deal architect

The dog days of SOA-mmer

Expect to hear lots about SOA and middleware next few weeks

• Oracle is launching its Fusion Middleware 11g July 1
• On its Flex call this week, I heard Infor invoke SOA several times
• Software AG announced webMethods 8.0 today – more SOA enablement

So, puzzled with this renewed focus on SOA I thought I would ask folks who know about hot days – Mad dogs and Englishmen.

I turned to the Englishman, Dennis Howlett who recently had dinner with folks from Tibco and probably heard SOA a few times. Dennis’ speculation “the promise of SOA was always about re-use and lower cost...I'm guessing that since that's top of mind these days?”

I turned to my beagle, Peanuts. He longingly looked up to the clouds, panting in the heat.

I suspect many customers also are - at SaaS and amazon type of clouds for truly lowered costs

More New Renaissance

on the innovation blog

Re-inventing the home/small office phone

In Korea, all of life is mobile

“Super Angels”

We are celebrating the recession by expanding

Your next battery – ambient electromagnetic radiation

Two ways to deliver a billion lines of code

I know someone who I believe is destined to write a coffee table book on Big Software. He idolizes big, game changing software over the decades like DB2, NT, SAP R/3 as others do with artistic masterpieces. Like a proud brew master he talks of software as "craft". When we talk, we usually argue. He thinks I am too hard of the "craft" of making software. Nothing good comes quick, cheap. My software quality points are trivial etc etc.

It’s time for me to call him for our periodic argument. Dennis Howlett outlines the meandering ways of BusinessByDesign at SAP. I am sure there are other catalogs about what went wrong with MS Vista and is going wrong with Oracle Fusion. In each case 5+ years or so of effort and billions in R&D.

Contrast this to the Apple App Store – 50,000 applications in just over a year. Which in turn is putting pressure on Nokia, RIM and others to develop similar apps ecosystems. 

Is the difference enterprise complexity? Is it the fact that Apple has mostly done it with an ecosystem of young, hungry entrepreneurs? That most of these entrepreneurs get micro-financing - most in the low 5 digit number funding?  Or that in contrast most enterprise software companies hang around other laggard software companies and outsourcers and hosting companies?

Whatever it is, there is definitely some game-changing stuff going on in the industry .

I cannot wait to call Mr. Big Software for our periodic argument :)

“IT Lite”

Julia King writes a timely piece in Computerworld where she is Executive Editor.

“What's in is "IT lite," which includes Web 2.0 technologies and services that are cheaper and easier to implement, mix and match. It also includes software from no-name, up-and-coming vendors; open-source tools and applications; and an ever-widening variety of tools for mapping, chat and more that are available for free on the Internet.”

BTW Julia started at Computerworld 15 years ago around the time I joined Gartner and it is always a pleasure to catch up with her as we did for this article. She is one of the few media folks who has consistently followed enterprise technologies. 

Sesame Street goes to the airport

I am torn between crediting this post to Sesame Street or giving United and RyanAir credit for ever creative fees and charges:

…There's a hole in the bottom of your pocket
There's a hole in the bottom of your pocket
There's a hole, there's a hole
There's a hole in the bottom of your pocket

There's a airline ticket in the hole in the bottom of your pocket
There's a airline ticket in the hole in the bottom of your pocket
There's a airline ticket, there's a airline ticket
There's a airline ticket in the hole in the bottom of your pocket…

There's a baggage fee on the airline ticket in the hole in the bottom of your pocket…

There's a check-in counter fee on the baggage fee on the airline ticket in the hole in the bottom of your pocket…

There's a home on-line check-in fee on the check-in counter fee on the baggage fee on the airline ticket in the hole in the bottom of your pocket…

There's a tax on the home on-line check-in fee on the check-in counter fee on the baggage fee on the airline ticket in the hole in the bottom of your pocket…

There's a surcharge on the tax on the home on-line check-in fee on the check-in counter fee on the baggage fee on the airline ticket in the hole in the bottom of your pocket….

Kids, sing this every time you check in with United and RyanAir and every other airline which nickel and dimes you.

Even better, avoid flying them. Do your meetings via telepresence and watch those Big Bird re-runs at home.

Flex should also include down, not just up

I listened to Jim Schaper introduce the concept of Infor Flex today. Includes plans to upgrade to their SOA solutions, or exchange licenses towards another Infor solution. That is goodness, though the listed discounts and transaction fees will need customer analysis and haggling.

But there is no downgrade path. If customers only want a low-touch plan – some bug fixes, minimal number of support calls, regulatory updates – you have to keep paying at full rates. As I have written before, customer needs and vendor delivery speeds (and their support costs) vary considerably making it very hard to justify a single maintenance rate across the product lifecycle – so my suggestion about letting maintenance rates float

To a question I asked, Jim responded “Unlike what we are reading about our competitors, we are not seeing as much defection in our customer base to SaaS or third party maintenance. Besides we will offer SaaS in several components of our offering”.

In other words, our customers are peachy and not really asking about flex down. Interestingly enough, we hear the same thing from from Lawson, Oracle and SAP with a similar qualifier - “We read their customers (those of our competitors) are asking for it, but not ours”.  A whole lot of reading going on.

With that definition of flex, remind me to not buy any bungee cord from any of them :)

Update: Frank Scavo and Ray Wang are more positive about Infor's announcement. Dennis Howlett less so.

The Real Deal: Nagaraja Srivatsan on Rethinking Product Development in Life Sciences

This continues a series of guest columns from practitioners and bloggers I respect. The category - The Real Deal - describes them well.

This time it is Nagaraja Srivatsan who is Vice President & Practice Leader, Life Sciences at Cognizant, a leading outsourcer – and a sponsor of this blog. He writes about the significant opportunities to rethink product development in Life Sciences

“Among the major strategic challenges facing global life sciences companies today is how to reduce the cost and time-to-market associated with bringing new products to market. The process averages nearly $900 million and 10 years of research and development for every major product.

As many industries before them, life sciences companies are being forced to answer a few fundamental questions: Which business processes are core to operational success, and perhaps more importantly, which are not. If a task is non-core, then it is likely a candidate to outsource to a trusted specialist which by harnessing a lower cost, highly skilled global talent pool can deliver superior outcomes. Taking this approach enables life sciences companies to then reallocate resources to core activities.

Historically, life sciences companies were comfortable outsourcing tasks in the clinical trial process to Contract Research Organizations (CROs). As life sciences companies started to create process standards, they looked at specific functions or business processes in the execution of clinical trials to outsource. This was called the Function Solution Provider model.

Today, the global economic crisis is changing the competitive equation. Amid resource constraints, life sciences companies are facing heightened pressure to speed new molecular entities through the regulatory approval process. They need a mechanism to increase the velocity of outcomes that arise from the clinical trial process to accelerate the transformation of costly R&D into revenue- producing activities. They now realize the “not-invented here syndrome,” which had limited outsourcing to CROs, reinforced an expensive and inflexible cost structure. They now know that not everything previously deemed core to their business was so. As a result, many companies are reassessing and re-defining what is core. And finding several areas which can be moved out including Clinical Data Management, Clinical Analytics and Medical writing, Submissions Management Support, Product Complaint Centers, Safety Case Processing and Safety Reporting.

How can life sciences companies embrace a more flexible business model to handle these newly considered non-core activities? We suggest a framework called “The In (sourced)-Out (sourced), Here (high-cost locations like U.S. and Europe)-There (low- cost locations like India and China)”.  The graphic below shows an example across the 4 quadrants (click on graphic to enlarge)

Here’s how this model could work in clinical operations. Start by examining key business activities, taking an end-to-end perspective. For instance, with Clinical Data Management they need to evaluate activities starting with study planning, set-up, panel recruitment and study execution and through data clean-up, analysis, reporting, closure and reuse. Life Sciences companies then need to decompose these processes into sub-processes and assess the best location where the process should be executed – Here ( in close proximity to stake holders) or There (executed remotely) and also evaluate if this process is core and needs to be executed (inside the organization or outsourced). This must be done for each and every activity.

Core sub-processes stay “Here” and “In”; non-core are moved “There” and “Out” to trusted partners. This is true across the industry, whether product development occurs in high-cost locations in the U.S. and Europe or lower cost regions of the world like India. The challenge is maintaining consistency of process across the product development lifecycle so that product quality doesn’t become a victim of necessary cost containment initiatives. In life sciences, as you can imagine, you cannot tolerate quality short cuts.

So, what are the critical success factors for a successful global service partnership? It’s the usual things (to name a few): proper governance; effective process; resource management; risk mitigation; and of course, delivering value – outcomes that could not be achieved otherwise. Some key steps include:

o Meeting/Exceeding required service levels: Bringing the right domain, talent and the tools can ensure exceptional quality of service.

o Measuring success: By establishing key performance metrics and rigorously measuring and monitoring them, life sciences companies can quantitatively demonstrate engagement success.

o Meeting regulatory requirements: You need to have the right audit process as well as quality system. Domain experience ensures that you are compliant with all audit rigor required by global regulatory agencies.

Judiciously applying the In-Out, Here-There approach will enable life sciences companies to elevate their operational efficiency, reduce costs and deliver higher quality products that sustain competitiveness in any economic cycle.”

He can be emailed at NSrivatsan AT cognizant.com

“The secondary software market”

Add to third party maintenance, SaaS, open source – another disruption to the traditional enterprise software market – shelfware reduction in the form of sale of unused licenses as Ray Wang at Forrester points out.

As Ray points out “This post provides an alternative that must be vetted by proper legal professionals. “ Indeed, don’t expect software vendors to give up without a significant fight. Even if they don’t let you resell licenses, if you can get them to not charge maintenance on your shelfware that would be a huge victory for most organizations. Parking should not only be for cars.

The “citizen help desk”

Four random conversations this weekend make me think if  as individuals we are getting these calls, wonder how wide a range of queries are hitting our IT help desks

• Converse with Mike Krigsman about trying to tether a iPod Touch to a Blackberry. He wants the iPod to do some Bluetooth dances its designers never in their dreams would have thought off.
• I see a Tweet from Pat Phelan “just had an email asking "I would prefer to update twitterfone by text rather than voice, can you do that" WTF”
• I talk to Charlie Bess and he has set up remote diagnostics for his family spread around the country. Would not expect anything less from a HP father - hate to think what help desk issues he has to resolve, though.
• I help my daughter uncover why she could not use dial-up from her grandparent's place in Longford, Ireland. Try doing that when the line is the only one - alternatively used to talk to her and for her to dial out!

Then the sneaking suspicion hit me – may be our IT help desks are not doing much, and we are just relying on each other – the citizen help desk!

Weekend Stuff : Run for the 100s

It’s one of those Florida mornings where the heat and humidity have already started the race about which can get to 100 faster. The mosquitoes and no-see-ums use their own race metric – how many bites they can pack in a day.

Contrary to popular belief, the flying menaces almost never win. They are smart enough to wait for the evening to do their thing :)