deal architect

Weekend Stuff: Obama’s Brilliant First Year

Not my words, those of Jacob Weisberg in Slate (saw it courtesy of Paul Kedrosky)

He quotes three accomplishments —preventing a depression, remaking America's global image, and winning universal health insurance.

Am I worried about the deficits? Absolutely. Do I think the world will continue to run to us whenever there is a military crisis and just as quickly bad mouth us? Yes. Do I think healthcare will be easy to fix? An emphatic no given the inflexibility of pharmas, insurance, litigation attorneys.

But based on what he walked into and what he has done, the man deserves our support.

Of course, what do I know? I only gave up on W after year 7 of his Presidency.

Now back to less unpleasant technology matters…

The end of packaged software as we know it?

Three very different data points over the last month contribute to this post

a) I was impressed to see at the Dreamforce conference last week how much custom development is going on on the force.com platform. The numbers we heard from Marc Benioff were big - 188 million lines of force.com code, 12 times as much as last year. Since June more than 15,000 companies have a signed up for the force.com free edition etc.

But the numbers are just numbers till  you see what end-user organizations are custom-building – not just vendors like Coda to build their own accounting applications. You have to stop and ask - has the pendulum swung? Are people building more rather than buying packaged functionality?

b) Then I saw fellow Enterprise Advocate Ray Wang present at a SAP user event in Manchester, England and point out 5 areas SAP has invested in recent years.

• Netweaver
• Duet
• BusinessbyDesign
• Solution manager
• Enterprise support

But there has been  little customer uptake. Alan Bowling, chairperson of the UK and Ireland user group is quoted: “SAP still develops stuff that only five people will ever use and then tries to drop it on us. ” No wonder SAP has had a tough job migrating customer bases. Why should they with new features they don’t really care about, and the chaos of a typical upgrade. 3-4 months of rehearsals, and the hold-your-breath long weekend execution of the upgrade.  In contrast, Marc Benioff  also harped on salesforce’s ability to perform“5 minute upgrades” using mirrored data centers.

c) Finally, a conversation with Zach Nelson of NetSuite brought home much more clearly how much more SaaS vendors understand their customer base. When you can see on-line which features your customer base is using extensively, and which new features get adopted in an upgrade release, that is one of the best feedback loops you can have. In on-premise world that feedback takes much longer, and the results typically based on surveys are never accurate.

Alan was further quoted as saying “We can now get in early and tell (SAP) that some things are either irrelevant or might be better if approached from a different angle. We’re gaining access to advanced roadmaps that would have been kept from us”. That is goodness, but it has taken years and will continue to take years to incorporate into future releases. How do you compete against Zach’s much better visibility in to his customer preferences?

More custom development. More tuned features in future releases. 5 minute upgrades.

The packaged software world is going through seismic changes.

This post was previously published on the Enterprise Advocates page

The shoemaker's children

On my flight over to San Francisco, I changed planes in Las Vegas and got free wi fi courtesy of Google. On my flight back on Delta I got free Wi-fly courtesy of eBay. Both are spreading some holiday cheer.

But San Francisco airport expected you to pay for wi-fi. No Google generosity there? Through the week, the AT&T mobile coverage in downtown San Francisco was miserable.

Shouldn't Silicon Valley have the best?

Where there are clouds, there is often a rainbow

Marc Benioff likes to talk about how salesforce is "democratizing" technology by making large enterprise class IT infrastructure and application management affordable for even the smallest companies.

But at Dreamforce this week, I saw a much wider view of his democracy.

At one end of the table was a ball of color - bob of red hair, purple trousers -  D.A. of the indie band Chester French. At the other end was Joe Drouin, CEO of Kelly Services which places 650,000 contract staff around the world, in a dark suit and white shirt. Quite a contrast in size of customer and dress code.

There was Avon which showed off how it leverages force.com and Facebook as it targets its Mark product line at a younger generation of customer. And there Bob Beuachamp, CEO of BMC which has made billions over the last 3 decades selling mainframe and other IT centric tools telling the audience that he had heard from a CIO "I have 30,000 servers and I hate them all"

There was appirio showing off salesforce's new Chatter features integrated with Google Apps. A few minutes later there was Accenture showing off a much more traditional set of survey screens.

There was Astadia, a new-gen systems integrator as Platinum Sponsor on the expo floor. And there was Deloitte, also a Platinum sponsor.

There was Gavin Newsom, the young, left-leaning mayor of San Francisco and there was Gen. Colin Powell, the right-leaning former US Secretary of State.

The show had 19,000 attendees registered from more than 60 countries...quite a rainbow.

Hey, this democracy thing may actually have some legs...

The maturing of salesforce.com

So, I am walking near Moscone Center - in town for Dreamforce - and the guy tempts me with the offer of a free convertible. Got my attention - see the sign "work for a consulting company whose name you actually recognize". It is Deloitte recruiting. And giving away BMWs. That's good for potential employees - but customers? Guess it was only a matter of time before the big consulting firms would salivate at the opportunities around salesforce.

Should walk around the expo hall tomorrow and see if appirio, Astadia, Model Metrics, Bluewolf can do better than a BMW :)

Sapience 2009: TCO Management Event for SAP customers

"Sapience 2009, an event for CEOs, CIOs, CFOs, and IT Decision makers seeking to escape the limitations of a strongly vendor controlled application landscape will take place December 8-9, 2009 at the Hyatt Regency Cambridge, MA." says the PR

Several other speakers will be presenting on ways to manage the SAP centric costs - shelfware, maintenance etc. I will be presenting on the even more pricey "surround" costs - the hosting, processing, storage and network costs which look astronomic compared to emerging cloud benchmarks; the cost of application management by supposedly "cheap" offshore vendors, the still too complex upgrades etc

See you in chilly Boston!

HP, the disruptor?

Why would Cisco move down into 25% mainstream server margin business when its networking business has yielded it 65%? That is the question many asked as Cisco announced its Unified Computing System in early 2009. Its marketing said it “..represents a radical simplification of traditional architectures, dramatically reducing the number of devices that must be purchased, cabled, configured, powered, cooled, and secured.”

Some would argue, a new class of infrastructure software – virtualization – had broken down traditional boundaries between computers, storage and networking and Cisco was merely reacting to that trend.

Events in recent weeks are confirming HP, in particular, pushed Cisco to do so.

Before Mark Hurd arrived at HP there was a strong partnership between the two with HP selling hardware, Cisco networking gear. Indeed, HP’s previous CEO, Carly Fiorina was on Cisco’s board. After Mark arrived, HP started to promote its own ProCurve networking brand while continuing the partnership. HP storage networking solutions were proposed most of the time with Cisco high-end switching directors.

Grumbling started when HP introduced its Virtual Connect product in 2006. The industry had been moving to blade servers – easy to expand by plugging in or out new blades into the chassis. But while this made easy for the server administrator, they had created problems for network and storage administration. With Virtual Connect, various network addresses were virtualized inside the module, and so are the links back to the server blades on the other side. So changes in server configuration did not affect network or storage administrators, and vice versa changes in network or storage did not affect the server administrator.

HP claimed that Virtual Connect could increase the productivity of administrators by a factor of three because of this flexibility.   The foundation for next generation network virtualization was laid. Rumors started floating that HP saw an opportunity in networks and Cisco saw the HP threat

And as it introduced its Virtual Connect Flex-10 Ethernet module in 2008, HP changed its messaging from administrator efficiency to economics saying it could “cut network hardware costs up to 75%.” Flex-10 distributed the capacity of a 10-Gb Ethernet port into four connections to dramatically lower the cost and complexity of network connectivity. 

And by late 2009, the split was accented as Cisco set up a joint venture to tighten relations with EMC around storage HP started more aggressively positioning its own ProCurve networking gear and announcing its own Converged Infrastructure Architecture. Now comes HP’s $ 2.7 billion acquisition of 3Com and it is all-out war.

I am not nice to HP for milking its dominant position in printers and related consumables. Its EDS unit is grossly overpriced compared to cloud competitors. Its software business gets unjustified margins. 

But  in reverse I need to be generous to HP for disrupting Cisco in network switches and routers.

Don’t take a Coke can into Pepsi HQ

I wrote earlier “if you are Steve Ballmer's (Microsoft)  kids you dare not use Google or try an iPod. I imagine his salesfolks dare not use salesforce.com...”

Zoli writes about Don Dodge moving from Microsoft to Google:

• Thanks Microsoft Outlook, but I’m going to Gmail.
• Thanks Microsoft Office Office 2007, but I’m going to Google Docs.
• Thanks Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.5, but I’m going to Google Android.
• Thanks Microsoft Internet Explorer, but I’m moving to Google Chrome.

No word about about changes in soft drink preferences, though…

Appirio’s Cloud Computing Ecosystem Map

They showed it to me on a printout a few months ago, and I kew I had to go get new glasses – it’s their cloud ecosystem map, which you can magnify on-line. Gives you an idea of the bewildering pace at which cloud vendors are proliferating.

The Economist Debate on Cloud Computing

The magazine is running a debate on cloud computing between Marc Benioff, CEO of salesforce.com and Stephen Elop, President, Microsoft Business Division.

Please check it out and comment.

I commented as follows:

“How do you recover from someone saying “Have you quit beating your spouse?” Say yes, and you acknowledge you did it in the past. Say no, and it implies you are still doing it.

The title of this debate is similar. “Cloud Computing Can't Be Entirely Trusted” You put it at a disadvantage with a negative connotation then expect it to defend it on why it should be trusted.

After all, how dare cloud vendors challenge the establishment when the incumbents have delivered so much?

• Masses of bug fixes which have to be applied at each site individually on a relentless basis. Thank you, Microsoft.
• Months and months of upgrade rehearsals to get it done – maybe - on a long weekend. Thank you, SAP
• Billions of dollars in software shelfware with little ability to trade. Thank you, Oracle.
• Downtime of “planned maintenance” hours while supposedly meeting 99.99 uptime SLAs. Thank you, EDS
• Servers utilized at 20% in most data centers. Thank you, HP
• Storage at $ 100 a GB over 3 years to most companies, when you and I can buy 1 TB for the same price - 1000X the capacity for a one time payment. Thank you, EMC
• Cold war era bunkers called data centers which have few of the design, cooling, proximity to renewal energy sources, tax incentive efficiencies that Google, Yahoo!, amazon have shown. Thank you, IBM
• Ever seen stats on average uptime, recovery time etc in customer base from an on-premise vendor similar to what many SaaS vendors show that transparently on their trust sites? Thank you, on-premise vendors for sharing that information.
• Ever seen a SAS 70 Type II audit report on an on-premise implementation? Thank you, on-premise vendors for sharing those.

Yup, Economist, Cloud Computing Can't Be Entirely Trusted. The incumbent, on-premise establishment on the other hand can overprice, under-deliver, cause massive overruns, suck out 80% of our IT budgets for routine work – but we need to keep trusting them.”