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On New Florence. New Renaissance.

$ 100 Laptop
Brazil and Ethanol
Public Schools
Office 2.0
Memory Spots
International Travel Traps - Jetlag and Plugs

HP buys Mercury

This weekend I was bantering with Thomas Otter of SAP about SOX and his response was its GRC focus was more around governance, less around compliance. And I responded then he ought to look at what Mercury has done in that space. With their acquisition of Kintana a few years ago they started positioning themselves in that space. Along with their testing suite and other IT management and SOA governance tools, Mercury had evolved in to "an ERP suite" for the CIO

So HP's acquisition makes sense as it competes for the data center against IBM, CA, BMC, CompuWare. This complements its own OpenView systems management product line. It also broadens its own software revenue stream, still tiny compared to Microsoft, IBM, Oracle.

Since its options scandal and related restatement and SEC scrutiny, Mercury has been rumored as a takeover candidate. I guess EMC and Oracle, two logical candidates have M&A fatigue after their spate of acquisitions. This is HP's first major acquisition since Compaq.

Mercury has largely grown in recent years through acquisitions. Will HP have to continue that posture or get enough synergies from its larger channel and OpenView leverage?

Update: James Governor adds a few more perspectives

Process Angioplasty - Dollar Rent a Car

I rent from Dollar for 4 reasons

- often 30 to 50% cheaper than Hertz and other majors
- 3 out of 4 times, they upgrade me
- the cars always seem new - less than 3K on them
- pretty generous Southwest frequent flyer credits for short rentals

But every time I do rent from them I wonder why.

They have a check-out process which could easily be automated - considering they do it thousands of times each hour. Instead, they print contracts out only after you show (about 20% of the time they will have pre-printed it awaiting your signature) and make you initial/sign in 4 places. Then as you drive out you have to sign another form after visually checking the car for dings and dents.

Hertz on the other hand, as I described here, has your signature on file (at least for regular customers) so prints your contract before you arrive and places it in your designated car. All you have to do is show your license and contract as you drive out. No signatures, no visual checks. Do their cars not get dinged? The cost of making customers sign for each instance just does not provide tangible enough benefits.

It costs Dollar 5-15 minutes of employee time for each transaction. Worse, it costs their preferred customers 20-30 minutes and their less frequent customers 30-60 minutes depending on the lines. In a competitive world, that means a number of customers never come back after such an experience.

Technology can dramatically improve customer service - by dramatically reducing the "face time" your employees need to have with your customer.

Dollar would do well to perform angioplasty of the manual steps and the paperwork. They have so many other positive things going, but the check out process is just shabby...

Is SOA always SO LARGE?

Dennis Howlett keeps telling me there are plenty of SOA success stories - customers are just shy about talking about them. Love to see them, because most I find fall in to 2 categories:

a) Large, mega implementations. Infoworld has a nice article this week on Wachovia's SOA adoption path. But like amazon.com, and Guardian Life  the time scales and economics are not for the faint. Wachovia's been at it 20 months so far. To "get the ball rolling" they recruited 265 technologists. $ 100 million + a year investment. I am sure the payback is impressive but few IT groups have shown ability to control such large projects well or get funding approved for such mega projects.

b) Customers with less custom apps who are waiting for their backbone apps vendor to deliver their SOA. And that re-architecting has been mega projects for their vendors and will be mega migrations for their customers.  Oracle promises Fusion applications starting in 2008  but little information on migration effort. SAP has been rolling out ESA for several years and does not expect even half its customers to have migrated in the next 5 years. Lawson leveraged IBM WebSphere tools and has managed to spring a short lead over other apps competitors.

I had a nice conversation last week with Don Rippert, CTO of Accenture and I have invited him to write a guest column on what he says they recommend to clients - a phased approach to SOA adoption.

As they say - how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time... 

LinkedOut!

My nephew sends me an invite to join his LinkedIn network. My nephew! He who knows every phone number and email I own!!

Just busting his chops, but seriously I get so many invites from LinkedIn and when I do accept them (every few weeks I feel guilty and sign in), 98% of them have NOTHING to tell me. It's just another notch on their belt. I have 4 contacts who have 500+ connections each!

I try to emulate Peggy Taylor - I try hard to respond to every email and phone and Skype and TypePad message I get. If you need to reach me, my contact info is in the profile. Open door.

I know lots of people love LinkedIn, but if you need to reach me, please just reach out to me directly ...cheers

Update: I just got a LinkedIn invite from good friend Chris Selland - it says "You had BETTER accept this!"

The Baker. er Blogging, Street Irregulars

No Sherlock or Watson or Wiggins associated with this group.  No hit with great sax played about our street - yet.

But the core group of bloggers from Sapphire have stayed together and added a few more strays along the way and have been christened the Irregulars.

They hold periodic audioconferences - and continue to produce great work like Jason with a summary from the last call about AppExchange.

In addition, they hang out at CrispyNews and comment about lots of happenings around enterprise technology.

Come play with the Irregulars!

Oracle as Industry Analyst

Courtesy of Jason Busch I saw this Oracle white paper (registration required) which advises organizations NOT to invest too much on spend analysis projects .

I think it is good solid advice - better than what the analysts are providing. I would just change a few words per below (italics mine)

"Many organizations are spending millions of dollars and countless man hours on ERP, CRM and other enterprise software spend analysis projects that do not deliver on the promise that our and SAP's salepeople have made of global sourcing.

Organizations are struggling and devoting increasing resources including expensive third party implementation resources to elaborate, long term spend analysis projects around our software ...."

Seriously, why not also recommend customers only implement general ledger functionality as against complete ERP functionality, or just SFA versus more elaborate CRM functionality...and while at it why not also issue Oracle's own version of the Magic Quadrant for these categories?

Why Johnny cannot phone

This World Information Society Report calculates for each country a Digital Opportunity Index (DOI) using various rating factors listed in the chart  (click to enlarge)

The US shows up 22nd!!!

I hope each Senator evaluating Net Neutrality reads the report and gets upset at the state of our digital union.

BusinessWeek has a depresssing story on telcos and why they do not still get it.

If you think Microsoft with partners like Nortel will make it much better, John Drovak disagrees.

Darn, forgot to pack Rolaids

When a major newspaper like FT interviews a major figure like Nandan Nilekani, CEO of Infosys you expect more than the description of the dining room and snarky comments on the meals both ate summarized at bottom of article as:

naan
chapattis
chopped vegetables
tandoori chicken
shepherd's pie
curd
chocolate cake
green tea

The rest is a revisit of what Tom Friedman wrote in the World is Flat. No real tough questions on whether India has peaked. How the recent explosions in Mumbai will/will not affect business.

I guess did not want to cause any heartburn around that gourmet meal, eh? Or perhaps did not want to face local ayurvedic antidotes for acid reflex?

Room to Read

I wrote about John Wood (ex-Microsoft) and his charity here. In the past six years, they have established 2,500 libraries and 210 schools in Nepal, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and elsewhere.

The New York Times interviews him here.

BusinessWeek on its upcoming cover highlights emerging MNCs from BRIC (Brzail, Russia, India, China) and other emerging markets. But that is a glorified look at the upper crust from these economies.

The reality of these emerging markets shows up in John's upcoming book (he sent me a preview copy). It will give viewers a look at the bottom of the pyramid - and the opportunities and the challenges.