deal architect

Verizon – pulling defeat from jaws of victory

I liked Verizon’s list of technology trends here

In 2006, I said the future is so bright for telcos as they sit bang in the middle of 5 “mega-trends”

- Globalization
- SaaS
- Mobility
- Collaboration
- Telemetry (GPS, RFID etc)

Verizon’s list of promising trends builds on this. That’s where they should be focused.

Instead Verizon keeps wanting to dip back and nickel and dime its customers. We recently had an erroneous call to Ireland (we usually use Skype or a calling card) . Verizon charged us $ 4 a minute after taxes. The lady of the call center insisted this is what it costs Verizon. When did they last update their agents scripts?

They have issues with early termination fees (back in the news again recently), shortfall fees, late fees even when their billing system is at fault, they have tried to substitute a lapsed tax with a “supplier surcharge”. Over and over again they annoy their customers by sneaking charges in and then making their agents defend their policies. If you have ever been to their retail stores, they are so sparse and lethargic, you wonder why Apple with its own vibrant stores would ever entertain doing business with them. 

The 2009 survey of consumers in 32 countries by the Reputation Institute put telecoms as 4^th lowest of the 25 industries surveyed – just slightly above tobacco, which was understandably the lowest.

What is it in Verizon and other traditional telcos that keeps them from really, truly breaking out and leveraging the wonderful opportunities they are squarely in the middle of?

SAP’s unheralded innovation

Mike Prosceno heads blogger relations for SAP. I must have personally given him a couple of ulcers because of positions I take on this blog. But he persists, invites me to briefings, keeps the conversations flowing.

Stacey Fish who works with him is even nicer. 

So, this morning they send me details about a briefing next week. They plan to use something called  nTAGs as conference badges .

But then the note has an ominous

“we promise the device is not a fancy “shock” collar”

Should I be paranoid? No, because I had blogged about nTAGS last year on my innovation blog, New Florence.

I have come to expect innovation from Mike and Stacey. A level of conversation that does not happen with most other large vendors. Access to their executives which is sometimes heated.

I can tell Mike “don’t BS me”. And he can tell me I am out of line. Believe me that type of conversation is a huge innovation in vendor world.

The “Anti-SAP” Conference?

I am presenting at the Sapience conference next week.

I had heard someone call it “The Anti-SAP conference” before and didn’t not think much about it. But today the Enterprise Irregulars brought it up again and I thought I would put my thoughts in writing.

Call me naive, but I am baffled it is considered “anti-SAP”

I am presenting mostly on how to manage systems integration, application management, hosting, upgrade costs around SAP. Some of these line items have been out of control for a long time, and others look bloated compared to emerging cloud metrics. SAP customers who have no intention of uprooting SAP have every intention in managing these costs (which can make up 70 to 90% of TCO in an SAP shop). How is that anti-SAP?

Ok, so you say Zach Nelson of NetSuite is presenting. Surely, he is sworn to see SAP wither away. Zach is one of the most realistic CEOs I have met. He knows there are business functions, certain locations where SAP customers cannot justify the SAP footprint where he has a shot in the SAP customer base. Will he replace SAP at headquarters in large customers? Highly unlikely any time soon. Ray Wang, my fellow Enterprise Advocate is similarly presenting broadly on SaaS. 

SAP has had plenty to time to offer its own SaaS version to its customers. It is being very selective about who its offers BusinessByDesign. But why is exposing SAP customers to alternatives in a vacuum created by SAP itself considered anti-SAP?

OK, so Seth Ravin of Rimini is presenting. Surely, he would love to get more third party maintenance in the SAP customer base. But if he does, it only confirms that SAP customers are not ready to uproot SAP. They just want a tiered maintenance price. SAP bought his previous company TomorrowNow, and offered a tiered option to Oracle customers, but chose not to do it for their own customers.

Same question - why is exposing SAP customers to alternatives in a vacuum created by SAP itself considered anti-SAP?

Helmuth Guembel, my former Gartner colleague and organizer of the event, consults with a number of SAP customers in Europe. From my conversations with him, many are unhappy with SAP, but few of them are ready to jettison SAP. But the key point is these are living, breathing SAP customers. The theme of the conference is “Alternatives for leveraging your investment in SAP.” How can that be anti-SAP?

I see Amit Bendov from Panaya is presenting – they actually streamline SAP upgrades. I see Steve Zollman from net-net presenting on SAP sustainability. How is that anti-SAP?

I don’t know many of the other presenters or have not seen them in years to know what their “agendas” are. And I will miss most since I am going to the SAP analyst/media summit on that first day. It’s SAP ‘s opportunity to coach me not to be ‘anti-SAP” :)

Gartner-AMR – tipping the scales even more

Gartner is acquiring AMR. Congratulations to my friends there including Tony and Bruce. Tony has always been a gentleman, Bruce a worthy ambassador for the entire analyst community.

But…

…what in the heck is Gartner doing buying a primarily vendor revenue driven firm? Its own vendor side revenues have steadily grown over the last decade.

Why does that matter? Ever been to an industry event where it was primarily vendors? Oh, it’s a good time, but you get that empty, one-sided POV.

From past conversations on this blog and elsewhere in industry, Gartner’s position will be the balance is just fine. After all, this adds less than 5% to our revenue. 

Problem is it was already past the tipping point – and this tips the scale even more.

But hey, it’s their money. I mean it was their money …

Weekend Stuff: Obama’s Brilliant First Year

Not my words, those of Jacob Weisberg in Slate (saw it courtesy of Paul Kedrosky)

He quotes three accomplishments —preventing a depression, remaking America's global image, and winning universal health insurance.

Am I worried about the deficits? Absolutely. Do I think the world will continue to run to us whenever there is a military crisis and just as quickly bad mouth us? Yes. Do I think healthcare will be easy to fix? An emphatic no given the inflexibility of pharmas, insurance, litigation attorneys.

But based on what he walked into and what he has done, the man deserves our support.

Of course, what do I know? I only gave up on W after year 7 of his Presidency.

Now back to less unpleasant technology matters…

The end of packaged software as we know it?

Three very different data points over the last month contribute to this post

a) I was impressed to see at the Dreamforce conference last week how much custom development is going on on the force.com platform. The numbers we heard from Marc Benioff were big - 188 million lines of force.com code, 12 times as much as last year. Since June more than 15,000 companies have a signed up for the force.com free edition etc.

But the numbers are just numbers till  you see what end-user organizations are custom-building – not just vendors like Coda to build their own accounting applications. You have to stop and ask - has the pendulum swung? Are people building more rather than buying packaged functionality?

b) Then I saw fellow Enterprise Advocate Ray Wang present at a SAP user event in Manchester, England and point out 5 areas SAP has invested in recent years.

• Netweaver
• Duet
• BusinessbyDesign
• Solution manager
• Enterprise support

But there has been  little customer uptake. Alan Bowling, chairperson of the UK and Ireland user group is quoted: “SAP still develops stuff that only five people will ever use and then tries to drop it on us. ” No wonder SAP has had a tough job migrating customer bases. Why should they with new features they don’t really care about, and the chaos of a typical upgrade. 3-4 months of rehearsals, and the hold-your-breath long weekend execution of the upgrade.  In contrast, Marc Benioff  also harped on salesforce’s ability to perform“5 minute upgrades” using mirrored data centers.

c) Finally, a conversation with Zach Nelson of NetSuite brought home much more clearly how much more SaaS vendors understand their customer base. When you can see on-line which features your customer base is using extensively, and which new features get adopted in an upgrade release, that is one of the best feedback loops you can have. In on-premise world that feedback takes much longer, and the results typically based on surveys are never accurate.

Alan was further quoted as saying “We can now get in early and tell (SAP) that some things are either irrelevant or might be better if approached from a different angle. We’re gaining access to advanced roadmaps that would have been kept from us”. That is goodness, but it has taken years and will continue to take years to incorporate into future releases. How do you compete against Zach’s much better visibility in to his customer preferences?

More custom development. More tuned features in future releases. 5 minute upgrades.

The packaged software world is going through seismic changes.

This post was previously published on the Enterprise Advocates page

The shoemaker's children

On my flight over to San Francisco, I changed planes in Las Vegas and got free wi fi courtesy of Google. On my flight back on Delta I got free Wi-fly courtesy of eBay. Both are spreading some holiday cheer.

But San Francisco airport expected you to pay for wi-fi. No Google generosity there? Through the week, the AT&T mobile coverage in downtown San Francisco was miserable.

Shouldn't Silicon Valley have the best?

Where there are clouds, there is often a rainbow

Marc Benioff likes to talk about how salesforce is "democratizing" technology by making large enterprise class IT infrastructure and application management affordable for even the smallest companies.

But at Dreamforce this week, I saw a much wider view of his democracy.

At one end of the table was a ball of color - bob of red hair, purple trousers -  D.A. of the indie band Chester French. At the other end was Joe Drouin, CEO of Kelly Services which places 650,000 contract staff around the world, in a dark suit and white shirt. Quite a contrast in size of customer and dress code.

There was Avon which showed off how it leverages force.com and Facebook as it targets its Mark product line at a younger generation of customer. And there Bob Beuachamp, CEO of BMC which has made billions over the last 3 decades selling mainframe and other IT centric tools telling the audience that he had heard from a CIO "I have 30,000 servers and I hate them all"

There was appirio showing off salesforce's new Chatter features integrated with Google Apps. A few minutes later there was Accenture showing off a much more traditional set of survey screens.

There was Astadia, a new-gen systems integrator as Platinum Sponsor on the expo floor. And there was Deloitte, also a Platinum sponsor.

There was Gavin Newsom, the young, left-leaning mayor of San Francisco and there was Gen. Colin Powell, the right-leaning former US Secretary of State.

The show had 19,000 attendees registered from more than 60 countries...quite a rainbow.

Hey, this democracy thing may actually have some legs...

The maturing of salesforce.com

So, I am walking near Moscone Center - in town for Dreamforce - and the guy tempts me with the offer of a free convertible. Got my attention - see the sign "work for a consulting company whose name you actually recognize". It is Deloitte recruiting. And giving away BMWs. That's good for potential employees - but customers? Guess it was only a matter of time before the big consulting firms would salivate at the opportunities around salesforce.

Should walk around the expo hall tomorrow and see if appirio, Astadia, Model Metrics, Bluewolf can do better than a BMW :)

Sapience 2009: TCO Management Event for SAP customers

"Sapience 2009, an event for CEOs, CIOs, CFOs, and IT Decision makers seeking to escape the limitations of a strongly vendor controlled application landscape will take place December 8-9, 2009 at the Hyatt Regency Cambridge, MA." says the PR

Several other speakers will be presenting on ways to manage the SAP centric costs - shelfware, maintenance etc. I will be presenting on the even more pricey "surround" costs - the hosting, processing, storage and network costs which look astronomic compared to emerging cloud benchmarks; the cost of application management by supposedly "cheap" offshore vendors, the still too complex upgrades etc

See you in chilly Boston!

HP, the disruptor?

Why would Cisco move down into 25% mainstream server margin business when its networking business has yielded it 65%? That is the question many asked as Cisco announced its Unified Computing System in early 2009. Its marketing said it “..represents a radical simplification of traditional architectures, dramatically reducing the number of devices that must be purchased, cabled, configured, powered, cooled, and secured.”

Some would argue, a new class of infrastructure software – virtualization – had broken down traditional boundaries between computers, storage and networking and Cisco was merely reacting to that trend.

Events in recent weeks are confirming HP, in particular, pushed Cisco to do so.

Before Mark Hurd arrived at HP there was a strong partnership between the two with HP selling hardware, Cisco networking gear. Indeed, HP’s previous CEO, Carly Fiorina was on Cisco’s board. After Mark arrived, HP started to promote its own ProCurve networking brand while continuing the partnership. HP storage networking solutions were proposed most of the time with Cisco high-end switching directors.

Grumbling started when HP introduced its Virtual Connect product in 2006. The industry had been moving to blade servers – easy to expand by plugging in or out new blades into the chassis. But while this made easy for the server administrator, they had created problems for network and storage administration. With Virtual Connect, various network addresses were virtualized inside the module, and so are the links back to the server blades on the other side. So changes in server configuration did not affect network or storage administrators, and vice versa changes in network or storage did not affect the server administrator.

HP claimed that Virtual Connect could increase the productivity of administrators by a factor of three because of this flexibility.   The foundation for next generation network virtualization was laid. Rumors started floating that HP saw an opportunity in networks and Cisco saw the HP threat

And as it introduced its Virtual Connect Flex-10 Ethernet module in 2008, HP changed its messaging from administrator efficiency to economics saying it could “cut network hardware costs up to 75%.” Flex-10 distributed the capacity of a 10-Gb Ethernet port into four connections to dramatically lower the cost and complexity of network connectivity. 

And by late 2009, the split was accented as Cisco set up a joint venture to tighten relations with EMC around storage HP started more aggressively positioning its own ProCurve networking gear and announcing its own Converged Infrastructure Architecture. Now comes HP’s $ 2.7 billion acquisition of 3Com and it is all-out war.

I am not nice to HP for milking its dominant position in printers and related consumables. Its EDS unit is grossly overpriced compared to cloud competitors. Its software business gets unjustified margins. 

But  in reverse I need to be generous to HP for disrupting Cisco in network switches and routers.

Don’t take a Coke can into Pepsi HQ

I wrote earlier “if you are Steve Ballmer's (Microsoft)  kids you dare not use Google or try an iPod. I imagine his salesfolks dare not use salesforce.com...”

Zoli writes about Don Dodge moving from Microsoft to Google:

• Thanks Microsoft Outlook, but I’m going to Gmail.
• Thanks Microsoft Office Office 2007, but I’m going to Google Docs.
• Thanks Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.5, but I’m going to Google Android.
• Thanks Microsoft Internet Explorer, but I’m moving to Google Chrome.

No word about about changes in soft drink preferences, though…

Appirio’s Cloud Computing Ecosystem Map

They showed it to me on a printout a few months ago, and I kew I had to go get new glasses – it’s their cloud ecosystem map, which you can magnify on-line. Gives you an idea of the bewildering pace at which cloud vendors are proliferating.

The Economist Debate on Cloud Computing

The magazine is running a debate on cloud computing between Marc Benioff, CEO of salesforce.com and Stephen Elop, President, Microsoft Business Division.

Please check it out and comment.

I commented as follows:

“How do you recover from someone saying “Have you quit beating your spouse?” Say yes, and you acknowledge you did it in the past. Say no, and it implies you are still doing it.

The title of this debate is similar. “Cloud Computing Can't Be Entirely Trusted” You put it at a disadvantage with a negative connotation then expect it to defend it on why it should be trusted.

After all, how dare cloud vendors challenge the establishment when the incumbents have delivered so much?

• Masses of bug fixes which have to be applied at each site individually on a relentless basis. Thank you, Microsoft.
• Months and months of upgrade rehearsals to get it done – maybe - on a long weekend. Thank you, SAP
• Billions of dollars in software shelfware with little ability to trade. Thank you, Oracle.
• Downtime of “planned maintenance” hours while supposedly meeting 99.99 uptime SLAs. Thank you, EDS
• Servers utilized at 20% in most data centers. Thank you, HP
• Storage at $ 100 a GB over 3 years to most companies, when you and I can buy 1 TB for the same price - 1000X the capacity for a one time payment. Thank you, EMC
• Cold war era bunkers called data centers which have few of the design, cooling, proximity to renewal energy sources, tax incentive efficiencies that Google, Yahoo!, amazon have shown. Thank you, IBM
• Ever seen stats on average uptime, recovery time etc in customer base from an on-premise vendor similar to what many SaaS vendors show that transparently on their trust sites? Thank you, on-premise vendors for sharing that information.
• Ever seen a SAS 70 Type II audit report on an on-premise implementation? Thank you, on-premise vendors for sharing those.

Yup, Economist, Cloud Computing Can't Be Entirely Trusted. The incumbent, on-premise establishment on the other hand can overprice, under-deliver, cause massive overruns, suck out 80% of our IT budgets for routine work – but we need to keep trusting them.”

EU and Competition in Technology

The thinking in most of the tech industry is we don’t need government intervention - at least not in the enterprise side of the business.  Big corporations don’t need protection. They can hold their own against the big vendors.

I disagree. Even the giants GMs and GEs don’t make up even 1% of Oracle’s or IBM’s revenues. The buy side is extremely fragmented whereas the vendor side is increasingly consolidated. Corporations spend 85% of their IT/telco budgets externally, and 75% of that is with the top 25 global vendors like SAP, BT etc.

It screams for periodic government scrutiny. Especially when vendors pull shenanigans like misleading and scaring customers on the use of third party maintenance to protect their 95% gross margins. Or selling printer ink at $ 5,000 a gallon and still misleading consumers about ink levels in their cartridges so they buy more prematurely of that precious commodity. Or international roaming charges at 50 to 100X what local firms charge.

If the government does not stop such rape and pillage, why do we bother to have any police at all? Let’s just disband all regulation and law enforcement.

So, I am ok with Neelie Kroes, the EU Commissioner for Competition and her office’s periodic scrutiny of  Microsoft or Intel or Oracle.

What I do not like is a seeming pattern of focus on US companies. While her office has moved against European telcos to cap mobile calling charges, I don’t see that office focused enough on European vendors like SAP or Deutsche Telecom. They need as much scrutiny as the large US vendors.

Of course, compared to what she has done in the last few years, our FCC, DoJ etc have been castrated when it has come to consumer protection around technology and telecom.

We need all of them to step up. Now, let me brace for hate mail saying  government has no role in technology markets.

Interview with Sal Allegra on IT Quality Assurance

With offshore firms offering testing teams in the thousands, I was intrigued what customers thought of Questcon’s test center right here in N. Carolina.

So I asked to interview Sal Allegra, IT manager at ISO, a member of the Verisk Analytics family of companies, about the work Questcon has done for them. Sal manages their quality assurance, change, and software configuration management activities.

Describe the business and application environment you are responsible for quality around.

ISO provides its customers a wide range of actuarial, underwriting, and claims information around property/casualty insurance. As is common in this industry, we have lots of custom-built solutions on a mixed bag of hardware platforms. We are in the process of transitioning many to Java on a Z Linux environment.

While the application complexity and data volumes are not out of the ordinary, with Verisk having recently gone public, we obviously will have an additional responsibility for hygiene related to our applications.

How mature would you say your QA environment is?

In flux is probably a good way to describe it. We have decided to take advantage of an enterprise license around IBM’s Rational Suite. The hope is it will provide some level of consistency and common repository across regression testing, performance benchmarking, and defect tracking steps.

One of the reasons to engage Questcon was to do an assessment of our current state and the maturity of our regression environment. Questcon reported our level of automation in that area was somewhat below industry benchmarks and proceeded to help us create a framework to significantly increase the automation.

Can you describe the test automation framework?

To me, a well designed framework makes you less testing-tool dependent and greatly insulates you from human vagaries of testing. Questcon did a quick assessment on our environment using 28 variables, and then conducted a proof of concept using a series of regression test cases.

They created a keyword-driven framework that helped standardize the code creation process and allowed us to leverage common utilities and function libraries. We anticipate we are now creating our regression scripts much faster. One of the added benefits was they helped reconcile separate scripts, one for acceptance and one for production to allow for shared efficiencies.

Were you hesitant to utilize Questcon’s remote center in Greensboro, NC?

They did the assessment and framework development on-site. That was really high-quality work. Once that was done they could have done the detailed development just about anywhere. The beauty of a well-defined framework is you can use junior resources right here in the U.S. and get competitive pricing without needing to look for offshore economies.

The big “aha” for me was Questcon did not just jump in and execute, but helped us rethink. Also, they have a vendor-neutral approach to testing tools, so their mindset is not rote or skewed towards a certain solution set.

The Real Deal: Damon Auer and Bob Glynn on “Rigid Agility or Agile Rigidity”

This continues a series of columns from practitioners I respect. The category "Real Deal" describes them well.

This time it is Damon Auer, Partner at Tribridge and Bob Glynn, co-founder of Affinity Inc, two high-class boutique consulting/systems integration firms. I have worked with Damon on a number of technology strategy projects and it’s always a joy to see his creative mind solving unsolvable problems -  like the seeming oxymoron of Agile development in a world of Rigid methodologies.

“Nothing like starting a story with an oxymoron.  But this one’s appropriate.

Our firms partnered 2 years ago to help a global Healthcare and Life Sciences company implement a new system to better support Configuring, Pricing, Quoting, and Processing Orders around the world.  The software to enable this functionality had already been determined to be Siebel (now part of Oracle). 

The initial plan was to build, validate, and deploy the system to about 7,000 users over a 24-month period using a very rigid Waterfall methodology.  This Waterfall methodology had been refined over a period of years at the company and was deeply integrated with Quality processes to insure that any system that goes live meets strict FDA systems validation guidelines. 

It was a good plan but . . .

3 months into the project things changed.  A lingering lawsuit took a turn for the worse and the company had only 12 months to get the new system live or face tens of millions of dollars of legal penalties.

We huddled with company Program Leadership and realized our current (tested but rigid) waterfall method would never get us across the goal line in time.  So we decided to immediately chuck the Program Plan, break our team into “Scrums”, enlist “Product Owners”, and “Sprint” as hard and fast as we could to meet the new time challenge.

This approach created a whole new set of challenges including immediate skepticism about our ability to execute an Agile project while dependent on 26 other teams (in 14 countries) still executing the classic Waterfall method.  And this was a packaged system (Siebel) not a custom development project – how was that going to work?  And how would we ever get the system documented thoroughly enough to meet FDA validation requirements?  And what the hell is a Scrum and a Sprint and a Product Backlog?  Oh yeah, and how will we take the consultant’s (us) Fixed Fee contract for implementing the system and fit it into a new schedule with a different set of requirements?

All great questions but we decided we didn’t possibly have time to answer them to everyone’s satisfaction – so we started the first Sprint.

We learned as we went.  Our skeptics continued their skepticism.  Until we went live with a system designed to meet businesses requirements 12 months later.  Then we were heroes. 

What we learned was: (1) the value of Agile methods in driving User ownership delivered systems; (2) the granular accountability (and empowerment) that Agile creates; (3) you can Sprint until the system is functioning then retrospectively validate the system to meet documentation and regulatory requirements; (4) Agile works with packaged systems! (this was a real aha for us).

What we already knew but had reinforced by this experience is: (5) there is no substitute for smart, flexible, committed Program Leadership – you can accomplish just about anything with the right people; (6) every transformational project has skeptics until you deliver.

So, oxymoron it may be, but Agile concepts (if not strict adherence to every nuance) can work in the most Rigid of Waterfall regulatory environments to produce great product. 

Take that from these two hands-on consultants. There you go - we ended this post with another oxymoron :)”

They can be reached at Damon DOT Auer AT tribridge DOT com and rglynn AT affinityinc DOT net

Tools: Test before you buy

I first asked in the late 90s when I was at Gartner – why do testing, conversion, change configuration and other tools vendors not allow system integrators to deploy their tools for the duration of relevant phase of an implementation - instead of trying to directly sell perpetual licenses to customers?

I was talking to Lisa Lovas of Questcon recently and she told me about HP’s Project-based Licensing Program. It enables Questcon to offer the HP quality and performance management software on a project basis for a term ranging from one to three months. Makes so much sense, and I would think significantly improves HP’s opportunities to convert to a longer-term sale.

Lisa was saying HP is well positioned to have its Quality Center be exposed to pressing new areas such as performance testing web apps. And other areas where IBM’s Rational and other tools have traditionally played. Her firm has experience working with both IBM and HP suites.  

NetSuite Business Cloud event feedback

I presented in the NetSuite Business Cloud seminar series in its final leg – in Chicago and Atlanta. The 6 week tour had previously been to London, Sydney, Manila and New York. While I did not envy some of the NetSuite employees for that travel, jet lag et al, the energy level in the 2 sessions I participated in was really high.

The customer panels and the lively audience q&a that followed were particularly striking.  In Chicago, it was Dave Weiss, Director of Internet Marketing at Wrigleyville Sports (they sell Cubs and other sports merchandise), Jim Holtzman CFO of Fieldglass (a SaaS contractor management solution) and Aaron Judy, VP of Technology & Operations at Wonderlic, Inc. (The cognitive testing company). In Atlanta, it was Chris Hauser, CFO, NASCO (healthcare claims processing) and Calvin Jackman, Controller, Mycom North America Inc.(telco network management services).

What was striking to me was how widely NetSuite has penetrated these enterprises – in some cases 80+% of all employees are using the system. How well integrated some of their web stores are with NetSuite. How NetSuite has made effortless for these growing companies. currency and local tax maintenance via other web service providers. How several of them talked about their growth without needing to add back office staff or IT infrastructure. How these customers sought out and bought NetSuite in spite of fact that it does not have sales offices in either city.

Most SaaS success stories we hear are about on the edges – CRM, HR related. It was great to hear core transactional experiences with customer orders, materials and supplier issues and of course, financials.

If this is fake, give us plenty more

Ron Markezich, corporate VP of Microsoft Online says "we're not seeing any inclination that Zoho or Google or Zimbra or any other of those offering fake Office capabilities can replace [Microsoft Office],"

And guess what – he said it as Microsoft dropped prices by 33 to 50% on its on-line productivity and email products.

Hey, the original for less is good. “Fake” with more product momentum than the original is even better.

I look forward to more fake Oracle via salesforce.com, more fake SAP via NetSuite, more fake EDS with amazon.com, more fake AT&T with Sykpe.

But, please no more fake Steve Ballmer blogs :)

This post was originally run on the Enterprise Advocates blog

Vendor traffic in the Data Center

Cisco adds the storage building block to its network and computing plans with a JV with EMC. HP, in turn, decides to go after Cisco’s sweet spot with new HP ProCurve offerings integrated with HP BladeSystem.

Oracle, awaiting regulatory approval for the Sun acquisition, is already targeting IBM as we saw at OOW.

Hey, competition is good. Hopefully, we will see more assortment pricing specials as is common in the CPG industry where vendors bundle their large portfolio of products.

But each of those five has shown it loves to run up margins to stratospheric levels in categories it is really strong at. So buyers need to use this new leverage to beat down those areas - and overall, also keep looking at and steadily moving infrastructure either via SaaS solutions or via infrastructure services to the cloud.

This post was previously run on the Enterprise Advocates blog

More New Renaissance

On the New Florence blog

12 really Maverick Ideas

Mouse 2.0

The new plants in Motown

Solar Decathlon

Intel Risks it all (again)

Not free, but reasonably priced, conference calling

I have written positively about my experience with FreeConference.com for almost a decade now. You and others pay your own long-distance charges to a common conference number, usually in a rural state like Iowa. The service provider then charges termination fees for each of the calls in that conference to the originating telcos.

The big telcos have bellyached for years. First, because this cut into their lucrative 50c + per minute per caller conferencing service. Then as they moved to unmetered plans on home and blocks of time on cellular long-distance lines, they resented these calls making up much of the traffic. Even though they charged $25, 50, 75 for those monthly plans.

Now Google Voice has jumped into the fray. They do not charge a monthly fee on your home or mobile line, so you can sympathize up to a point. But they get advertising revenue as it helps overall Google viewer metrics and customer aggregation.

Here’s my perspective as a consumer. I don’t particularly want free..I would be happy to pay 3-4c a minute for the convenience of knowing everyone I invited to a conference call will not be blocked.

So FCC, jump in and swat the conference calling boys and Verizon and Sprint and AT&T and Google to come up with some middle ground between free and 10c a minute a person that freeconferencecall.com charges for its own toll-free service.

In the meantime, time to start using Skype conferencing more.

Windows 7: Winning Battle, Losing War?

“But here's a funny thing. By the end of the week, I looked at what I was doing on the tiny screen - and found that just about everything involved software not made by Microsoft. So I'd installed the Firefox browser in preference to Internet Explorer, and started writing documents using Google Docs rather than Microsoft Word, and checking my e-mail via Gmail. As for music, I'd installed iTunes, and to feed my social networking needs, I placed Tweetdeck on the taskbar.

I had ended up furnishing my new Windows 7 home with some familiar items from elsewhere - so perhaps the operating system matters less than it once did.”

says Rory Cellan-Jones after reviewing the new software for BBC.

In general, the feedback about 7 is it’s more stable, faster than Vista.

But in the 5+ years Microsoft lost with Vista, the world has clearly moved on to SaaS, to social networks, to mobile..as Roy and most other consumers will testify

Update: Anshu points out the lag will continue in future "And so, if Microsoft recognized a killer feature like 'conversations' in Gmail, and decided to add it to the product last year (2008), the product will be released in 2010 and by the time people replace their PCs and corporations adopt the latest as 'standard' - it will be 2013 to 2015 for many."

The disruption from Global Warming

A blog which focuses on disruption should highlight what Discover considers the 9 industries which will be most disrupted by climate change…

• Wine making
• Fishing
• Ski resorts
• Other tourism
• Insurance
• Forestry
• Mining
• Meat
• Energy

I am surprised they did not include real estate – guess my Florida property will do fine :)

More Innovation

On New Florence

Starbucks’ new high-tech coffee

Mainstreaming tech for the disabled

Best Buy as Art Gallery

One-touch Ping Diabetes system

The lost art of changing flat tires

Asian Drama

No, not the Gunnar Myrdal Nobel Prize winning classic. What is going on in the Galleon case. A net of S. Asian (Sri Lankan, Indian, Pakistani) immigrants accused.

By a DA who is also S. Asian (Indian) in origin.

Shades of Giuliani versus Mob in 1983. For which the Italian government actually gave him an award.

Not sure Preet Bharara will get an award from India for the Galleon case. though, even if he wins prosecutions.

Maybe a Bollywood movie in his honor, though? 

Introducing a new sponsor: salesforce.com

Given the disruption theme of my blog, I am pleased to welcome salesforce.com to the past and present gallery of innovators and disruptors who sponsor this and the New Florence. New Renaissance blog.

One of their differentiators in the SaaS market is their PaaS – Platform-as-a-Service – Force.com. Readers may finding interesting this IDC report based on interviews of 10 companies that developed custom apps on Force.com and ran them for at least 12 months. Pretty impressive results including 3 month payback - check them out here

Disclosure: Blog sponsor policy is outlined here

Intacct Webinar slides

If you would like the slides Dan Druker of Intacct and I used for our Webinar on Wednesday – The Mandate for Cloud Financials – you can access them by registering here

SAP TCO – Enterprise Advocates Webinar

Dennis Howlett, Ray Wang, Frank Scavo and I hosted a webinar on the topic of SAP TCO reduction. Lively session -  we went 20 minutes over as the questions kept flowing and covered plenty of ground. And there was plenty of live Twitter feedback at #EAcall

Dennis has posted a summary and a few of the slides we used. We will shortly be putting together a package with all the slides, speaker notes and the fuller q&a.

Many more SAP-Siemens like software renegotiations

It is a small sample, but one with gravitas. Kash Rangan and team at BofA/Merrill Lynch surveyed 21 CIO’s from major, well recognized U.S. organizations in the Fortune 1000 and across different industries and found improving success rates around their renegotiation of maintenance contracts -  similar to what appears to have happened at Siemens

Mark Hurd : Cancel your HP/EDS Outsourcing Contracts

Well, he did not say that. But he came close.

“”We have 1,000 hacks a day and I can’t tell you why, but they keep showing up. We wouldn’t put anything material in nature outside the firewall.”

Actually he meant oh, you are fine with HP/EDS infrastructure, but now with amazon or salesforce.com or Google, you better watch out.

Ingenious.

And insulting to the large customers who are signing up in increasingly large scale with SaaS and cloud providers. And doing so after crawling through the data centers and networks of these providers.

And insulting to the firms which are issuing SAS70 Type Ii audit reports on their infrastructure.

As Larry Dignan summarizes “Here’s a guy who was speaking as a CEO running a massive company that happens to sell infrastructure that’ll revolve around cloud computing.”

Advantage Michael Dell – he stands next to Marc Benioff at conferences and writes a foreword to his new book knowing full well Marc is already one of his biggest customers.

This was originally posted on the Enterprise Advocates blog

SAP-Siemens: He said, she said

“SAP said Wednesday that Siemens has signed a three-year renewal of its software maintenance agreement, an announcement that would seem to quell widespread speculation that the global engineering and electronics company was considering dumping vendor-provided support in favor of lower-cost alternatives.” PC World

I checked with Helmuth Guembel at  Strategy Partners (I worked with him at Gartner) who is close to a number of SAP customers in Europe. His sources tell him other details SAP chose not to publicize.

He hears Siemens got the deal at under euro 20 million a year compared to the euro 35 million they were paying earlier. They also got perks such as MaxAttention, extended maintenance on some Siemens specific  enhancements thrown in and also got some shelfware off maintenance.

SAP will, of course, publicly deny this and Siemens will, of course, publicly not confirm it. And they are very justified in not sharing the gory details.

What cannot be denied is more and more mature SAP shops are questioning the value of the maintenance dollar. If only SAP would let the maintenance rates float - so far lower for mature SAP customers, all this gossip, intrigue and badwill with customers would go away.

Instead SAP, will like Oracle, let customers leak away to Rimini and other third party maintenance providers one by one– Oracle’s losses are already in the hundreds of customers. Or discount heavily when push comes to shove.

And try to spin via PR every thing is just honky-dory.

Gartner lawsuit – Putting it on a pedestal

So, Gartner is getting sued over its Magic Quadrant.  The complaint says

Defendant’s wrongful conduct has had, and continues to have, the effect of destroying competition in the enterprise market for archiving. …

..In addition, Defendant’s conduct has harmed, and continues to harm, the creative forces of American innovation, and, consequently, the long-term competitiveness of the American economy.

Frankly, that’s putting them on a pedestal. And timed for week of ITxpo will make for plenty of conversation in Orlando and in Twitterland

But as I wrote here, there are a thousand points of influence these days and Gartner (and other analyst firms) represent only a few of those points - - more so at the “top of the sales funnel” than in the due diligence or negotiation stages in a technology procurement.

This report in TechTarget confirms that sentiment

“End users aren't as frustrated by Gartner's research, but said they use the Magic Quadrant report sparingly, usually during early research in vendor selection. Several IT professionals said they took the findings with a grain of salt and assume that top-ranked vendors were also Gartner clients.

Still, many said they had to take the rankings into consideration, if only to appease C-level executives in their own companies who track the findings. Top-ranked vendors typically publicize their rankings within the media and for customers.

How much impact does Magic Quadrant PR? Not much, several IT pros said. "I would say [the Magic Quadrant] has about a 20% influence on the overall vendor decision," said one former IT executive at a New York publishing company. It is "certainly not a deal maker or breaker."

As far as creative forces of innovation, I have had no problems cataloging over 1,500 instances over last 4 years on my New Florence innovation blog – less than .1% have been identified in a Gartner report.

A PR nightmare

In his swearing in speech, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan Preet Bharara, now in the middle of the Galleon hedge fund insider trading scandal laid out his principles:

"The willingness to resign over principle; the courage to resist even overwhelming public pressure to do the wrong or incorrect thing; the independence to banish politics from all deliberation and decision-making; the maturity to admit mistakes in public, even at the risk of certain embarrassment."

It’s fair to assume he did not get any coaching from many of the tech PR firms out there :)

The New, Old Ethics

I was remarking to someone recently all the thorny issues that are coming up with new technologies like food/biofuel tradeoffs, “God powers” with nanotech and genetic engineering and more basic ones like privacy issues and routing of traffic through neighborhoods with children as a result of GPS navigators.

I told them when I went to business school our course in ethics focused on foreign corruption, sexual harassment etc. Clearly important, but generally low-tech stuff – and that our universities should be updating their curriculums for high-tech effects on ethics.

Before we get too carried with that, this weekend’s sting operation at Galleon and the ripple effects of the alleged insider trading by executives at  IBM, McKinsey and Intel (and Akamai, AMD, Google and other companies whose stocks were traded) shows high-tech may have some “older” ethics issues it needs to sort out.

On my blog, I frequently lament as an industry we are too focused on investors versus buyers. Way too many conversations in the industry are about who’s acquiring who. how a vendor’s pipeline and quarterly prospects look.

Most of it is idle and Twitter gossip, but a little too much of it is used for unfair trading advantage. Most of the people being accused in the Galleon case are in fairly high places in their organizations. My fear is it goes much deeper and wider in their organizations and in the rest of high-tech. Need to clean up those ethics first before we try to tackle those around God-powers.

Frankly, we need to escalate attention to ethics in general in the industry

Introducing a new blog sponsor: Questcon Technologies

Given the disruption theme of my blog, I am pleased to welcome Questcon Technologies which assures software value through innovative quality, test and auditing solutions. A division of Howard Systems International, it leverages years of experience and countless observations to uncover hidden inefficiencies in business performance and software development processes.

The disruption it offers is the ability to bring back to the US – specifically to its Greensboro, NC center - testing which has gone overseas. The NC facility allows it to competitively price services and its clients avoid the jet lag, time zone, travel hassle and communication issues so common in global delivery centers.

It's good to have them join the gallery of innovators and disruptors who sponsor this and the New Florence. New Renaissance blog.

Webinar: Reducing SAP Ownership Costs

Ray Wang, Dennis Holwett, Frank Scavo and I will be presenting the first in a series of Enterprise Advocates webinars. The first one on October 22, a week from today will focus on SAP Ownership costs. Others are planned around other technology vendors.

Details here

NetSuite Business Cloud seminars

Will be presenting along with Zach Nelson, CEO and several NetSuite customers at the Chicago and Atlanta sessions on November 3 and 5.

Come join us – details here.

Fusion Applications: My questions remain unanswered

In July, I wrote about Fusion Apps that were being shown to a select few customers and market analysts under NDA

“But he does not say what functionality he tested. I mean after 5 years of development, there should be mountains of code across the enterprise wide processes. He does not say which pieces are going to be cloud based. You think given the release date in 2010 it would largely be so. He does not discuss its economics. Again, given the realities of third party maintenance, cloud pricing, market softness etc, it better be. What transition tools will Oracle deliver – in a world where customers are getting spoiled by background, painless SaaS upgrades, Fusion better come stapled with a new class of conversion and testing tools.”

After reading the analysis from Paul Hamerman (Forrester) and Josh Greenbaum, both unfettered of their NDAs now that Larry Ellison finally showed a peek review at OOW, I still have most of those questions.