deal architect

Any given Monday

Ho-hum - another $ 4 billion outsourcing announcement. Shell outsources various infrastructure components to EDS, AT&T and T-Systems.

But look closer. First big international win for AT&T. T-Systems supporting data centers around globe. Another sign the telcos are becoming global. And EDS not doing the data center stuff - long its core competence. Roughly $ 800 million a year for major IT infrastructure for a $ 400 billion revenue run rate company. The benchmark of .2% of revenues will make most peer CIOs salivate.

But look again. Under their cover and program management, these 3 vendors will have hundreds of other vendors, contracts, SAP instances, etc. Unless Shell has re-defined the governance and vendor management game book, expect the age-old finger pointing. And margins that come from the tiered technology supply chain.  So the deskside, messaging and mobile support for its 150,000 users will average by my estimates over $ 100 a user a month. The higher price of staying with the more traditional on-premise, Microsoft centric technology.

So in some ways, a new day. In other ways, just another Monday.

Motorola in the Enterprise

Now that it has decided to split into two, it will be interesting to watch how the enterprise focused unit, unburdened of the market attention to its cell phone business, does.  I know several senior technology executives left when Ed Zander moved on. Padmasree Warrior is now CTO at Cisco. Toby Redshaw moved to a CIO role at the UK insurance company, Aviva. And Carl Ichan continues to pressure the board.

But Motorola has some enviable assets in the enterprise wireless network market and with its enterprise mobility solutions - many that came with its Symbol acquisition.

InformationWeek has a recent report.

Need a GPS to navigate this social map

Loic LeMeur, definitely one of the pioneers in the social networking space shares his social map 

And comments:

"The challenge for Friendfeed and the like is that while I really like all my services gathered in one place, I would rather that these would be centralized on my blog instead of a third party service. Yes you can cross post or add badges, but it's not really like a center feed in your blog. What I like about my blog is that it is my space, I own it, I can customize it and change it, I do not depend on anybody (except the software and host, TypePad of course, needless to say)."

Amen.

In the meantime, if you are looking for a GPS to navigate the map of countless social services and tools, the EU may be taking a hard look at the Nokia-Navteq deal. For a while now, I have been concerned the EU has been tough on Microsoft, Qualcomm and other US players while winking at Nokia, SAP and European vendors.

The Big "O"

I chuckled when I read Phil Wainewright's post Ever been Oprah'd?. It talks about the spike in web traffic whenever Oprah mentions a company or its products. I chuckled because he heard it from Ken Harris, CIO at Shaklee.

Don't get me wrong. Ken has a great CIO resume - with brands like The Gap and Nike on it. But I ran into Ken during the Oracle/PeopleSoft hostile bid. He and I were on opposite sides as expert witnesses - he represented Oracle - in one of the legal proceedings during that episode.

What does that have to do with Oprah? In the late 90s, Oracle kept going back and forth between a fat and thin client architecture for its applications. Given Oprah's own weight fluctuations, the inside joke among some Gartner analysts then was the real Big "O" was based in Redwood Shores, not Chicago.

Since then, Oprah has been known to host several Fusion chefs in her shows and magazines. Oracle, of course, hosts several Fusion developers....

SODDI - Some Other Dude Did It!

I spent some time with Thomas Neudenberger, COO of realtime recently. His company, a SAP partner, offers a biometric security solution - to enhance SAP core security. It is primarily fingerprint driven but could also interface with retina or DNA scanner if the customer wanted . As he puts it, passwords are about what you know, smart cards and tokens are what you carry, but biometrics are truly what you are - the antidote to what he says forensic attorneys call SODDI!

A case study of the solution at Polk County School District - which had fraud preceding its implementation-  is written up here. Only power users with access to critical functions are covered by the additional security.

The School District should, however, be on the watch out not to hire folks like Lukas Grunwald -)

More in new Florence

On the New Florence blog

CeBIT cool stuff

The Battle of the Social Graphs

Portable chargers powered by nature

Technology and US Politics

The Google Leprechaun

11 Cloud Computing Vendors to Watch

What's next?

About the time Jeff Nolan was publishing his post last week on "incrementalism", a client was asking me "so, what's new in technology?" and I led him from A for Apple iPhone to Z for Zoho.

Jeff wrote: "The Valley (where he lives) thrives on the new new thing (possibly one of the most poignantly titled books ever) and with every turn of a generation there is an awkward moment where we’re just figuring out where we’ve been but have yet to see where we are going… right now is that moment."

Away  from the Valley, I see 3 different views of "where we are going"

a) Enterprise adoption of all the recent innovation

For a while now I have been concerned about the innovation "glut" - too many technologies chasing for too few innovation dollars. While I think bigger vendors spend too much on sales and marketing, most younger companies just want to keep rolling out cool stuff, not pushing for their adoption in the enterprise. As Jeff himself is helping the company he is now with - Newsgator. Selling enterprises on the new world of RSS. What this also means is a more aggressive positioning against incumbent vendors. As I have said many times, there is no magic "innovation" IT budget. You have to show the CIO and business executives ways to chisel existing spend to justify budgets for your cool stuff.

b) "Multi-channel Mashups"

I find most technology companies very siloed.The really big ahas in recent times have come when two or three categories of technologies and trends have been mashed up to create a whole new value proposition. SaaS mashed software functionality and application hosting and maintenance services. Telepresence is taking advantage of advances in high-definition displays and high speed, highly reliable bandwidth across major global regions. Listen to Steve Jobs and he talks about his competitive advantage comes from owing both the software stack and the hardware. Go see the 40+ categories of technologies I track on the New Florence blog. The next big wave of innovations will come from mashing products from 2-3-4 of those hardware, software, telecom and service categories.

c) Innovation in other global nodes

As I wrote recently, the Valley is First among equals. If it slows down in innovation, there are plenty of other places around the world which will pick up slack. Valley entrepreneurs and VCs can and should contribute elsewhere. They have become more global since the last slowdown but I still see too much Californication.

So, I have a broader view of "where we are going" and am actually pretty excited about "what's next"

Weekend Stuff: The Quantico Circuit

I just love books/movies whose titles mash up an exotic place and an exotic object. Like The Maltese Falcon and The Eiger Sanction. Some day you will see The Quantico Circuit.

For now, it is the subject of an affidavit filed by a whistle-blower, Babak Pasdar which suggests one of the major US wireless providers has an open backdoor for the Feds to monitor mobile conversations.

I thought it would be interesting to see what algorithms might be used to monitor those millions of conversations. Could Gmail be a good proxy given it parses millions of email and pops up sponsored links?

A quick test of Gmail with the words "Maltese Falcon" pulled up several Kirk Hammett links. Huh? The Metallica guitarist shares last name with the author of the book. "Eiger Sanction" pulled up a Gran Turisomo 5 link - for the Playstation racecar video game. It  features an Eiger Nord race.  "Quantico Circuit" pulled up one for circuit breakers and one for circuit boards. I would have expected this.

"Al-Qaida" drew a blank.

Darn, I hope our spooks have better algorithms -)

Weekend Stuff: World's best airports

As Heathrow's new Terminal 5 gets off to a bad start - in fairness not the airport itself, but BA's performance there - it is heartening to see BusinessWeek's gallery of much less harried ariports. Indeed, some have movie theaters, pools and communal baths.

One way to save fuel

"Drivers on cell phones, even on hands-free devices, travel more slowly than other drivers, are less likely to pass sluggish vehicles and ultimately take longer to complete their commute — researchers estimate that such distracted drivers lengthen the average car commute by about 5% to 10%."

Time

Look on the bright side - slowing down to 55 mph would save plenty of fuel...

Ofcom in UK is hoping for similar fuel efficiencies as it approves mobile calls on planes in European airspace -)