deal architect

Two recommended CRM Blogs

I was recently introduced to Bruce Hadley's blog.  He is well respected in the vendor community (especially in CRM world) and provides professional and fair coverage. It was nice to see from his blog Larry Ellison offer help to and Greg Gionforte (RightNow) defend salesforce.com during one of its outages. Even as they beat the crap out of it on individual sales deals. Larry is an individual investor in salesfoce.com though professes to want to see his investment be written down to zero.

I was also introduced to Jim Berkowitz's CRM Mastery blog. Differently from Bruce's Jim has more of a practitioner perspective. He links to a variety of perspectives on CRM vendors and also broader customer centric topics.

Both useful CRM resources.

What happened to 4P's of Marketing?

OK, so I may be carbon dating myself - but my Marketing 101 class talked about the 4p's - Product, Promotion, Place and Price. Realize that marketing has become a lot more complex, but I find few tech marketing folks seem to be involved in price book decisions.

Seth Godin, uber-marketer, posts an entry titled Most people don't really care about price. He tones it somewhat in his post  "...price is a signal, a story, a situational decision that is never absolute". I disagree - in a deflationary tech market, pricing is hugely important. Too many marketers try to coach their salesforces to "value sell" and provide them glib "objection handlers" to defend out-of-touch pricing.

Jeff Nolan of SAP indicates presentations have become part of their marketing P's. A well developed and delivered presentation is a joy. But from a buyer's perspective, a well priced product is even more delightful.

Pricing is too important for marketers to leave to their accountants and analysts. And even worse to let their salespeople do it deal by deal.

Blogroll feedback

Ok, so I officially feel guilty.

A reader sent me an email (probably did not want to embarrass me by making a comment on the blog)

"So you love technology blogs - then why no Blogroll...? I know a lot of folks LINK to you"

Partly because I myself do not follow many Blogroll links. I follow threads of discussions and links within posts. So, I similarly link quite a bit within my posts.

I have seen Dennis Howlett's roll grow and grow. On the other hand, I see Jeff Nolan moved away from them when he switched to Wordpress.

So. readers, please give me some feedback...happy to put up a roll if you would find that handy.

10 Years in Supply Management

Courtesy of Jason Busch, I saw this 10 year retrospective on how supply (procurement) management has evolved. It has been a quite a decade. Marketplaces. E-procurement. Global sourcing, not just from China and India. Procurement BPO.

But as I wrote here technology procurement has been a bit of a backwater. Few technology procurements have used auctions. For all the talk around offshoring, few procurement shops have done much global technology sourcing. Lots of opportunities for improvement processes, vendor management, tools to make that a lot more sophisticated - and to derive much more value from the technology spend which accounts for 10% of revenues in some industries.

"When the average corporation makes 25-30% gross margins, how can sourcing say they are doing a good job when their software vendors are making 90% gross margin on their annual maintenance? Offshore vendors - supposedly " cheap" - making 45%? For every dollar in technology spend, their peers in raw material or other indirect procurement have to severely beat down those vendors to average out the high margins in technology spend."

We should join Supply Management in celebrating the advances in sourcing and spend management, but we have lots more to do.

IBM's Global Innovation Outlook

I have been hard on IBM recently but need to credit it for its Global Innovation Outlook (GIO) Report which I saw courtesy of Sadagopan.

"In 2005 and 2006, the GIO 2.0 gathered 248 thought leaders from nearly three dozen countries and regions, representing 178 organizations across four continents for 15 “deep dive” sessions to discuss three focus areas and the emerging trends, challenges and opportunities that affect business and society:

• The future of the enterprise
• Energy and the environment
• Transportation and mobility"

Lots of neat insights in each of those areas.

In 2004, IBM had released GIO 1.0 which had covered

• The future of healthcare
• The relationship between government and its citizens
• The intersection of work and life."

The GIO 2.0 is a nice summary of the opportunities for innovation in technology, process, networks, everything. IBM's Irving Wladawsky-Berger blogs about it here.

My question for IBM - how are enterprises going to fund innovation? Today my advice is it has to come out of utility spend enterprises make with IBM, EDS, Oracle etc. Does IBM have alternative funding advice or is it going to slash its utility pricing?

Why I love technology blogs

4 5 posts this week confirmed for me why some of the best technology analysis and reporting is being done by bloggers, not MSM or industry analysts.

Paul Kedrosky comparing subtle changes in Google management risk assessment in its 2004 and 2005 annual reports.

Robert Scoble giving air time to a Microsoft attorney (timely as the EU wants closed hearings it its Microsoft antitrust case)

Tom Foremski highlighting the "15 year anniversary of the article series that started Open Source systems"

Nicholas Carr talking about Warren Buffett's views on technology investments.  BTW - I diaagree with Mr. Buffett as I wrote here.

Guy Kawasaki's little-to-do-with-technology-but-feel-good post on "sucking down". I will still avoid United Airlines but I think his tips will help regulate blood pressure better.

Fellow bloggers, we have many petty battles in blog world, but varied posts like the ones above from investor, employee, commentator and other angles just make me proud of how well this medium is evolving - and helping us debate the present and future of technology and celebrate its past. Much more so than the one-way communications most MSM and analyst groups continue to deliver.

The Power to Predict

The CEO of Tibco, Vivek Ranadive has put together a book of case studies on how innovative companies are leveraging technologies to advantage. Readers of this blog know I love to write about "applied" technology - what CIOs do with technology building blocks. They are the unsung heroes even as we like to celebrate high-tech entrepreneurs and vendors.

Dennis Howlett and Tom Foremski provide their endorsements.

37 ways to leave your software vendor

"...the answer is easy if you take it logically..."

with apologies to Paul Simon

37Signals is a neat little SaaS company. Neat because they build web based apps and development tools and proudly say they are "products that do less". Neat because they are based in Chicago away from the hype. Neat because they only have 7 employees. And yet get product out at what BusinessWeek calls warp speed.

They question Google's definition of constraint based development. I hate to think what they think of Oracle or Microsoft's R&D.  A clue - their site says "Join us and say goodbye to bloated software"

Update: I expected reaction from larger vendors, but I notice James McGovern, an enterprise architect at The Hartford, has started a healthy debate about why Ruby (which 37Signals uses) is not ready for the enterprise -  over 20 comments  most disagreeing with him. I suspect we will see a lot more debates and name calling like "bloated" and "immature" go on.

A C.E.O. Who Wouldn't Say 'I Settle'

NY Times reports on the SEC case (that it dropped after 5 years) against Gary Kennedy, former CEO of TenFold.

I have written before about the need to revisit software revenue recognition cases the SEC seems to love to bring against software vendors:

"...the rules were written when license sales were the dominant portion of software vendor revenues."

"...it is interesting that the SEC does not apply the same rigor to capitalization of software costs by buyers...."

"When (software) discounts approach 90% of list, talk about rigorous revenue recognition is well - as they say in Texas, cheap."

Time for the industry and the SEC to rethink the issues.

Building the A380 in 7 minutes

Courtesy of Sadagopan I saw this 7 minute video on the process to produce the mammoth new Airbus. I love big birds. With all the travel I have done over my career, I still look forward to flights on Boeing 747-400s.

Of course, the A380 is even bigger (555 passengers in all double decker format) (click on this interactive site to compare it to the 747 or to a VW Golf and an elephant), can fly further (8,000 nautical miles), embodies more technology advancement (from composites to engine efficiency to over billion lines of software) and has more creature comforts (from entertainment systems to even showers). Read about them here and here.

A big annoyance: Not one major US airline has signed up as a charter customer. In the days when Pan Am was a dominant international airline, it was a charter for the 747. Nowadays, the global leaders are Singapore Airlines and BA while our majors struggle for survival. 

Frequent flyer miles are not going to be enough to make me fly on a Delta 767 when the competing choice is A380. With the world getting flatter, the A380 is going to be the bus for the changing trunk routes around the world.