deal architect

We the chumps

I recently passed the Ayn Rand section in the bookstore and saw her book I had read a long time ago. I also thought if she lived today, given her libertarian views, she would bristle against how many businesses take advantage of us.

Let me cite some examples

a) A friend who has recently authored a book commented “the first draft was fun. The second draft was work. The 6th draft was a royal pain in the neck”. He is pointing to a truism in publishing. Even though book publishers keep 80 to 85% of book revenues, the majority of editing and marketing (and of course 100% of the writing) is done by the author.

b) A few years ago airlines started to allow us to self-serve boarding passes. Nice, but instead of thanking us for saving them on labor and printing charges, RyanAir and other airlines piled on and dreamed up another fee if we did not print them at home. Self-service has been hijacked.

c) Another friend of mine refuses to join social networks. He is not a Luddite by any means, but worries about privacy issues and about losing the personal touch to his relationships. But even more so he makes the point, why should I unless they compensate me? Think about it. 750 million of us make Facebook what it is, but will we see even a dime from its $ 100 billion valuation?

d) An event organizer calls me for a speaking opportunity. I ask him to call my speaker’s bureau which negotiates my fees, travel etc. He bellyaches about not having much of a budget. I take pity and tell him if he lets a blog sponsor also get a speaking slot, I will do it for free. He brazenly says the sponsor would need to pay for the whole event while expecting me to speak for free!

e) I talk to someone about SAP’s community, and I point out unless it has changed over the last 5 years it is fuzzy who bears the cost and who gets the benefits as I wrote here.

Even more than Rand, I feel the need for all of us to (re) read Dr. Harris’ classic I am ok, You are ok.

Way too much of today’s business is unfortunately driven by “I am ok, but you are a chump”

Looking for technology in all the right places

Apologies to Waylon Jennings Johnny Lee for twisting his words from Urban Cowboy, but I have been pleased to see salesforce.com make Canadian acquisitions – Radian6 and now Rypple, the social performance management vendor. In the last couple of years, I have had a chance to (revisit) several Canadian cities, and it has been impressive to see the froth of startups and innovative thinkers (as I wrote after my Toronto visit) beyond the big boy, RIM (the Blackberry company) everyone seems to know about and increasingly have less than positive things to say about.

It’s also nice to see the HR space get attention between Workday’s impressive  funding, SAP’s acquisition of SuccessFactors and now Salesforce acquisition of Rypple.  The whole people management world is topsy turvy as companies struggle to handle a socially savvy demographic of workers, global talent pools and weaker ties as they leverage contractors, crowds and customer self-service to do tasks previously done by employees.

Looking ahead, and maybe influenced by Steig Larsson’s books and upcoming movie, I have been impressed with the innovation happening  around the Baltic Sea. I feature Estonia’s “tiger leap” in my next book, remarkable after decades of communist stagnation. It is nice to see Google convert an old paper mill into a data center in Finland. Stockholm was named Europe’s Green Capital last year. With the acquisition of SuccessFactors, the small country of Denmark will have even more influence than it did with a co-CEO in the SAP boardroom. Again here, good to see focus shift from the big boy, Nokia, which like RIM has had recent challenges.

From a business process POV, it is good to see a renewed focus on demand forecasting and broadly on business model innovation. Amazon and Nintendo’s repeated supply shortfalls of their devices especially during the holidays and HP’s overshot with its TouchPad, show the volatility of demand companies are increasingly struggling with. More broadly, we are seeing a remarkable array of tech enabled business models – freemium (my friend Jeff Nolan recently wrote about that), as a service, bottom of pyramid etc that many industries are experimenting with and call for new tech solutions.

As Johnny famously sang “Playing a fool’s game, hoping to win”, in love and in technology it helps to not just look on the beaten path…

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Burning Question: Should more events be virtual?

I knew I had a conflict and could not be at the SAP Influencer Summit. So, I was pleased when Mike Prosceno of SAP emailed “its all being recorded so you can watch on demand at your leisure.” Then I see Vishal Sikka, CTO of SAP did his presentation by video.

And I wondered what if most – the presenters and the attendees – were virtual? Could it be effective?

I ask the question because for the first time earlier this year I watched the SuperBowl at home with a laptop and smartphone nearby. My family was in and out several times during the game. Usually if I watch the game, it is with friends. The tweets and FB posts and web access to drill into trivia about a player or a team or a standout commercial made for an unusually enjoyable experience.  The fact that Dallas, where the game was being played, had miserable weather made it even more enjoyable to be where I was.

But that was roughly 4 hours. Would it work for a 2 day event? Could you replace the hospitality of Mike and Stacey Fish? Could you provide salty commentary from the likes of Dennis Howlett and his video guests? Could you replace the snarkiness of bloggers like Brian Sommer and James Governor? Could you replace the hospitality of an airline during holiday season? :)

Readers what do you think? If nothing else, it will help my planning for February 5. Yes, the next Super Bowl! 

Calling all Buyers

Apologies to Train, but I need to twist their words to

“I need a sign to let me know you're here
All of these lines are being crossed over the Twitter channel..”

I recently chanced upon a GAMEC printout from 1997. GAMEC was Gartner’s ticketing system which scheduled and documented analyst conversations with technology customers. From 1995 to 1999, I estimate I was assigned close to 8,000 GAMECs. Several times a day, a week, a month, a year it was our finger on the market pulse. Oh, we listened to plenty of vendor pitches, but as my colleague Jeff Comport taught me the relentless “dull roar” kept us in touch with market realities.

That dull roar today is the Twitter stream. It is relentless as well and keeps you in touch with the market. With one big change. It is mostly from vendors or market watchers writing about vendor sourced news or events. Two weeks ago, IBM’s Connect summit dominated the conversation.  Last week the airwaves were filled with SAP/SuccessFactors talk. This week it will be from SAP’s analyst summit. What is striking is how few buy side signals filter through.

I have my own way of compensating. My consulting and my books keep me in touch with many CIOs and technology buyers. Like I did last week, I post about P&G, Burberry and NOAA innovations on New Florence.

That is True North. It was the best lesson Gartner taught me…

“….Cause my TV set just keeps it all from being clear………”

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Extreme Cloud

As I run through a near-final edit of my next book, I feel like I am watching a video summarizing the X Games. So many elite technology athletes – buyers, vendors, regulators, influencers – are profiled across the book. While the book is not exclusively focused on the cloud or SaaS, it is impressive how many examples come from cloud world.

Global Reach: Dave Smoley, CIO of Flextronics is profiled for rolling out Workday to “consolidate 80 different HR systems across the world”. The really striking thing – he stuck his neck out to start the project over 3 years ago when the cloud and Workday were not considered robust.

Extended Global Reach Take the global human reach above and extend that to the “Internet of things” – sensors, devices, tags etc. Japanese automaker, Toyota is planning a private social network called “Toyota Friend” powered by Chatter from salesforce.com. It will connect Toyota customers with their cars, their dealership, and with Toyota. Coke is doing something similar with its vending machines.

Speed: In three months, 26 international markets went live for Groupon on NetSuite. Groupon, by the way, has been called the “fastest growing company of all time”.

Efficiency: The case study on the Facebook Prineville data center shows groundbreaking innovations that allow the center to run at an unbelievable PUE (a measure of how efficiently a data center uses power for compute versus heating/cooling or other applications) of 1.07 when many corporate data centers are barely at 2.

Sustainability: The case study on Google focuses on its green initiatives and how it has pioneered investments in wind, geothermal, concentrated solar and other alternative energy sources to run its cloud.

Productivity: While they deal more with personal productivity, the concepts Amazon, Google and Apple showcased this year as they tried to out-do each other with Music in the Cloud have tremendous enterprise potential. Next-Gen enterprise applications will take much further their replication and matching concepts. Sukumar Rajgopal, Chief Innovation Officer at Cognizant is planning several applications with a philosophy of "we live in a connected world and what one user enters can be used to populate that for thousands of others.”

I know many companies and vendors are still struggling with even basic cloud adoption. All I can say is we have seen nothing yet in terms of where the cloud is headed.

Crossover Candidates

In my  next book, I have several examples of what I call crossover executives who moved from tech vendors to user organizations or vice versa. The book has guest columns from Tony Scott, now CIO of Microsoft who got there after tech leadership roles at Disney, GM and Bristol Myers Squibb, and in reverse Vijay Ravindran, Chief Digital Officer at The Washington Post Co, who got there after stints at Amazon in its early days and startups like Catalist. Walmart in buying Kosmix picked up two executives that Amazon had picked up a decade prior when it acquired Junglee. This is an extremely healthy trend.

Seeing tweets from my friends Dennis Howlett and Ray Wang from Le Web in Paris, I see the need for another type of crossover 0f execs, ideas and products. From consumer to enterprise tech and in reverse. My book also highlights several of those opportunities. Here are a few:

Next-gen ecosystems: Apple, Google, eBay (and Microsoft and RIM) can teach most enterprise vendors about dealing with individuals and small businesses, not just larger systems integrators and outsourcers. Apple’s App Store remarkably has 600,000+ apps and only a small portion come from bigger services firms.

Next-gen infrastructure : Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, eBay, Twitter and Microsoft all have remarkably efficient (energy, tax, other elements) data centers and networks. Enterprise tech is smug about its high availability and SLA needs but there is much to learn from consumer tech.

Next-gen supply chains: If you look into supply chains of consumer tech – from contract manufacturing to retail outlets there is an amazing amount to learn in global manufacturing, physical logistics, demand forecasting, store design, reverse logistics from Apple, Amazon, HP.

Next-gen sustainability: When I talk to consumer tech companies I hear plenty about conflict minerals, rare earths, humane global labor, more sophisticated product packaging etc that enterprise tech is mostly naive about.

Next-gen product design: This is an obvious one. From Apple’s iPads to Google’s Doodles to Microsoft Kinect, consumer tech has reshaped our views of what enterprise tech should deliver. I have a nice case study on how Lexmark applied Outcome Driven Innovation (ODI) as it designed its Genesis printer. Plenty for enterprise tech to emulate.

Consumer tech, in turn, can learn plenty from the enterprise, especially from many so-called buyer organizations. I find there is general disdain for such companies and names like Xerox and Blockbuster are usually used as examples in contempt. But there is a huge amount of innovation happening at 3M, Corning, GE, Siemens, BMW and many other large companies that consumer tech could benefit from.

In his biography, Walter Isaacson devotes a couple of humorous pages to how Steve Jobs got to learn about Corning, and meet with its CEO about Gorilla Glass. 3M has 55,000+ products – somewhere, somehow they can teach any company to improve their products or services. Both companies generously spent time educating me for my book.

Crossovers of executives, products and ideas are hugely important – hope to see many more in the coming years.

Substitute S for Z?

TechCrunch brazenly had a URL of zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz about the SAP announcement of its SuccessFactors acquisition.

I must admit I had an Animal House moment: “They cannot make fun of our enterprise vendors, only we can!”

Then I saw Peter Goldmacher of Cowen, who definitely has enterprise pedigree, interpret that SuccessFactors is a trophy wife for SAP as a proxy for Workday.

Now it makes sense.

Let’s just Anglicize the TechCrunch URL to sssssssssssssssssssssssssss

SaaS…SAP…Sybase…SuccessFactors…Stepford… :)

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