deal architect

Gartner lawsuit – Putting it on a pedestal

So, Gartner is getting sued over its Magic Quadrant.  The complaint says

Defendant’s wrongful conduct has had, and continues to have, the effect of destroying competition in the enterprise market for archiving. …

..In addition, Defendant’s conduct has harmed, and continues to harm, the creative forces of American innovation, and, consequently, the long-term competitiveness of the American economy.

Frankly, that’s putting them on a pedestal. And timed for week of ITxpo will make for plenty of conversation in Orlando and in Twitterland

But as I wrote here, there are a thousand points of influence these days and Gartner (and other analyst firms) represent only a few of those points - - more so at the “top of the sales funnel” than in the due diligence or negotiation stages in a technology procurement.

This report in TechTarget confirms that sentiment

“End users aren't as frustrated by Gartner's research, but said they use the Magic Quadrant report sparingly, usually during early research in vendor selection. Several IT professionals said they took the findings with a grain of salt and assume that top-ranked vendors were also Gartner clients.

Still, many said they had to take the rankings into consideration, if only to appease C-level executives in their own companies who track the findings. Top-ranked vendors typically publicize their rankings within the media and for customers.

How much impact does Magic Quadrant PR? Not much, several IT pros said. "I would say [the Magic Quadrant] has about a 20% influence on the overall vendor decision," said one former IT executive at a New York publishing company. It is "certainly not a deal maker or breaker."

As far as creative forces of innovation, I have had no problems cataloging over 1,500 instances over last 4 years on my New Florence innovation blog – less than .1% have been identified in a Gartner report.

A PR nightmare

In his swearing in speech, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan Preet Bharara, now in the middle of the Galleon hedge fund insider trading scandal laid out his principles:

"The willingness to resign over principle; the courage to resist even overwhelming public pressure to do the wrong or incorrect thing; the independence to banish politics from all deliberation and decision-making; the maturity to admit mistakes in public, even at the risk of certain embarrassment."

It’s fair to assume he did not get any coaching from many of the tech PR firms out there :)

The New, Old Ethics

I was remarking to someone recently all the thorny issues that are coming up with new technologies like food/biofuel tradeoffs, “God powers” with nanotech and genetic engineering and more basic ones like privacy issues and routing of traffic through neighborhoods with children as a result of GPS navigators.

I told them when I went to business school our course in ethics focused on foreign corruption, sexual harassment etc. Clearly important, but generally low-tech stuff – and that our universities should be updating their curriculums for high-tech effects on ethics.

Before we get too carried with that, this weekend’s sting operation at Galleon and the ripple effects of the alleged insider trading by executives at  IBM, McKinsey and Intel (and Akamai, AMD, Google and other companies whose stocks were traded) shows high-tech may have some “older” ethics issues it needs to sort out.

On my blog, I frequently lament as an industry we are too focused on investors versus buyers. Way too many conversations in the industry are about who’s acquiring who. how a vendor’s pipeline and quarterly prospects look.

Most of it is idle and Twitter gossip, but a little too much of it is used for unfair trading advantage. Most of the people being accused in the Galleon case are in fairly high places in their organizations. My fear is it goes much deeper and wider in their organizations and in the rest of high-tech. Need to clean up those ethics first before we try to tackle those around God-powers.

Frankly, we need to escalate attention to ethics in general in the industry

Introducing a new blog sponsor: Questcon Technologies

Given the disruption theme of my blog, I am pleased to welcome Questcon Technologies which assures software value through innovative quality, test and auditing solutions. A division of Howard Systems International, it leverages years of experience and countless observations to uncover hidden inefficiencies in business performance and software development processes.

The disruption it offers is the ability to bring back to the US – specifically to its Greensboro, NC center - testing which has gone overseas. The NC facility allows it to competitively price services and its clients avoid the jet lag, time zone, travel hassle and communication issues so common in global delivery centers.

It's good to have them join the gallery of innovators and disruptors who sponsor this and the New Florence. New Renaissance blog.

Webinar: Reducing SAP Ownership Costs

Ray Wang, Dennis Holwett, Frank Scavo and I will be presenting the first in a series of Enterprise Advocates webinars. The first one on October 22, a week from today will focus on SAP Ownership costs. Others are planned around other technology vendors.

Details here

NetSuite Business Cloud seminars

Will be presenting along with Zach Nelson, CEO and several NetSuite customers at the Chicago and Atlanta sessions on November 3 and 5.

Come join us – details here.

Fusion Applications: My questions remain unanswered

In July, I wrote about Fusion Apps that were being shown to a select few customers and market analysts under NDA

“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.”

After reading the analysis from Paul Hamerman (Forrester) and Josh Greenbaum, both unfettered of their NDAs now that Larry Ellison finally showed a peek review at OOW, I still have most of those questions.

Marc Benioff’s Playbook

I got a review copy of Marc’s new book – Behind the Cloud – out on the 19th.

It is full of details about his personal and professional philosophies. Organized into 111 “plays” of a little over 2 pages each, it is an easy read.

You get insights into his (and the company’s) approach to philanthropy.

“I did not know this would be the case, but our customers also have greater appreciation for us because of our philanthropic efforts. Customers have rallied behind our cause, arriving at our conferences early to help build playgrounds and paint schools (even in the rain)”

The company gets criticized for its high SG&A, and there is some insight into what they spend it on – and what they do not spend on.

“Typically, 60 to 65% of our account executives qualify for this trip (3 days in Maui).Most companies reward only the top 10 to 20% percent of their sales reps …”

“How many times have you gone to a restaurant based on a giant ad? …How many times, in contrast, have you followed the recommendation of a friend or a positive review in a magazine or newspaper? Unbiased references by experts carry tremendous power”

Some people call Marc egotistical.  What impressed me was how generous he is in the book to friends, employees at every level, customers. If that is egotistical, we need more of it.

Webinar: The Mandate for Cloud Financials

Dan Druker of Intacct and I will be running a webinar on October 21 starting at 12 noon eastern. My theme is "There is a difference" when comparing cloud applications to on-premise solutions.

See you there!

OOW: Pleasantness and Disappointments

As I leave OOW a few random thoughts

Most enjoyable - time spend with customer reps. market watchers like David Dobrin, Paul Greenberg, Frank Scavo, Ray Wang, Ameed Taylor,Tom Wailgum, Bruce Richardson, Thomas Otter and many more;  vendor reps like Karen Tillman at Oracle, Anshu Sharma at salesforce.com, the team at NetSuite. 

Most surprising - running into Joyce Boland at Oracle I worked with at Gartner 10 years ago, Brad Everett who I run into every few years starting with our first meeting in Saudi Arabia, 25 years ago and now at Equaterra, Ben Worthen of the WSJ.

Most disappointing - little news on Sun integration and converged services - understandable given the regulatory approval process the merger is still going through. Not understandable is the decision to wait till Larry's keynote to talk about Fusion apps. An Oracle rep told me once Larry speaks, all the NDAs on the analysts and media who have seen early versions will come off. They will create the buzz. Really? A few hundred of them? Had they started the conference unraveling that, 35,000+ attendees would have created magnitude more buzz over the 3 days. Also not spending time with the folks at Rimini and many others I could not visit with.

As I fought the lashing rain on Tuesday, I said I could have experienced the near Category 1 conditions at home in Florida. I did not need to fly all the way here , especially since I did not pick up much from the conference. But then I would not have spent time with Karen and Paul and Brad ...on balance, worth the trip.

Thanks, Oracle for the hospitality.