deal architect

HP Cloudprint

I read this morning in the NY Times about HP's new offering - Cloudprint and I go this is a candidate for my New Florence innovation blog.  It promises "to share, store and print documents using a mobile phone." Many a times, I have gone into Kinkos on the road and spent a fortune printing stuff. So, I am excited - hey, maybe  HP has dreamed up a nano printer to go with my PDA.

But the HP site has no details (I searched for Cloudprint on their site), and the article says HP has been quiet about it. It appears to go as follows - you send HP a document, and they convert it to PDF format, and SMS you a document identifier code to your cell phone. Then you use the code to retrieve the document wherever you travel to.

But then I think Adobe has offered an on-line version for a long time now to convert documents to PDF and then store them on its servers. I could produce a PDF at home and store it on any online storage or email system. I could put files on a nano zip drive and carry them around. Heck I can even store and view PDF files on my PDA.  How does Cloudprint really let me get away from Kinko's?

Then I get it. They want to make it easy for me to keep using Kinko's. Through use of Google Maps they make it a bit easier for me to find Kinko's. So it reminds me  HP's printers at home are cheaper.  Just marginally cheaper.

Update: My ex Gartner colleague Carter Lusher left a URL for Cloudprint in the comments below. So I tried to use its directory to find print shop locations  - I found none in the 50 mile radius of Manhattan or Tampa. I did find 2 in Palo Alto, near HP's HQ. But they are restricted to HP employees. In fairness the Cloudprint site says "beta", but without even the Kinko's locations, not sure how helpful it can be. One future feature mentioned on the site which would be nice - Print CloudPrint documents to your home or office printer, no matter where you are and when you get back, your printed documents will be waiting for you...I can see using Cloudprint to store and print brochures or static documents you often need on the road, but for most other one-time use documents, the other options I mentioned above like a zip drive seem so much easier.

What is EDS's own Next Big Thing?

I enjoy perusing the EDS Next Big Thing Blog. It is written by the brains at EDS who are paid to look in to the future. Two recent posts - one on trends in storage and compute capacity  and their rapidly declining cost and another operational automation - caught my attention.

And raised the logical question: What is the company which just about invented outsourcing (at least infrastructure outsourcing) doing about both trends?

I would love to hear, on the first, what EDS is doing, for example, to get to price points amazon's elastic cloud can deliver - 15c a gigabyte  a month on its S3 service. If any one can  deliver utility  computing pricing EDS can. It has the scale which puts it on top of most of the stats (petabytes supported, help desk calls handled etc) I quoted in this note.

Second, what is it doing about operational automation? If anything, it seems to be investing more in offshore labor. Last year, EDS invested in the Indian services firm MphasiS.

In November 2005, I wrote a blog hoping EDS would share more about how it is transforming itself. I keep waiting for it. EDS's own next big thing.

 

Making your company run like a donkey

sorry I could not resist twisting Prof. Andrew McAfee's title for his post Making your company run like a Ducati

Defending ERP systems he says "Companies that go through the hard work of deploying enterprise IT and shutting off some of their pre-existing legacy systems are reducing their complexity, not increasing it." He is right, of course. The problem is the "shut off" over the last decade of ERP has been much lower than the "wall to wall" coverage promised by its salespeople.

In many verticals outside of manufacturing, the ERP vendors did not deliver enough functionality (see how few ERP packages even today have replaced legacy utility billing, telecom billing, insurance claims processing, banking DDA systems and a long list of major applications). And where ERP vendors did deliver vertical functionality, many of the vendors (some vertical specialists did better) priced those "vertical engines" expensively (argument being there are fewer customers to amortize the vertical investment across - and a bit of  "no CIO wants to custom build these any more, so we will justify the premium pricing").

Even within manufacturing, it is amazing how many companies mostly implemented core financial modules of the ERP package. So the complexity reduction that Prof. McAfee talks about has been much lower, on average, than ERP has promised.

In return though, we have paid dearly for the "lowered complexity". We have become dependent on expensive systems integrators and "SAP Basis jockeys". We have been put through a series of forced, often disruptive, upgrades. We have put up with amazingly poor quality from releases like Oracle 11i. And finally, we keep having to buy the license every few years in annual maintenance...

...talking of which, Ray Wang at Forrester and Jim Shepherd at AMR square off on the topic of third party maintenance in this SearchCIO article.

Ray goes ""If I could stop paying maintenance costs and sell those licenses, that would be very interesting. If I could use another provider to give maintenance at half the cost, that would be very compelling, but we don't have either...We don't actually have a perpetual license."

He takes the position I have for a long time -- see here, here, here . Just because you bought a Porsche you do not need to get your car serviced every time at their dealers.

Jim on the other hand goes "While 22% or 15% maintenance tax on the software sounds like a lot of money, (Shepherd) said it's the cost of doing business in a volatile environment subject to changes in both business practices (new regulations, privacy issues, etc.) and in the technology itself."

Jim, if the cost of doing business is so high, show me a software vendor which spends more than 5-7% of its revenues a year on "new" stuff - not bug fixes, not localization - new stuff? Plus, for major upgrades, don't many software vendors expect an incremental upgrade fee?

ERP has paid for a number of software industry Porsches ...we just need to retro-fit them with Ducatis -)

Burning question: Is cheap dangerous?

"Tainted imports: Are you next?" screams the cover of BusinessWeek SmallBiz

"Manufacturing in China seemed like a good idea. Then came poisonous pet food, faulty tires, and toxic toys"

Now it is turning to the consumer perception that "Cheap is Dangerous".

How will affect not just manufacturing around the world, but also IT and BPO to India, E. Europe other low cost markets? Indeed, I recently wrote "Offshoring to... the USA!" with the weak dollar making US products look awfully cheap to the Europeans. Will they also view US products as just less safe?

I take a number of clients on due diligence trips to their IT and other service providers around the globe. Will due diligence become even more intense? Will companies embed more of their quality and testing employees at the "source" - at vendor locations, at the beginning of the supply chain?

Or is it just statistically normal? When China exports over $ 1 trillion worth of goods to the world each year, can you not expect an occasional Ford Pinto or Vioxx?

Post your comments below...

Wiki Censorship

"Caltech graduate student Virgil Griffith just launched an unofficial Wikipedia search tool that threatens to lay bare the ego-editing  and anonymous flacking on the site. Enter the name of a corporation, organization or government entity and you get a list of IP addresses assigned to it. Then with one or two clicks, you can see all the anonymous edits made from those addresses anywhere in Wikipedia's pages." - Wired magazine

See what edits the CIA, the Mormon Church, Al Jazeera, Amnesty International and various corporations have made to entries in Wikipedia. Most you can chuckle at, others are just plain bizarre.

I can see a thriving business for consultants helping companies (re) define their Wikipedia access policies. And those about anonymous comments on blogs.

Champagne Tastes, Beer Pocket Money

Dan Farber laments that our favorite web services are far from the "five 9s" - SLA of 99.999% availability

"Skype (eBay), Cisco, salesforce.com, Yahoo, Google, Netflix, Six Apart, Craigslist, ZDNet and other CNET site–the list goes on of sites that have suffered more than a few hours of downtime for various services."

Of course, it would be nice to have that predictable an up-time, response time and other service levels. But are we willing to pay for it? And what is the rebate if delivery fails?

Corporations which pays lots to EDS and IBM and other outsourcers have most of their applications supported less than 100 hours a week (out of possible 168). Of course, global order entry, network, card processing and other systems stay up most of the time, but even there, there is plenty of downtime for scheduled and unscheduled maintenance. 

And they cost an arm and a leg in redundant, mirrored infrastructure. And when they do not meet the service level, the penalties and rebates are surprisingly low in most outsourcing contracts.

Of course, it is irritating when Sykpe or salesforce.com is down. But let's get real? Do we want to pay Verizon or IBM pricing for these services?

 

Maybe he should have stayed Virgin

Poor Don Carty. The new CFO at Dell presided over the investigation which led to this in NY Times

"The senior management of Dell regularly falsified quarterly returns from 2003 through 2006 to create the appearance that the company had met sales targets..."

Don presided over the near-bankruptcy filing at American Airlines in 2003. And he left to help Virgin establish its US operations.

As Virgin's first US flight took off a couple of weeks ago, Don probably should have stayed with that exciting new event in US aviation, than get into the mess at Dell.

Spilled Milk: Don't Cry. Mop Up. Move On.

Cynthia Rettig, writing in MIT Sloan Management Review, goes around the world with Tom Friedman and back a few years of research in to basically conclude payback from ERP sucks. Dennis Howlett laments the lack of solutions to the "ERP mess." But the mess has been going on for a while. Chris Koch of CIO Magazine, who Cynthia quotes, first interviewed me about ERP complexity in 1995.

The good news is Cynthia's article is in a publication which will get executive attention. Not that they do not know. I recently met an executive at a client about to start an ERP implementation. He sounded like a man headed to the gallows. Nervous, not excited about the project. (That afternoon, I felt really embarrassed for our industry that after 100K+ ERP projects, we still cannot  make it a no-brainer)

But it is way past talking about messes.  Companies are in various stages of ERP hangover management.  Not always looking at SaaS, as those vendors would have you believe. Not that easy to rip and replace a backbone ERP solution. But SaCS. And aggressive re-negotiation of ERP maintenance contracts, or moving to third party maintenance.

The only ones who do not seem to realize the party is over are the vendors, who are using SOA, compliance and more low payback justifiers to extend the run - and some of their implementation partners. 

Innovation Posts

On my New Florence blog

Jeff Han on a better user interface
Photo Clip Art
"Periodic Table of the Internet"
"The Next Big Thing" in Enterprise Software
Aggressive and Defensive Traffic -on the Network
Data Visualization at Digg
Technology and Global Youth
 

Can you spray paint innovation?

During my trip to Europe last week, someone told me about consumer protection in Scandinavia against the fine print in low fare airline marketing. You know the kind - 1 seat every 5 days on a flight at a particular fare - if you are wearing green socks and your middle name starts with Z. I found the guidelines here.

I think we need a similar set of guidelines for Oracle and SAP as they share their excitement about the cool and hip stuff they are doing with Web 2.0, Second Life etc.

Here's Oracle's Paul Pedrazzi on social apps behind the firewall at the vendor

"To “launch” our Alpha, I sent an email to a group of a few hundred people inside Oracle. In the first hour of operation we went from 3 users (Jake, Rich, and I) to over 270 users. After 10hrs we were nearing 2,000 users and today we hit 10,000. Just over 1/7th of the entire company in under 3 business days. No marketing. No master plan. This was an experiment, remember. We were dumbstruck."

And his colleague, Rich Manalang about building a social app in under 24 hours

"I started coding on a Thursday night and by mid-day Friday morning, I had the general pieces in place so that data can be entered. On Friday afternoon,... I made a few enhancements over Saturday and Sunday and by Monday, the site was live! It’s become such a popular site internally, that there’s talk of putting together a public facing IdeaFactory site for Oracle customers — I’m hoping that happens."

Here's SAP's Craig Cmehil at some of the cool stuff he is doing on Second Life

"...the SAP Community Network is having a brand new building built for use in the community, even have our first event almost completely planned out with two of the top contributors in the community."

This is neat stuff. It is good to see enterprise vendors try out the new, cool stuff - and  turn WIIFM to WIIFE - make consumery stuff more enterprisey.

It is also good to see Paul, Rich and Craig passionate and fired up...but, sadly, they represent that elusive "advertised fare" in their organizations.

You really think Oracle is ready to become transparent with its customers? You really think SAP and partners can implement anything for its customers in 24 days, let alone 24 hours? Can they come close to the web 2.0 rich experience for users? Will they ever get anywhere near price points we are seeing from pure play web 2.0 vendors?

Till I see massive transformations at both, all this cool stuff is a thin coat of innovation paint on old, overpriced products and business models.

So color me cynical. But I don't own green socks, and my middle name does not start with Z. And I like to save my clients real dollars, not virtual Second Life money.