deal architect

VoIP and “defensive patents”

Can you see the irony? Serially, several large US telcos sued Vonage and as Daniel Beringer wrote at GigaOm. " Vonage lost because of the difficulty in finding the proper documentation of prior art 15 years after the fact." and concludes" A formal process of filing prior art to the public domain will protect an emerging infocom industry better than just depending on overworked patent examiners and applicants for prior art searches."

And after 15+ years those same big telcos are fighting for that IP to still not be made available to consumers. They have convinced Apple and Microsoft to not allow VoIP applications on cell networks – only via Wi-Fi. And even on Wi-Fi some carriers block VoIP packets.

I think patents should be awarded with a “use it or lose it” philosophy. Certainly be nice if courts sided against “defensive patents” – those selectively invoked to stifle competition.

Yearning to get on the AT&T mobile network

So am I going soft? Me, one of AT&T’s regular critics for its outrageous international roaming, for its patchy 3G, then exaggerating its 3G reach in its ads…but at many times on the 4.5 hour Southwest flight yesterday where I signed onto its Row 44 “wi-fly”, I could not wait to get on the ground and onto the AT&T network.

Only 4 of us on the flight were on the service (I walked about the plane and asked anyone who had a laptop open). So, not enough to cause contention issues. Each was unhappy with the service.

It started off surprisingly well. I ran a ping on Speedtest.net and the download speed was 1.8 mbps. Not bad. Yahoo Maps give you an interactive location, altitude etc. Cool.

The upload speed, though, was snail like - less than 200k. And it went downhill from there. Pages were taking minutes to load. Firefox froze a couple of times. Oh well, write off the $ 10 fee.

But I decided to switch to my PDA and paid another $ 6 (yes, lower fee than for laptops). Much better. I could check all my mail accounts – multiple ISPs. I could use Twobile to post tweets -  about 70% of attempts. I could track the Rays -Yankees on the ESPN site.  But (not surprisingly) the YouTube client would not connect to its servers. Same with AT&T’s Cellular Video.

Though Southwest specifically says VoIP is a no-no , I tried to fire up Skype. The app would not load. Google Voice: called my daughter – she could hear me. I could not. So we switched to its SMS back and forth.

I had a Twitter conversation with Karen Auby of Plantronics during the flight. Her experience on Virgin’s wi-fly is a lot more pleasant. 

Overall, though the words “poor man’s Jetblue” kept popping in my head. I mean for most of the decade satellites have allowed its passengers to watch live TV – and here I was squinting into a PDA and finding out every few minutes whether Jabba Chamberlain had thrown a ball or a strike.

Wi-fly better get good in a hurry.

So, back on terra firma, I fire up Bing Mobile on my PDA to help me navigate, and I get on a call. Few minutes into the call I notice the maps are not painting. I have moved out of AT&T’s 3G coverage and of course when you are downgraded to its Edge coverage you cannot walk and chew gum at same time.

Oh, because I am in the wilderness where I should be grateful for any coverage? Yes, the wilderness called I-880 which cuts through the heart of Silicon Valley. And all the negative feelings towards AT&T came rushing back…

HR Conference: Deal Architect negotiates massive discount!

Took plenty of arm wrestling and agreeing to say he is the best sailor in the world, but Bill Kutik has finally agreed to the best possible discount for my blog readers for the 12th edition of his HR Technology Conference in Chicago, September 30-October 2.

It is the world’s leading event in that sector. Attracts 2,000+ high-level HR practitioners (a third VP or above), software and service vendor CEOs, and most of the HR sectors industry analysts and bloggers. They come for the excellent no-sales-hype conference sessions, the largest show floor of 250 exhibitors, and Bill’s signature vendor Shootout session.

Here’s how you can get the $ 470 discount off the $1,645 regular registration rate.  Type VINNIE09 in the Promotion Code box in the online registration at www.HRTechnologyConference.com . No expiration - yes even the day before if like me you are a procrastinator.  Though closer to the event he may ask you to endorse he is a better sailor than Larry Ellison :)

See you there...I will be on the lookout for disruptive SaaS and other HR vendors for this blog and HR innovations for the New Florence one.

More New Florence

On the innovation blog

ESPN Baseball Doppler Tracker

Pew Survey on Public Perceptions of Science, Religion

GE’s Net Zero Home

Wearable gizmos

Hurricane Calming Technology

WIIFM?

Poll business users and see how many would vote for the feature sets below from Apple and Oracle as more innovative…

“If you misplace your iPhone, Apple’s MobileMe service can help you find it. Log on to me.com to view a map that shows the approximate location of your iPhone. If it’s nearby, have it play an alert sound to help you find it, or display a message on the home screen to help someone return it to you. If displaying a message hasn’t resulted in its safe return, you can initiate a remote wipe and restore your iPhone to factory settings.”

Apple 3G S feature brochure

“SMART tool for Oracle On Demand—originally called the Single and Multi-Tier Auto Refresh Tool for Instances. It's an end-to-end On Demand refresh tool that integrates all our daily refresh efforts into a single solution in a very transparent way. It automatically performs any kind of refresh flavor, such as single-tier, multi-middle-tier, Oracle Real Application Clusters [Oracle RAC], non-RAC, and DMZ. Previously, refreshes were handled manually and painstakingly.”

Nominee for Oracle Innovation Showcase

Innovation via vendor un-consolidation

This should be must watching for CIOs and procurement folks and of course large tech vendors who preach vendor consolidation and “single-source, wall-to-wall coverage”

John Hagel on how the Chinese in particular are innovating through vast, scalable networks of suppliers with deep specialization

With smaller vendors “the person on the other side is not a lawyer or a procurement person – it’s someone who ran a plant like mine” 

As for lack of IP protection “I need to continually innovate …so I can stay a step ahead …even though I know I am being copied”

Via Dennis Howlett

IBM/SPSS: Predicted to underachieve

I have long written about predictive analytics and pattern recognition as promising innovation areas on the New Florence blog. And SPSS is a leading vendor in that space with its engine being repackaged by more rear-view mirror analytical vendors like SAP and IBM.

So not a big surprise that one of them would acquire SPSS. IBM just did. My view is SPSS will languish there.

Because of what John Schwartz of SAP pointed in our meeting last week. IBM does not sell analytics to the business user. It’s part of an infrastructure sell. Oh sure, if they got their act together, its huge services arm could. But we hear that with every one of IBM’s many acquisitions and it rarely happens.

The other reason is as with Oracle, acquisitions at IBM just become a line item on a growing order form. They are maintenance revenue streams, not products to be polished and embellished.

Oracle Fusion Apps: So many questions

I will make time for Floyd Teter of JPL any time of day or night - if for no other reason I don't want to be cut off his BBQ guest list:)

He writes he recently had a “peach of an assignment” – validation testing Oracle Fusion. His write up is encouraging.

But he does not say what functionality he tested. I mean after 5 years of development, there should be mountains of code across the enterprise wide processes. He does not say which pieces are going to be cloud based. You think given the release date in 2010 it would largely be so. He does not discuss its economics. Again, given the realities of third party maintenance, cloud pricing, market softness etc, it better be. What transition tools will Oracle deliver – in a world where customers are getting spoiled by background, painless SaaS upgrades, Fusion better come stapled with a new class of conversion and testing tools.

All these questions are helping me work up an appetite…Floyd, fire it up :)

TCO – Total Cloud Ownership

I ran into Stan Swete of Workday last week and he mentioned they had been carefully benchmarking upgrade costs vis-a-vis on-premise vendors. In turn, his ears perked up when I told him about NetSuite’s recent benchmark of energy efficiency in their cloud compared to on-premise.

While most SaaS/cloud vendors look ridiculously cheap in most TCO elements compared to their on-premise competitors, in the next wave (sooner than you think), they will be compared against each other.

So, last week in our conversation with Parker Harris of salesforce, the question came up – why would customers pay its storage costs compared to rates amazon and now Microsoft with Azure are bringing to market? Will it need to rethink its EMC infrastructure? From there the conversation moved to whether it needed the Oracle DBMS – whether it could afford to keep passing along those costs when vendors like Zoho and RightNow aggressively use open source components.

Cloud vendors have to take control of every aspect of their TCO. Like Google with its commoditized server chips. Like NetSuite imploring its reseller channel to deliver more services as software. Like Microsoft rethinking data center design and economics. Like salesforce going to market with smaller SIs like appirio, Model Metrics and others – not just the traditional SIs. Network costs. Systems management costs. Every aspect of the TCO.

Yes, that includes sales costs. As they grow, I am seeing some cloud vendors go back to the “big boys” for sales talent. Not sure that is smart. Because that continues to assume your competitors will continue to be Oracle and IBM. In the meantime, their future competition - other cloud vendors are scheming how to drastically lower their SG&A.

Update: plenty of other examples from readers. Helpstream leverages MySQL and the amazon cloud. Nenshad mentions PaaS below - Coda has leveraged salesforce.com's platform for speed and cost efficiency.

Two ends of the customer bell curve

NetSuite points out that three of the four most recent tech IPOs - OpenTable, Inc. (NASDAQ: OPEN), SolarWinds, Inc. (NYSE: SWI), and LogMeIn, Inc. (NASDAQ: LOGM). – run on its platform. Impressive references in this slow growth economy.

It also rolls out an initiative to target Sage resellers. Sage, as Dennis Howlett frequently points out, has been content to keep customers on its legacy, on-premise platforms. 

While resellers are key in the SMB sector, I think Sage customers would on their own be intrigued by why much faster growing peers are picking NetSuite, and how they could have some of that magic run off on them.