deal architect

Mashup Security/Privacy issues

Guess it was only a matter of time, but New Scientist raises some issues around the growing world of mashups.

A CIO Blogs

"I believe that it is only a matter of time before enterprise software consists of only four types of application: publishing, search, fulfilment and conversation."

" How we can prevent the unintended consequences of walled-garden approaches to content. How we can avoid DRM holding up innovation. Why identity and presence and authentication and permissioning are important. Why emergence theories and “democratized innovation” matter. How we can take advantage of the opportunities that mobile devices offer us."

This from the new (personal) blog of JP Rangaswami, CIO of the bank, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. I saw it courtesy of Ross Mayfield and have previously commented about his vision here.

Five comments:

Great to see a CIO blog

Refreshing to see a taxonomy at much higher level abstraction than current noise around Web 2.0, SOA, SaaS ...

To banks, information is lifeblood and they spend upwards of 10% of revenues on IT. In other sectors, the CIO is lucky to have 1 or 2%. So, he gets to "play" and innovate a lot more. Hopefully, other CIOs will get jealous and find the innovation money by squeezing their utility spend.

In addition to the usual barrage of cold calls, emails, snail mail, golf invitations - he has bravely opened himself to another channel of selling - or at least attempts at selling. I am already scheming!

Great to see a CIO blog.

Web 2.0 in Enterprise

Jeff Nolan reports on a panel on the convergence - and related confusion. Zoli Erdos has a minute by minute here.

Lots of people and the audience talking across each other. But since people are involved probably leads to conversation and collaboration technologies - let's see that will affect employees, customers, vendors, partners...

Blogging is like a box of chocolates

My post this morning Addicted to Blogs is already the single most read post I have ever had. That too on a Sunday (ok, Super Bowl last Sunday would have been tough to compete against)

It took me 15 minutes to write. Others have taken days to think about, write, rewrite - and may be 20 folks read them. As Forrest Gump said "...like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get". One reader called my post an "incredible mashup". In the web 2.0 world that is the equivalent of knighthood!

3 bloggers I want to thank for inspiring my "addicted" post yesterday

a) Om Malik, prolific blogger, who from the beach yesterday had to blog and post an entry called Perfect reason to Not blog

b) Dennis Howlett, who writes his best stuff between 8 and 10 pm eastern - except he writes from Spain, 6 hours ahead.

c) Robert Scoble, who created a little firestorm yesterday with his comments about "blogger ethics" and generated an amazing amount of passion for a Saturday (over 75 comments on his post)

Each of them in different ways shows how addictive blogs have become for the writers and readers. Like those chocolates Forrest was talking about.

No Blog is an Island

Charles Zedlewski invokes Spinal Tap as he responds to my blog about memeorandum. He says he does not care if he is way at the distant end of the long tail of blog exposure.  He has strong opinions on a number of enterprise technology topics - I believe he deserves to be heard by a broader group of folks. Today, we seem to find blogs almost by accident. Various sites have blogrolls - some have 50+ and we refer to each other in our posts. But the neat thing about memeorandum is the topical linkage, by relevance etc. If they do not care enough about enterprise topics we all need to encourage other comparable sites to emerge.

I would instead like to suggest a different genre from Charles'- Joan Baez -  No man is an island, even if he is at the outer extremes of the blog galaxy.

"The New Boom"

Chris Anderson writes in Wired Magazine a more eloquent version of my Florence during the Renaissance and Economics in New Florence

The one thing I disagree on - he ends with "most New York cab drivers are happily ignorant of what's hot in the Valley, just as they should be". That immigrant group is probably more aware than the average American of what is going on in Bangalore, Dalian and elsewhere in the world. The neat thing about the new boom is it's happening in so many places around the world - as I wrote in Florence above.

Monster Mashup

Courtesy of Dave Berlind I saw this definition of "mashup artists" using ubiquitous APIs to build new applications on what Dave calls the "uncomputer".  I then saw this "Mashup Camp" (already sold out).  The creative prospects are unbelievable -and I was marveling at how far we have come from the initial APIs in the enterprise world and the ambitious Open Applications Group attempted in 1995.

But why just stop at APIs? It would be great to see other building blocks - RFIP, GPS, open source, predictive analytics - being similarly being mashed up to create enterprise applications.

Any one care to join me to think about a Monster Mashup camp on the lines above? Say, around Halloween?

Web, Schweb - Enterprise Predictions for 2006

Over the last couple of weeks it has been good to see so many bloggers make their forecasts about 2006.  But - most  are about Web 2.0 - Google this, Flickr that. Of course, with Apple and amazon.com enjoying a bumper holiday season, the focus on consumer technologies is only accented.

Much as I love Google, it cannot process BOMs for the average manufacturing company. Much as my daughter loves her iPod, it will not process insurance claims. Whoever does whatever with AOL will not improve supply chain logistics at UPS.

As we did in the last Internet Bubble, we risk making the Web and consumer technologies the center of the technology world. It’s the Gates/Plattner scenario again I wrote about earlier. As I wrote in Florence during the Renaissance, innovation is happening in a number of other areas which CIOs are actually much more excited about - especially at amazing new price points. Also as I have said over and over again this year, many elements of enterprise technology spend are grossly overpriced.

So, here’s my forecast for next year - good and bad - with more of an enterprise focus:

1) SAP, Oracle and Microsoft (around enterprise software) will have poor years as pricing pressure intensifies on core products and particularly on maintenance revenue streams. SAP will de-emphasize its web services talk and go back to focusing on applications and business payback. Oracle will go the other way and talk more about architectures as it masks the enormity of rationalizing its various application acquisitions. CIOs will increasingly question if all they are doing is subsidizing Microsoft's focus on Google.

2) We will see version 2.0 definitions of  CRM,  SCM,  HRM etc emerge which will a) redefine process coverage (e.g. CRM is more than SFA and call centers) that the market leaders have chosen to define the categories as and b) utilize appropriate, newer technology building blocks  - GPS,  RFID, RSS in the category re-definition process.

3) CIOs in many non-manufacturing verticals will tire of waiting for robust software solutions for their major engines (claims processing, trading systems) and more aggressively look at BPO options to support these processes. These CIOs, especially in financial services verticals, will pioneer attempts to leverage web 2.0 driven discovery and social networking tools with their enterprise applications.

4) An infrastructure vendor - likely Dell or Sun (as it tries to redefine itself) - will introduce infrastructure outsourcing at aggressive, "utility" price points to cover a wide range of network, database, desktop and other services. In its hype cycle for outsourcing Gartner defines infrastructure outsourcing as one of the most mature. As systems management automation and offsite, shared labor models mature, an efficient services "supply chain" becomes much more viable.

5) A generation of “appligators” will emerge - small systems integrators which specialize in innovation areas like web services or telemetry and willing to work with clients in small, intense teams. We will not be able to tell till 2007 if they are of a more modest breed than their predecessors, the Scients, Viants around the ebiz boom in late 90s.

6) Large US and European outsourcers (EDS, Accenture and by extension IBM, HP etc) will find themselves squeezed between a) private equity firms who want to take their valuations from 1 or 2X revenues to close to 10X many of the Indian vendors enjoy and b) CIOs who want price points much closer to what Indian vendors can quote. This will force these outsourcers to finally get serious about becoming much more efficient with automation, global delivery models etc. They will find Indian vendors expanding into horizontal process consulting and BPO (finance, HR) beyond their traditional IT competencies.

7) China will look beyond hardware and start to flex its muscle around software and services.  Chinese firms in these categories will start to raise significant capital and make small acquisitions in the US and Europe to acquire customer channels.

8) SaaS models will come under increased scrutiny from buyers about stringent SLAs and business continuity plans. In 2001, after the India/Pakistan nuclear war threat, Indian vendors  went through a similar spike in scrutiny. After last week's well publicized outage at salesforce.com, this will become a required due diligence step in evaluating SaaS options. The scrutiny helped Indian vendors mature - it will similarly increase corporate confidence in SaaS.

9) CIOs will do serious "spend management" around storage (due to proliferation of volume demand) and telecommunications (due to proliferation of mobile, broadband and other products) investments.

10) CEOs will start lobbying Congress to back off on the compliance burden and pressure their CFOs to significantly streamline and justify compliance spend. The SOX gravy train for software vendors and auditors will slow down.

This plus 6 quarters may buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks! A version customized by Zodiac signs is planned soon...

Author Note: Sandhill.com carries a slightly modified and expanded version of my 2006 Enterprise IT projections here.

Forget Web 2.0...let's jump to 3.0

Phil Wainewright at ZD Net has been talking quite a bit about Web 3.0  - his term for the convergence between enterprise apps and Web 2.0 concepts - here, here, here and here.

He is to be complimented about taking to a more formalized level what I had mentioned about corporate CIOs adopting "business casual" user experiences and generally getting more hip about emerging social networking and collaboration technologies.

John Hagel has a nice commentary on Phil's columns here

I have three nits:

a) Most CIOs have to look at innovation beyond what is being classified under Web 2.0. As I wrote in Florence during the Renaissance they can evaluate sensor telemetry, more sophisticated analytics, open source etc. His term Web 3.0 may be too narrow a focus.

b)  He quotes the CIO of  Dresdner, JP Rangaswami in one of his posts. Technology is considered lifeblood so many banks spend 10% of revenues when the average manufacturing  CIO is lucky to justify 2%.  Also, Banking is pretty heavily custom built applications, so you do not have to wait for SAP or Oracle - backbone applications in many other verticals - for years before they release new innovation. Phil's suggestions may be years ahead of reality for them.

c) Finally, "enterprise 1.0"  - today's incumbent, utility spend eats up too much of IT spend. We need to crunch that spend before we can find funds for many 2.0 or 3.0 initiatives. Every time the large vendors deliver "innovation" they price it at a layer above the base, previous layer.

Nice framework, Phil...we need to get CIOs the money to do what you suggest and other innovations around RFID, GPS, and so much more...

Mary Meeker: Fanatic

"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject" - Churchill

I met Mary Meeker a couple of times in the late 90 at Morgan Stanley conferences. Given my enterprise focus, I was much more aligned with her colleague, Charles Phillips. But I remember her passion - and the mind boggling amount of data she was able to collect and package. No industry (or financial) analyst even came close to what she had.

She was the cheerleader for AOL, ebay, amazon and other Internet stocks, and through the dark days when the bubble broke, continued to be a fan. Charles left for Oracle and many of her contemporaries have been driven out of the business. Her fellow analysts continue to be wary of her - see here and here.  But as she says in this interview many of her Web stocks have bounced back spectacularly.

As this presentation at Stanford a few weeks ago shows she is now positioned to be the cheerleader for Web 2.0 - and backs it up with lots of interesting data.

People will say she lost investors billions. I happen to believe the job of the analyst - financial or industry - is to present data, and let readers make their own mind. From that perspective I am glad she continues to be fanatical about collecting and presenting data. What you do with that is your responsibility - tempting as it may be to credit or blame her for the results.