deal architect

SAP's Engineering De-emphasis?

Through the 90s, when Gartner analysts did our frequent pilgrimage to SAP in Walldorf, you could see Peter Zencke's and Claus Heinrich's fingerprints on much of SAP's product line. Claus announced today he is leaving next year. Peter is leaving later this year.

And of course Shai Agassi who was very influential in product direction, left last March.

To me, this is more of a sign SAP has been tilting for years towards its SG&A side of the organization. That's not great news for its customers. Or indeed the industry.

Update: I believe I have been unfair to the next generation of technologists in the company - Vishal, Herve and others. That was not my intention - just pointing out where the Executive Board composition has veered.

Capex complications

With the credit crunch, it should be a no-brainer. CFOs should be pushing for more opex, less capex in IT. That should on surface be good for cloud computing as Larry Dignan suggests. And SaaS and leasing.

But we live in strange times.

In the last few weeks, I have seen leasing and financing deals with unattractive residual and interest terms. I have seen EBITDA calculations where a capex project actually looked better because interest and depreciation were ignored in the comparison - even though upfront cash flow looked ugly.

In the end SaaS and cloud computing will have to continue to win with overwhelming cost advantage compared to incumbent on-premise models. Every CFO, in the end understands those set of numbers.

Dreamforce

salesforce.com has invited a few bloggers to Dreamforce - "the SaaS event of the year" - next week.

I am looking forward to it - particularly interested in learning about how the ecosystems around it  - software vendors like Intacct and next-gen service partners like Appirio  - are evolving.

I will definitely be there Sunday evening and Monday - trying to extend my stay through Tuesday. So, if you are there send me a note - let's try and grab a cuppa.

"Interlining" in telcos

Consumers suffer when airlines refuse to interline - they cannot check bags all the way to destination, they need multiple tickets etc. 

I would argue it is getting worse with telcos and cable companies:

a) Sprint and Cogent disconnect their networks disrupting web traffic

b) the all too-frequent spats between cable companies and the affiliates they carry

c) The FCC's recent proposal is expected to set off upheaval in how telco revenues and termination fees are shared between local and long-distance carriers

More Innovation

on the New Florence blog

Why your laptop will keep getting faster

Ericsson's Wind Powered Cell Tower

The Making of a Popular Science Cover

How many words is a high-def photo gallery worth?

The state of "Data Fusion"

No hanging chads

 I early-voted yesterday since I will be in CA on the 4th. The early voting appears to be a big hit - an average of 10,000 voters a day in our county in last 8 days, and that should increase. Starting today, the Governor has mandated the early voting booths to be open 12 hours a day.  I had a 45 minute wait outside the library polling place where 1,122 other citizens voted on Tuesday.

The process started off high-tech. Swiped my driver's license and took an electronic signature.

The rest of the process was relatively low-tech. Got a 2 page ballot to blacken appropriate oval spaces on. The flow through the candidates and the amendments on the ballot were fairly simple and the optical scanner appeared jam proof.  Much as I do not like this retrograde back from electronic voting machines, our state's history of problems calls for a simpler, easier to audit and trust process. 

Nice touch that county employees were handing out free bottles of water and slices of pizza. Someone joked - that's all we will see as individuals from the big bailout. And the colorful sticker pictured we all got :)

"Welcome to November baseball"

Bad weather, bad umpiring, bad play - this has been a poor World Series so far.

Nothing would match the emotions of the November play in New York after the 9/11 delays in 2001, but I would love to see this Series go to Game 7 this Saturday and then let the best team win in the dry confines of a domed stadium.

I know Phillies fans want it done, but baseball would be the clear winner.

Anticlimaxware

I love it when vendors go hush-hush about products they should have delivered years ago. It is the opposite of vaporware. Like Oracle seems to do at every one of its major conferences when it comes to details of Fusion applications. Or the periodic updates - typically about delays - from SAP about its BusinessByDesign

Now Microsoft promises "private technology preview" of its SaaS Office applications later this year.

A preview later this year? In a market where Google, Zoho and others have redefined what time-to-market means?

"Why this tech recession will be different"

I made my point in January. I wrote "As a buyer of technology, sit down with your budget for the last few years. If the categories and percentages have not changed much and you have not taken advantage of various innovations and price declines and newer vendors, you are doing your organization a huge disservice if you just batten your hatches. In a recession, you should be dramatically transforming your IT budget and sourcing strategy."

George Colony of Forrester makes his this month. It is an optimistic one about the recession actually accelerating innovation projects. "Virtualization, social computing, mobile computing, Green IT, SOA, extended Internet (connecting the physical world to the digital world) are front and center on the agendas of large companies. Will many of these projects get cut back? Yes. But many are part of long-term company plans -- they will persist despite economic slowdowns.

But I already see bigger, incumbent vendors digging in to protect their revenues and margins from older "utility" areas - in "uplifts" for older software releases, in print consumables and roaming mobile charges and outsourced processing and storage. Many, many items which should have been declining nicely for years but continue to crowd out budgets for innovation projects.

If such vendors continue to win, this tech recession may end up being no different from previous ones.  And that would be depressing.

Wrong Side or Wrong Cloud?

Bob Warfield summarizes a raging debate between Tim O'Reilly, Nick Carr, Hugh MacLeod and many other bloggers around scale, network effects and economics of clouds.

What is fascinating to me in this discussion is there is no mention of IBM, HP/EDS, EMC and a whole bunch of "old-school" infrastructure outsourcers.

As I wrote last year, the major outsourcers individually can boast this kind of scale - these are statements from a series of their marketing presentations

• We manage 2 petabytes of dynamic on-demand storage (that is 15 zeros  - lots of little zip drives)
• We have 25,000 Microsoft trained specialists
• We have an IP footprint in 150 countries
  
• We support more than 15,000 customer data centers
• We do over 3 million desktop/laptop installs a year
• We  respond to 25 million help desk calls a year -in over 20 languages

Either the whole cloud discussion is too narrowly being focused on the buzz being created by the likes of amazon and Microsoft (with its Azure announcement yesterday) or the incumbent infrastructure outsourcers are completely out to lunch when it comes to cloud computing.

We may have to commission the Hurricane Hunters to figure out the intensity of these emerging clouds - and in the debates around them.