deal architect

What a treat!

Zoli arranged a lunch with Sridhar Vembu when I was in the Bay Area last week. I had met Sridhar briefly once before, and knew him as the CEO of Zoho, the innovative Office 2.0 solution. But as we went back to his office and he showed me the other products his developers in Chennai, India have developed, I was amazed at the variety, which made the lunch buffet at the Indian restaurant we had just left look sparse.

His company, AdventNet has a wide range of application management, security and other software. But I was even more impressed with his ethics and philosophy. I asked him what his exit plans were - he said he had already had a few offers, but his real passion is to build a large Indian software company. As I have written before India has produced a number of successful services firms like TCS and Satyam, but few successful software companies.

His view towards customers is epitomized in the quote from Gandhi on his site. His pricing philosophy is summarized in the guest column he wrote a few weeks ago. He sponsors Jambav a site aimed at kids for special needs. He hires teenage kids who realistically have zero hope of ever going to college and ever being hired by India's services firms, and encourages them to code and test.

Ok, so he probably will never approach YouTube's valuation and media appeal. But it sure is a treat to meet an entrepreneur who marches to a different beat. Customer before investor. R&D before marketing. Values before valuation.

More technology at the Ballpark

Last week while I was in the Bay Area there was talk of the San Francisco 49ers moving to Santa Clara. That would allow for a newer, more digital stadium, as this article talks about the new baseball stadium for the Oakland A's in Fremont.

The NFL's new commissioner, Roger Goodell, in his first interview a few weeks talked about leveraging more technology like "communication devices that could be used by players other than the  quarterback, who currently receives plays and instructions from a coach via a receiver in his helmet. Potentially, receivers and offensive linemen also could be outfitted with equipment that would help visiting offenses to better execute in extremely noisy stadiums."

My previous posts about how technology is influencing

American Football
Super Bowl
Baseball
Winter Olympics
Soccer Balls
Jogging and more
Daytona 500

The evolution of Thanksgiving

As we live in the world of social networks where news travels amazingly fast, I have always been fascinated at how the first Thanksgiving in 1621 spread over 3 days has grown virally and morphed over the centuries. Today we fly cross-country, we watch football on high-def, we cannot wait to start holiday shopping on the web - oh, and we have compressed the dinner into one hour. And we have ethnic variations as the holiday has become increasingly secular. 

And the world has become far more complex - needy folks locally and our troops far away. But so much to give thanks for. Even if it means accepting that President Lincoln was a re-incarnated Hindu and chose Thursday as the day for the national holiday.

Thanks, my virtual reader friends for putting up with my rants and my raves. And, here's to hoping to more in-person get togethers in our travels - as I did last week in CA with several fellow bloggers - Charles, Bruno and Zoli.

Cheers.

"A Paradox that gets CIOs"

"It’ll be a neat trick if you can drive innovation and growth while tightly managing costs, compliance and risk." writes Abbie Lundberg at CIO Magazine. She then cites Gene Hall of Gartner as saying "that the number of CIOs getting fired is on the rise because "many CEOs believe that their CIO is [too] cost-focused and not capable of contributing to growth—and they need IT to contribute to growth."

What Kool-Aid are these industry luminaries drinking? Saving money from utility IT spend is far from over. In 3 transactions in the last few months I have in each case delivered to clients over 30% savings compared to incumbent spend (in one case 65%). Abbie and Gene are providing CIOs (and CEOs) bad advice if they tell them to stop crunching that spend (including their spend on Gartner)

On the other hand with the huge amount of innovation going on - from web 2.0 to mobility to telemetry to SaaS and much more - if CIOs cannot leverage at least some of that innovation, they do deserve to move on.

Tastes Great. Less Filling.  It's not either or.

Who put our oil under their sand?

No, this is not about a bumper sticker I once saw in Texas.

This is about Entitlement culture in the tech sector.

The E word came up during a conversation with a client this week as he talked about the attitude of his long term tech vendors

But not just vendors - I was reminded of E when I read on Thomas Otter's blog about the coffee spilling episode - how dare some one say IT does not matter?

Thomas talks about the alternative in Bulgaria. Unfortunately, around the world in Bangalore and Beijing, IT staff sit in air conditioned comfort and believe they deserve more than other white and blue collar staff. The E culture in our industry is not localized.

I am constantly reminded of it when I hear vendors say they need to increase their share of the customer's wallet. In some societies that is called picking pockets.

When I hear young punk entrepreneurs say "how dare the CIO block us? We will go direct to the business users and get our fair share of the wallet"

When I hear IT staff berate their internal customers with a steady stream of technology jargon, and proclaim how smart they are to be even able to pronounce some of the stuff.

Three words for our industry - zero base budgeting. What have you done recently for your customer - internal or external? Today, yesterday, tomorrow - every day. Till we do, folks like Nick Carr will be right to keep asking - does IT matter?

Captives, Contracts, Communities, Crowds

I was invited to present this week to the Young Presidents Organization in San Francisco on Global Talent Sourcing . Several others presented on strategy and execution issues - including speakers from McKinsey, Everest Group  and entrepreneurs shared their own war stories from India, Philippines and E. Europe.

I am delighted that entrepreneurs are looking at global talent while their companies are still young. It was fascinating to hear one audience member describe himself as the "outsourced CEO" - he and few others are in the US, the rest of his team offshore.

My basic message was to not get stuck in analysis paralysis like I see at so many large companies. Three religious wars - whether to outsource, what to outsource, where to outsource - put many companies in neutral when they could be executing, making mistakes, improving. And I pointed out the issues with both captives and outsourced arrangements.

I also encouraged the audience to look at talent in emerging community and crowdsourcing models.  Finally, I reminded the audience the good old USA is for many is still the best "offshore location" - when you add in the total cost of travel, time zone, accent, process familiarity and other issues beyond the basic cost of labor.

My slides are below.

Download ypo_slides.pdf

New Florence posts

Posts on my other innvoation blog

Improved Video Searching
Next Gen Grocery Carts
Personal Infoclouds
Software Quality
Business Process Cross-Fertilization
Web Science 101
Jogging
Power Grids
Side Roads
Home Security via cell phone

Electronic Deposit, Paper Float

Banks are starting to roll out electronic deposits for small businesses as this NYTimes article describes. If I do not have to go the branch, it is a good week.

But I made 2 ATM deposits over the last couple of days in the BofA corporate account - and checking my account electronically this morning they still do not show.

Then banks love to get you on float. Here is the explanation of a charge BofA hit me for:

"Funds are held to allow the deposited item to clear the paying bank, and this process takes two to five business days. If the funds deposited are used within the time that we are waiting on the check to clear, you will be assessed a fee, as this is considered a short-term loan"

Nothing about paying my company interest on the "short term loan" we give the bank in the form of a bank balance, though...

Your personal "speed gun"

I have received 2 tickets in the last 4 years which I thought were unfair. I guess everyone does, but both I believe were "speed traps" which the AAA defines as "traffic enforcement measures and practices which are designed to raise revenue rather than prevent crashes or where there is evidence that enforcement is not justified by sound engineering principles."

I now wish I had had the CarChip in both cases.

One was for supposedly not coming to a full stop in the middle of an Indian reservation in the Everglades. The kids needed a rest break and two cops were waiting at this obscure stop which averages a car every few minutes. I called the AAA and they recommended I fight it because it had all the symptoms of a speed trap. I took a day off, drove back to the spot, took pictures and went fully prepared to explain to the judge in Naples the physics of my full stop. The judge flipped through the photos with little enthusiasm and told me something to the effect of "The cop is a professional whose version I trust more". If I had a CarChip, I suspect this particular judge would have had the same bored look if he had flipped through its data. But then again, it would have told me for sure if I just slowed down to 2 mph and rolled through the stop.

The other one I had just accelerated from a stop sign. Again 2 cops. One stopped me and told me I was going 35 in a 25  zone.  I told  him I could physically not done that given the distance from the stop and asked to see the radar gun. He refused.  As I tried to  comment on the citation his refusal to show me evidence he threatened to arrest me if I wrote anything beyond just signing it. With my son in the seat behind me getting traumatized I just agreed. I thought about calling Orlando's mayor about his finest, but figured it would just be another waste of time. I wished again I had a CarChip. May be the cop was right all along.

If cops knew we had our own "speed guns" would they issue fewer questionable tickets? Would we dispute fewer? I think so - what do my readers think?

Shock and Awe

Readers of my blog know I am tough on IBM. I guess I expect lots from the world's largest technology vendor. 

But in a recent outsourcing deal, I got a glimpse of IBM's arsenal - and what it can pull together when it sets its mind and bureaucracy to an account it wants to win. Remote application management from a US center, backed up with mirror organizations from Argentina and India. The US contact center in a calm, controlled environment with noise canceling technology and impressive application specific knowledge bases. The data center in a Kevlar protected, redundant-everything setting elsewhere in the US. Clean cut project managers, accountants and technicians in business casual clothing. Oozed confidence, yet not intimidating. There are so many physical and intellectual assets at play that the client's one concern is whether IBM's delivery management can coordinate it all. All this at price points offshore firms could not match.

Too good to be true? The proof is in the delivery pudding, but it sure is nice to see IBM pull it together. It would be even better to see IBM do this on a consistent basis in a number of deals.

Update: Sadagopan points out that HP has overtaken IBM as the largest global tech vendor, and that Accenture is now ranked as the largest systems integrator. I say this is good for IBM - unburdened of the crown it can focus on customers - performance like what I describe above is what is needed, not just bulk.