deal architect

Generation X meet Generation G

I have written before about my wish  for our young - that they actively become part of the burgeoning Generation G around the world.

But why just our young? What about 30, 40, 50 year olds?

I was pleased to see Francisco D'Souza, who recently took over the CEO reins at Cognizant, write his vision of The Future of Globalized Services. I have had numerous occasions to deal with Francisco. Usually we are on opposite sides of the table, but he is easy to deal with, responsive, low-fuss (not sure he thinks that of me -)). 

Francisco is comfortable in Africa (where he was born) or India (where he has most of his staff) or New Jersey (where he lives). He is Generation G in Generation X clothing.  I predict Cognizant will have a much easier time transiting to truly global delivery because of him compared to Indian firms who talk about global delivery but primarily do it out of India.

I was also pleased to see Rusty Weston launch a site called My Global Career. I have written columns for Rusty over the years at Information Week and other publications he has edited. He too wants to bring Generation G to Generation X.

I spent much of my 20s working in different countries for PwC.  And global careers were not common back then and I got lost in the HR admin shuffle a few times - so all that travel did not help my overall career back then.

As global careers become routine, may be fun to do it again.

But  wait, I already have a global career looking at my Delta statement  I think in big companies and small, global careers are going to be routine. Especially at small companies which are Micro-Multinationals from inception.

New Florence Posts

On my innovation blog

Technology and Indian tribes
Founders at work
Mashup Montage
The Machine is Us/ing Us
Second Life on your Mobile
MySpace as 911
The Medium of Food
Long Distance Churches

Hello!

At the Oscars last night, Apple ran commercials for its planned iPhone. It celebrated tens of clips from films with characters saying hello, yo, hey-ya ...it was very well done, I thought.

Meanwhile YouTube is running a commercial for its many other likely uses.

To misquote Elton John "Hello seems to be the hardest word"

A Michelangelo should not charge Sistine Chapel rates...

...for painting a farmer's barn".

As I was reviewing old Gartner notes I wrote in the 90s for this post, I stumbled across the quote above I had used in a report in 1998. It was from a ruling at a US Circuit Court.

Brian Sommer explaining salesforce.com's success says "Benioff's more right than even he knows". I would change the statement to say "Benioff's priced more right than he even knows". Without even trying to, he has raised awareness about the economics of enterprise software - and also hosting, apps maintenance, upgrades. The software and related infrastructure has been around for a decade or two and implemented and supported thousands of times. Certainly not one-off, artistic stuff.

Now comes Google Apps, the premier version. $ 50 a user a year. Forget the apps - get it just for the 10 GB of storage with a 99.9 % SLA. Google is similarly providing a lens that not just Microsoft applications, but traditional hosting, storage etc are over priced. OK, so concerns about integration with active directory, encryption, and legal concerns about emails being sub-poenaed will preclude some companies from seriously considering Google Apps, but no reason why they cannot use it as a benchmark when they negotiate with HP or CSC.

There are plenty of enterprise areas which are "barns" and crying out for SaaS, SaCS and Utility pricing.

So tell your incumbent vendors they are troppo caro. With the money you save you can afford to go see the Sistine Chapel. Many times. Even on a weak dollar.

Holy Cow!

You may have seen a previous version about corporations from different countries and what they would do with 2 cows.

Here's a technology vendor twist.

ACCENTURE
You have 2 cows. And thousands of calves. And converted school buses to transport them.

APPLE
Two cows extremely unhappy that company, emboldened by the iPhone settlement, is rumored to be thinking of a Big Mac ad campaign, Supposedly the chubby PC character from the current campaign will ask to SuperSize everyone's Vista.

AT&T
You have two cows. You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows. Then you hire a consultant to analyze why the cow drops dead. You re-purchase the other and hire other consultants to rename it.

BRITISH TELECOM
You have two cows. Both are mad.

GOOGLE
You have one cow. You sell one inch squares on the cow as advertising space. You are considering tearing down the "you can make money without doing evil" sign on the tail to free up even more advertising space.

GROUPE BULL
You have two cows. You go on strike, organize a riot, and block the roads, because you want three cows.

HP
You have two cows. You package your milk in print cartridges. Per ounce that costs more than even SAP's milk.

HUAWEI
You have two cows. And a billion workers. The cows yield the cheapest milk in the world. But the Chinese censors will not let you advertise your product on the Google cow.

IBM
You have many cows. They all yield blue milk and have red polka dots around their necks.

INFOSYS
You have two cows. They freely roam the streets of Bangalore. People worship them and give them right of way because they are at Level 5 of the Cow Maturity Model.

MICROSOFT
You have 101 cows. They are named Vista, Media Center, Mobile,  Lucky, Pongo....

NOKIA
You have two cows. You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. Your engineers are constantly looking for places to put more antennae.

ORACLE
Like Microsoft you have many cows. But you walk around offering to buy everyone else's cows.

SALESFORCE.COM
You have two cows. You tell everyone else they don't need cows, just milk. And you promise a 99.9% service level of delivery of milk by 6 am every morning.   

SAP
You have two cows. They are named R/3 and A1S. You think Microsoft cow names are so 1990s. Your gallon of milk costs more than the entire Huawei cow.

TELESP - Brazil
You have two cows. You have trained them to yield ethanol.

Lies, Darn Lies and Statistics

"India will take at least 163 years to match China’s research workforce of 850,000 even if Beijing were to freeze the number today" - courtesy of Indyvation

Yes, I hope some of that Chinese research is going in to building a Fountain of Youth. I would like to buy that statistician a drink in 163 years....

What SOA sounds like to the business user

SOAP,  WSDL, ebXML, UDDI -  this sales guy can help you sell it.

No wonder business folks are screaming for IT to order thousands of licenses...

TechTarget's Favorite Technology Blogs

TechTarget lists its favorite blogs in various categories here.

Deal Architect made the list - thank you readers for the support, and especially those that may have recommended the blog to the editors.

Impressively, the Enterprise Irregulars just about swept that category.  Prof. Andrew McAfee,  Dion Hinchcliffe,  Ross Mayfield,  Rod Boothby and Sadagopan 's blogs were also selected.  And Thomas Otter's was selected in the SAP category. 

Drinks at Spago's -)

Of Potatoes and Protein

I love potatoes. Shows in my slender figure. But I cannot change the reality that I will get 7 to 8 times as much carbs as protein from them spuds.

Brian Sommer laments, like I do, the lack of innovation from the major ERP vendors. But then he goes on to say "the consultancies are the clear leaders here (around innovation)".

That's where I have to bring in the potato analogy. Services firms - and telcos - don't do innovation. They talk about it, expect premium for it, but they deliver bulk. Brian and I both played the game at Accenture and PwC respectively.

Last year BusinessWeek reported "While Intel Corp spent $ 5.1 billion last year on research and development, AT&T spent just $ 130 million. The word "research" doesn't even appear in Verizon's annual report"

Ditto for services firms.

I would rather goad SAP and Oracle and Cisco and Siemens into more innovation, and cheer on emerging startups which push them in to innovation, than expect it from Accenture and AT&T.

I want bulk from the latter - at staple prices.

The ERP Center of Hype?

Much as I respect my fellow Irregular, Sadagopan, I cringed when I read his post ERP's Center of Gravity shifts to India.

It reminded me of the huge staffing numbers the Deloittes and Accentures would throw out in the ERP boom of late 90s (when at Gartner I had the job of listening to and smiling at their claims).

In May 1998 I co-authored 2 sizable reports on the state of ERP implementation services. One of them was titled "The Mirage of Choice" and it summarized:

"...in a $19 billion application services market, there should be plenty of opportunities for real differentiation. Instead, there is resource clustering around the leading application vendors (e.g., SAP and PeopleSoft as compared to QAD or Computron), life-cycle coverage(e.g., implementation as compared to post-live maintenance), business processes (e.g. finance as compared to product design) and vertical markets (e.g., consumer packaged goods as compared to banking)."

India's ERP services 9 years later are similarly clustered - with some differences. Most of India's ERP experience is in post-live apps support. When it comes to first time implementations, many clients still use Western firms ( I had 3 clients last year in different vertical markets which were uncomfortable using Indian firms for their implementations, even though they have used Indian firms in other IT areas). The feedback around India is the level of functional knowledge in many areas is still pretty shallow. So considerable work is in the coding, testing, diagnostics. Indian vendors are heavily concentrated around SAP and Oracle. They are risk averse and secondary software vendors have a hard time getting their attention. In spite of the clustering, Indian vendors like the Westren firms in the 90s continue to expect a premium for their ERP services compared to other IT services.   

To me, the growth of Indian ERP services reflects an end of life phenomenon. After 30 years+ of ERP (and previous MRP forefathers), the market should be much more mature and reflect much more reasonable price points. I think Indian vendors have a huge opportunity to go in and sell  SaCS and third party maintenance to vast numbers of incumbent ERP customers (not just SAP and Oracle). At the right price points and service levels.

No hype needed.

Update : Sadagopan responds