devices and user interfaces, where as the aging base has its own unique technology needs. 

It could also affect global competitiveness in the next couple of decades. The US is uniquely positioned to take advantage of a broad spectrum of generations. In comparison, India and China have a much younger workforce, but not as much depth in middle and top management talent. On the other hand countries like Germany and Japan have more of a challenge filling the younger roles as their low birth rates and relatively closed immigration policies conspire.

B for Blackberry and Bold and Business

Caught in a world where Motorola got caught flat footed, and facing global competition from the likes of Apple, Nokia, Samsung and HTC RIM is coming out blazing to protect its corporate turf. It recently announced an initiative with SAP, is launching a $ 150 million developer fund, and unveiling a new device, The Bold which has GPS, and consumery multi-media features as well. Not just boring corporate email any more.

Hope to make it to WES2008 in Orlando for a few hours this week. That should be total immersion on everything Blackberry. I am going with my HTC/AT&T Tilt.

Bold of me, eh?

"Nothing earth shatteringly new"

Dennis being kind discussing Oracle and its plans for "Enterprise 2.0"

Honestly, there is so little Oracle has had to show around Fusion or next-gen apps for the last few years that even this pre-announcement deserves a mention.

Of course, Oracle had already declared itself  a leader in the space back last Fall...

Whither SAP Verticals?

While several bloggers reported good progress from Sapphire last week in a number of SAP horizontals - Jason Busch on SRM,  Jason Corsello on HR, Brian Sommer on Business Objects and other analytics, and Paul Greenberg on CRM, I was disappointed to not see much coverage on non-manufacturing verticals such as banking, utilities, insurance, healthcare etc.

I asked 2 SAP executives - Jim Hagemann Snabe and Bob Stutz - at Sapphire about such verticals. Jim acknowledged legacy, typically custom developed vertical applications have been tough to displace particularly in the US.  In a few deals where I have seen SAP vertical proposals, I can tell you the "displacement" is tough because SAP's TCO (particularly those of its SI partners) has not been compelling - you could custom develop that functionality again for cheaper. Just maintaining the legacy apps is even cheaper.

Bob told us they were planning a CRM onslaught on several verticals. But overall, I did not see not much more on specific vertical functionality.

It would be nice to validate SAP' claim it is  is "strong" in 24 verticals when for the most part sells core ERP modules outside of its manufacturing base. Here's typical SAP-speak - Bill McDermott talking to AMR Research last month "The subject then turned to hot verticals. He immediately cited banking and retail. On the banking side, companies are starting with financials. The plan is to move them to more of the ERP suite and then on to core banking applications." 

That's horizontal functionality, my friends till (if) those customers get to implement those core banking apps.

Problems like those at Waste Management occur because of ambiguous definitions of "wall to wall" coverage in many non-manufacturing markets. If not SAP, its SI partners are pretty loose with definitions of vertical maturity.

Next time, I go to a Sapphire I hope to request Mike Prosceno to stack my schedule with non-manufacturing vertical sessions. I promise to also stay longer than a day :)

Update: Frank Scavo provides another POV

Weekend Stuff: AT&T and Mother's Day

What I wanted to get for Mother's Day :)

My kid's overruled me. My son said - she's our mother! Estee Lauder, Lindt and Barnes and Noble won out.

My AT&T rebate paid for it. Yup, finally arrived. For those curious - Supervisor Larry never called. Seriously, why would any one  at AT&T  reach out and touch someone?  That's for us consumers to do and pay for.

PS - Louisville Slugger has partnered with MLB to donate $10 per the special bat above sold to the Susan G. Komen Foundation to help find a cure for breast cancer.

Weekend Stuff: More on Myanmar tragedy

Living in Florida, I am keenly interested in hurricanes. I have written before about technology which is going into tracking those monsters. So I was curious how much advance notice the Myanmar government had before the catastrophic Nargis hit.

This New Scientist map shows 5 days.  The Indian Metrological Department appears to have given their Burmese (Burma was previous name for Myanmar) peers several warnings of the storm's track. 

What a shame if the government was as uncaring in preparing its citizens as it now appears to be after the strike.

Weekend Stuff: World's Most Worthless Money

Ok, enough self-pity about the sinking US dollar.

This gallery at Portfolio.com shows we still have plenty to be grateful for

What is an analyst?

3 decades after Gartner was started, Carter Lusher (formerly of Gartner) asks the question and many in the industry jump in with their opinions.

No question the role/definition of an analyst is changing. Compared to their hey days in the 90s, today an analyst is only one of many influence points that buyers leverage in their IT decisions. 

I read his post in a week where I spent time with Mike Prosceno who runs blogger relations at SAP. At Sapphire this week, I saw him equally comfortable with analysts, bloggers and journalists. Through his career he has dealt with all 3 categories. Now if he would spend some time in sales he would also understand buyers. Increasingly, peer input is a major influence point.

But short of that, Mike is the closest I would suggest to someone with the broadest understanding of the changing influencer landscape. 

The Poor Man's MacBook Air?

Popular Science catalogs how hackers are starting to soup up the Asus EEE PC with more memory, more USB slots - and installing Mac OS.

Of course, see the bottom. "Installing an Apple operating system on non-Apple hardware is a violation of the End User License Agreement, which is legally a breach of contract."

Where have we seen that recently? Oh, yes the Psystar. The EEE is just a bit portable - like the Air.

What would the Jesus Phone do?

Of course evolve to JP2 - er, Jesus Phone 2,  oops, next version of iPhone - with features this Popular Science gallery asks for.

Wait - my AT&T Tilt already says yes to all 10 items in the gallery.

And the new HTC Diamond does even better - FM radio, 3.1 mp camera, eGPS, better display...

Well, ok I stretched the truth - my Tilt does not support A2DP to stream music to a Bluetooth headset.

Something my kids basic Nokia 6085 can do - that you can buy refurbished for about $ 20. I have a feeling given the humility of the Man, that would be the JP.

"I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore"

So we got the mandatory "No comment" as we asked Dr. Henning Kagermann of SAP about the TomorrowNow matter. I followed with what he thought about Rimini offering maintenance to his customers. He nodded his head - not sure he was aware of the announcement that morning.

Next topic, I figured.

But he spent the next few minutes painting scenarios without mentioning names or specifics.

The bracketed words are mine, but it went something like:

Customers need choices (of third party maintenance). But depending on the outcome (if Oracle wins) not sure other large companies (like SAP) will ever offer it. Only smaller firms (like Rimini) likely will. The wild card is how customers react. How customers react to the outcome will determine the future of such services.

He emphasized the part about customers.

I interpret that to mean (Oracle) customers should do this.

Who will tell the people?

Whatever you think of Tom Friedman or the New York Times, read this.

SAP's US enigma

I deal with a number of multi-national clients where the HQ is somewhere a few thousand miles away and it is always interesting to hear perspectives from the "other side". Every Sapphire, you get to hear that from the 747 full of SAP folks who come over - about its US market.

To start with the US is SAP's largest market - no one complains about that - except when the dollar is weak, of course.

But SAP's market share in the non-manufacturing verticals (like banks and utilities) continues to be much smaller than in Europe. SAP's customer base upgrade to ECC 6.0 is going much slower than in Europe. SAP TCO in the US tends to be much higher because its SI partners tend to sell a lot more "change management" and other soft services - at least in German speaking Europe, the outside help in typically much more tactical and product centric. The US middle market is very fragmented and very diverse - very different from the "mittelstand" co-CEO Leo Apotheker invoked in one of our conversations with him this week.

Bill McDermott, President and CEO of the Americas was recently added to the SAP AG board. I imagine there will be much more nuanced discussions about the US market and the state of the dollar in that boardroom for the next few years.

More Innovation

On the New Florence blog

Blockbuster's makeover

Refinery City

Maker Faire

HP's Memristor breakthrough

Babbage comes to the US

Innovation in the Heartland

More on SAP's "Hidden" Innovations

Had I not shared a ride with Denis Browne, head of SAP's Imagineering Lab and heard what his group is doing, I could have sworn innovation was a banned term at Sapphire. When I asked co-CEO Leo Apotheker what he is  hearing from customers as he transitions in to his new role, he said they want SAP to keep their businesses running. In other words, boring but predictable.

I have written before SAP does not do a good job showcasing what it has in the labs. But this Sapphire seemed particularly barren - other than some discussion around its BPM strategy and the mobile CRM announcement with the Blackberry (which RIM, not SAP, is leading the R&D investment in) I scanned the press releases for product innovation after I left Sapphire and did not see much. Indeed, as Charlie Wood points out SAP even had "iPhone amnesia" after announcing it last year.

Later in a social setting, in a discussion about his hometown, Paris,  Leo described a growing set of  its citizens who commute on a weekly basis to New York and other global cities - the ultimate trend setters. Here's hoping he brings that imprint to his products. He did say he wants his engineering group to build products that "delight".

Update: Susan Scrupski on SAP's investments in Web 2.0

MISO Plotting a joint SaaS offering?

Oracle, in conjunction with the other large software vendors  — IBM, Microsoft and SAP among them — is plotting to launch a salesforce.com and Google competitor...so reports Om Malik.

NOT!..but he does report a rumor that AT&T - along with British Telecom, Deutsche Telecom and NTT among others — is plotting to launch a Skype competitor.

If true, how ironic would that be after years of ignoring/fighting VoIP offerings? If that happens MISO banding together to offer SaaS may not be that far fetched - would it?

Burning Question: Is SAP walking a mile in customer shoes?

So, at Sapphire SAP presented reasons for delay around its BBD SaaS offering. Most explanations centered around SAP "learning and optimizing what our customers have been doing" with hosting, applying SAP fixes, Basis support, upgrades, user support - various aspects of application management.And SAP automating many of these expensive, manual tasks. 

Privately, some SAP employees have told me the BBD journey has been a revelation how much its SI and outsourcing partners charge its clients, and now SAP is driven not just to improve economics for future SaaS customers but also for existing on-premise customers.

To which I go - Yeah! Why has it taken so long?

Then the other part of me goes - in bits and pieces SAP has offered services like this for years. Its consulting, systems integration, help desk and outsourcing groups know the effort and economics around SAP implementations and support and those in its large services ecosystem.

What do readers think? Has SAP embraced a new religion or is it just spin to explain away BBD delays?

Welcoming WiMax

The Sprint-Clearwire off again/on again WiMax offering is back on again. And that is welcome news for consumers as Verizon and AT&T dominate US telecoms. The fact that Comcast and Time Warner are also investors will mean more "bundles"via cable competition. Stakes in the venture from Intel and Google show increasing convergence between the historically open technology and historically protected telecom sectors.

Who knows what will happen between now and 2010 as Verizon and AT&T roll out their own 4G networks and T-Mobile looks to acquire Sprint and on.

But for now let's savor this news as our telecommunications try to catch up with many others around the world.

COST: The New MISO

Fellow EIs Phil Wainewright, Jason Corsello and Bob Warfield anoint the leaders of SaaS:

Concur, Omniture, salesforce.com and Taleo.

All I have to provide is the acronym COST .

All the current market leaders - MISO orMicrosoft, IBM, SAP and Oracle - had to do was be tardy with their own SaaS. And, of course, keep persisting with their TCO, to make the COST moniker appropriate.

On-shoring!

Stanley Bing at Fortune reveals that in the middle of the recession why there are plenty of entry level jobs right here at home.

Fortune also has a Faces of the Future gallery profiling the next generation of employees - all in their 20s - at several Fortune 500 companies across various industries.

The Greatest Generation?

I did not spend long at Sapphire - but in a 24 hour period I felt like I had borrowed a time machine which allowed me to span a century.

Tom Brokaw, the former NBC anchor, a featured speaker brought tears to my eyes as he described "the greatest generation" - the subject of his best seller. The generation which grew up during The Great Depression, then fought the Second World War, and then instead of expecting to be pampered after those major sacrifices brought the world the post-war boom. (He also wove in how the country's turmoil in 1968 was so similar to what we face today)

His speech made me wonder how my generation will be viewed by future ones.

I kind of got an answer from a conversation with Dan McWeeney, one of the youngest Enterprise Irregulars. He is a wunderkind who worked for Colgate, got assigned to a tour at SAP Imagineering and now works for Adobe. Dan sees what corporate America has done to my generation - used and abused it - and is wary of long-term corporate life. But Dan has a certain way about him, that you just know he will do fine no matter what twists and turns his career takes.

I got a very different perspective as I shook Dr. Kagermann's (SAP co-CEO and long-term steward) hand for probably the last time as he heads to retirement. Over the last 15 years I have met him on several occasions and always appreciate his open and even-keeled approach (within the bounds of his fiduciary responsibilities).

2 generations separate Dr. Kagermann from the one Brokaw described. Another two separate Dr. Kagermann from Dan. It is rare I get to appreciate in a 24 hour period fine specimens across that wide a spectrum of generations.