deal architect

Oh sweet sassafras...this could hurt

In all the hype around the new Blackberry Storm, the one thing that stood out for me was the reference to sassafras in the Verizon Wireless ad.  

What the copy editors do not appear to have checked is sassafras was in the past thought to be a cure for gonorrhea. And that the FDA banned it in 1960.

And Blackberry calls its touch screen technology SurePress. Wait, that's a brand of medical bandages.

Ooh, this Storm could cause some damage :)

The Annual CIOInsight "Value from IT Vendor" survey

CIOInsight has an annual "value from IT vendor" survey where it polls IT execs about which vendors deliver business value, reliability and quality (and loyalty).

Here is the gallery of its the Top 40 vendors

The Top 5 - RSA Security, Google, Checkpoint, Cisco and Dell.

Microsoft, Oracle and SAP come in low at ranks 29, 33 and 34. AT&T and Verizon come in at 37 and 40. Of course, readers of this blog should not surprised by the low ranks - given the survey's emphasis on value for money.

More innovation

On the New Florence blog

A social network of cars

Country, er Global, code 883

Nike's social network

Most promising technologies - MIT Technology Review

India over - and on - the moon

AT&T Mobility - Credit where it is due

I must be in a generous mood having written a similarly titled note about Oracle earlier in week.

Two things I like about AT&T Wireless

a) you can retroactively go back to the beginning of the current billing cycle and tweak your plan. In reviewing our account on-line, I noticed one of my kids had run up a large number of text messages way above their plan limit. I called, fortunately a day before the billing cycle ended, and changed the plan to unlimited for a fraction of what the per message overage would have been. Of course, I don't plan to tell my kids they now have unlimited texting - next thing I know they will be Twitter addicts :)

b) AT&T has a concept of rollover minutes, where if you do not use all your voice minutes they roll them over for up to 12 months. Cingular, which AT&T acquired, pioneered it and AT&T has retained the feature. Helps smooth out the monthly bills.

They do not allow rollovers on business plans, but they allow pooling across groups of employees as a smoothing technique. And you have to watch AT&T - if you reduce the minutes in the plan you lose the rollover even though you had 'earned" them.

As with Oracle, the flaws are many - but credit where it is due.

Look who is getting tethered

No, not this toolbox which floated away from the astronaut.

AT&T discloses the iPhone is being groomed to become a modem you can tether (or not via Bluetooth) to your laptop. It has been a glaring weakness for the iPhone, and ironically a feature that Microsoft turned Apple-like and made very easy to use with its Internet Sharing in Windows Mobile 6.0. In the previous incarnation its DUN feature was dunning with its unfriendly scripts.

I use the feature occasionally on the road when I cannot access a hotspot. But is it worth $ 60 a month that AT&T expects for such tethering?

Maybe if you travel as much as that floating toolbox :)

Selling is only the beginning

I remember the title as the theme of our annual firm get-together when I was as a young PW consultant. We had a couple of major projects gone bad and the firm's leadership thought it wise to bring a more acute qa focus through out the firm. Back then we were all hunters AND farmers so the message sunk in pretty easily - badly designed sales were worse than no sales.

In today's world of segregated sales from delivery, stories such as those Mike Krigsman reports about IBM's issues in Texas are all too common, especially in multi-year outsourcing. The sales team disappears after the transition period of 3-4 months and re-appears a few years later when the contract renewal is up. In between, the delivery team uses duct tape, grit and heroism to keep the project afloat.

I still see the hunter-farmer blend in many small consulting firms. But it is a fading breed in larger services firms. And part of the reason their delivery quality has steadily slipped.

What's wrong with this picture?

"EAL6+ High Robustness ... means that the government has put Integrity through the most rigorous hacking and security tests to determine if its strong enough to meet the needs of the most sophisticated and critical computer systems, such as those that support electrical grids, power plants and banking systems." ZDNet

In the meantime, we cannot make the Blackberry secure enough for the most powerful man in the world?

"Pareto Paring"

John Hagel, in his usual professorial manner, writes about "strategic cost reduction"

I have a simple, non-strategic, non-high falutin' addition to his list.

Assign an analyst to look at gross margins of your suppliers and target those with 60%+ higher than yours for re-negotiations.  Voila - bunches of software maintenance payments, international mobile roaming and other tech line items will float to the top.

Then target those with 40% and print supplies, outsourced storage and bunch of other tech items will show up

Target 20% above your own margins and you will be surprised that even so called low-cost offshore vendors generate that.

Give Pareto credit if you want for the savings.

Bailout Humor

Heard on Wall Street and Main Street

"This is worse than a divorce - I have lost half my net worth and I am still stuck with my spouse" :)

Joe the accountant

Whatever you may have thought of Joe the Plumber, to me he highlighted the fact that backbone of the US economy (and indeed most economies around the world) is the millions of our small businesses.

Each one of them needs accounting software, and Intuit and Peachtree and others traditionally sold to them via various retail channels. In the new world of SaaS, the web becomes the store front.

So, I was intrigued with a conversation with Jerry Jalaba, VP of Channels at Intacct - he told me about the successful hybrid model they have evolved. They have relationships with a number of accounting firms like LarsonAllen, one of the largest CPA firms in the US (and others like SS&G and Haney)

These firms leverage Intacct's accounting SaaS to offer services to a wide range of SMEs without needing to install software at each client, fedex a bunch of papers to clients and back - traditional ways in which accountants did business. When I started my career with PW, we did not even have Fedex:)

I was intrigued because Jerry came to Intacct from Postini (now part of Google) - where his channel was obviously web-centric. And here he heavily leverages a more traditional go to market channel to sell a web service.

BTW - I have a feeling Joe the Plumber is going to come up over and over again as tax debates rage on in the new administration. The accounting firms don't mind that focus on taxes :)