deal architect

EU and Competition in Technology

The thinking in most of the tech industry is we don’t need government intervention - at least not in the enterprise side of the business.  Big corporations don’t need protection. They can hold their own against the big vendors.

I disagree. Even the giants GMs and GEs don’t make up even 1% of Oracle’s or IBM’s revenues. The buy side is extremely fragmented whereas the vendor side is increasingly consolidated. Corporations spend 85% of their IT/telco budgets externally, and 75% of that is with the top 25 global vendors like SAP, BT etc.

It screams for periodic government scrutiny. Especially when vendors pull shenanigans like misleading and scaring customers on the use of third party maintenance to protect their 95% gross margins. Or selling printer ink at $ 5,000 a gallon and still misleading consumers about ink levels in their cartridges so they buy more prematurely of that precious commodity. Or international roaming charges at 50 to 100X what local firms charge.

If the government does not stop such rape and pillage, why do we bother to have any police at all? Let’s just disband all regulation and law enforcement.

So, I am ok with Neelie Kroes, the EU Commissioner for Competition and her office’s periodic scrutiny of  Microsoft or Intel or Oracle.

What I do not like is a seeming pattern of focus on US companies. While her office has moved against European telcos to cap mobile calling charges, I don’t see that office focused enough on European vendors like SAP or Deutsche Telecom. They need as much scrutiny as the large US vendors.

Of course, compared to what she has done in the last few years, our FCC, DoJ etc have been castrated when it has come to consumer protection around technology and telecom.

We need all of them to step up. Now, let me brace for hate mail saying  government has no role in technology markets.

Interview with Sal Allegra on IT Quality Assurance

With offshore firms offering testing teams in the thousands, I was intrigued what customers thought of Questcon’s test center right here in N. Carolina.

So I asked to interview Sal Allegra, IT manager at ISO, a member of the Verisk Analytics family of companies, about the work Questcon has done for them. Sal manages their quality assurance, change, and software configuration management activities.

Describe the business and application environment you are responsible for quality around.

ISO provides its customers a wide range of actuarial, underwriting, and claims information around property/casualty insurance. As is common in this industry, we have lots of custom-built solutions on a mixed bag of hardware platforms. We are in the process of transitioning many to Java on a Z Linux environment.

While the application complexity and data volumes are not out of the ordinary, with Verisk having recently gone public, we obviously will have an additional responsibility for hygiene related to our applications.

How mature would you say your QA environment is?

In flux is probably a good way to describe it. We have decided to take advantage of an enterprise license around IBM’s Rational Suite. The hope is it will provide some level of consistency and common repository across regression testing, performance benchmarking, and defect tracking steps.

One of the reasons to engage Questcon was to do an assessment of our current state and the maturity of our regression environment. Questcon reported our level of automation in that area was somewhat below industry benchmarks and proceeded to help us create a framework to significantly increase the automation.

Can you describe the test automation framework?

To me, a well designed framework makes you less testing-tool dependent and greatly insulates you from human vagaries of testing. Questcon did a quick assessment on our environment using 28 variables, and then conducted a proof of concept using a series of regression test cases.

They created a keyword-driven framework that helped standardize the code creation process and allowed us to leverage common utilities and function libraries. We anticipate we are now creating our regression scripts much faster. One of the added benefits was they helped reconcile separate scripts, one for acceptance and one for production to allow for shared efficiencies.

Were you hesitant to utilize Questcon’s remote center in Greensboro, NC?

They did the assessment and framework development on-site. That was really high-quality work. Once that was done they could have done the detailed development just about anywhere. The beauty of a well-defined framework is you can use junior resources right here in the U.S. and get competitive pricing without needing to look for offshore economies.

The big “aha” for me was Questcon did not just jump in and execute, but helped us rethink. Also, they have a vendor-neutral approach to testing tools, so their mindset is not rote or skewed towards a certain solution set.

The Real Deal: Damon Auer and Bob Glynn on “Rigid Agility or Agile Rigidity”

This continues a series of columns from practitioners I respect. The category "Real Deal" describes them well.

This time it is Damon Auer, Partner at Tribridge and Bob Glynn, co-founder of Affinity Inc, two high-class boutique consulting/systems integration firms. I have worked with Damon on a number of technology strategy projects and it’s always a joy to see his creative mind solving unsolvable problems -  like the seeming oxymoron of Agile development in a world of Rigid methodologies.

“Nothing like starting a story with an oxymoron.  But this one’s appropriate.

Our firms partnered 2 years ago to help a global Healthcare and Life Sciences company implement a new system to better support Configuring, Pricing, Quoting, and Processing Orders around the world.  The software to enable this functionality had already been determined to be Siebel (now part of Oracle). 

The initial plan was to build, validate, and deploy the system to about 7,000 users over a 24-month period using a very rigid Waterfall methodology.  This Waterfall methodology had been refined over a period of years at the company and was deeply integrated with Quality processes to insure that any system that goes live meets strict FDA systems validation guidelines. 

It was a good plan but . . .

3 months into the project things changed.  A lingering lawsuit took a turn for the worse and the company had only 12 months to get the new system live or face tens of millions of dollars of legal penalties.

We huddled with company Program Leadership and realized our current (tested but rigid) waterfall method would never get us across the goal line in time.  So we decided to immediately chuck the Program Plan, break our team into “Scrums”, enlist “Product Owners”, and “Sprint” as hard and fast as we could to meet the new time challenge.

This approach created a whole new set of challenges including immediate skepticism about our ability to execute an Agile project while dependent on 26 other teams (in 14 countries) still executing the classic Waterfall method.  And this was a packaged system (Siebel) not a custom development project – how was that going to work?  And how would we ever get the system documented thoroughly enough to meet FDA validation requirements?  And what the hell is a Scrum and a Sprint and a Product Backlog?  Oh yeah, and how will we take the consultant’s (us) Fixed Fee contract for implementing the system and fit it into a new schedule with a different set of requirements?

All great questions but we decided we didn’t possibly have time to answer them to everyone’s satisfaction – so we started the first Sprint.

We learned as we went.  Our skeptics continued their skepticism.  Until we went live with a system designed to meet businesses requirements 12 months later.  Then we were heroes. 

What we learned was: (1) the value of Agile methods in driving User ownership delivered systems; (2) the granular accountability (and empowerment) that Agile creates; (3) you can Sprint until the system is functioning then retrospectively validate the system to meet documentation and regulatory requirements; (4) Agile works with packaged systems! (this was a real aha for us).

What we already knew but had reinforced by this experience is: (5) there is no substitute for smart, flexible, committed Program Leadership – you can accomplish just about anything with the right people; (6) every transformational project has skeptics until you deliver.

So, oxymoron it may be, but Agile concepts (if not strict adherence to every nuance) can work in the most Rigid of Waterfall regulatory environments to produce great product. 

Take that from these two hands-on consultants. There you go - we ended this post with another oxymoron :)”

They can be reached at Damon DOT Auer AT tribridge DOT com and rglynn AT affinityinc DOT net

Tools: Test before you buy

I first asked in the late 90s when I was at Gartner – why do testing, conversion, change configuration and other tools vendors not allow system integrators to deploy their tools for the duration of relevant phase of an implementation - instead of trying to directly sell perpetual licenses to customers?

I was talking to Lisa Lovas of Questcon recently and she told me about HP’s Project-based Licensing Program. It enables Questcon to offer the HP quality and performance management software on a project basis for a term ranging from one to three months. Makes so much sense, and I would think significantly improves HP’s opportunities to convert to a longer-term sale.

Lisa was saying HP is well positioned to have its Quality Center be exposed to pressing new areas such as performance testing web apps. And other areas where IBM’s Rational and other tools have traditionally played. Her firm has experience working with both IBM and HP suites.  

NetSuite Business Cloud event feedback

I presented in the NetSuite Business Cloud seminar series in its final leg – in Chicago and Atlanta. The 6 week tour had previously been to London, Sydney, Manila and New York. While I did not envy some of the NetSuite employees for that travel, jet lag et al, the energy level in the 2 sessions I participated in was really high.

The customer panels and the lively audience q&a that followed were particularly striking.  In Chicago, it was Dave Weiss, Director of Internet Marketing at Wrigleyville Sports (they sell Cubs and other sports merchandise), Jim Holtzman CFO of Fieldglass (a SaaS contractor management solution) and Aaron Judy, VP of Technology & Operations at Wonderlic, Inc. (The cognitive testing company). In Atlanta, it was Chris Hauser, CFO, NASCO (healthcare claims processing) and Calvin Jackman, Controller, Mycom North America Inc.(telco network management services).

What was striking to me was how widely NetSuite has penetrated these enterprises – in some cases 80+% of all employees are using the system. How well integrated some of their web stores are with NetSuite. How NetSuite has made effortless for these growing companies. currency and local tax maintenance via other web service providers. How several of them talked about their growth without needing to add back office staff or IT infrastructure. How these customers sought out and bought NetSuite in spite of fact that it does not have sales offices in either city.

Most SaaS success stories we hear are about on the edges – CRM, HR related. It was great to hear core transactional experiences with customer orders, materials and supplier issues and of course, financials.

If this is fake, give us plenty more

Ron Markezich, corporate VP of Microsoft Online says "we're not seeing any inclination that Zoho or Google or Zimbra or any other of those offering fake Office capabilities can replace [Microsoft Office],"

And guess what – he said it as Microsoft dropped prices by 33 to 50% on its on-line productivity and email products.

Hey, the original for less is good. “Fake” with more product momentum than the original is even better.

I look forward to more fake Oracle via salesforce.com, more fake SAP via NetSuite, more fake EDS with amazon.com, more fake AT&T with Sykpe.

But, please no more fake Steve Ballmer blogs :)

This post was originally run on the Enterprise Advocates blog

Vendor traffic in the Data Center

Cisco adds the storage building block to its network and computing plans with a JV with EMC. HP, in turn, decides to go after Cisco’s sweet spot with new HP ProCurve offerings integrated with HP BladeSystem.

Oracle, awaiting regulatory approval for the Sun acquisition, is already targeting IBM as we saw at OOW.

Hey, competition is good. Hopefully, we will see more assortment pricing specials as is common in the CPG industry where vendors bundle their large portfolio of products.

But each of those five has shown it loves to run up margins to stratospheric levels in categories it is really strong at. So buyers need to use this new leverage to beat down those areas - and overall, also keep looking at and steadily moving infrastructure either via SaaS solutions or via infrastructure services to the cloud.

This post was previously run on the Enterprise Advocates blog

More New Renaissance

On the New Florence blog

12 really Maverick Ideas

Mouse 2.0

The new plants in Motown

Solar Decathlon

Intel Risks it all (again)

Not free, but reasonably priced, conference calling

I have written positively about my experience with FreeConference.com for almost a decade now. You and others pay your own long-distance charges to a common conference number, usually in a rural state like Iowa. The service provider then charges termination fees for each of the calls in that conference to the originating telcos.

The big telcos have bellyached for years. First, because this cut into their lucrative 50c + per minute per caller conferencing service. Then as they moved to unmetered plans on home and blocks of time on cellular long-distance lines, they resented these calls making up much of the traffic. Even though they charged $25, 50, 75 for those monthly plans.

Now Google Voice has jumped into the fray. They do not charge a monthly fee on your home or mobile line, so you can sympathize up to a point. But they get advertising revenue as it helps overall Google viewer metrics and customer aggregation.

Here’s my perspective as a consumer. I don’t particularly want free..I would be happy to pay 3-4c a minute for the convenience of knowing everyone I invited to a conference call will not be blocked.

So FCC, jump in and swat the conference calling boys and Verizon and Sprint and AT&T and Google to come up with some middle ground between free and 10c a minute a person that freeconferencecall.com charges for its own toll-free service.

In the meantime, time to start using Skype conferencing more.