deal architect

The best and brightest from everywhere

Tim Duncan is a class act, but I believe Manu Ginobili deserved the MVP award in the NBA finals. His passion (and play) fired up the local crowd and made the vital difference in the last few minutes of the close Game 7. What a run he has had leading his home country, Argentina to Olympic Gold last summer and before that in the Italian league. The NBA has done well with Nigerian, Yugoslavian and several other players from around the world. So has baseball with the Matsuis and the Sosas. And golf with the Vijays and the Annikas. And, of course, hockey.

While the cynics will argue about these players taking American jobs on these teams, look at how it has helped the NBA and the NFL develop global franchises. The SuperBowl is watched by over a billion people around the world who know little about linebackers and quarterbacks.

Now if the British and Australians and Indians become better marketers, we may someday end up with a kid from Hoboken, NJ saying  "Cricket been berry berry berry good to me"!

"Open Media 100"

Another sign of the growth - if not the growing influence - of blogging. AlwaysOn announced the Open Media 100.

It is good to see Toolsmith and Enabler categories recognized - they are helping organize and optimize the exploding world of blogs. But the nominees in the content/influence oriented categories - not sure corporate CIOs would recognize even one of the names. Most of the nominees represent a community which fawns over Apple and Google, and could not begin to spell SunGard or BEA.

Ok, enough nitpicking - let's celebrate the pioneers and keep making the "Open" analyst community more influential in the corporate technology world...

Free Bird

"If I leave here tomorrow
Would you still remember me?"

Lynyrd Skynyrd

I got several reminders about birds and freedom last week. Could have been Mike Tyson's collection of pigeons which are annoying his neighbors. More likely, Morgan Stanley CEO Philip Purcell having to resign when he could not stem a flock of fleeing executives. Ironic that some one who understands capital liquidity, did not realize that intellectual capital is also pretty fluid

Then there were other conversations around other "birds". An exec described to me his company's focus on its aging workforce and the use of knowledge management and other technology to prepare for coming transitions. Microsoft has a section of its site dedicated to the implication (and opportunities) around graying of the baby boomer generation.

SAP has been on a recruiting tear especially from its competition - including two execs - Nimish Mehta and Doug Merritt I really like. While it is pretty common for salespeople to jump around quite a bit, SAP is gathering a varied set of talents as it begins its ambitious re-positioning.

An offshore firm executive casually told me his staff attrition was around 20% - but still lower than the "industry average". He did not appear to have a "fuel hedge" for his clients.

I heard about an analyst firm CEO who threatened a key analyst with a non-compete if he left. Smart are they are, analyst firms take their non-competes seriously - a vestige left over from the 17th century. He is likely to lose this "caged bird"

"For I must be traveling on, now,
'Cause there's too many places I've got to see. "

PS: Skynyrd fans - you may find this WSJ article amusing or annoying, but worth a read.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

courtesy of Chris Selland I came across Steve Jobs' commencement speech at Stanford last week. I happen to think the media gives Apple way more credit than it deserves in the circle of IT life but what an eloquent, inspirational speech......

Adam Smith in Paris

At the Paris Air Show last week, Indian and Chinese airlines booked huge orders with Boeing and Airbus.  And many of the airlines are privately held - 5 years ago most of the airline industry around the world was public sector.

Of course, as an American I wish Boeing had won more than Airbus. But for all the nay sayers like Lou Dobbs who talk about one way trade traffic, this is a small repartee. GE, Coke, Pepsi, Citibank and a bunch of other American companies are benefiting from booming middle classes in the developing world.

The better question to ask is why are companies like Delta, GM and others not able to make money there?

PS - for all the flying we all do, highly recommend at least once in your life go to the Paris Air Show (it alternates with The Farnborough Air Show in UK every other year). I went in the mid 80s just as Boeing was rolling out its majestic 747-400. This year Airbus showed off its massive A380. There are all kinds of commercial, military, vintage planes. Quite a show. It is the Sapphire of the aviation world.

Customers as "viruses"

Contact centers can be extremely aggravating. You only seem to call them when there is a problem. But years ago, I realized my yelling at reps does no good – the poor folks do not make up the rules. And it does not matter how valued a customer you are (I seem to have a number of problems with Delta Airlines with whom I have flown 2+ million lifetime miles, and to a lesser extent with Amex where I have been a member since 1980). If I do not like a company policy or action I should get to management and tell them I am displeased.

Unfortunately, contact centers are often used as “shields”. A Delta supervisor told me this week she is NOT ALLOWED to forward a customer request to company headquarters in Atlanta. She cannot leave a voice message or send an email to one of her executives. She has to tell the customer to write in or call in. And guess what – she is only allowed to give out a generic address or phone number. An Amex rep once told me they were not allowed to give out email addresses for their execs. Something about virus control. I asked him if it was virus or customer control. It took me 3 seconds to figure out the email format for the appropriate exec and I directly sent him an email.

If that still does not generate action, I inform the executive and then put them on a “90 day black list”. I use competing products for those 90 days and at the end of the period send in a letter to the executive including copies of tickets/charges from his competitors informing him that I hoped he enjoyed the $ 200 change fee (or whatever else mean his company did) but that he missed out on $ X,000 worth of business in those 90 days.

Sound like a lot of work? Yes – but as a technologist, I consider call center folks part of my technology fraternity. They are often helpless and can only follow policies they have no say in. Instead of yelling at them, I hope my withholding dollars gets the message more directly to their management.

If you have other ways to get to management of companies and to get their attention without abusing contact center folks, love to hear them.

Also memo to corporations. Mine your frequent customer stats. If someone has dramatically reduced their spend over the last 90 to 120 days they may have put you on a 90 day blacklist like I do. Much better to recover those customers than to permanently lose them.

Your CRM technology and people investments are meant to get you closer to your customers, not hide from them

Oracle's "OFF SAP" offering

Oracle is offering SAP R/3 customers up to 100% license credit, to switch from SAP to Oracle applications. Additionally, as part of its "OFF SAP" offering Oracle Consulting offers a free workshop to assess the customers' specific migration plan.

Sure, I will tell my SAP clients looking at pretty expensive mySAP upgrades over next couple of years to analyze this offer. But, likely the burning question will be the same as that PeopleSoft and JDE customers have with SAP's "Safe Passage" offer to them - who will pay for the huge migration costs many, many times the cost of "give-away" licenses and financing? Oracle has its hands full defining migrating paths for PeopleSoft and JDE to its future Fusion versions - will they have much to offer SAP customers in migration tools? With Oracle's documented quality problems with release 11i, users need to be cautious with so much on its plate.

HP's crown jewel - the printer business

In the Southwest line the other day, I noticed the “print at home” boarding passes on A4 paper exceeded the Southwest card stock passes. Sign of the times – we love the convenience of home banking, travel management and we print a lot of statements and boarding passes at home. HP loves it too. Its printer business is a star. But here’s the catch - the cost of a decentralized or home printed page is many times what it costs a Southwest or Amex with their purchasing scale and production equipment.

As the WSJ puts its “Computer users world-wide spend $22 billion a year on ink cartridges. The price of ink per milliliter from the big printer shops such as Hewlett-Packard Co. and Lexmark International Inc. has been steadily rising, at about 1% a year, according to research from Lyra Research. At the same time, the big companies are getting stingier with the amount of ink they are putting into each cartridge. For example, when H-P eliminated one cartridge that had 42 milliliters of ink and cost $29.99, it replaced it with another that costs $19.99 but has only 19 milliliters of ink”.

HP’s Joshi has this view:

“Small and medium businesses want to focus on their own business. They don't want to focus on their printer”.

Interesting how every tech vendor sells its stuff as strategic, but when it comes to cost comparisons, always paints it as trivial and non-strategic. Also, it does not just affect small businesses. Many large companies (my CIO customer base) have mobile and at home work forces who use smaller printers. So the search for cheaper options will intensify.

Remanufactured cartridges are a growing option, like third party maintenance for software.

And then there are other choices. I recently switched to an older model $ 99 black and white laser printer with a 6,000 page yield cartridge (at roughly the same cost as the separate HP Inkjet color and black and white inkjet cartridges were costing me to yield 400 pages).

I have also found a hidden jewel in the Microsoft Office suite – the Microsoft Office Document Imaging feature – my hard drive is where a lot of my “printing” goes – now if the TSA security at the airport would only accept an electronic boarding pass…

Analyze This!

I posted this on AlwaysOn - and have cut and pasted it below (minus the typos on the AO post)

"Whether you think industry analysts are rock stars or jerks you are probably not using your time and money investment with them effectively

Ask vendors their definition of “Evil Empire” – and it is likely not Oracle or Microsoft, but Gartner. Ask them after they have cooled down after a 10 minute tirade about Gartner who their favorite analyst is and it is likely Bruce Richardson at AMR Research – he is funny and friendly. Then ask them how many deals Gartner lost them or AMR won them and you will likely get a blank stare. They do not know. And if they do, the numbers are probably far less – both ways - because the average buyer keeps his own counsel. Analysts are just one small contributor to his decision making process. But as an industry we sure spend a lot of time, money and emotion around analysts.

I have been blessed and cursed to be part of analyst ecosystem for a while now. At PwC, I ran an internal industry analysis group and was a consumer of AMR and other research. Then I was a Gartner analyst for 5 years following (and annoying) software vendors and outsourcers. I was next an entrepreneur and challenged and forced a revision on poor research one of the firms wrote about us (yes, it can be done!). I have been an expert witness in some high profile software litigation and have opined on analyst research. Now I am a sourcing consultant to CIOs and at times compete with the analyst firms. So you could say I have seen them from many angles.

Here’s some perspectives to consider:

a) The best analysts analyze market sectors, not vendors

I know marketing folks scrutinize positioning on “magic quadrants” with a magnifying glass but the best analysts focus on pattern recognition and sector trend analysis. Vendor execution and market share, more than analyst opinion, then determines quadrant positioning. One of the best sector calls I saw was when Erik Keller (and his team at Gartner) predicted the ERP market would slow down due to Y2K drivers in 98, not 99. Wall Street, other industry analysts, even Gartner Y2k analysts, the vendors disagreed vehemently, but he stuck to it – and he was right.

b) The better analysts spend more time buyers than with vendors

To be able to do a) well, analysts need to have their finger on the market pulse. Erik was hearing from many CIOs their Y2K "batten down" plans – and their timing did not mesh with the rosy stuff he was hearing from the ERP vendors. At Gartner, we were tracked on how many calls/meetings we did with buyer organizations (not sure if they still track this). In a couple of years my annual metric exceeded a thousand buyers. Some of my peers did even more. It is the elusive “voice of the customer” that we all seek.

As a vendor, you should be asking your analysts about similar buyer metrics. Even more importantly give them time to focus on buyers. The average analyst has to sit through so many mind-numbing vendor presentations. Get coaching from Bill Hopkins at Knowledge Capital Group on how to succinctly, and only infrequently, brief analysts. Less is more. Give them time – indeed, force them to spend more time with buyers and then summarize the "voice". If they are not spending time with buyers, they get bored and create FUD (see Louis Columbus’s great post FUD is Analysts’ Oxygen on AO).

c) The analyst is a small contributor to the buyer decision process

As I started working more with CIOs as a consultant than as a remote analyst, the revelation set in that buyers use analyst firms primarily as a "check mark". Only during a step or two in a sales funnel process do buyers actually reach out to analysts. They read analyst written reports even less. The highest impact of analysts is in the short listing process but in equally important scripted scenario, site visit or contract negotiation steps their impact is far less. Most analyst firms have consultants available to hire on a project basis, but it is a different talent and incentive pool from the research analysts. So while encouraging analysts to spend more time with buyers, understand that they are getting input on only certain elements of the procurement cycle.

d) The average vendor spends way too much time and money on analysts

A convergence of poor execution by the analyst firms, global labor trends and other factors point to analyst firms being significantly over priced at this point – see my blog Analyzing Analyst Economics Then if you add the time and money your marketing folks spend briefing analysts and at their events, add in similar effort by your PR firms and other analyst “groupies” – you get the “TCO” picture. All this, while most vendors have not thought about what to about blogs, new forms of user groups – new “influencers”. Most vendors should rethink this whole area.

When I first joined Gartner, a vendor called and asked how it felt to be a movie critic. I was a bit offended – here I was counseling companies on $ 100m ERP project decisions. But he was so right. Vendors are the Spielbergs – nothing an Ebert said could really have helped “Minority Report” and nothing could have sunk “Private Ryan”. May be Spielberg should have called Ebert before he made "Minority Report" and listened to the "voice" of the consumer.

Is there a hyphen in "anal retentive"?

may not sound like a compliment, but this was the ultimate tribute my friend Judith Rothrock got from Barry Wilderman, a respected Meta analyst a few years ago. Judith was the marketing executive who brought spark to Hyperion, then Lawson when I was at Gartner. She made you listen, watched what analysts said like a hawk, brought passion to boring financial products. She now runs her own marketing firm - appropriately named Jrocket. Having worked with mostly large companies (she was also at IBM and Mobil before) I was not sure how she would do with smaller technology vendors - but I have talked to 3 of her clients in the last few months and she is just as effective.

You want passion, energy behind your marketing - Judith can provide you a nitro jolt! I am just glad I do not have to spar with her any more...better as a friend!