deal architect

Business continuity and country upheavals

Outsourcers will generally offer up disaster recovery/business continuity clauses in application/people based contracts that are derived from data center/machine based contracts. You can move processing from one affected location to another far easier than you can move teams.

The situation in Egypt is unusual – multiple cities affected at the same time, but it is a reminder for customers to think through onsite/offsite ratios, whether the vendors skillsets and staff are distributed across countries not just cities within a country, and what the SLA really means when social upheaval stops staff from getting to work for days, and even if they could, the telecommunications are affected. 

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Verizon-Terremark

So, on the $ 1.4 billion planned deal, the WSJ comments

“The acquisition could help the company secure more deals for such services—collectively known as "cloud computing"—and compete with companies like Amazon.com…”

VentureBeat on the other hand says

“The deal nets Verizon 13 data centers across the world, including a 750,000 square foot center in the U.S., Amsterdam and Brazil. While Verizon is spinning the purchase as a way to advance its cloud services, the deal really boils down to buying a lot of real estate for servers.”

I would say it is somewhere in between. I highly doubt Verizon can culturally sell much of anything which does not require a multi-year commitment and does not come with a hefty early cancellation penalty. So competing with Amazon or other cloud vendors in small units of processing/storage and small units of time is not likely.

On the other hand, Terremark does bring more than data centers. It brings decent competence in managed services, something Verizon can use as it grows its corporate business. Terremark also brings government vertical and international, particularly Latin American presence which extends Verizon’s reach in both.

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The past, present and future of Work

Prof. Tom Malone of MIT wrote the seminal book The Future of Work in 2004. When I interviewed him for my book about ways work has changed in the years since, he honed in on the phenomenon of communities and crowds and shared the research he and his colleagues have done to break down the “genomes” of these new organisms – what makes them tick, who “works” for them, why etc. 

When Time magazine interviewed Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook a few weeks ago they did not ask him about “future of work” but his comments put our friends bang in the middle of future business processes – and of course work:

“most applications are going to become social, and most industries are going to be rethought in a way where social design and doing things with your friends is at the core of how these things work.

If the last five years was the ramping up, I think that the next five years are going to be characterized by widespread acknowledgment by other industries that this is the way that stuff should be and will be better.”

Yesterday, Tibco announced tibbr and next week IBM’s Lotusphere will be dominated by how such social design is influencing enterprise collaboration thinking. You cannot get Marc Benioff of salesforce.com to quit talking about how his Chatter is reshaping “work” at his customers.

If you had gone to the Gamification Summit in San Francisco last week you would have heard Jane McGonigal tell fellow game designers to a) bring the game metaphor to enterprise processes and b) to make work tasks more challenging – after all, what’s a golf course without sand traps and other obstacles?

Four other interviews in my book focused on other ways work has evolved:

• Gunjan Bhow of Platronics talked about how they used to sell to the aviation/space vertical in the 60s and 70s (Neil Armstrong used one of their headsets to speak his famous words from the moon). In the 80s, call centers flourished as toll-free lines appeared and provided a big new market for their headsets. In the 90s as companies downsized, the small and home office became a new focal point. In the last decade, mobile phones and Bluetooth headsets mushroomed. Now the market is moving to IP based devices and “unified communications” as companies struggle to bring together the multiple ways workers communicate.
• Francisco D’Souza, CEO of Cognizant, brought a global perspective. We used to “bring people to work” as he was growing up and saw the world as the son of a diplomat and we now “take work to people” as he diversifies his talent pool around the world. Impressive the technology and tooling Cognizant is investing in to make results consistent for clients irrespective of where the talent is.
• John Dean, former CIO of Steelcase who has used a tablet since 2003 on how iPads and other tablets may change white collar work

“Organizations need to redefine what is a “ good - enough ” deliverable. I wish I could just share what I sketch out on my tablet. But today I have to translate it into language of the Word and PowerPoint world. Ideally, those tools should be used for a limited number of formal documents and external presentations.”

• Oliver Marks, who writes the Collaboration 2.0 blog on ZDNet summarized the past, present and future of work with this quote 

“It is a jarring contrast - today’s office is more likely to be mobile technology from a car, or a VoIP call from a home office, but with the continued popularity of Dilbert comics and the TV hit The Office , the old world of cubicles, monitors, fax machines, and water coolers seems to be frozen in time. ”

Crowds, friends, tablets and games – yup, not our father and mother’s world of work anymore. What we do for work, where we do it, when we do it, who we do it for is all different.  Huge opportunities for talent managers – and technologists - as “work” continues to evolve.

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Adult supervision – Google and HP style

“Day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!” tweeted Eric Schmidt as Google announced he would move up to Executive Chairman.

Lost in that bombshell was a move by Ray Lane, the incoming Non-Executive Chairman at HP to add some exceptional talent to its board. Gary Reiner, former GE CIO, is one of the most innovative CIOs the industry has seen. Meg Whitman takes credit for eBay’s growth and was ready to take on an even bigger challenge – running the State of California. Shumeet Banerji, CEO of the consulting firm Booz and Dominique Senequier, CEO of AXA Private Equity bring substantive international breadth. Patricia Russo brings deep telecom industry expertise (and during her tenure as CEO at Alactel-Lucent oversaw an impressive data center consolidation project – some thing HP has been pitching to many of its customers).

The rumor mill calls it the post-Hurd purge. That the HP board was due – again - for a cleanup. May well be true. It’s impressive to see the quality of talent this cleanup is sweeping in.

The IBM archipelago

Remember the IBM of old? Homogenous corporate culture, even down to dress code.  In recent years, I have had a growing sense IBM has become a series of islands as I get PR from a wide range of its hardware, software and services, and often vertical market units. In a number of ways, decentralized business units are great for customers – they are closest to the markets they are dealing with. Indeed, I had lunch recently with the CEO of a financial services industry software vendor and he was complimenting the quality of IBM personnel in that vertical.

But IBM is increasingly marketing complex, Polymath like solutions which cut across many of its products – and those of many partners.  Bob Warfield writes about the promise of IBM’s Watson in future business analytics  It’s exciting not just for IBM just like its Deep Blue’s prowess at chess was something the tech industry celebrated. But as I saw some commercials this weekend where IBM is already touting Watson, I wondered which part of IBM will bring something packaged and coherent around Watson to the enterprise market? Or will it be a series of individual projects like many of its Smart Planet projects have been to date?

IBM helps a number of customers with integrations. Its Cast Iron and other software integrate countless applications.  Be nice for it to showcase its “internal integrators” which build bridges across its wide expanse of home grown, acquired and friendly partner “islands”

A new form of “buy-side analyst”?

In the investment world there is a clear demarcation between sell-side and buy-side analysts. Been wondering whether the tech world needs something similar as I read various industry research and have conversations with several technology advisers.

Among the research I am referring to is Gartner’s Mid-Market ERP MQ and its cloud infrastructure MQ  and“prolific Paul” Greenberg’s 6 part series on CRM vendors. I am puzzled I don’ t see NetSuite, Plex or other SaaS vendors in the Gartner mid-market MQ (the fine print says NetSuite was excluded since it mostly has “service-centric businesses, rather than product-centric businesses”. In fairness, the Gartner title does say “MQ for product-centric businesses”). In contrast I see what Paul calls the social “mainstream” with vendors like Jive and Lithium in his list.  I see the Gartner’s cloud list  and see it is co-mingled with more traditional hosting and has earned it the scorn of Bob Warfield and others for that lack of delineation.

I have also been talking to several advisers in the last few weeks. Many are ex Big 5 and now in smaller consulting firms, and they are coaching their clients on emerging technology trends.  Many tell me it feels like the early 90s again – as companies evaluate a dizzying array of new and disruptive technologies.

Part of the reason companies are turning to such advisers is they do not have internal analysts who can take (or ignore) market assessments from Gartner, Paul, me and so many others and rationalize it to their unique industry and company needs.  Most IT staffing has been cut to the bone – 80 to 90% of many IT and telecom budgets are now with external vendors. So, internal analysis today is often transactional and tactical.

But external advisers can only go so far. Buy-side analysts should be working with them during the technology evaluations and continue to add their focus during deployment with implementation partners.

How would such analysts be funded? The 80 to 90% spend with incumbent vendors is a motherlode of potential savings.  Good buy-side analysts should be able to easily and quantifiably justify their budgets.

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