A week ago J.P. Rangaswami of Salesforce.com tweeted about the London Docklands and it took me back in time. Around this time, two decades ago, I was getting ready to finish up my tour of duty in London. In the year prior, my then employer Price Waterhouse had set up a data center in the emerging Docklands development. The trip to the area back then was “dodgy” as the English politely call it. Even more dodgy was the assignment I had. I was given two teams of recent recruits to develop prototypes on two ERP packages – McCormack & Dodge and SAP R/2. The vendors kindly gave us the software and rooms full of documentation (SAP’s was mostly in German) but little else (hey, we were partners, not customers!). The two teams struggled through the process but managed to document the implementation for future demos/training.
Last week, I got couple of reminders of how far we have come since. Stan Swete, CTO at Workday, sent me a guest column for the blog. I also opened a package from my friend Tom Foydel. It’s his book on NetSuite OneWorld Implementation.
Stan makes a relatively simple statement that is dramatic when you think about what customers needed to do “The ability to start a SaaS implementation as soon as the contract is signed because you don’t have to wait for hardware and software to be delivered and installed.”
Tom’s book is in very readable English. Even more impressive is the functional scope he covers. I thought he would focus on core accounting modules in a primer, but he also covers case management, kitting, deferred revenues. While most customers will still need the skills of a reseller (like Tom’s firm SightLines) or a NetSuite consulting firm partner he also manages to pack in several implementation steps like advanced configuration and data migration. All that in 380 pages.
In the meantime, the Docklands, and neighboring areas like historic Greenwich have gone through impressive renewal. The Docklands even has its own Symphony.
Amazing, though, how many customers still don’t take advantage of such software deployment and business model improvements. Pretty dodgy, if you ask me.
