deal architect

SOX in US, BOTOX in UK?

While US accountants are focused on Sarbanes Oxley, Dennis Holwett points to image and other issues with accountants in the UK..

Symantec - Security, Storage, Sigh

9/11. Privacy. SOX. Exploding data. Connected users worldwide.

Why is Symantec not doing well even as it sits atop two of the hottest markets in IT - security and storage?

BusinessWeek reports "Symantec Chief Executive John Thompson is used to hearing doomsday scenarios. But usually those dour outlooks focus on threats by computer worms or malicious hackers -- not the state of his own company."

Future City

Courtesy of Charlie Bess of EDS I saw that the Finals of the National Engineers Week Future City Competition are on this weekend.

Future City asks middle school students to create cities of the future, first on computers and then in large tabletop models. Nice way to encourage budding engineers and scientists...

Of Extinction and Consolidation

Newsweek reports on the stunning find of 39 new species on a mountain top in Papua, Indoensia. Click through the picture gallery for some wild and weird new (ancient?) breed

In related news, word is coming from all around of a new breed of SaaS, open source, Indian, Chinese software vendors even as the industry worries about consolidation and extinction of a number of species...

Hey, some good news about Microsoft

Om Malik (actually guest columnist Matt Maier) feels good about Microsoft Mobile

Notice a pattern here - it takes Microsoft 2,3, 4 attempts to get a market segment going. Can you imagine how much more scary they would be with $ 6b in annual R&D and over $ 8 b in sales and marketing if they got more products done right the first time?

Nicholas Carr presents on Utility Computing

Nick Carr has graciously put up his slides from the pitch he made at the Open Source Business Conference. Less about open source, more about his vision for utility computing. (for my post on Oracle/Sleepycat click here)

I have never disagreed with his view of utility computing. The concept of giving up private "generators" and moving to centralized, shared, efficient utilities makes sense.

Where I continue to disagree with him on is whether IT Utilities are today, or will be tomorrow, more efficient than private, CIO driven "generators"

As I wrote in Utility Computing - Wish it was so easy

"EDS has over 100,000 employees. The average Fortune 500 CIO has 500 IT employees. Infosys has delivered over 18,000 projects using its GDM. The average CIO has done fewer than 10.  Microsoft spent $ 6 billion in R&D last year. The average Fortune  500 CIO's total IT budget (not just on software) is less than $ 50 m. Yet vendors cannot price their products or deliver performance on a utility scale model? How much more scale do they need?"

While SaaS models are being priced reasonably, and showing signs of reliability as utilities, overall private IT "generators" have a long life left yet. IT Utilities are still not priced right and need to dramatically improve delivery reliability. If each of us had to negotiate that hard and spend that much time monitoring our electric, water, gas, lawn service - our utilities -  we would have little budget or time left for anything else.

Of Constraints and Consumers

My post about Google's view of Innovation = Vision + Constraints, led to rebuttals by James Governor and one by David Heinemeier challenging how constrained Google development really is.

A comment by Chui Tey on James' blog, presents the issue from a consumer's POV.  He calls Google an "attention broker". We all have limited attention. Google has helped dramatically lowered attention needs for research. Google Maps for directions etc.

Extending that to the enterprise, vendors would do well to define innovation in terms of stretching customer budgets. The average Fortune 500 CIO has a $ 50 m a year budget. Optimizing that more requires much more constrained thinking than if  you are CTO at Microsoft with a $ 6 b R&D budget or Oracle with a $ 1.5 b budget. Constraining how much your systems integration partners charge to implement, how much pain your next release causes - are just as important.

We can argue about how constrained or not Google's development methods are. In the end the consumer's constraints are what matter more. Attention or budgets. I do not hear too many complaints from CIOs about Google - yet.

salesforce.com's transparency

Nice move by salesforce.com to show key up-time and other performance metrics for all to see. If you click on the red button for service disruption on February 8, you can see details of what happened.

As I predicted this is the year "SaaS models will come under increased scrutiny from buyers about stringent SLAs and business continuity plans.". I still expect larger customers will want to perform more detailed due diligence, but it is a gutsy move by salesforce.com to building confidence in SaaS.

Anxiety Amid the Prosperity

Interesting essay by Robert Samuelson

"A puzzle of our time is why the economy has become  increasingly stable while individual industries have become increasingly unstable."

While he talks about the broad economy, we can say that about the tech sector and its "towers". While overall technology spend continues to be flat or increase dramatic changes are happening in its composition. As I wrote in The Incumbent's Dilemma

"Never in my two decade long IT career have I seen as I do today so many tech sectors simultaneously in churn  And in many cases, the challengers are not the 6th or 8th market share player in the category but often brand new players out from left field."

Another large vendor with me-too SaaS

On the heels of SAP's ho-hum CRM SaaS, comes Microsoft's Office Live. 

Phil Wainewright writes Whatever Office Live is, it ain't the Web Office

Update: Jeff Nolan of SAP offers a more positive perspective. And he was himself not as generous about his own CRM SaaS

Also, Microsoft announces a delay in availability of the next version of Office.