deal architect

Where the Future begins

"Where the west begins" is how Fort Worth, TX (where I went to school) describes itself. I found myself there last week. It was delightful to see Maxine and Grant, now in their 80s, good hosts to this young pup back then. Nary a PC or mobile phone or HDTV in their lovely home.  It was great to see Nicholas, 6 - my cousin's son with every electronic toy known to man in the bustling new Dallas suburb of Frisco.

52 miles, 3 generations between the two. And countless accents and cuisines which now call that sprawling "metroplex" home.  Cross-currents of every sort.

And I thought what an appropriate end that trip was to a fascinating year.  Cross-currents of every sort. Plenty of clients willing to look at new frontiers - from utility computing to mashups to E. Europe. Over 500 posts on the Deal Architect blog on disruption in status quo in technology. 10 international trips for clients.  Over 300 blog posts on innovation in technology on the New Florence blog. Readers of my blogs from 191 countries. 

So, as I look forward to another year of cross-currents, I want to thank a few folks for the year that was:

Customers

One of my proudest moments this year was at a conference with plenty of VCs, entrepreneurs and software executives. At the beginning of my presentation I asked every CIO and CTO to stand up and had the audience applaud them. I believe in our industry we treat customers way behind investors and partners. So, my first set of thanks goes to my clients and technology buyers everywhere - we are nothing without you.

Readers

Thank you for letting this Marco Polo delight you and annoy you with the tales from my travels. You have many other options for your time, and I appreciate your debating, encouraging, or just plain skimming what I write.

Disruptors

My firm helps companies with reducing waste and fat in IT. No matter what we say though, nothing moves buyers more than having viable alternatives they can see and feel and touch. So here's to the SaaS, utility computing, new-wave outsourcing, third party maintenance, open source, VoIP and whole bunch of other vendors who challenge the status quo in the industry.

Innovators

Hands down, my most enjoyable activity every week is to catch up and catalog on the New Florence blog all the innovative CIOs and all the innovative vendors who are blazing new paths in nano-technology, telemetry, mobility and more.  My new year's resolution - write a book on the New Renaissance and celebrate all you innovators who keep making us go "wow" about technology.

Enterprise Irregulars

This band of ragmuffins has to be one of the smartest group of folks I have been associated with in a while. We debate fiercely - and we cannot agree on Twitter or Facebook or Google Groups as a messaging platform, but I would be remiss to not thank you for your camaraderie and insight on a wide range of topics.

Central and East Europeans

While I have enjoyed your beer and friendliness, my various trips this year have introduced me to how much you cherish freedom. We take it for granted. You lost it, and fear losing it again. I hope I can go to at least one new Central or East European country every year - and get a renewed boost of your zest for that precious commodity.

My family

I have an incredibly supportive family for allowing me to travel as much as I do.  And blog as much as I do.  I should thank you every day, not just at end of year. Make that another resolution for 2008

So please join me in a moment of melancholy and remember recently passed Dan Fogelberg and his version of Auld Lang Syne.

Then toast to technology to help navigate the cross-currents in 2008!

Safe Bets for 2008

That time of the year again. Resolutions to be made and broken by January 31 and predictions to be made and laughed at by February 15 .. so here's mine...in honor of the new Southwest boarding process I assigned them an A1 for most likely, all the way down to C3 for least likely to get a comfortable seat.

Apple: Every major presidential campaign will approach Apple about its TV campaign and ask to brand its candidate as Mac, and leading competitor as PC. Three will even request the PC character be made female = A1

AT&T:  Will seek immunity for having shared with the NSA all the new places consumers create on its Seamless World website. Dan Brown is supposed to be writing a book on how the anagrams will help surveillance = C2

Gartner: will give up on its probabilities and will adopt this SW model of IT boarding priorities. Of course, it will also give up on magic quadrants and put these predictions on a 3 x 3 table - A,B,C as rows and 1,2,3 as columns = C3

Google: (and) Facebook will disclose that a suspected spam group declared the whole world as their "friend" and give rise to a new term, Pokespam = B3

HP: Its most popular product will be consulting time with its execs to help companies trim their own IT budget - particularly their HP spend = C1

IBM: In recognition of its growing international employee base - predominantly male and young, IBM will be renamed International Boyz II Men = B1

Microsoft : Will redefine "mashup" by letting its various diverse software, device, gaming units finally collaborate with each other. An early product - "Zune Bob. Sharepoint." Unlike the cartoon namesake, it will offer mobile, GPS, fileserver, MP3, pineapple juice and more = A3

Oracle: As with cars, the Feds will require it to put a domestic content sticker on its products ...domestic as in how much was written in its labs versus acquired = A3

SAP: Tired of slow customer uptake on upgrades, it roll out its SaaS offering, BBD but will discourage incumbent customers from qualifying. Rumor has it the algorithms come from Vegas slot machines to ensure less than 2% will qualify = B2

Verizon: will roll out Any Apps, Any Device and move away from its 24 month customer contracts. Appropriately, it will also change its slogan to - Can You Pay Me Now? =  A2

Of course, take these and several quarters to the local Starbucks and you may, just may get a cup of coffee...but you have plenty of other predictions and wishlists on the web to fall back on. Here are some from fellow EIs - Dennis Howlett, Jeff Nolan, Anshu Sharma and our newest member, Charlie Bess of EDS.

PS - Observant readers will notice I did not disclose my New Year's resolution. I put it in anagrams on the AT&T site above -)

The future's so bright ...I am going to change careers

In this post I wrote about the bright future for telecomm products and services as they sit in the middle of 5 large industry trends - Globalization, SaaS, Mobility, Collaboration and Telemetry.

Well, here's an interesting counter-point from Brian McConnell - as he "retires" from telecomm. As an entrepreneur he has seen the industry from the ground up and you would be foolish to ignore the aches and pains he describes.

But why do I believe we are just seeing the beginning, not the end of history, when it come to disruption and innovation in telecommunications? Next gen iPhones,  Wi-Fly, WiMax, wiring Africa, telepresence, more broadband juice from existing copper,  next-gen navigation devices, next-gen healthcare...I could go on and on ...somebody is going to keep making money.

Trillions worth.

More in New Florence

On my innovation blog

IDC Predictions for 2008
Solar-as-a-service
10 Virtualization vendors to watch
Wi-Fly
LeWeb3
Science Debate 2008
Outsourcing in 2010
The Last Supper: in 16 billion pixels
CALO: Massive AI project

The best gift of all

Nothing - iPhones, fruitcakes, jewelry - nothing can match the gift this family got this holiday.

But hope Santa spoils yours with the toys and treats as well -)

Does Asia need the iPhone?

"Does Japan need the iPhone?"asks BusinessWeek.

In a number of ways the iPhone would be regressive to a number of features already available to Japanese consumers.

"Japan's 10 handset makers, which dominate the domestic market, already offer dozens of models .. that send e-mail, browse the Internet, shoot photos and videos, and even pick up live TV broadcasts. Most come with a built-in global positioning system, and some even double as credit cards and commuter passes or safeguard personal data using fingerprint or face-recognition technology...In its current form, the iPhone doesn't work on Japan's advanced third-generation, or 3G, network"

Actually the same argument would go for Korea and a few other Asian countries with more sophisticated mobile networks and gadgets that US consumers will not see for a while. And at its current pricing  and lack of WI-FI ubiquity the iPhone would have a hard time reaching the mass market in China or India.

But, as an old girlfriend used to say "What I need and what I want are two different things"

So let's rephrase the question "Does Asia want the iPhone?"

On December 23, Apple would say who cares? If they don't want it, we got plenty in Europe and US who Santa would gladly deliver one to to tomorrow...On January 1 and beyond, though Japan's consumers may provide Apple a next-gen road map...

"A pair of brown shoes in a world of tuxedos"

Great quote from Tom Foydel, ex Oracle now a NetSuite reseller and a fellow Irregular, as he asks "Does Oracle fear NetSuite?".

He concludes they live in very different worlds and that "Oracle is too big to make it down the staircase".

I suspect Juergen Rottler, EVP Customer Services at Oracle would disagree. At Oracle OpenWorld, he mentioned that in the last year, Oracle has grown from 1.7 million to 3.6 million on-demand users and that Oracle University has trained 350,00o  students on-line. It certainly understands how to run a large scale SaaS operation.

In that sense, Oracle is ahead of SAP as it rolls out its BBD and builds its own SaaS infrastructure (versus leveraging the  experiences and infrastructure of its partners). It has not gone through the joys of setting up data centers, managing thousands of SLA driven customers, or tried to manage Wall Street nervousness on the large CAPEX appetite of SaaS.

What neither Oracle or SAP are really ready for though - the scenario of Champagne Tastes but Beer Pocket Money Budgets Wait till the Tuxedo and Champagne crowd figure out what Brown Shoes and Beer crowd are paying for roughly similar functionality.   

Then Jeff Foxworthy's 12 days of Christmas will look pretty real...

Ogilvy missed one style of blogging

They did not account for the NCAA Live Blog in this catalog of 25 blogging styles and their recommendations for maximum number of posts, buzz factor etc..

"The NCAA issued new rules this week that will allow credentialed press to blog live NCAA championship sporting events. The rules, however, limit the number of times reporters can post live blogs depending on the sport they cover." -  NY Times

Technically do Tweets count as individual blogs? And if T-Mobile does not deliver them do you still get thrown out of the game?

Value for Money: Executive Talent

Red Hat hires its new CEO from Delta Airlines. Wow...why go outside the tech industry? Partly because Jim Whitehurst will bring fresh ideas, partly because he knows how to run a lean operation (the way Delta has been the last few years) and partly because he is a closet geek. "He was running Fedora Core 6 and Fedora Core 7 at home. He was running Slackware at home and he was an experienced software developer..."

What was more interesting was this quote from the current CEO, Matthew Szulik on potential candidates from larger vendors ""When you take them out of the big buildings, without the imprimatur of Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Oracle, or HP around them, they just didn't hold up."

He is confirming recent CIO Insight survey on the customer views on value for money from big tech vendors and those about innovation in the Booz Allen annual survey. The bigger vendor executives live in the high SG&A, high margin and low R&D world. They can move within that world, but have a harder time transitioning to disruptive vendors and their much more frugal sales structures and partner ecosystems.

3 billion Deal Architects!

Tim Ferris, author of The Four Hour Workweek, says Indians are great negotiators (saw his post courtesy of James Governor)

Funny guy Russell Peters enacts an intense negotiation between a Chinese and an Indian - over a $ 35 item.

I better change professions. Negotiations are about to get offshored!

And hire Tim to negotiate a 4 hour workweek in my next employment contract...