deal architect

With friends like this...

...Microsoft's partners are doing what Microsoft will not do. Listen to its customers. Downgrade, extension, detour - call it what you want, business customers will get extended support on XP.

As for individual schmucks like you and me, no consumerization of technology - we will continue to beta test Vista...

More Innovation

On the New Florence blog

Technology and Library of Congress

Spy City tour

Mobility Lifecycle Management

The hotbed that is Iceland

Sending video to a moving target

BusinessWeek's Most Innovative Companies

Business function, geography, vertical

Baihui, part of PC Stars,the largest on-line distributor in China is private labeling a Mandarin version of Zoho apps.

Not only has Zoho been on a torrid pace of functional expansion beyond its Office 2.0 tools, it's good to see it expand into promising geographies.

Next stop - hopefully underserved verticals.

Redux: What if the Red Cross only spent 10% in charity?

Much as I love the tech industry, I dislike the fact that it spends so little in R&D - and in contrast spends 3,4,5X in SG&A. When you question it, the typical response is more R&D would be wasted. In that case, why not give it back to consumers and let them spend it more efficiently? If your favorite charity only contributed 10% towards needy causes, you would not send them much the next year. If your local government did that, there would be impeachments galore.

CIOZone lists R&D spend by large vendors - on average 9.7% of revenue. Measly as that is, outsourcers and telecom vendors spend even lower (You do not see a Verizon or an Accenture on the list. IBM and HP show in this list because of their R&D spend in software, chips and printers. Their outsourcing groups invest only 1-2% of revenues). And since they make up over 50% of many IT budgets you can see how poor the innovation quotient is in most IT budgets. And with software vendors, quite a bit of the R&D actually goes towards fixes, patches, localizations - not really innovation.

It brings out even more clearly that if CIOs want more fiber/less fat in their IT diet they need to move  dollars from larger vendors to smaller, startups which typically spend much more in R&D and innovation or to their own innovation "tiger teams."

Even more "disruption of disruption"

Last week I wrote about "disruption of disruption"

With its storage in the cloud, amazon has for a while offered storage at prices almost 1/10th of what large outsourcers charge their clients.

Now it disrupts its own storage costs.

"We've often told you that one of our goals is to drive down costs continuously and to pass those savings on to you. We have been able to reduce our costs for data transfer, so we're pleased to announce that we're lowering our pricing for data transfer, effective May 1, 2008."

Voluntarily lowering prices? Another disruption to the traditional outsourcing market where the general attitude is Moore's Law does not apply to their sector.

What about the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?

Oil is up almost $ 20 a barrel this month! A terrorist attack would likely not had so rapid an impact. So why are not tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve? In fact, we keep pumping into it.

Cynics say we only have reserves equal to 2 months of oil imports - what difference would it make? In a tight oil market a lot. After Katrina, the government pumped out about 11 million barrels - 1.5% of the reserve and it had a calming effect on the market.

What do readers think?

If Forrester was a food critic...

...it would look favorably on my local Dilly special. In contrast, S. Pellegrino is much more picky in its annual of World's 50 best restaurants.

I say that because Forrester defines Enterprise 2.0 as:

"A set of technologies and applications that enable efficient interaction among people, content, and data in support of collectively fostering new businesses, technology offerings, and social structures."

With that broad definition, any tech vendor would qualify. I mean fire your entire marketing team if they cannot get Forrester to call them Enterprise 2.0.

That is if you want to fight for a measly $ 4.6 billion Forrester estimates for the category out of annual technology and telecom spend of over $ 2 trillion.

More in New Renaissance

on the innovation blog

USAF Thunderbirds and Innovation

Lenovo's Face Recognition Technology

MIT Technology Review's Top 10 Emerging Tech

Microsoft's Data center ambitions

Microsoft Clearflow

Surface Computing at AT&T Wireless stores

What do you want to see from the web in the future?

Jeff Nolan has a nice wish list of the "next" web as he heads to Web 2.0 Expo

1. I want technology that is pervasive but obscured, in other words I don’t want to have to think about it in order to use it.
2. I want applications and services that don’t force me into Faustian bargains that require me to give up my privacy in order to benefit from them.
3. Give me advertising and promotion that has utility for me, that does something productive while at the same time fulfilling the advertising objective.
4. Give me use-anywhere-any-time.
5. Most of all, stop talking about what you do and tell me what you will do for me.

Data Center Makeover

If you had told me 5 years ago, the boring data center would be one of the hottest areas in the technology industry I would have laughed.

But several trends have converged to make it so

• Cloud computing - Microsoft's Mesh offering this morning in response to what amazon, Joyent and others have been pioneering
• Breakthrough designs - Google, Sun and others , in particular, have been rethinking traditional raised floor and other accepted best practices in data center design
• Green Computing - the focus on lower energy consumption and a willingness to consider alternative energy efficient locations like Iceland
• Virtualization - VMware was one of the hottest IPOs last year, but there are several other vendors in the space
• DC Consolidation - Really aggressive consolidations like HP's internal moves from 85 data centers to 3 pairs worldwide with related savings in everything from real estate to network costs.
• Standardization - with ITIL - decades of data center operations and yellow books being formalized and best practices shared
• The move to services  - part of a broader desire for clients to reduce their capex IT spending and buy it more as as an opex service - SaaS, HaaS, PaaS
• Remote monitoring - the ability to monitor key components of network, database etc from cheaper, remote locations
• New tax incentives - seems like every state in the US and every savvy emerging country wants to attract data centers with incentives

But all this excitement is often muted at several of my clients. Why? Because many data centers are outsourced, and few outsourcers are proactively bringing these efficiencies to bear on their contracts. Clients are stuck in multi-year deals and outsourcers want to squeeze every last bit out of older data centers.

While HP can brag about its own DC consolidation, check how many of its DC clients have seen the pass through effects of such efficiencies. While IBM launches its own version of cloud computing check how many of its clients are being offered utility computing economics. While Accenture can talk about "green computing" check how many of its own DCs are green.

So, yes if you had told me 5 years ago data centers would be a hot area , I would have laughed. If you had told me many of the innovations would come from amazon and Google, not folks like EDS and CSC, I would have questioned your sanity. But that's the reality and outsourcers need to catch up and pass along these efficiencies. Fast.