deal architect

“Consumer Grade is the new Industrial Grade”

so said Charles Phillips, CEO of Infor in one of his talks at his company event last week. Darn, I should have had the quote in my new book. I describe the trend as “the enterprising of consumer tech”.

The book describes the amazing efficiency of Apple’s retail operations and its business model innovations , Google’s cleantech investments, Apple and Google’s huge ecosystems, Facebook’s hyperefficient data center, Amazon’s logistics, PayPal’s financial engine, Zynga’s blend of public and private clouds, HP’s global supply chain, Lexmark’s social savvy, Dell’s packaging innovations and and…

Three things that stood out in my research

a) How little even business pubs write about these operational details. The Swishers and the Mossbergs and the Pogues write plenty about new iPad features and gossip about their executives, but given the likely interest of their executive readerships, surprisingly little about the sausage factories. I was pleased to see Adam Lashinsky of Fortune touch on at least some operational detail in his book Inside Apple.

b) Lots of enterprise vendors whisper about what they are doing with Apple or Amazon, but then clamp up citing non-disclosures. Truth is often they are doing surprisingly trivial stuff in consumer tech companies.

c) Few enterprises are acknowledging consumer tech provides the new benchmarks for their industries. Amazon and Google data centers are more best practice than those of IBM and Accenture. Foxconn’s contract manufacturing of many consumer products is redefining economics, quality and time to market expectations for outsourcing. PayPal’s micro-payment capabilities are better than those of much larger banks. It takes a brave board like J.C, Penney’s to hire as its CEO the head of Apple Retail.

In  a joke, when asked what he had learned at Oracle, Phillips joked “not to announce a product (Fusion) seven years before it was ready”. Last week in  a call with SAP I told them that years after talking about HANA I would have expected it to have atleast 20,000 customers with some level of adoption.

That’s another lesson from consumer tech. Have your channel, your ecosystem ready to roll it out months before a formal product announcement.

Marc Benioff of salesforce.com is one of the few enterprise executives who has long admired consumer tech.  In my 2010 book, I quoted him

“ We stand on the shoulders of giants like JerryYang [founder of Yahoo!], Pierre Omidyar [of eBay], Jeff Bezos [of Amazon],
and Biz Stone [of Twitter]. ”

Marc is so right - it behooves us all as writers, and enterprise vendors and IT to learn more about what makes consumer tech go. This is the new industrial grade.

It’s going to be a great year for preserves!

…Or fresh treats…

The New Florence blog is benefitting from such a crop of innovation, it is already up to  205 posts this year. At that rate, it will have more posts for the year than all the posts in its first 3 years. Thanks to John Hagel, Jarret Pazahanick and many others for post ideas. 

Photo Credit

The Norman Rockwell airline

I have been increasingly exasperated by the lack of wi-fi on most Southwest flights – either equipment not installed or their satellite based service (as different from the GoGo air-to-ground on other airlines) is spotty. To make up for that though, I love their non-stops to so many cities, their on-time performance (3 ouf of 5 flights in last two weeks were 15 minutes early)…and the many wonderful people you meet on their flights.

People like Martie Bowlsby from Eagle Valley in Oregon. She had driven to Boise, Idaho and taken a Southwest flight from there, and sat next to me on the Denver Tampa flight last week. She described her idyllic home. As this article says 

“A temporary resident is known as an Outsider.  If he buys land or marries into an established family he has his foot in the door and becomes known as a Newcomer.  After seven years of right living he makes a step up the social ladder and becomes known as a Johnny-come-lately.  Eighteen years later he is promoted to the comfortable status of Home Folks.  But, it is added, he can never achieve the ultimate rank of Oldtimer because he didn’t have sense enough to be born to valley parents in the first place.”

But even more interesting was her description of her baking skills. They are lost on me, but I convinced her to share her prize-winning Apple Pie recipe. We borrowed a drink chart page from the Southwest attendant and she graciously wrote it down – from memory. Readers, if you try it, save me a slice!

I certainly did not miss wi-fi much on that flight.

More New Renaissance

on the innovation blog

The Marvelous Marlins stadium

Walmart’s Movie iCloud Match type offering

The smart Rice Cooker

The Scootercase

John Lewis innovates home deliveries

Consumerization of IT – the really big opportunity

Both in the panel I was part of at Inforum this week in Denver and in this guest column for InformationWeek, I highlight that consumerization is actually a major revenue opportunity for most companies. But to get there will need new skill sets few enterprises have in place today.

Inforum: The Enterprise Climbers

Bill Starke’s sculpture in the lobby of the Hyatt in Denver I stayed at this week is a good metaphor for the changing enterprise software industry.

In general, everyone treats SAP and Oracle as the pursued, and SaaS vendors as the pursuers. Infor is generally talked about as a list of 70,000 customers on every one’s bullseye. This week at their event, Inforum, new CEO Charles Phillips took pains to show Infor is also a viable pursuer, both to retain his own customers and for new competitive opportunities.

Besides showing off its own investments (including 600 new developers hired in the last year) there were plenty of associations with the future of the industry. In a fireside chat in the Executive track, Phillips hosted Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, and they discussed the past - Benioff took a shot at Siebel and Phillips just smiled when he would have pushed back – both are Oracle alums)  and the future - Benioff pointed out Facebook is “younger than our two companies, and already bigger in revenues” and the management cultures the two leaders are shaping at their respective companies.

Backstage (I was on a panel on Consumerization of IT which followed that fireside talk), I spent some time with Phillips, got a quick demo, and got his always incisive view of the industry (I have known him since his analyst days at Kidder Peabody). During the course of the day, I had a chance to mingle with several Infor customers and its executives.

Phillips and much of the fresh blood he has brought into Infor (many from Oracle), and the Lawson acquisition have given Infor a noticeable burst of energy. While much of the conference focused on the mandatory homage to social, mobile, cloud jargon and the “speed” theme via ION (Intelligent Open Network) middleware and a collection of common services I was struck by the vertical niches Infor has presence in.

They include Lawson’s healthcare and government, Intentia Fashion, Baan Manufacturing (including Ferrari whose CIO spoke at the conference) and plenty more from the countless acquisitions it has made in the past. While most of the pursuers are going after horizontal financial, HR, CRM areas, Infor has the opportunity to focus on vertical and geographic niches across its wide empire.  The management team Phillips gave plenty of time to in the day include a Canadian and an Englishman and my panel was moderated by Peter Quinn, a well traveled Scotsman.

And most customers don’t expect Infor to stray too far from its core strengths. I asked several healthcare customers if they would like Infor to get into clinical areas, and the answer was they should keep focusing and enhancing validated inventory management, profitability analysis, unique labor/contracting related HRM issues for their industry.

Sculptor Starke has been quoted as saying “My observations on the human condition are meant to be both humorous and thought-provoking.” Inforum also turned out to be both.

More New Florence

on the innovation blog

He said, she said

The Queen in 1952 and 2012

Google’s Easter Eggs

The feature which launched a thousand projects

A Financial Services app store

More Innovation

On the New Florence blog

21st Century Cocktails

Epcot Flower and Garden show

Cupcake ATM

The Forgetting Pill

Revolutionizing Solar Panel production

Book promotion for blog readers

Offer for my blog readers - buy a copy of my new book, The New Technology Elite, and I will mail you copy of my last book, The New Polymath, a $ 39 list value. Email your proof of purchase and mailing address to thenewtechnologyelite AT gmail DOT com.

Offer valid till May 15 or till my stash of Polymath runs out. Readers outside US - due to customs restrictions, this offer is only for US addresses, so you are welcome to participate with a US mailing address for a friend or colleague.

Lady Serendipity

Dean Homer Erekson at my alma mater, The Neeley Business School, asked several alums to contribute to a collection titled Major Moments for its 75th anniversary. I was honored to be invited and contributed below – I wrote it last year before my new book was out.

“I have had several mentors and major moments in my career, but the one I give most credit to is “Lady Serendipity” for what happened in October 1983.

I graduated with an MBA from Neeley in the summer of 1980, and went to work in the Fort Worth office of Price Waterhouse. Three years later, I had just received my first promotion, but I was restless.

I did not really enjoy being a CPA, and noticed an opening published in the firm’s newsletter. They were looking for staff in the Riyadh, Saudi Arabia office. Not a plum expatriate assignment by any definition…and the region was about to get very dangerous.

As I was getting to Saudi, the U.S. Marines’ barrack was bombed in Lebanon, and the Iran-Iraq war started soon after. Because the assignment was considered a “hardship,” we were allowed to leave the country every three months. It gave me a chance to see the world, and I have been to 40 countries.

Going to Saudi in 1983 was a major moment, because it honed my curiosity “antennae”.

Building on experience

My two-and-a-half years in Saudi Arabia allowed me to diversify my skill sets in a small office. I was allowed to work on technology projects I would never have done in a U.S. office.

I came back to the Dallas office, but jumped at the opportunity to go back to another assignment in Saudi. From there I spent two years in London (where I also met my Irish wife, who in turn had been to 30 countries on her own) and the Netherlands. My passport kept filling up.

From Price Waterhouse, I moved on to Gartner, an IT research firm, and then was an entrepreneur in a dot.com that failed.

The last five years I have been a technology strategy consultant. I also write two technology blogs, which has allowed me to write a well-received book on technology- enabled innovation, The New Polymath.

While the career has meandered, and the start-up challenged the family’s financial foundations during the technology meltdown of 2001-2003, each of these moves has brought a new set of industry contacts.

People are amazed when they hear I wrote my book -- which has interviews and profiles of over 150 innovators -- in just four months. My wide network allowed me to do so.

Advice

-- Take every opportunity to go out and shake as many hands as you can. I am part of every social network you can name -- Facebook, Twitter, Flickr etc. -- but there is nothing like breaking bread with people around the world.

-- Be curious about a wide range of subjects. Polymath, in my book’s title, is Greek for a Renaissance person like Leonardo daVinci or Ben Franklin, who were good at so many things.

-- In today’s society and workplaces, we are encouraged to be specialists. You need to specialize and be very good at what you are doing at that particular time. But…there is no law that says you have to do the same specialty over and over again, in the same exact location.”