deal architect

More New Florence

on the innovation blog

The stars are truly aligned!

Security at the Royal Wedding

25 most powerful Asian businesspeople

National Train Day

Introducing a new sponsor: Workday

Given the disruption theme of this blog, I am pleased to welcome Workday to the past and present gallery of innovators and disruptors who sponsor this and the New Florence. New Renaissance blog.

Workday was founded by Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri  following Oracle’s hostile $10.3 billion takeover of PeopleSoft in 2004. They started it with the belief that customers deserved better than the traditional on-premise software model and its inherently high costs related to up-front licensing and maintenance fees and long, complicated software upgrade cycles.

Six years later, Workday is one of the most interesting companies in the often ho-hum area of enterprise software. Workday’s primary products are Human Capital Management and Payroll, and it’s growing its customer base for a new product, Workday Financials. As I blogged recently, one of their major differentiators is delivery of new features to customers several times a year in updates that typically take just a few days, rather than the often painful, months-long upgrade cycles associated with traditional software.

Another differentiator: while SaaS/cloud computing is often considered SME focused most of Workday’s nearly 200 customers are large or mid-size companies, some of which have tens of thousands of employees using Workday across the world.

Disclosure: Blog sponsor policy is outlined here

The other Royal Wedding

There was quite a crowd this week in Orlando at Blackberry World.  A “flawless” Flash experience with Adobe on its PlayBook, Bing support from Microsoft  and Facebook’s first tablet app. IBM announced its Global Financing unit will now fund tablets.

Wait there’s more – Android Apps run as native binaries. so there’s Google and by extension amazon’s Android App Store. And Verizon’s.

Wait, who misplaced Apple’s invitation? :)

Telecom’s Got Talent

The 2009 survey of consumers in 32 countries by the Reputation
Institute put telecoms as fourth lowest rated of the 25 industries surveyed — scoring just slightly above tobacco, which was ranked, not surprisingly, the lowest.

Defensively, Verizon President and COO Denny Strigl told an audience a couple of years ago the telecom industry is “unfairly maligned”.

After seeing Steven Hall audition below, Denny does have a point. There’s definite talent in that industry.

Wish they would move some out of their billing and pricing groups who dream up all kinds of creative stuff!

 

 

More Innovation

on the New Florence blog

Chase mobile deposits

Google: Big Data, Simple Algorithms

Eggs – HighTech and Low-tech

FastCompany’s version of innovation

Zach Nelson: Play-by-Play Analyst!

I am looking forward to seeing Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite at his SuiteWorld event next week. You can talk to Zach for hours about his company, of course. But even longer about sports – football as befits a Nebraskan; baseball with many different ties NetSuite has with the Oakland As. And even longer about every aspect of the broader tech industry: for my book, Zach was incredibly generous opening up his rolodex to so many folks I ended up profiling.

And his analysis is always insightful like in this article:

“Just when the likes of Lawson and Epicor are desperate for innovation, they are going to be viewed as ATMs for private equity financiers.”

“At Microsoft's recent Convergence conference, CEO Steve Ballmer jumped in the 'Way Back Machine', set the dial for 1999 and announced a Cloud ERP strategy that would make any other software executive blush.”

“(SAP) Business ByDesign is the David Hasselhoff of software – it must be big in Germany, but we just don't see it that much in the US.”

That’s just a warm-up. Look forward to the live color commentary next week!

Apple and global trade and jobs

Soon after I posted on the President having dinner with many of Silicon Valley leaders, I had a conversation where the person said “Sitting next to Steve Jobs, I hope Obama gave him hell for all the jobs in China”.

It was a polite conversation and I did not point out that Apple has created tons of wealth for US shareholders. That Apple retail stores have created many new US jobs over the last decade. The Apple App Store has created opportunities for many US entrepreneurs who have created most of the 350K+ apps. 

I also did not point out that the Chinese contract manufacturer he was referring to,  Foxconn, is also a key supplier to HP, Cisco and many other US high-tech companies, not just Apple.

Maybe I should have, but I am glad Larry Dignan at ZDNet makes some of those points in response to Rep Jesse Jackson Jr’s comments about Apple.

In reverse, I just posted on Fortune’s list of 25 most powerful Asian businesspeople. The CEO of Foxconn is on it. So are executives from Toyota, Tata, Hyundai and others.

It is an impressive list. But look at their financials and see how much each of them depend on US customers . And yet the Jesse Jackson Jrs in their countries are all ready to dump the dollar and write off the US. 

Really?

We need Larry Dignans in their markets to also call them out.

Earning eyeballs the old-fashioned way

As I talk to potential case studies for my next book, it is easy to show them the last book’s website, FB page, LinkedIn Group, Flickr gallery, my innovation blog. But I need to also point out how much positive press I have brought to case studies like GE, Plantronics, Cognizant, salesforce.com, UFL by using their examples (and many others) in the presentations/events I have done around the book. Yes, even BP which last year was toxic – in my talks I vigorously praised the CTO group profiled in the book.

In our social world we often underestimate this old-fashioned channel. Many in the audiences are executives and influencers who don’t have time to read a book or even a blog ( and majority certainly are not on Twitter) but can spare a few minutes of time listening to inspiring tales of innovation.

As I was updating my speaker bio this weekend, I was impressed how long a list of events I had presented at in the last few months. Here’s a few:

• Netsuite SuiteWorld – San Francisco, CA (next week)
• IBM Author Call series
• Lexmark/IN2LEX Startup Advantage - Lexington, KY
• Procurement Leaders Forum - Chicago, IL
• Cognizant Community - Orlando, FL
• Insight Real Cloud Summit - Scottsdale, AZ
• Arizona State U - Tempe, AZ
• GigaOm Bunker Session - San Francisco, CA
• EuroCloud – London, UK
• Cap Gemini - Amsterdam, Netherlands
• iSchool, U. of Toronto - Toronto, Canada
• Salesforce.com Cloudforce - San Jose, CA
• Sapience – Cologne, Germany
• Enterprise 2.0 – Boston, MA
• Babson College – Wellesley, MA
• Knowledge Infusion Executive Forum – Dallas, TX

Thanks again to all the event hosts (and others not listed above) and to many friends who recommended me to these events. The biggest thank-you goes to the many innovators in the book (and the next one). They are the story - I am just a messenger.

A multi-channel messenger.

Turn right at the fountain

A neighbor of mine is going to Paris for the first time and asked me for some advice. I copied several pages from a book which catalogs 6 walks around the city and interesting factoids written by George Oakes when he was a NYT travel columnist in the 60s. The book has walks in 20+ other European cities – and even with all the new architecture is timeless and had been my constant companion when I lived in Europe in late 80s. Even in our fast paced world, some things do not change as much as we would like to think

I had developed for my outsourcing clients a primer on India (and a few other destinations) for first time visitors – coaching on culture, infrastructure etc. I developed the first edition a decade ago, and periodically updated with minor tweaks as I accompanied them on due diligence trips. In recent weeks, I have shared with several first time visitors who were headed there (thankfully without me – so I did not have to suffer through the joys of jetlag)

One of them reported back the trip was fascinating, my slides had been useful but added a jewel about her bazaar shopping experiences “heard every line under the sun --  how beautiful I am, what an aura I have around me, and what a deal I was going to get because I was the first sale of the day.”

Did I mention “Even in our fast paced world, some things do not change as much as we would like to think”? :)