deal architect

6 years of New Florence

It started off slow – first 3 months I averaged only a post a month on my innovation blog which is now entering its 7th year. Now I am at pace of a post a day and find I need to speed it up even more. We truly are living in a New Renaissance with so much innovation in so many fields. The blog covers 40+ categories from biotech to cleantech to mobility to cloud computing.

In a sense, the blog has made me impatient. I see too many large technology vendors deliver small improvements to old products and call it innovation. I have a wide set of benchmarks from the blog to measure them against. I also see many technology vendors arrogantly believe they are the only ones capable of technology innovation – so I enjoy highlighting what a John Deere or a Corning or a Walgreens is bringing to market.    

The blog also keeps me optimistic – technology can solve any problem we face. It inspired me to write my last book and is helping me as I research my next. My speaking engagements draw heavily from the body of 2,000 posts I have compiled.

In a tribute to Florence, I ended The New Polymath with a setting in its magnificent Palazzo Vecchio. I have attached pages from that epilogue below. I welcome you to read this, and join me daily as I catalog even more innovations over the next few years. Thanks!

Download NewPolymathEpilogue

More New Florence

On the innovation blog

Dual-Pol Radars and Tornadoes

Random Forests, Naive Bayesian estimators, RESTful services..oh,my!

Electronic eyeglasses

Corning’s Gorilla Glass: decades of waiting, now a rocket

Zen and the art of upgrades

A Japanese executive once told me in their corporate culture, executives were shuffled around quietly and when the re-org announcement finally happened months or years later it was a non-event. That caused much less corporate chaos.

Workday just announced Release 13. While it is feature rich and newsworthy, what is remarkable is this statement:

“As of today, all live Workday customers are running Workday 13.”

Contrast this to typical on-premise upgrade – announcements with fan fare, and years later few customers have upgraded and have to be threatened, force marched and worse.

Multi-tiered ERP

In the early 90s I did some work with a multi-national which had SAP at its home country, J.D. Edwards on AS/400 in major country subs, Platinum on LANs in smaller markets and spreadsheets in even smaller markets. Not ideal, but broadband and talent costs justified the tiered strategy. In the 2000s, with telecommunications better and a number of offshore firms helping with implementations in secondary markets (if you check ERP references of a TCS or a Wipro, you see a number of such rollout projects), some of those tiers got flattened.

In last couple of years, I have seen tiering reappear – in many cases at the initiative of some of the regional subs. They are tired of the corporate chargebacks of expensive amortization of software license, annual maintenance, private data centers and not-so-cheap-any-more offshore application management.

In its earnings call today, CEO Zach Nelson talked about how NetSuite is benefitting from such re-tiering.

Another trend in recent years is the emergence of the “micro-multinational” – small firms which are global almost from inception. They would prefer not to tier – but still like the SaaS model vendors like NetSuite offer. Pay more only as you grow.

Sparks fly faster?

AT&T has been running the commercial below over and over.

A few years ago it ran commercials which showed leprechauns and Amelia Earhart suggesting coverage at the ends of rainbows and remote islands - when it was having all kinds of issues even in dense metro areas like New York city and San Francisco.

Isn’t AT&T risking it again?  Its site says “AT&T has deployed HSPA+ to virtually 100% of our nation's fastest mobile broadband network, which enables 4G speeds when combined with enhanced backhaul. We are rapidly expanding enhanced backhaul to cell sites throughout the country, adding new cell sites weekly.”

But even in the mountains?

The good news in the commercial: it is good to see someone other than an owner toss away an AT&T phone:)

Can Leo and Michael reshape the enterprise?

On the heels of my “The arrogance of enterprise tech”, I read a Fortune interview with Leo Apotheker of HP and a Forbes interview with Michael Dell.

Both tout how they can use their agility in consumer markets to change their enterprise businesses.

Leo says: “We're living in a world where the consumer is going to drive enterprise computing, not the other way around, so that gives us a strategic advantage over all the other guys.”

Michael says: “We also think the cost efficiencies learned in our days as a PC company apply to enterprise software and services. Enterprise-class IT services can be affordable. That's our deep belief.”

Easier said than done.

An HP watcher told me recently there are three HPs – the consumer group which is actually pretty agile as it competes with Apple, amazon, RIM, Toshiba, Lexmark and others. Then there is the somewhat slower enterprise server group; finally there is the software and services group. In his view the last is just plain out of breath compared to the consumer side.

I would suggest Dell is in a similar boat.

If Leo and Michael both believe their consumer groups are their ace in the hole, they should let those groups redefine their enterprise businesses – not continue to rely on remnants of a once dominant EDS (that they now both own) which saw its glory days end over a decade ago.

More New Renaissance

on the innovation blog

Why everyone can learn from Cirque du Soleil

The Civil War – on your iPad

Royal Wedding 2.0

Technology at the (Taubman) Mall

Infor-Lawson: Low on the Richter scale

As a Lawson customer once told me “Their pace suits us – we are into kayaking not jet skiing”. I have called them the “quiet” software company. Every couple of years they would do something exciting like when CEO Harry Debes pronounced SaaS would be dead in 2 years. Come to think of it he said that 2.5 years ago!

So will the Infor/Golden Gate acquisition change much? I doubt it. Infor can make all kinds of exciting promises, but the reality in enterprise software as shown by Oracle, Microsoft and Infor itself over last decade is “fusing” acquired technology and coming up with next-gen products takes way too much effort and time. Besides as Charles Phillips of Infor said in the press release they are buying Lawson to “extend our existing portfolio, particularly in areas such as healthcare, public sector, manufacturing and human capital management”

The other learning from the last decade is acquirers want to keep the maintenance stream going as long as possible with promising words such as “unlimited”. So, don’t rock the boat is a “best practice”

In this case, don’t rock the kayak. 

The arrogance of enterprise tech

Notice how many enterprise tech execs smirk about consumer tech and call it “toys” ? Because enterprise tech costs $$$$$ while consumer tech costs $, enterprise tech must be that much more complex – right?

Let’s see how "un-complex" consumer tech is. Apple has built from scratch a retail chain which had 200+ million visitors last year. Its metrics - revenue per square foot of store space, customer satisfaction etc make even long time retail giants drool. amazon, RIM and others have to live with a electronics, displays and other component supply chain which routinely adjusts to major shocks like the Japanese tsunami. Liquidity in the Apple and Android app ecosystems is measured in billions of downloads a year and partners in the hundreds of thousands.   Google, Yahoo! and Facebook have world-class data centers which should have really been designed by IBM, Accenture and other large outsourcers given their premium pricing. Then there is the time to market - product half-lives are a fraction of those in enterprise markets.

Come to think of it – I am glad most enterprise vendors (with exceptions like HP and Microsoft, and Cisco till its recent decision to demphasize consumer markets) stay away from the “toys”. Lord knows they would also be priced at $$$$. As for looks and quality. let's not even go there:)

The economics of abundance

I was talking to a CIO recently and he was marveling about what he called “infinite capacity” -  at his scale he has access to cheap broadband, storage, event talent with the global reach of his company. It was his view of abundance.

I read Dennis Howlett’s Million Dollar Addiction and see a very different view of what some vendors consider “abundance”. Supposedly, Bill Gates was befuddled that Google was offering users 2 gb (now even more) of free Gmail storage. That should have led Microsoft to focus on de-duplication, multi-tenant labor arbitrage, cheaper tier 3 storage and other efficiencies (not to mention rethinking its own software pricing). Instead for years it resisted and you could say continued to encourage CIOs to cap corporate Outlook mailboxes at 100 mb. 

Most telcos have seen the pennies based economics that Skype, Vonage and others have brought to IP based calling. But see how they try and sneak in circa 80s voice charges and even more outrageous global roaming and data charges.

In a back channel, Dennis tried to defend to me enterprise pricing by saying they process complex enterprise transactions. That they do - but in our world of “infinite capacity” should not checks and invoices and customer orders be also processed for pennies?

Abundance is not about just milking deep pockets of customers (increasingly less deep) – it’s about applying cheap memory, storage, broadband, labor to continually deliver awesome new metrics in the functions vendors are invited to help around. They may still be able to continue their million dollar addiction, but as the saying goes they will have made it up in volume.