deal architect

More Innovation

on the New Florence blog

SpaceX and spacecraft reusability

The Virtual Sky

Turn wood into sugar

The OnLive Desktop: MS Office on iPads

The new benchmarks

I am helping review for a client competing proposals from several consortia of software vendors and systems integrators/outsourcing firms. The range of on-premise versus SaaS, onshore versus offshore talent, opex, capex, EBITDA calculations of license, hosting, maintenance, implementation etc. is mind-boggling. It shows the convergence of so many trends in the enterprise world.

As if that was not enough, I see this Good Technology report which shows rapidly growing iPhone and Android presence in the enterprise. Next week’s SuperBowl will accelerate a trend we saw last year – every major brand is looking at social marketing and integrating that with traditional media. No longer can enterprise vendors pretend that Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon are just “consumer tech”, not major factors in the enterprise and that they should not be benchmarked against them.

In this new world, I thought this WSJ article about SAP focusing on Oracle was well – so 90s. If that is all SAP is focused on, it’s already in big trouble. Because the CIOs I deal with are working with a much broader portfolio of vendors than ever before, and every $1 for SAP has to be benchmarked against cloud storage, iPads, digital marketing and so much more.

It’s not SuperBowl time in the technology league – it is the start of the season, and it is a league with parity where last year’s weak teams have stronger draft picks. Time to broaden our competitive horizons.

Zach Nelson: A Decade in the Clouds

Zach Nelson is a really interesting tech executive. He has a wide rolodex (over 20 pages in my last book, The New Polymath came from interviews with Zach and several others he introduced me to), diverse interests (numerous relationships with the Oakland Athletics baseball team, part owner of the Omaha Nighthawks football team, golfer), and he is entering his tenth year as CEO of the cloud computing pioneer, NetSuite. 

Every conversation with him veers in many fascinating directions. I recently had a chance to listen to him reminisce about his decade at NetSuite.

Given your big company experience at Oracle and Sun, and the dot.com bust, was it not a very risky decision for you in 2002 to join a startup like NetSuite?

Actually my career has always been about doing startups, though within large companies. At Network Associates, I helped roll out both MyCIO.com and McAfee.com (which interestingly enough was actually the first Cloud IPO way back in 2000). At Oracle, I was there when we launched video on demand and Interactive TV. At Sun, I headed up marketing in the SunSoft/Solaris spin-off.

So, joining a young company was not much of a challenge, but I did have 5 criteria guiding my job search, and amazingly NetSuite (then called NetLedger) met them all. I wanted to be with a Web-based enterprise software company. The term SaaS had not been coined then, but my experience with McAfee.com and MyCIO.com taught me customers preferred software from vendors who not only wrote the code but also managed it, and that the web had to be an integral part of the deployment/delivery platform. NetSuite fit that bill.

I wanted a great development team. (Founder) Evan Goldberg had that in place.

Given the dot.com bust, I wanted to join a startup which had real customers, not just ideas. I also wanted to see a good funding plan. NetSuite already had thousands of small customers, and having Larry Ellison (Chairman and CEO of Oracle) as a major investor met my 3rd and 4th criteria.

My last criterion, looking back, was possibly the most unreasonable. I wanted a short commute. If you remember traffic during the dot.com boom in the Bay Area, we were all commuting for hours. NetSuite, amazingly, was just 3 miles from where we live.

So, in many ways, it was actually an easy decision for me to join NetSuite.

Over the last decade, the highs must have been really high, the lows really low. Can you share a few of each?

In many ways, it has been one long high, but the last couple of years have been particularly satisfying. Even though NetSuite continued to grow during the downturn, nobody can say he or she enjoyed the slowdown of 08 and 09. However, those years focused our investments in two areas that have really paid off for NetSuite and our customers: the verticalization of our product and our company, and the traction the OneWorld product has provided us in global customers.

Looking ahead, two things really excite me. One is our exposure to large enterprise customers shows us how poorly their current legacy systems work and what a huge opportunity we have there. The second is the emergence of new opportunities in the emerging eCommerce market. There really is no platform for easily extending your transactional processes to customers, partners and vendors via ecommerce, and I think we have a very differentiated approach there.

But bigger companies tend to prefer working with larger vendors like SAP, don’t they?

When you see how companies deploy applications like SAP, you quickly see that approach is dated. Any company that has a multi-year road map to deploy enterprise systems will be crushed by faster, more nimble competitors who are moving their operations to the Cloud using NetSuite.

I used to worry about SAP and Microsoft making a move to the Cloud. But after waiting year after year for them, I now believe whatever they do in Cloud Computing is superficial. SAP may throw marketing around for BusinessbyDesign or Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains, but fundamentally their DNA remains that of on-premise software companies. And smart customers know that those applications will not give them competitive advantage in the Internet Age.

NetSuite has been a risk-taker on many fronts. You used the auction method for your IPO. You expanded internationally in relatively risky markets like the Philippines. How do you sustain a risk taking culture?

These are calculated risks. In each of those decisions I have bet on an executive I felt comfortable with.

For the IPO, we bet on Bill Hambrecht and his firm’s auction model and philosophy. For our Philippines expansion or the Czech development effort, again I bet on strong executives to make us successful.  It is as much about the people you have to execute a strategy as it is about the strategy itself.

You seem remarkably compatible with (founder) Evan Goldberg, your CTO. Very few founders and professional executives who come in later co-exist as long as the two of you have.

Evan is one of the smartest people I know and could run sales or services or anything he chooses to tackle, but he loves and is focused on development. I came in wanting a solid development team in place. So our skillsets and interests are very complimentary. Quite often the founder and the professional executive don’t delineate their roles well enough, but with Evan and me, our roles were clearly articulated. And we both believe in what NetSuite does to help our customers fulfill their business visions.

Tell us about folks who inspire you

Larry Ellison is one for showing me how your vocation can also become your avocation. I was at Oracle when he turned billionaire, and I asked myself if I was that rich, would I not retire? After working at NetSuite, I figured out why he is still at it. I couldn’t imagine anything more enjoyable to do with my time. I have the best job in the world.

Well, I believed the last statement till I saw Brad Pitt play Billy Beane in Moneyball, and I figured out HE probably has the best job in the world! I am honored to have Billy’s guidance as a director and customer. As the movie shows, he saw the game of baseball from completely different eyes. On our board he brings the consumer mindset to the enterprise world. He forces us to think differently, as he did the baseball world.

More New Renaissance

on the innovation blog

Click first, Focus later

Electronic Noses

The future of war

Next-gen Cruise Life Boats

The technology news supply chain

My friend Brian Sommer recently pointed out “On 5/14/2012, SAP, NetSuite, Plex Online, Host Analytics and other vendors(?) are all having their user conferences.” Clearly, that will be a busy news week. But it made me think about the news supply chain and how it mirrors the volatile technology supply chain.

In an interview for my upcoming book with Tony Prophet, a senior vice president, overseeing hardware purchasing and logistics for HP, discussed the complexity of demand and supply chain planning. It is a massive operation -  HP churns out two personal computers a second, two printers a second, and a data center server every 15 seconds.  While there are thousands of wrinkles, broadly he talked about:

a) Long term shifts

Absorbing the various acquisitions HP has made – removing redundancies that Compaq, 3 Com and others brought. Adjusting to product transitions – PCs to laptops to tablets. Buy versus build transitions and global manufacturing shifts

b) Short term blimps

Increased demand around back-to-school campaigns, Black Friday
promotions, or regional holidays like the Chinese New Year

c) Unplanned events

He described the acrobatics HP had to go through after the Eyjafjallajokull
volcano explosion and the Japanese tsunami.

Now about the technology news supply chain and how I see it feed content for my books, blogs, consulting and speeches and how it has similar long term and short term patterns.

a) Long term shifts

As Intel rolls out its Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, and Haswell processor families over the next couple of years, as Microsoft rolls out its Windows 8, and manufacturers like HP and others roll out various thin and light form/factors we are about to witness an epic battle between Ultrabooks and Tablets. That story will, however, take years to develop. As I read Dr. Michio Kaku’s Physics of the Future, he lays out a roadmap for countless technologies all the way through 2100. There are countless long term stories to explore.

b) Short term blimps

Beyond the week Brian talks about above, there are so many more year round. Every January, the Consumer Electronics Show and the President’s State of the Union bring plenty of science and technology news. February brings the Super Bowl and the Oscars, which year after year become  richer in technology application and content. This year’s Presidential race is bringing focus on polling and forecasting technologies, growing influence of social media, and the candidates’ positions on science and technology issues.

c) Unplanned events

In updating edits of my last two books, I have been amazed at how many major and minor technology news items break on an everyday basis. Some are major like Steve Jobs’ passing, others are more localized -  people I had profiled who changed jobs, companies made acquisitions, lawsuits were filed, and countless other events most of us would not notice on a routine basis.

A challenge for technology marketers

Companies spend marketing dollars heavily at their events, analyst tours, and product launches. Most, however, rarely consider the other news they are competing with. It may sound like noise, but it often drowns out what they are trying to present. In many cases they would be better off with a more constant stream of news rather than heavily concentrated bursts in the form of their events or tours.

Apple and US labor

Steve Jobs supposedly told President Obama ““Those (iPhone) jobs aren’t coming back,” according to this article in the New York Times.  Apple’s labor in China is also showing up in much hand-wringing in the Presidential race.

Let’s explore a few other dimensions of the issue:

The Chinese labor is a small part of the iPhone

It is mostly assembly of components that come from Japan, Korea, Germany and other countries. The China value add in the iPhone is less than 10% by many accounts. Frankly, I would rather see US companies compete for the higher value components that go into iPhones, iPads and other Apple products.

China today, Brazil tomorrow, gone day after?

Foxconn, Apple’s contract manufacturer which employs the Chinese labor, has looked at a shift of at least some of the jobs to Brazil. It has also looked at robots to replace some of the jobs. Do we want those jobs to come back to the US, then watch them move out again?

Who could take over for Foxconn in the US?

It’s’ not just the economics. Foxconn has delivered to Apple unbelievable flexibility across so many product releases and security given the intense scrutiny Apple products get. If Apple brought it back to the US, could an IBM or an Accenture or another outsourcer deliver that level of performance?  And most US outsourcers also have significant non-US labor forces in India, E. Europe and elsewhere. So, unlikely jobs would remain in the US.  Also, there is little reason for Apple to insource the function and run it on its own given it went through a disruptive buy versus build transition in the late 90s.

What about the App Store, retail and other jobs?

700,000 apps and counting have created plenty of entrepreneurial opportunities for thousands of small businesses in the US. From the case study on Taubman malls in my upcoming book, many of which have Apple stores, I also know they have become more of anchor stores than the Macys and other traditional stores. That has meant vibrant customer traffic and jobs in many retail locations. Then there are Fedex and other logistics jobs from the massive global supply chain around Apple products.

Where are the AT&T and Verizon jobs around the iPhone?

AT&T and Verizon in particular (Sprint more recently) have earned at least $ 50 billion in voice and data plans around the iPhone. Given the network issues AT&T has had, and the data limitations both have put on iPhone customers, it does not appear either has invested much in network expansion even with that much revenue.  Those are construction and telecom jobs that by definition are much more difficult to offshore – they would stay in the US.

Whether Apple likes it or not, there will be plenty of this discussion given the elections this year. I hope the discussion is a bit more nuanced than just focusing on the assembly jobs in China.

More New Florence

on the innovation blog

Predictive Policing

The largest move since WW II

Sensors to detect volcanic ash

Somebody left the gate open!

More innovation

On New Florence

The Atlantis prepares to become a museum piece

CES: Year of the Ultrabook

KO-SU mobile education

Google Search, plus Your World

Our Third Jobs

I have written before about “customers as workers”. In their 2007 book, Revolutionary Wealth, the Tofflers called it our “Third Jobs” - “the unnoticed work we do without pay for some of the biggest corporations”.

Back then, they may have been overreaching, but today when you look at all the self-service, it really hits home. Here is a quick list of some of the tasks we do that an employee used to do:

• airline reservations and check-in
• ATM and mobile banking
• self check-out at grocery stores
• web payments to various suppliers
• IVR based routing when phoning call centers
• self-help using website FAQs
• scan QR codes on real estate for sale signs and self-tour through videos
• rental car check-out and check-in and driving directions
• hotel check-in/check-out and touchpad control of many room functions
• voice mails
• tax calculations and returns
• personal health care monitoring
• basic auto maintenance
• dining buffets and vending machines
• hr/benefits enrolments and other tasks

The problem is very few HR execs (or unions or government agencies) view this as their responsibility. Worse,  many corporations are opportunistic about how they deal with such self-service

• many banks, airlines and telcos expect us to pay for the “convenience”
• web based self-service and our smart devices are exposing us to a new set of privacy breaches and security challenges
• many of the self-service kiosks, UIs, IVR paths are poorly designed
• there is very little human back up for consumers who do not want to self-service or seek an option when the self-service path is not satisfactory
• many corporations trust their customers even less than their employees (I asked the manager of a large retail chain why the checkout kiosk insisted I put items in the bagging area. He sheepishly told me there was a scale under the bagging area which double checked the weight of the scanned item was actually the one being taken out. Some rental car companies assume you did not refuel your car and automatically add a fuel charge)

In a broader “social design” context in my next book, Sukumar Rajgopal, CIO at Cognizant says “It would be nice to move to a “productivity income statement” where we charge the IT department $1 for each data item users enter and in return we charge users $1 for each data item that the system prefills for them. Think how differently we would think about enterprise
systems if we did that.”

Indeed, think of that as applied to our Third Jobs!

A Rare Medium Well-Done

I am introducing a new category of periodic posts to recognize articles, blogs, books, videos interviews I think are well executed.

I appreciate the compliment when people tell me I am a prolific writer. Actually, I am a much more prolific reader. The New Florence blog cites/embeds over 4,000 articles/videos from over 500 different sources. My next book had over 500 citations in the back credits.

This category will allow me to recognize items that stand out as I continue to research for my blogs, books and consulting.

They may be pithy like Richard Corliss’ short column about Hollywood’s challenges in Time I referenced last week. They may be substantial on a somewhat obscure topic like Dr. Michael Lamoureux’s paper on Spend Visibility this week – 130+ pages, 70+ figures!  They may be investigative pieces. They may be period pieces. But they will stand out in my broad reading.

Hope you enjoy my selections. And, of course, I would welcome reader recommendations on any items they found impressive and should merit mention in this category.

First lot of book reviews

Books go through waves of reviews – executives, media, US readers, international readers. You appreciate them all because people take the time from their busy schedules to read, then provide feedback. Over the last couple of weeks I have received the first set of reviews for the upcoming book – comments from executives and influencers I respect. Most read a late draft of the book over the holidays so I am particularly thankful .

Here are some

Michael McNamara, CEO, Flextronics

“Technology enabled innovation is the future, but make no mistake, that future is here today.  Mirchandani uses technology athletes to inspire us in that even the things we may think are impossible, are in fact either a current or near- future reality.”

Phiroz Darukhanavala (Daru),  VP and CTO, BP plc

“This book will inspire and energize you. Countering the prophets of doom who proclaim the “death of IT”, Mirchandani vividly illustrates through dozens of case studies that IT and related digital technologies are thriving in organizations big and small, public as well as private, changing the very nature of business products and processes. To the CIOs of organizations currently focused on spending millions of dollars on supporting traditional IT, this book is an urgent wake-up call that the emerging CIO role is to lead their organizations boldly into this digital world…… or else risk getting swept away by the relentless tide of new technology.”

Francisco D’Souza, President & CEO, Cognizant Technology Solutions

“In The New Technology Elite, Mirchandani reveals the secret sauce that separates corporate leaders from laggards, market winners from also rans in the unforgiving global economy.  He neatly deconstructs the creative spark, innovative thinking and excellence of execution that successful companies must continuously master to translate smartly conceived and efficiently delivered technology solutions into market outperformance and sustainable competitive advantage.  Doing so, reminds us that while technology innovation may start with tightly orchestrated ideation in the dark recesses of the virtual back office,  success is often determined by the industrial scale that is unleashed to create products and services that deliver vibrant and intuitive user experiences, as well as rich and utilitarian capabilities, that anticipate customer needs, today and tomorrow, and measure up to, if not exceed, rising consumer and business expectations.”

Peter Fingar, Business Strategy Advisor and author: Business
Innovation in the Cloud and Enterprise Cloud Computing.
(www.peterfingar.com)

“Mirchandani has done it again. After opening our eyes to compound technology innovations in his last book, The New Polymath, he now instructs us to become technology prosumers (producers and consumers), no matter what our business or industry. Traditionally technology consumers for back-office automation, smart companies are now learning to embed smart technology in their products and become technology producers that delight their tech-savvy customers. Carpe Diem, or become a footnote in business history. Mirchandani tells us why and how."

Chris J. Murphy, Editor, InformationWeek

“This book isn't for those who want to stick to "IT as usual." Mirchandani uses real-world examples to catalog the wide range of forces driving IT leadership to adapt or fail in the digital economy.”

Timothy Christen, CEO,  Baker Tilly

“Today, every company must ‘rethink everything’ from their core processes to their fundamental business models. In his new book, Mirchandani shows countless examples of how new technologies have removed historic barriers thus allowing companies to rethink everything. Mirchandani’s book is a must-read for business leaders who want to inspire and re-dedicate their workforce. More importantly, it will serve as a guide to the new ways with which collaboration, innovation, technology and more will fundamentally, permanently and perpetually change the businesses of today. If your firm has the will to change, this book has the guidance.”

More New Renaissance

on the innovation blog

The Intel/Qualcomm faceoff

CES: The New Car Show

Move over Bellagio!

Stephen Hawking turns 70

The Consumerization of Enterprise Tech. The Enterprising of Consumer Tech.

SAP has hired Julie Roehm as an SVP of Marketing. I don’t know the lady and think it is unfair that the stories about her border on tabloid reporting. But it is an interesting move for SAP to hire someone with a background in consumer advertising at Chrysler, Ford and Walmart.

At IBM’s Lotusphere this morning, Paul Gillin reports “Lotus social business platform, which borrows liberally from Facebook, Hootsuite and paper.li. The user interface is a Facebook/Google+-like internal social network”

It’s good to see consumerization finally impact the enterprise world. 

Even as IBM’s Sam Palmisano retires, he talks with pride about having spun off the “consumery” PC business. A couple of years ago, at an SAP event I wrote about consumer tech being characterized as “toys and buzzwords”

Better late than never. It’s only taken a decade. As I wrote in The New Polymath

Of course, it was not just Apple. Microsoft introduced the Xbox in 2001; HP announced more of a focus on entertainment with its Media Center PC in 2002; Skype arrived in 2003 and would change calling habits for millions around the world; the massively multiplayer game World of Warcraft disrupted our lives in 2004; and in 2005, with  the Sony Rootkit issue, consumers started to hear about intellectual property issues previously limited to corporate corridors. Since 2005,
Google’s growing Web and mobile presence has introduced consumers to analytical power that big companies paid bucketloads of money for. The Apple iPhone—considered one of the most successful product launches ever—and all kinds of GPS, gaming, entertainment, and other gadgets have only accelerated the consumerization trend. The Wii
reshaped our expectations of computer interfaces; the Kindle, our expectations of books. Electronic House magazine has celebrated houses with all kinds of home theaters and elaborate security systems. eBay has built a cottage industry of individuals doing business from home. JetBlue has moved call reservations to agents working from home. SOHO is no longer just a Manhattan neighborhood but a growing revenue category for technology companies as the acronym for small
office, home office.

The problem is the consumerization trend has accelerated. Consumers are getting used to music in the cloud, Siri voice interfaces, Kinect gestural interfaces while enterprises are still struggling with cloud security, and still only improving keyboard and mouse interfaces.

And even more dramatically, my research for my next book showed “enterprising of consumer tech”. Apple’s Retail, Google’s Green initiatives, Facebook’s data centers, eBay’s (Paypal) financial processing, Amazon’s logistics are absolutely top-notch. Tim Cook of Apple, Tony Prophet of HP, Jim Miller of Google and several other consumer tech executives are  operational/supply chain geniuses.

The ways things are going, enterprise tech will not just need to learn about consumerization, but also enterprising, from consumer tech. 

Life post-SOPA?

I had couple reminders over the last few weeks of how messy attributions and permissions already are – so what about life if SOPA passes?

a) My book editors went through and highlighted several quotes from articles which exceeded 50 words. I shortened them so we would not need specific permissions – we already provide credit citations in the book. Far more messy were music lyrics and photos. I had a 2 line quote from Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin. My publisher deleted it. Forget 50 words, the music industry has a zero word policy. Everything needs specific permission. We were going to have an interesting photo for the case studies in each chapter (you can see several I had lined up if you scroll down the excerpts here). But getting permissions from a couple was difficult – so there will be no photos at all in the printed book.

b) On New Florence I posted a blog on Citi’s commercial “Somebody left the door open”. The scenery, the climbing and the song are all inspirational. CNN’s Jeanne Moos did a piece which was part parody, part feature on the artists. My post embedded on the blog a YouTube video of that CNN piece. 3 days ago there were no problems – yesterday several readers alerted me the video had been pulled. I thought CNN had posted it. The YouTube message said there were numerous complaints against the person who had posted it. So, I changed my post to a YouTube post from Citi and a link to the CNN site for that segment.

As I reviewed the CNN site, I noticed in its 2 minute length it credits Citi, Getty Images, CBS 60 minutes, Carlos Mason, WMP and Libero. Technically, it should have also credited some websites including Twitter. Post-SOPA, they likely would.

I agree on the need to combat piracy. But we also need to rationalize “fair use” concepts. The way we are going we may end up with rolling credits after every 30 second commercial!

The rumors of the PC’s death are greatly exaggerated

If I read another piece which praises IBM for exiting and calls HP dumb for staying with its PC business, I will scream. As CES showed this week, we are moving to the form/factor of thin and light Ultrabooks. With Intel’s scale and three phase processor rollout schedule and Microsoft’s marketing muscle around Windows 8, with touch screens and innovative use of Gorilla Glass (version 2 is 20% thinner) in lids and keyboards we are going to see an explosion of attractive models.

And let’s not forget, the growing affluence in China, India and elsewhere opens up many more first-time consumers who want portable and home based devices.

More New Florence

on the innovation blog

Reengineering the server supply chain

Technology and Music

The Hexagon Project

Brookstone: Integrated QR

Innovation Myopia

In 2005, the year in which I launched my innovation blog, New Florence, I had 65 posts there. This year, at the pace January has started, I will have that many by the 3rd week of February! And my books written in the last 3 years have another 800 pages of other innovation case studies and trends. In spite of all the doom and gloom, we are living in an amazing innovation boom.

It also drives home the myopia of so many companies and individuals. There are vendor fan boys who refuse to acknowledge innovation from competitors.   There are social mavens who have no interest in sensors or satellites. There are folks who measure innovation based on R&D spend when business models, ecosystems, channels are showing dramatic innovation opportunities.  There are tech journalists in NYC who have never visited any of the innovative CIOs within driving distance of Manhattan. There are process specialists – hr, procurement etc - who only show interest in their domains.

We all need to expand our horizons. There are some dramatic implications for all of us no matter which industry we work in, which country we live in, or what phase of life we find ourselves in.

Time flies faster – much faster  Best Buy used to sell plenty of extended warranties. Now it has moved to “shortened”warranties via its Buy Back program. As customers lust after newer versions of everything, that program promises to buy back recent versions you are ready to retire. Last year at CES, it was the year of the tablet and people called HP a basket case. This year at CES it is the year of the Ultrabook, and HP is back with a vengeance. Workday has 3 major updates a year. In contrast many other enterprise vendors are still on 3-4-5 year cycles to release products or upgrades.

Our experiences are way more global Our airlines and telcos and our politicians still pretend consumers live in a cave. They forget we fly Lufthansa and Singapore Airlines and experience broadband in Japan and Finland and watch CNN and are active on Facebook and know there is a much better way. An IBM executive in Romania told me in 2004 that the entire hilly country of Macedonia was a hotspot. I filed that away and used it as an example in The New Polymath, after an email exchange with the project manager on that deployment. You don’t even need to get on a plane. I scrounge sites like MIT Technology Review and New Scientist for innovation ideas. Once a month I go to my local Barnes and Noble. I skim 8 to 10 magazines over a cappuccino and get 4-5 blog ideas every visit.

Demographic stereotypes are outdated I was fascinated with my nephew’s 2 year old daughter when they visited over the holidays, especially how adept she was with her iPad. (yes, her personal one). I am even more fascinated to see grandmas on flights with Kindles. When I ask them they tell me they are lighter than hardbacks, the font size can be magnified, and many like the text to voice feature. And then the conversation often drifts to medical devices at home and Bluetooth in their cars.

Sourcing stereotypes are outdated Technology capitals – Silicon Valley, Bangalore, Munich – are particularly arrogant about their role in the innovation world. My next book has plenty of Silicon Valley but it also has case studies on Estonia, Roosevelt Island in New York City, 3M in Minnesota, Corning in upstate NY, UPS in Georgia, Valence Health in Illinois, Taubman Shopping Centers across the country.

We are way more technologically curious I was fascinated with the Chinese printer my local takeout has to help out the cooks in the back with order information. I asked the owner for a tech tour. She asked me to come back when it was less busy and then gladly and proudly complied. The New Florence blog was inspired by a conversation with a manager at the New York Marriott Marquis. He explained how kiosks and software negated the need for what would have been years of chaos if they had tried to add more or bigger elevators in that always busy Times Square property. I have had countless conversations with pilots who are transiting at the back of the plane about aviation technology. I used to get funny looks, but now a days technology curiosity is not unusual. Your consumers expect more, your users expect much more.

Our friends are also more technologically curious Mike Prosceno of SAP, an avid fisherman,  sent me an email describing a fishing forum where they were discussing how they could use 3D printing to produce lures in the exact color combination based on what the fish were biting.  I constantly get ideas for the blog from Dennis Howlett in Spain, Thomas Otter of Gartner in Germany, Charlie Bess of HP in Texas. My friend Tom Chimera owns an RV and told me he was headed to an RV show this week. I asked to join him and yesterday, the President of Featherlite Coaches gave us a tour of the technology in his high-end Prevost RV (list of $ 2.7 million). Everything from iPad controls to technology to ensure zero emissions from a 50,000 lbs home on wheels. Tom was even more energized than I was after the session and I have invited him to guest blog on the experience.   More signs technology curiosity is becoming more mainstream. Expect much more demanding customers, partners, investors.

Enjoy the innovation boom. Get a new set of prescription lenses. So much to soak in! And so much new to adapt to.

7 signs you’ve outsourced too much of your analysis

Stephanie Overby recently wrote an article for CIOs to evaluate if they have outsourced too much IT work. I think  analysts and bloggers should ask a similar question: are we too dependent on vendors for our content?

Here are 7 signs we may have outsourced too much:

1) The T-shirt collection in your closet, your jar of pens and your collection of USB drives are a gallery of vendor logos

2) Your tweets mostly originate at vendor events

3) Your calendar is peppered with quarterly vendor earnings calls

4) Your most anticipated report or post is a Magic Quadrant, Wave or some other vendor ranking write-up

5) Your phone number is on the speed dial list of several vendor PR firms (to younger readers who don’t know what speed dial is, you probably also missed out on the Y2K analysis bonanza!)

6) Vendor executives have turned analysts – they are coming up with market definitions (hint: Cloud), TLAs, market sizing estimates. They even send out emails offering their analysis of vendor events.

7) Even your kids don’t want to join you on your 10th trip to Orlando this year for yet another vendor event

The Real Mega-trend in IT. Hint: it’s not social, cloud, Big Data

So, by now you have read a bunch of last year’s trends and forecasts for this year. You probably have your favorites – cloud computing or Big Data, maybe?

Talk to CEOs and the big excitement is about what is on display at CES in Vegas this week. No, not ultrabooks – but technology which is showing up in “smart” products and services no matter which industry they are in.

Why? Because while clouds bring efficiency, social brings feel-good, Big Data improves intelligence, technology in products bring revenues and margins. That’s the mega-trend – technology is moving from process to product.

This year’s CES, with a keynote from Mercedes CEO Dieter Zetsche accelerates what I describe in Chapter 1 of my upcoming book from last year’s CES.

“There was Walgreens—yes, the pharmacy chain—showing off its  Refill application that allows you to scan the bar code from a previous  prescription using a mobile phone, transmit it, and get a text message  to go pick it up at a nearby store….Whirlpool showcased its Duet washer/dryers with LCD screens and various laundry apps designed to give users advice on stain removal and other laundry questions… Nike introduced a GPS-enabled Sportwatch developed in collaboration with the navigation vendor Tom Tom… Ingersoll Rand showed off tech innovations around its Schlage home security and Trane thermostat products… Ford chose to unveil its all-electric Focus at the CES show rather than at the traditional car launch showplace, the Detroit Auto Show, which was only a week later….Not to be outdone by Ford, GM showcased a retail, boxed version of an OnStar-equipped rearview mirror…. 3M showed off its Patterned Transparent Conductors (PTC).”

As IT moves into product and services, ironically the really critical technology projects often organizationally move away from the IT department. Daimler (yes, the Mercedes folks) has more than 1,000 software engineers in their R&D group, compared with hundreds of others who support internal IT systems like SAP. As IT moves into product, companies need their technicians to be far more design savvy. They need their IT and their IT vendors to be more paranoid as product rooting and hacking becomes more sophisticated. It needs them to rethink IP issues. It needs them to be socially savvy during product launches. My book goes into 12 attributes of this new IT. 

We live in exciting times. To some degree the current landscape is a throwback to the 1960s and 1970s, when we dreamed of competitive advantage through technology. Sabre, the American reservation system,  and American Hospital Supply were spoken of fondly for changing their industries.We have a similar opportunity now, but in most organizations
the IT group and budget and most vendors are still primarily focused on the back office and process improvements, not enough on product or revenue or growth.

Bring out the fact checkers

Update: since my post the SAP post has been revised to say “SAP Business ByDesign is the first fully-fledged ERP suite coming from SAP that users access and work with through the Internet.”

‘Tis the season for debates and fact checking statements by candidates. Not politicians, but technology vendors

Like this one by SAP in a column titled Cloud Strategy that I saw courtesy of Jon Reed:

“With SAP Business ByDesign, SAP was (and still is) the first company to release an ERP suite that users access and work with through the Internet.”

I just happened to peruse Tom Foydel’s book on NetSuite implementations, and it covers Manufacturing and Distribution functionality such as assembly and kitting. Is that not ERP? Last time I checked NetSuite was also born over a decade ago and has been growing its functionality for years.

Also, when did the “cloud” get narrowly defined as “through the Internet”? Where’s multi-tenancy, different business model, other aspects SaaS pioneers have been innovating for a while now as Stan Swete of Workday wrote?

And after overruns in their last ERP implementation (thanks to you know who), many customers are much more inclined to do best of  breed CRM and HRM implementations around Salesforce.com, SuccessFactors (yes, that SAP spent billions acquiring) and others.

Talking of politicians, one of the Enterprise Irregulars commented “It is true.  SAP started working on ByDesign right after Al Gore showed them the internet he invented.”

More Innovation

on New Florence

The Digital Doctor

It’s all fun and games

Rationalizing the Calendar

Brad Feld by the numbers

A fine piece of analysis

It’s less than 450 words. It’s written by a movie critic, not an industry analyst.

I was impressed, however, how crisply Richard Corliss summarized trends in the movie industry in his Time column – its challenges and its global growth.

The analytics he embeds – seasonal, demographic, related to genres – speak a thousand words each.

Be nice to see more technology analysts and bloggers abstracting higher -  not just talk about product features or happy vendor talk, and more about trends in sectors. And yes, even those trends that don’t look positive. 

We have come a long way, baby!

A week ago J.P. Rangaswami of Salesforce.com tweeted about the London Docklands and it took me back in time. Around this time, two decades ago, I was getting ready to finish up my tour of duty in London. In the year prior, my then employer Price Waterhouse had set up a data center in the emerging Docklands development. The trip to the area back then was “dodgy” as the English politely call it. Even more dodgy was the assignment I had.  I was given two teams of recent recruits to develop prototypes on two ERP packages – McCormack & Dodge and SAP R/2. The vendors kindly gave us the software and rooms full of documentation (SAP’s was mostly in German) but little else (hey, we were partners, not customers!). The two teams struggled through the process but managed to document the implementation for future demos/training.

Last week, I got couple of reminders of how far we have come since. Stan Swete, CTO at Workday, sent me a guest column for the blog. I also opened a package from my friend Tom Foydel. It’s his book on NetSuite OneWorld Implementation.

Stan makes a relatively simple statement that is dramatic when you think about what customers needed to do “The ability to start a SaaS implementation as soon as the contract is signed because you don’t have to wait for hardware and software to be delivered and installed.”

Tom’s book is in very readable English. Even more impressive is the functional scope he covers. I thought he would focus on core accounting modules in a primer, but he also covers case management, kitting, deferred revenues. While most customers will still need the skills of a reseller (like Tom’s firm SightLines) or a NetSuite consulting firm partner he also manages to pack in several implementation steps like advanced configuration and data migration. All that in 380 pages.

In the meantime, the Docklands, and neighboring areas like historic Greenwich have gone through impressive renewal. The Docklands even has its own Symphony.

Amazing, though, how many customers still don’t take advantage of such software deployment and business model improvements. Pretty dodgy, if you ask me. 

The Real Deal: Stan Swete on Business Value from SaaS multi-tenancy

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

This time it is Stan Swete, CTO and VP of Product Strategy at Workday. Besides being one of the best technologists in the enterprise world, he is also one of the nicest and most articulate.

“This week at Workday we have our auditors in to review the internal processes and controls related to development and delivery of our Software-as-a-Service solutions. This time around, the review includes an audit of how we implement multi-tenancy on the application and database server layers of our architecture.  Prepping for this review as I’m trying to write this column makes me smile, because it reminds me of how little Vinnie and other analysts want to discuss the merits or importance of multi-tenancy.  It took me more than one presentation to analysts to realize that while having a multi-tenant architecture is essential to being able to do what we do, my analyst friends would rather focus on delivered value.  So I have made it a New Year’s resolution to focus my 2012 comments away from our approach to SaaS and toward the value it delivers. 

The way to think about the value SaaS delivers is to step through all phases of the enterprise solution lifecycle and compare the old on-premise way of doing things versus the new way things happen with SaaS. Some of the obvious differences have been identified for these phases:

· Implementation. The ability to start a SaaS implementation as soon as the contract is signed because you don’t have to wait for hardware and software to be delivered and installed.

· Upgrades. Getting more frequent and cost-effective access to new functionality because the vendor manages updates and data conversions.

· Integration. Moving the execution and monitoring of integration to the cloud with solutions such as Workday’s Integration Cloud.

Two other areas of differentiation for the support and implementation phases get less attention, but data has emerged with more SaaS experience:

· Implementation. All mechanical tasks to support the implementation team are performed by the SaaS vendor’s operations staff that does them in production. This eliminates the risk and variability of having customers or their implementation partners figure out how they are going to do it themselves. It takes huge time and cost out of setting up, copying, and taking down the various environments needed during implementation.

· Support. Incidents that are fixed for one customer are fixed for all customers at the same time, allowing customers and the vendor to avoid more calls on the same topic. Also, since there is only one environment, neither the customer nor the vendor has to spend time trying to describe and replicate the customer’s specific environment.

Still, even after six years of experience, we continue to find additional ways the new model delivers greater value to our customers.  The most recent example relates to how performance enhancements and performance benchmarking happen with SaaS vs. on-premise software. In recent months, we’ve developed enhancements to how Workday processes payroll for customers with large workforces. This work resulted in significant performance and scalability improvements, which we published in a benchmark featuring payroll processing for a 35,000-person workforce.

Consider how performance enhancements and the resulting published benchmarks happen in the on-premise software world. The vendor creates a new version of its software with performance enhancements, designs a benchmark to measure improved performance, and then executes it on very high-end equipment provided by its hardware partners. The benchmark is published, and existing customers get the information in a report.  In order to achieve (or even get close to) the benchmarked performance, customers must upgrade their software to apply the performance enhancements, and/or update their hardware to benefit from the newest and fastest equipment used in the benchmark, and/or tune their database.

In the SaaS world it’s a little different.  We benchmark on the same hardware and network configuration all our customers use.  It wouldn’t make sense to speed things up by getting a higher-end box just for the benchmark.  Also, we make the performance enhancements developed for the benchmark available to customers in our production environment.  Our customers don’t get involved with upgrading software.

In the case of our work for large payrolls, the main capability we added was the option to run a single payroll across multiple servers for improved speed and scalability. The enhancement was tested with one of our customers on Workday 13 (the update all our customers went live on in April 2011). Our benchmark testing the enhancement was completed in July.  The performance enhancement was made available to our production environments team starting in Workday 14 (live in August 2011). The customer that tested the enhancement began benefiting from it in the production environment in August.  The customer’s investment in the process consisted of running payroll and observing that it completed correctly and much faster with the enhancement.

Interestingly, our customer let us know that members of its IT team were watching the initial test runs of our payroll optimization at the same time they were waiting for the arrival of a DBA consultant to help them begin a tuning project for an on-premise enterprise application they use.  In their minds the contrast was striking.

It’s too bad “PaaS” is taken as an acronym.  It could also stand for “Performance-as-a-Service.””

Stan can be reached at stan dot swete at workday dot com

What might IBM learn from Apple

Mark Fidelman blogged “Why every company needs to be more like IBM and less like Apple.” His arguments are cultural. IBM is supposedly open, more socially savvy. Apple is, in contrast, closed, secretive. Very different reality from the famous “Big Brother” commercial Apple ran during the 1984 SuperBowl, he says.

Let me come back to the cultural aspects in a moment. I happen to believe IBM should also benchmark itself against the areas I discussed earlier in week comparing SAP to Apple. What percent of revenues come from recently introduced products – new data centers, new software, new service practices? How do we become more vertically influential – as in industry changing not just showcasing healthcare or city uses of smarter technologies?

On many of those points, I would say most companies would want to emulate Apple not IBM.

Now onto IBM and social. One of my 12 attributes of the technology elite in the book is being socially savvy. IBM gets some play in that chapter for its social business initiative, but more prominent examples come from last year’s SuperBowl and integration between traditional and social media, Google’s I/O conference, Dell’s use of Radian6 to monitor social buzz, Nike+ as an example of gamification, Toyota’s plans to integrate its cars into a Chatter based network. The case study for that chapter is the Lexmark Genesis – the social features of the product and the social launch it enjoyed.

About Apple and closed. The book spends time on its ecosystem. Apple has allowed the biggest ecosystem of entrepreneurs and small businesses to evolve in the 600,000+ applications in the App Store. It bet on an Open Standard, HTML5 compared to Adobe with Flash or Microsoft with Silverlight. Its manufacturing is remarkably outsourced. If all that is closed, give us more!

About Apple and secretive. The book goes into Apple keeping its huge iCloud data center from public eyes, including Google Earth. It goes into Apple’s disclosing its anechoic testing chambers (each cost a few million) after the iPhone 4 antenna issues. I am big on transparency – but given what Apple has to hide from competitive or malicious eyes, I am ok with its secretiveness.

In fact, I would love to see more such innovations from IBM. And I would rather see it secretive and innovative, rather than social and a lumbering follower. 

More New Renaissance

on the innovation blog

The “God Particle”

Rare Earths Drama

Reinventing the way we remember

Jet lag – without the flight

The future of work and workers

Over the last few weeks been thinking of the radical changes in the workplace. No, not just SAP/SuccessFactors and the hype around that. More macro trends

a) My two nephews, on either side of 30 years, visited over the holidays. One came with his wife and 2 year old. There were, of course, my kids, 18 and 20. My wife and I were the “old ones”. It was fascinating to watch the 4 generations. The 2 year old has to be the cutest kid in the world. She loves purses and constantly carried a grown up’s purse or bag around. Even more impressive was her adeptness with her personal iPad and the various smartphones we left around. My nephew gave my wife, Margaret a tutorial on her iPad. Next thing I know she wanted my Amazon password to download a medical reference ebook. “Much lighter” to carry around than the hardback. My nephews wanted to watch digitized videos of themselves when they were younger (I have converted our VCR tapes going back to 1990 to JPEG files). My kids wanted to hear about my nephews travel (both are in outsourcing sales) and how they stay productive on the road all the time. Wi-Fi on planes, GPS and bluetooth on the highway, hotel technology comes up. I salivate about HR managers optimizing these multi-generational trends.

b) “it probably shortened the budget cycle by 25 percent because there was far less confusion” says Gordon Coburn in an interview in my next book. He is CFO at Cognizant and is describing the impact of telepresence within the organization. It is also the standard for how Cognizant does senior management calls. It also has become the preferred approach for early-stage interviews with recruits. More impressively, Cognizant is rolling out telepresence out to major clients. Two areas with high payback have been during transition and training.

c) Plantronics recently moved into a cool new HQ. “…the team responsible for the re-design lowered cubicle walls and created a number of “free spaces” unlike the conference rooms seen at most companies. You won’t find any oversized conference tables here; instead you’ll see brightly colored ergonomic chairs, plush couches made from sustainable materials, and walls and flooring designed to muffle sound.” says Pat Wadors, SVP of HR. What’s fascinating is Plantronics has astutely aligned its headset and other products with mega labor trends over the last few decades – the growth of call centers, then those of home offices, then those of mobile phones, now increasingly unified communications. It’s HQ reflects the jumble of workplace choices most companies are balancing.

d) I walk into a Brookstone and see their catalog with 5 QR codes, and it hits me how much “work” is now being done by customers. Walgreens allows me to scan in my prescription refills. Home Deport allows me to self check-out. Home for sales signs allow you to scan a code and go to a site with walkthrough videos, eliminating initial work agents did a few years ago. Banks and airlines have long mastered the art of customer self-service, and some even charge us for the privilege. This “customers as workers” trend is another evolution of contractors, crowdsourcing and other forms of non-employee labor we have been seeing.

e) I talk to a client and they want to bring home offshored staff. Ideally they would like to build a rural, university town workforce in the US – close enough for HQ staff to visit, far enough to get a loyal and qualified workforce. I speak to another and they want to swap out China based staff for some in Brazil. I see another move into Poland. The initial plan was to leverage the labor, but now the excitement is the customer opportunity.

f) I see the last minute maneuvering in Congress about the payroll tax – and a 2 month holiday. I see a USA Today report on quirky employee benefits - “Pet insurance, at-your-desk meditation services, jewelry discounts and funeral planning”. And I wonder what chaos each will bring to payroll and benefits processing. 

All these shifting tides! It is a fascinating - and frustrating - time for talent managers. I chuckle at folks who say HR is the most boring department in an enterprise….

What might SAP learn from Apple

My friend Dennis Howlett has written a post with that title. WTF you may say – different markets, different species. Not really. My next book focuses on the “technology elite”. There are user organizations, consumer tech companies, enterprise tech companies profiled.

Against that wide palette you get to cut across categories and look at multiple elite attributes.  I thought it would be interesting to go back to my research on Apple in the book and find areas where SAP may be able to evolve.  The sentences in italics are extracted from the latest edit of the book.

Measure yourself  based on new product revenues

Apple gets about two-thirds of its revenue from iOS devices, a platform that didn’t exist four years ago. In contrast, SAP revenues from HANA, BYD, even SuccessFactors will likely not even be 10% by end of 2012. SAP could start right there. It has to be willing to throw out the old, not continue to milk that maintenance.

Quit thinking only like a software company

You look at SAP executives, and you see impressive software backgrounds. But little with hardware (clearly important as it focuses on in-memory and cloud offerings) or experience from other disciplines. Apple put together a remarkable diversified team of executives. Three examples:

• The London Daily Mail asks, “Who is the most valuable Englishman
  on earth? Wayne Rooney? Colin Firth? Neither gets near Jonathan Ive, the boy from Chingford who is now senior vice president of industrial design at Apple.”
• In the 1990s, Apple made a strategic decision to deemphasize its own manufacturing. Metrics such as inventory turns did not look impressive especially when compared to Dell, which was then a paragon of efficiency. Plants in Ireland, Singapore, and United States were outsourced. Tim Cook, now Apple’s Chief Executive Officer, gets credit for that supply chain transition.
• Apple, of course, has gone from strength to strength with its retail
  operations, as we describe further in Chapter 12. Over 230 million
  visitors entered one of Apple’s over 300 stores around the world in 2010. In the ultimate compliment, Apple’s SVP of Retail, Ron Johnson was recruited in the summer of 2011 to become CEO of J.C. Penney.

Become much more vertically influential

Five years ago, I would not have said this. SAP was/is the backbone in many industries. But if I ask the question, did SAP really change them, the answer is mostly no. Apple on the other hand has shaken up multiple industries.

• It’s tough enough to develop a dominant business model in your own industry as Apple has with its iPads. Try bringing along the music industry with a single song model as iTunes did starting in 2003.
• ..when the iPad was introduced, Apple actually managed to convince book publishers to increase e-book pricing beyond the market standard being set by Amazon.
• Prior to Apple introducing the iPhone, carriers paid device manufacturers just enough for “planned obsolescence,” and subsidized those devices to consumers. This allowed them to lock customers into another long-term contract….Now as Apple
  expands its carrier choices—AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint in the United
  States—the mobile service becomes the commodity in this changing
  business model.

Become much more global

Five years ago, I would have said this even less. SAP had/has global staffing, global customer bases. Apple has blown by it.

• “Well-off clientele (at a spa in Germany) and always totally global: Egyptians, Russians, Israelis, Lebanese, the Stans, smatterings of everywhere else, many Europeans and rarely an American. The universal adoption of the iPad this year is incredible—everyone has one, ages 25–70. People are doing mail, checking local newspapers, getting news from home, but this is not a surfing/gaming crowd. Reminds me of last year’s universal adoption of the Stieg Larsson novels, when everyone was reading the same book in different languages.”
• The (2008 iPhone 3G) rollout required coordination with telcos like VimpelCom in Russia, Etisalat in Dubai, and Telia in Sweden, which many of us have never heard of.
• “The major producers and suppliers of iPhone (the first one in 2007) parts and components include Toshiba, Samsung, Infineon, Broadcom, Numunyx, Murata, Dialog Semiconductor, Cirrus Logic, etc. All iPhone components produced by these companies are shipped to Foxconn, a company from Taipei, China located in Shenzhen, PRC, for assembly into final products and then exported to the U.S. and the rest of the world.”

Rethink partner/ecosystem strategy

The more than 600,000 (as of November 2011) and growing applications
in the Apple App Store range from the sublime to the silly (the book has several examples). But the sheer size of the marketplace is a formidable Apple asset. The head of iOS development, Scott Forstall, has commented that Apple has, in the iOS App Store, “created the best economy in software in the history of the planet.”

Besides its impressive size, the Apple ecosystem is mostly made up of small firms and entrepreneurs. SAP continues to rely on its larger SI/outsourcing partners even with mountains of data around their project overruns, overpriced hosting and application management. Also, there is nowhere near the productivity in incremental, new applications.

There is plenty more in the book about Apple. And Google, Facebook, HP. And Corning, 3M, UPS and many other “elite” companies. When the book is out maybe we can compare SAP to the others. SAP would show well against many of them. But it would also need to evolve in many other directions.

How blogging has gone mainstream

Between my consulting, speaking, book writing and blogging I am blessed to have access to a wide range of technology vendor executives, CIOs, and influencers. What was impressive in my recent book project compared to that to The New Polymath 2 years prior was how much more influential blogs and bloggers have become.

A few perspectives:

Product Launches

In one of the book case studies, Jerry Grasso, VP of Corporate Communications at Lexmark says 

“We launched the Genesis product at BlogWorld and New Media Expo in Las Vegas…We usually launch products at CES or other technology shows but over the last year we have seen a tipping point for the payback from leveraging social media. We launched simultaneously with press events in New York and San Francisco and even in those cities we invited a mix of
bloggers in addition to more traditional media like the New York Times.”

In the chapter on social savvy I present the example of the buzz Michael Dell created when he showed a Gizmodo blogger in an elevator an unannounced version of one of his products. It goes into how Dell used Radian6 to monitor the resulting social traffic over the next few months through the actual product launch.

We all saw the coverage the iPhone 4 misplaced prototype and its antenna got. The book draws on the influence of blogs on those topics. There are several more examples of the influence of blogs during product launches. 

Topical coverage

I was impressed at the range of topics I could interview bloggers for:  Brad Feld on software patents, Tom Raftery on sustainability in tech, Frank Scavo on vertical technology spending trends, Dennis Howlett on SAP mobility trends, Larry Dignan on RIM’s challenges, Brian Sommer on the negatives of social networks, and many more.

Substantive material

I am not a big fan of end notes – I find them distracting as a reader. I find URL links much less intrusive. My book publisher, to its credit, likes to share detailed citations so people can research a topic much further. So, my book will have over 500 citations at the back. Many are references to books, academic journals, press articles. About 15% of them are references to blogs. Scan those 30+pages and you see plenty of ZDNet, GigaOm, Ars Technica and also many individual blogs. I suspect if I had written this book 4 years ago, the blog proportion would have been 10 basis points lower and the press articles that much higher.  That’s another sign of the volume and the improved quality of blogs in the last few years.

Executive communication

While it is still hit and miss across the industry I was impressed with how much material I could use from corporate blogs. Steve Jobs’ brilliant post about Adobe and why it should adopt HTML5 was to me one of the most effective pieces of marketing to come out of Apple. Google does a pretty effective job of sharing information about its products, data centers, philosophies on its blogs. I learned about Jeff Bezos’ groundbreaking letter to shareholders with all kinds of technology jargon from a blog post by Amazon’s CTO, Werner Vogels. I could go on.

The Thin Line

The bloggers I admire use multiple channels effectively. Robert Scoble uses video, Hugh MacLeod uses cartoons. I have a thin line between my blogs, books and speeches. UA’s Smart Shirt, Toro’s sophisticated lawn mowers, Deere’s FarmSight, The Hillsborough Tax Collector and many other examples mentioned in the book were first highlighted on the New Florence blog. One of my inspirations for The New Polymath was I noticed I was tagging blog posts across multiple infotech, cleantech, healthtech categories and realized there was a growing set of multi-disciplinary products and technology teams. In reverse, I have excerpted about 10% of my books on my blogs. My presentations are chockful of innovation examples from the blog. To me that’s another sign of mainstreaming of blogs. In many ways, blogs are just another channel for many of us.

Not all good news

I see way too many folks who used to blog now just tweet from industry events. Or they summarize other people’s blogs in newsletters.

Personally, one of my New Year resolutions is to increase my blog posts in 2012. I have averaged 1 daily post on New Florence for the last few years. Hope to get to 1.25 this year. So much innovation and wow to profile! Different themes for this blog, but expect to see more vibrant posts.

Gutenberg is looking down in fascination at the awesome publishing power we all individually have today. More of us need to express ourselves. Interview someone interesting. Review a book or a product. Write about an interesting trend.

Who knows, an author may find a useful nugget for their books like I did on Rashmi’s blog about how Indians have evolved their own interesting social etiquette around missed calls on their mobile phones!

IBM’s “Great Society”?

As Sam Palmisano gets ready to retire, expect to see more glowing articles like this by Steve Lohr in the NYT.  The man deserves plenty of kudos, but I thought he got carried away for taking credit for “solving societal challenges”?

Let’s compare IBM against a few more modest benchmarks during Sam’s decade. 

Against Apple

Everyone says how much smarter IBM was compared to HP by getting out of PCs and printers – in fact, most of its hardware business. How about comparing to what Apple has done with all kinds of gadgets and other hardware?

Against Facebook and Amazon

IBM has a long storied history around data centers. But over the last decade, the real data center innovations have come from web companies and cloud computing vendors. Wall Street likes that IBM margins are fatter from not passing such efficiencies on to customers, but should customers?

Against Salesforce.com and Workday

IBM makes a lot of money from application management and business process outsourcing. But over the last decade, multi-tenancy and shared service efficiencies have come from SaaS vendors who support thousands of customers at a fraction of the labor IBM (and other outsourcers) assign to their application support. While labor economists like the jobs IBM creates, should its customers?

Against Google, Microsoft, Oracle and……

Lotus Notes, Tivoli, DB2, WebSphere were once state of the art and deserved premiums.  Today,  IBM hopes and prays migration costs intimidate customers into staying put with its products.

Against truly smart customers

IBM cleverly flatters city, healthcare and other “smarter planet” customers with the smart moniker. But truly smart customers have picked up on fact that IBM mostly provides services in such projects and they can get better results with different service providers and technologies.

Sam’s decade will be remembered as one where IBM learned to squeeze value out of aging assets. Now if it can show society how to do something similar, I will be much more willing to credit IBM with “solving societal challenges.”

More New Florence

on the innovation blog

Plantronics’ cool new digs

IBM’s annual ‘5 in 5’

Tableau – making spreadsheets snazzy

3D printed Christmas Tree ornaments

More Innovation

on the New Florence blog

Fijit Friends

Disney Appmates

Starbucks is a tech barista

Kelvin- Helmholz Waves

Hey, Hollywood!

‘Tis the season to see Tom Cruise, Matt Damon, Daniel Craig, Robert Downey Jr. ‘Tis also the season to review the typeset version of my new book.

And as I juxtapose the two, I am staggered how many tech themes Hollywood could weave blockbusters around. Here’s 10 to start with:

a) The New New Thing

Think of the drama around the Apple iCloud launch – the race with Google and Amazon around cloud music, the massive data center which was kept hidden even on Google Earth till a few days prior. The iPhone 4 – the misplaced prototype and Apple’s disclosure of its 16 anechoic testing chambers each costing over $ 1 million each after its well publicized antenna issues. Can you imagine the suspense Hollywood could produce around each product launch?

b) Jobs, Bezos, Page

Justin Timberlake is itching to play someone meatier than Sean Parker. Ben Kingsley did Gandhi 15 years ago. Come on, Hollywood – so many tech titans waiting to be profiled. And like Madonna and Pele they have highly recognizable single names.

c) Conflict Minerals

if you thought Blood Diamond was heart wrenching, imagine what a movie about the current conflicts in the Congo around tantalum, tin, tungsten and other minerals indispensable for consumer electronics would be like.

c) Mongolian Grill

Imagine the high-level stakes Hollywood could vividly portray as China reduces its supplies and US and other mining firms ramp up production of neodymium, terbium, yttrium and other rare earths critical for cleantech.

e) Move over Gekko!

Wall Street has nothing on the lawyers on all sides of Google in its Android and other legal battles. Especially when you throw in a bit of Steve Jobs “willing to go thermonuclear war” about Android.

f) Shall we play a game?

Thermonuclear war is so 80s. in 2007, the whole country of Estonia was brought to its knees for several days in a cyber attack widely speculated to have originated in Russia. Web War One, and many more sophisticated attacks later there is plenty of more contemporary WarGames material.

g) The Sting II

OK, so Sony Pictures would likely not finance it, but the repeated hacks against the PS3 and LulzSec and Anonymous hacks against so many corporations would be great fodder for thrillers.

h) Silicon Empire

Come on, have we not had too many gangster TV series? How about one around the ups and downs at HP. Think about it – every human interest and gossip angle could be covered in a series.

i) The Big Bang ecosystem

Why only one nerdy show about physicists? How about a show with entrepreneurs who write Apple, Android and Blackberry apps and about their neighbors who work for Indian, E. European and Costa Rican offshore firms? Think of the “enterprise tech sucks” jokes and “but it pays for expensive vacations” repartees in all those accents. Oh, and “Blackberry sucks” jokes too:)

j) The TAF – Technologically Advanced Family

A series about a modern family with way too many iDevices, blogs, apps for everything, soccer games and birthdays all synched. mobile pays for latte, Netflix jokes. Imagine the Christmas tree episode.  Imagine a road trip without the bag with the power chargers!

Note to Hollywood: My book has serious descriptions of each of these 10 themes . But if you promise you will pay for “expensive vacations” I can easily develop some interesting movie or TV scripts :)

Peace, Joy …and Wow

This year, more than others, I have become even more aware of how technology innovation makes so many smile, even if only for a fleeting moment. We saw how many billions the master, Steve Jobs, touched. More so it is in many small episodes I have personally encountered.

There’s Brady Cullimore who saw me present at U. of Phoenix and has sent me a steady stream of emails about things that made him go “wow”. There’s my hair dresser, Blanca who proudly shows off The New Polymath in her store. The poor lady has little idea what’s in the book, but excitedly reports how patrons ask to borrow it.   There’s Debbie Brown who told me how inspired she was by my blog on Space Shuttle flight STS-400 – a flight which fortunately never took off.   There’s the executive I asked to review my next book and he emailed this week how much he enjoyed the case studies. He is one of the most innovative executives I know, and it is nice to see him go “wow”. I could go on.

So, on this day, I wish each of you all peace and joy. Most of all, I wish you plenty of “wow”. And I hope you pass that along. Whether you are a developer, a salesperson, a blogger we all have the power to make people go wow.

That is a wonderful gift to receive and to give any day of the year !

Business Model Disruption

In the wake of Oracle’s missed quarter I have seen the words ‘business model” bandied a few times. My reaction: we ain’t seen nothing yet.  As Don Tapscott summarizes succinctly  “There are two kinds of business models: those that have been disrupted by technology, and those that have yet to be”

One of my elite attributes in the next book is being “Malleable” – with business model innovation (BMI). So many technology enabled models like “freemium”,”as a service” “from bottom of pyramid” are being tried in many industries.

The story of Apple becomes even more fascinating when you look from a BMI perspective. It popularized music by the MP3 unit and is evolving us into Music by Matching with iCloud at $ 25 a year. It has moved eBooks to an agency pricing model, away from the $ 9.99 standard Amazon had established (personal opinion as an author: Variable pricing adds complexity to a consumer’s decision. Would like to see pricing settle but you have to admire Apple for challenging the Amazon stronghold around books).  It positioned Smartphones away from the planned device obsolescence model carriers like because they can lock consumers into one long term contract after another with a small subsidy on a cheap new device.

Don’t extrapolate Apple to the rest of the tech industry, though. Enterprise tech vendors are BMI laggards for the most part. Amortize software maintenance over number of calls to their contact center and it may easily be $ 20,000 a call. A roaming call from staff visiting E. Europe may be at $ 4 a minute. Your storage may be fully costed at $ 2.50 a gb a month. A deskside PC visit by your outsourcer may cost you $ 500. Your printer likely needs ink which costs over $ 5,000 a gallon. 

Pick any SAP, IBM, HP, EMC, ACCN, VZ, any BPO shop at random and see how many of those scenarios apply. They are ripe for BMI. Actually BMD as in Disruption.

Like I said, we ain’t seen nothing yet.

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How can you be nice to Oracle?

I guess my post last night stood out while most others were busy railing on Oracle. I got a couple of messages asking why Oracle deserved my kind words.

Whether a tech vendor or a topic I tend to rely on multiple channels for my opinions – my social channels (Twitter, the Enterprise Irregulars, LinkedIn etc), the over 100 sources I scrounge each year for my innovation blog New Florence, my book research (several hundred sources in last couple of years), my consulting clients, vendor exec access and commentary, industry analysts and financial analysts. For startups and consumer tech I tend to rely more on the left side of the source list, for mature enterprise vendors, more on the right side. With vendors like Oracle, SAP, IBM, HP with vibrant customer bases I tend to rely more on the sources in the middle.

If I relied only on the left side, I would have a very negative view of Oracle. SAP, in particular, does better in social channels.  Right side, till last night, had too positive a view of Oracle. The ones in the middle provide the balance. And Oracle does as well here if not better than SAP, HP and IBM. While they do not call Oracle a “bed of roses”, I get much more negative customer feedback on value from SAP or IBM investments. SAP provides much easier executive access but when you measure progress against problems they acknowledge in previous meetings, the results are often disheartening. After a while you learn to discount that channel.

It’s like my political views. I tend to vote for the candidate, not on party lines. So I am not surprised when I get “WTF?” comments.

A tough crowd

When The New Polymath came out, I took heat for being nice to an innovation group at BP. It had nothing to do with the Gulf spill, but people would have preferred I paint BP as a villain.

With my next book, as I excerpt on my other blog, I have had a couple of people suggest I drop HP because of its turmoil this summer. Others think Boeing does not deserve the ink for its 787 program because the plane is 3 years late. Someone even suggested Corning did not deserve to be in it because Gorilla Glass will not cross $ 1 bn in revenues this year,

Guess what? They all stay in the book along with Apple, Google, Facebook and others who are faring better in popularity polls. In different ways, the less popular ones show how what I call the technology elite are coping with complex scenarios – and yes, even adversity.

Too many of us expect pristine examples. Look at the heat Oracle is taking for missing its quarter today. No one is perfect. You want proof? Read Walter Isaacson’s bio of Steve Jobs.

BTW, I wanted to profile Oracle in the book. Their integration of countless acquisitions would have made a nice example of a technology elite company, but I could not get PR signoff. And yes, if they had been in the book, a missed quarter would not have made me drop them from it.

The SAP cloud – a freak of nature?

In Florida, where I live, we know a thing or two about clouds. We see them in the horizon or on the radar and we reset lawn sprinklers from auto to manual. We think of sedating our beagle, who becomes a baby when he hears thunderclaps.

Not every cloud brings rain, though. Last February, Chicago had “thundersnow”. Last week, Birmingham, AL had spectacular “tsunami” clouds . From my conversations with the National Hurricane Center I profiled in my last book, I learned we still have much to understand about weather systems in spite of the mountains of satellite and sensory atmospheric data we have access to.

What to make about the SAP cloud? It plonked big money to buy SuccessFactors a couple of weeks ago. Last week, at the Influencer Summit, it declared it was “all in” the cloud. SAP has announced better integration of BYD, its cloud product, with Google Apps.

It’s quite a transformation in just a few months. At Sapphire in Orlando, I asked Bill McDermott, co-CEO, about the continuing SAP commitment to Microsoft Office and other products, and he said in many of his customers, SAP and Microsoft are the two “strategic IT vendors”. At the event, SAP was still tentative about BYD. John Wookey, a prominent executive in its cloud strategy, had unexpectedly left just prior to Sapphire.

We are seeing a much more cloud-confident SAP. But is it just an aberration? The proof will come in what the field and the partner ecosystem do in the next couple of years.

I want to see SAP annoy Wall Street by showing a substantial increase in capex in its data centers and networks. Yes, like Microsoft and Amazon and Google have in the past. In the field I want to see if SAP is willing to cannibalize older products and maintenance revenue. I want to see the partner flavor evolve.  Today, it is still full of old school outsourcers more comfortable with renaming their hosting services as “private clouds” and with single-tenant application management models. It would be nice to see Google resellers, Android and Apple entrepreneurs become prominent in the SAP ecosystem.

I am afraid it is the  “Kelvin-Helmholtz effect” we saw in Birmingham. It is the turbulence which forms “when a fast-moving layer of fluid slides on top of a slower, thicker layer, dragging its surface”. Slow and Drag are key words when thinking about SAP’s legacy and current partners.

For now, let’s just enjoy the phenomenon and say “Wow!”

More New Florence

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