deal architect

We need more HP/Oracle “moments”, less IBM “moments”

Earlier this year I wrote, We need more Apple/Google/Amazon “moments”. less IBM “moments”. After reading the twitterstream around Steve Mills, IBM’s SVP and Group Executive - Software & Systems  at IBMConnect, I should add HP and Oracle to my list.

On HP:  Steve Mills explaining his views of HP's prospects in the future. New direction? Where was this board in 1991?

On Oracle: "The way you compete with Oracle is benchmark, benchmark, benchmark, because Oracle is not tethered to the truth."

Hey, all that is good fun. Ray Lane and Larry Ellison can zing him back as well or better

But it’s things he says about IBM which make me say what I am saying

“#smarterplanet has been one of the best campaigns”

“Mooooove over enterprise data centers. Steve Mills re cloud computing: Why buy the cow when you can just buy the milk?”

Both of them reflect the reality of IBM today.

Smarter Planet is about IBM Services knitting together largely somebody else’s technology - sensors, satellites, analytics etc. If there was a “percentage content made at IBM” sticker on each of those projects as there is on cars, I bet it would be less than 20% .

On cloud computing it again plays to IBM Services. They would love to swap out Dell for Sun for HP for Cisco gear so long as they were delivering to an SLA. And implement SAP or Oracle or salesforce.com. And use their volume to beat down on the product value of the equation.

Is that what customers really need? The ratio of labor and telco services to products in the industry is already dangerously high, and if it was not for innovations from SaaS vendors which allow for multi-tenant application maintenance, and cloud infrastructure vendors which leverage ultra-efficient data centers, it would be even higher.

So, I for one am glad, HP’s board continued its focus on chips and printers in 1991. As the case study on their supply chain in my next books says “It is a massive operation – the largest in the technology industry with over $ 60 billion in components, warehouse, transportation and other logistics costs. The HP machine churns out two personal computers a second, two printers a second, and a data center server every 15 seconds.”

Same with Oracle. I am glad they are focused on chips and code.

Without other’s products, IBM would not have much to sell in services…

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So much to be thankful for

I don’t think I will complain ever again how long it takes a PC to reboot. Because over the last year, I have watched with amazement (and some frustration) how my own body has “rebooted”

Last Thanksgiving I had been back from the hospital about a month, and my worried nephews and cousins came to visit. I was not very good company – weak, still dazed. The only good news was I had lost so much weight, I could eat as much pumpkin pie as I wanted. But I did not have much of an appetite.

This year, I will have to be careful and choose between Margaret’s sherry trifle, and pumpkin pie and apple pie. The appetite is back.  Amazingly, in the last few months I have delivered a whole new book. Posted over 500 blogs on this and New Florence. The reboot continues well.

So many big and small things to be thankful for. I have seen my son enjoy his first car. I have seen my daughter blossom from little to big sister at her sorority. With my reduced travel I have enjoyed the many walks and time with my beagle, Peanuts.

And I have so many people to thank for that.

Starting with Margaret.  Herself a medical professional, she advised me to also seek unconventional treatments like hyberbaric chamber sessions (the theory being the brain as the biggest consumer of oxygen would heal better with the pure oxygen infusions), acupuncture, and biofeedback. She did so while shepherding two teenagers in their worry about their father. She joined me in many of my trips this year.

But Margaret’s biggest contribution was encouraging me to reduce my travel and instead concentrate on the book and blogs. Peanuts must have bribed her:)

Which brings me to my readers and my sponsors. So many of you sent me good wishes. So many of you saw me at events and made a point of saying “you look great” whether I did or not. Thanks to my blog sponsors for their support. Thanks to many consulting clients who worked with my reduced travel regime.

Why do we only dedicate a day a year for Thanksgiving? I have so many more to thank – friends, doctors, neighbors, service personnel and on and on.

Last week I heard the oldie “Signs” by Five Man Electric Band. With so many protests around the world, the song just sounded so timely. But I particularly liked the ending

So I got me a pen and a paper and I made up my own little sign
I said, "Thank you, Lord, for thinkin' 'bout me. I'm alive and doin' fine."

Of sausages and technology

Rob Carter,  CIO at Fedex, is an executive I have long respected. Every event I have seen him present at, it has been in business terms – not geek talk.  He made a comment, though, last year to Chris Murphy at InformationWeek which puzzled me “.. business unit execs must understand even deep concepts such as a services architecture. "The more we kept this stuff behind the scenes, the less real it was to the business,"”

I am a fan of Mark Twain who once said “Those that respect the law and love sausage should watch neither being made.” I  hold the same opinion about technology – let’s delight the business and the users with applications of technology not mire them in developer and architect talk. Let’s keep that behind the scenes.

So I was pleased to see Rob at a conference couple of months ago.  He spoke about warning a visitor not to stay at the Memphis Airport Hilton while showing on the screen a radar like view of countless Fedex planes descending into or taking off from Memphis airport a bit after midnight. He pulled out the SenseAware sensory device and talked about how it allows healthcare and other Fedex customers to keep near real-time track of sensitive shipments. It was language any executive, actually anyone off the street could understand.

I say this because I read Richard Hirsch’s really nice note about SAP’s SUP this weekend. I also read John Appleby’s note about SAP HANA and BW. Richard and John are both extremely smart consultants who work for SAP partners. But the immediate thought that went through my head was why does SAP itself not have a mountain full of mobile and analytical applications to show after months and years of talking these technologies. Why are we being given a tour of the sausage factory?

Not just picking on SAP. I see many SaaS vendors who will somehow bring multi-tenancy into a conversation even at the wake of someone who never came close to a PC or mobile phone. I know outsourcers who will bring in agile and waterfalls into a conversation on white water rafting. 

Some things are best kept behind the scenes.  I heard a commentator say the Congressional Supercommittee (tasked with finding budget cuts) should have made its hearings public.

Gag me with a spoon, was my reaction!

Defending Ray Lane

Ray Lane is taking hell for a photo which shows him with a MacBook at home. The sky is falling – how can the Chairman of HP be so un-PC?  Shades of the poor Fedex man who supposedly got fired for carrying a Coke can into Pepsi HQ. Or that of Citibank supposedly rejecting employee expenses charged on personal Amex cards.

I have known Ray for over 15 years now. Trust me he can be extremely proud and defensive of his companies.  I have had heated debates with him when he was President of Oracle and I was a Gartner analyst. And he is an early adopter of many of their products.  He rode an early Segway ( a Kleiner company) into a commencement speech, he drives an early Fisker Karma EV (he is on the board), and he was sending emails from his HP Veer shortly after it was released this May.

He has been one of my first calls as I started research for each of my books. He is always full of suggestions – and has introduced me to a number of Kleiner portfolio companies and to execs at HP. But he has also talked nicely about Google, Apple, Amazon, eBay and plenty of others. And he has also clammed up when I reach into topics he would rather not comment on given his fiduciary or moral responsibilities.

Go on be snarky if you want. Personally, I wish more industry leaders were as open-minded as he is.

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A morning with Malcolm Gladwell

We could use more story tellers

It was 1997 if memory serves me right. Doug Burgum, then CEO of Great Plains (now part of Microsoft) used his entire keynote at the annual Stampede user event to talk about the story of an English clockmaker, John Harrison who beat out far more qualified scientists to solve one of the vexing problems of the 18th century – how to accurately measure longitudes, so important then for sailors and for all kinds of navigation since.

The person sitting next to me was agitated. “What a waste of time” he said having expected Doug to talk next release features. I was too polite to tell him I was delighted – well worth the flight to Minneapolis and then a long bus trip to Fargo, ND where the event was. I later complimented Doug for the talk without props or slides and he modestly thanked the author of a book he had read on the topic.

I similarly enjoyed Malcolm Gladwell’s talk which focused on Emil Freireich earlier this week at the HCL event. No props, no slides –  Malcolm  was sharing research from his next book about Freireich’s work on leukemia in the 50s.

Fresh from the talk and a few minutes I spent with him afterwards, I was piqued by the noise caused a couple of days later by his talks for Bank of America. He has plenty of detractors as this Columbia Journal Review summarizes and at least a few admirers for his charm with the opposite sex. The story teller has himself become a story in the traditions of Hemingway and Capote.

But what I like about his writing (and speaking) style is his curiosity on a wide range of subjects and his observation of nuances. Example - I quoted him in my last book about the network of Nathan Myhrvold, ex CTO of Microsoft, and a modern day Polymath.

“ You know how musicians will say, ‘ My teacher was So - and - So, and his teacher was So - and - So, ’ right back to Beethoven”

The imagery in just those two lines is poetic.

Or his recent New Yorker piece on Steve Jobs. Using the same material (Isaacson’s recent biography) available to any of us, he picked up nuances most of us would have glossed over.

Do I agree with everything he says or writes? Heck no, but I like his ability to tell a story and weave in examples from Fleetwood Mac, oncology, the Industrial Revolution in the UK, wherever.

We need more such stories in technology. Not just gossip about Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page. Stories cataloging the design and launches of new products, company turnarounds, the charitable pursuits of our leaders, unsung developers or salespeople.

More human interest stories. 

Doing an enterprise Dyson

On the New Florence blog I have posted about the “serial disruptor” James Dyson . You have likely seen him on commercials with his vacuum cleaners.

“Dyson's modus operandi is to reinvent everyday products whose design has calcified into a standard that he believes to be flawed. "Doing a Dyson", as his approach has become known.”

And it occurred to me how in enterprise world we are always trying to define new market categories or sell a houseful of appliances rather than just vacuum cleaners or heaters.

Lord knows we have so many calcified enterprise processes that could be “Dysoned.” In this article 4-5 years ago, I wrote about several HR point solutions. Good friend Phil Wainewright pointed out John Wookey while he was at SAP had created a refreshing new travel and expense app. His new company, Salesforce.com via its acquisition of Manymoon has a task management app, appropriately called Do.  

We could use a hundred more Dos and Dysons in the enterprise. And the willingness of SAP and Salesforce to sell them as individual SKUs, not part of some intergalactic suite.

HCL Unstructure – an eclectic event

You know you are not in Kansas anymore when the morning keynote begins with Malcolm Gladwell and the state of oncology circa 1955, and the evening keynote by President Bill Clinton makes you ponder what astrophysics will teach circa 2055 with new planetary discoveries and neutrinos speedier than light. And sandwiched in between are the CEO of American Electric Power who explains the challenge of balancing newer fossil fuel sources with wind, solar and other alternative fuels, and the CEO of Tibco presents a cameo of his latest book ‘The two second advantage” and many other varied points of view.

You know this is not your typical rubber chicken circuit when the customers you sit down at lunch or share a cocktail with have titles in product engineering, R&D and IT and represent banks, medical devices, aerospace and wide range of other industries.

You know you are not going to be saturated with typical vendor marketing when there are sessions on bartending, magic, disc jockeying and an elaborate Bollywood-style Indian wedding.

I spent 24 hours at HCL’s Unstructure event and came away not too much smarter about their various services (though thanks to Sadagopan, Sandeep Kishore and Rajarshee Dutta, my hosts I met most of its senior leadership) but feeling challenged and refreshed.  And most customers I talked to felt the same and appreciated the low-key selling at the event.

Krishnan Chatterjee, Global Head of Marketing for HCL told me satisfaction scores of customers who had been to at least one of these meets was statistically better than those that had not, and those that were regulars to the event were even happier.

Less selling is more – something I have also noticed at Cognizant events. May be something for software vendors to consider at their events and reduce the demos and executive pitches they fill their agendas with.