deal architect

Who wants to be an Oracle-aire?

At last year's Oracle OpenWorld, I wrote Oracle missed a major opportunity to showcase to its customers progress on Fusion applications.

After reading Bill Kutik's column this week, I am guessing they are not going to disclose a whole bunch at this year's event in September either.

While my guess will save my company some time and money in not showing up, I actually hope I am wrong. Going on 5 years now, PeopleSoft and JDE customers, and since 2006 Siebel customers have paid Oracle tens of billions of dollars in maintenance and deserve better than secrecy and guessing games.

More New Renaissance

On my innovation blog

The Bat-Pod

Find a parking space on your PDA

Computing on 2 watts of power!

Total Solar Eclipse

How truly innovative is the iPhone 3G?

Hamlet 2.0: To Twitter or not...

Tweet 1

To Twitter, or not : that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The pangs of frequent downtime,

Tweet 2

Or to go against a sea of analysts and influencers,

And by opposing them? To have more time to sleep;

And dream in 140 zzz’s

Tweet 3 (after system recovers)

ay, there's the rub;

Than hyper-connect with others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make followers of us all;

Tweet 4

OMG – we are in the middle of an earthquake!

You'll, time for another power-nap?

Tweet 5

Man, that was scary!

And lose my chain of thought - micro-blog you now!

The fair Ophelia! Link Lizard!

Be all my sinful long blogs remember'd

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

With thousand apologies to Shakespeare

and thousand curses to AT&T for the high cost of text messaging:)

Just when CFOs need to become more tech savvy...

The SEC moved closer to allowing public companies to use their Web sites and corporate blogs to meet  disclosure requirements.

CIO Insight summarizes Forrester research which shows more CIOs are reporting to CEOs and other titles, much less to the CFO. It also catalogs differences in organizations where the CIO reports to the CEO versus the CFO. A vertical cut at the survey is also reported by InformationWeek.

"Our fear is to be relegated to just providing access to the internet"

So tells J.P. Rangaswami of BT to the WSJ Blog as it acquires Ribbit. JP is a heck of a smart guy who has been molding BTs culture to go from "screwdrivers" to "keyboards". And my friends Phil Wainewright and Jeff Kaplan are positive about this acquisition.

But, JP what exactly is wrong in your core business of "providing access to the internet"?

It is the job of telcos to make the access faster, cheaper, better. Less than the quarter of the US and Europe mobile users has 3G access. Much of US and Europe homes are still on "narrowband" speeds only slightly better than dial up.  And we are the "developed" world.

But let me not call it a job. As I wrote here, it's mind boggling the opportunities globalization, telemetry, mobility etc are creating for telcos. Who else can build communications infrastructure at that scale? Who else knows how to manage those big capex projects? 

As I like to tell outsourcers - quit dreaming up innovation projects. There are so many innovation opportunities in your own operations.

Same with telcos. Plenty of money and margin in just providing access to the internet - from home, from the farm, from the road, from the air etc. For people, for sensors, for devices. Around the world.

IT is right to whine

Over at Tech Republic, Patrick Gray has stirred a hornet's nest calling IT a bunch of whiners. Shades of Nick Carr's IT does not matter. And threatens IT will get outsourced if it does not shape up.

I have three reactions:

a) How much more can you outsource? As I have written many times before, most IT shops are 80 to 90% already outsourced - outsourcing not just to EDS or Infosys but spend on external hardware, software, outsourcing and telecom vendors as a percent of IT budget. For all their scale, vendors have not consistently shown they can deliver technology cheaper or better than internal staff. It is time to bring some of that external spend back in-house, not even think about more outsourcing.

b) If you are going to beat up on IT, beat up 6 to 7X times on vendors in proportion to the internal to external spend. IT takes blame for Microsoft's bugs, Accenture's SLA based downtime, for SAP's ugly UI, for ATT's patchy 3G coverage...everything. The average vendor spends 5% of revenues on R&D. If you want to blame IT for lack of innovation beat up on Oracle and Verizon for spending way more on SG&A than R&D. And those billions of marketing dollars crowd out the few critical voices there are out there.

c) IT has an almost impossible job - balancing innovation, keeping lights on, compliance and security. Most deliver a lot for 1 to 2% of revenue. Find me any other domain in the executive suite with that much stress, which outsources 80 to 90% of its departmental spend, has that much enterprise-wide impact and that much rapid change in its tools.

Faced with unsympathetic comments from the likes of Patrick, IT is absolutely justified in whining...unfortunately, unlike vendors it has zero marketing dollars to make its case.

Move on...nothing to see here...everything's fine

Both AT&T and Verizon report good quarterly results, and our two largest carriers would have you believe telecom consumers in US get dandy service..

So why are think tanks like Brookings mentioning our telecom infrastructure in the same breath as our crumbling bridges and clogged highways?

Can I have a root canal instead?

Larry Dignan on the spec for a new CEO for Alcatel-Lucent

"if you’re a CEO type that thinks you can bridge a U.S.-France cultural divide, manage a multinational and can catch Cisco go for it."

Sounds like many aspects of the merger integration did not go well. What appeared to be  going well (at least from a few tech industry sources) was a data center consolidation project. It was whittling down 25 DCs and 125 server rooms spread globally across the 2 companies to 6 DCs. As I have written before, consolidations are a difficult, but high payback, operation in many DC makeovers companies are embarking on.

"SaaS enters the mainstream"

My former colleagues Bill McNee, Bruce Guptill and Mike West have finished a large survey on SaaS adoption in enterprises and summarize it in this Sandhill column. General conclusion - it's being adopted "bottoms up" in a variety of spots across the enterprise and user satisfaction is "exceptionally high"

I was surprised to see Finance/Accounting adoption lower than "specialized verticals". A few days ago, Dennis Howlett put together a quick pricing spreadsheet on some of the SaaS accounting packages and I remember thinking there were so many more including NetSuite, Intacct and others as Jeff Kaplan's Showplace lists. Without the benefit of the sample Bill and Co had access to, I would have argued it was the highest area of adoption (or tied with SFA in CRM) with 33% penetration...

More on Software Maintenance

Not content with SAP offering to disband TomorowNow, Oracle expanded its allegations yesterday.

The revolt against SAP's increased maintenance is no longer isolated to its German heartland. Dennis Howlett reports on feedback from the UK and France.

In meantime, Rimini reports 400% revenue growth in their third party maintenance business. Most of it comes from Oracle customers - they have only recently started to offer SAP support, so amazingly the growth may actually accelerate

Intriguing to think how big Rimini might be by the time the Oracle/SAP matter goes to trial in February 2010.