deal architect

The Valley View of Enterprise Tech Power

What a pleasant surprise to see Business Insider wake up to enterprise tech, and even say “it’s really the stuff that’s changing the world” as it lists the “50 Most Powerful People in Enterprise Tech”.

The cloud is well represented – executives of Amazon, NetSuite, Oracle, Salesforce.com, SAP/SuccessFactors, Workday – are in there. So is infrastructure – Dell, EMC, HP. So are enterprise VCs – Ray Lane, Marc Andreessen etc.

But I found some glaring omissions:

• No CIOs. Seriously? A CIO with a $ 5 billion annual IT budget in a New York or London bank does not qualify as powerful? Someone like Gary Reiner who did many innovative things at GE and is now an investor at General Atlantic?
• No outsourcers other than IBM. No Accenture or TCS? No Foxconn, one of the biggest contract manufacturers and employers in the world?
• No telecomm players? Most companies spend more on telecomm than all software, hardware and IT services put together. They may be boring but a Verizon or Deutsche Telecom would have made my list.
• Little European or Asian representation. Actually, little N. American representation outside the Valley.

Tulips Fields Forever

I spent several months on a project in Holland in the late 80s. That meant several drives and train rides along the countryside and tulip fields like the one below.

The New Florence blog feels as lush, and as diverse. Through June, there are 315 posts this year, across dozens of technology categories. This month, there are several entries around how our summers have evolved. Next month will bring several around the London Olympics.

Enjoy the abundance!

Photo Credit

The Conflicted Cloud

Is it just me or is it the season for all large vendors to start praising the cloud? From Verizon’s Uppernet commercials to John Chambers at Cisco Live, it is a mandatory sound bite for every industry marketing event.

Every time I hear a legacy (ok, established) vendor talk cloud, I am reminded of a one-on-one with this executive who had just finished his keynote where he described his company’s cloud vision.  Brutally honest, and unprompted, he told me (I am paraphrasing to protect identities)

“Only you industry analysts care about the cloud. Only a minute number of tech executives have shown they can migrate their business model to the cloud. So financial analysts certainly are not cheering us to get there”

This interview with EMC President Pat Gelsinger while much more guarded in language says the same thing. He defends the status quo with the typical insurance argument:

Well, they need high performance. They need a five nines SLA. They're responsible for governance. They need to sign off on legal requirements. There's a SOX requirement or other financial requirements associated with failover, failback. There's a numerous set of reasons, a high availability requirement. As they go international, they often just don't have the network bandwidth to get to and from [cloud storage].

But is that insurance worth 5, 10, 20X the cloud alternative? Wish they had asked him that.

I have two litmus questions for legacy vendors when they talk cloud:

a) What has been your cloud capex in the last 3 years? So, Verizon strip out your FiOS fibre, your cell tower, back haul investments.  So, IBM strip out your staff training costs and old data center refurbishments. Tell us about your cloud data centers.

b) What has been your revenue share of direct to end-customer cloud sales in the last 3 years? So, Dell strip out server sales to Facebook or other cloud providers.  So, SAP strip out hosted and “old data centers masquerading as private cloud” installations.

The real answers in both cases are pretty low. Even more disappointing is that their executives have little interest in increasing their ratio. Only industry analysts care about the cloud :)

More Innovation

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FPL’s simulated hurricane

GE and Big Data

MIT Technology Review’s Top 10 Technologies

Are we paying an “Apple tax”?

Much as I admire Apple and have profiled them favorably in my books, our household has no iPhones. Plenty of iPods/iPads/iTunes but no iPhones. I refused to pay the AT&T premium for the iPhone, and then the Verizon premium.

The Orbitz hotel recommendation engine which is in the news because in default mode it shows pricier properties to Mac users may be the tip of the iceberg. At least Orbitz allows you to sort properties by price. I imagine there are sites which deliberately show Apple users higher prices and don’t give them a choice to sort differently.

With Sprint also an iPhone carrier for the last few months, I had considered trading in the family’s Blackberrys and Android phones. Maybe we will wait!

Will “Social” finally grow up?

In New York today, Oracle announced its Customer Experience (CX) strategy. It has been evolving nicely in several Oracle briefings a few analysts have had over the last few months. It reflects several realities organizations face – homogenizing customer relations across physical and digital channels, the growing social media and customer/product analytics marketing groups have access to, and as a corollary to the last point the growing influence of the digital “Mad Men” – agencies replacing traditional outsourcers as the hot new service providers. Notice, I did not call CX a product – it is more of a framework which allows Oracle to blend many of its own and RightNow CRM, Order Management, Retail POS/merchandising, Endeca and other analytical tools. It is one of the few vendors out there that can pick and choose from a wide inventory of components.

Over in Redmond, Microsoft confirmed it will pay $ 1.2 billion for Yammer. The acquisition has been a shockingly poorly kept rumor, and the price has more than a few folks scratching their head. I was initially surprised it will be part of the MS Office unit, but makes sense to socialize the document-centric SharePoint and the messaging world of Exchange.

Microsoft will also hopefully make more “industrial” the applications for Yammer. Yammer has its own use case catalog here, but the applications are pretty light. But the sentiment is not, as George Zachary, one of the Yammer investors says in this interview…”change the world for the better”

That aspirational, feel-good vibe has defined the social category from its roots, and manifests itself every few months in the E2.0 conference like the one last week. Happy talk, but not many impressive case studies.  I know there are many out there. Even though my books don’t focus exclusively on “social” both had a chapter full of examples with tangible payback.

My hope is Oracle and Microsoft help “social” grow up - by focusing on specific customer experience or collaboration themes rather than the high-falutin’ “Enterprise 2.0” or “change the world” talk.

More Innovation

on the New Florence blog

Summer Innovations – Cordina frozen drink pouches

OneCognizant: System of Engagement meets System of Record

Mobile Innovators

Rapid Charging EVs

Mobile apps for the bottom of the pyramid

A millennium  of math

Traditional Media is Dead. Long Live Traditional Media.

This weekend, in a twinge of nostalgia on the 40th anniversary of Watergate, I rented All The President’s Men. I never get tired of the Jason Robards (as Ben Bradlee) line:

"Nothing's riding on this except the First Amendment of the Constitution, freedom of the press and maybe the future of this country"

What happened to those media heavy hitters?

Last year, as I interviewed Washington Post execs for my book, I was thrilled to get from them a photo of Ben Bradlee and Bob Woodward handling iPads. It was part of their new iPad app promotion. Those heavyweights are far from retired. 

And the rumors of the demise of “traditional” media are greatly exaggerated. Last week as I analyzed the biggest sources of innovation stories for the New Florence blog,  that media did extremely well.

Joe McKendrick writes about the legendary investor, Warren Buffett and his recent investment in newspapers. He asks “Is that sentimental or savvy?”

Talking of Buffett, here is what I wrote in an InformationWeek guest column:

“(My growing book) research actually led me to a detour. I tried to find industries that were NOT thinking about smart products and services. An executive suggested I look at the portfolio of the legendary investor, Warren Buffett. He has made a fortune avoiding companies that are susceptible to technology turmoil. So, I looked at some of his investments. They include Coke, Burlington Northern, and Procter & Gamble, and found an Internet-linked vending machine, satellite-based railcar tracking, and social media innovations. They're actually very savvy technology innovators.”

The executive who suggested I look at Buffett’s portfolio? Don Graham, Chairman and CEO of the Washington Post, which is now an impressively diversified technology company. From my book:

Its Kaplan unit is one of the largest online education companies. Its Cable One unit is one of the largest cable companies in the United States and services a number of rural communities. It has digital properties like Slate. It has invested in startups like Avenue100, which provides marketing analytics to institutions. Trove (previously iCurrent) is a social news site and aggregator, and SocialCode helps companies with Facebook advertising and user engagement campaigns.

Traditional media is not dead. It is evolving and in many ways far more aware and relevant for our digital world than so-called “new media”. And Buffett is far more tech-savvy than his “aw-shucks” style would suggest.

“How Amazon saved my life”

Jessica Park sings the praises of Amazon for helping her with her self-publishing career. Saved her life may be a bit too exuberant, but then again who am I as an author who uses traditional publishers to question that enthusiasm?

Jeff Bezos in his annual shareholder letter points to many Jessicas who have taken advantage of its Amazon Web Services, Fulfillment by Amazon and Kindle Direct Publishing to make a decent living. He could also have mentioned Amazon Affiliates who link referrals from their sites to Amazon and make a nice 4 to 6% on the order value.

Of course, it is not just Amazon. Apple, Google, eBay and others have done the same for countless small businesses. In my new book, I profiled Charlie Wood and Gerlinde Gniewosz as two highly qualified entrepreneurs in the Google and Apple worlds.

These new ecosystems are having a profound impact on the talent marketplace.

As my book says

When Apple shares 70 percent of revenues with a developer, when Google shares 95 percent of Chrome revenues, and they absorb significant marketing, credit card processing, and other fees, it is compelling to become an entrepreneur rather than go work for IBM or Accenture implementing SAP or other enterprise mobile applications.

And as Jessica says why work for a traditional publishing company?

More New Renaissance

on the innovation blog

Wearable Devices

HP Discover

The Big Jambox

Sonos at 10

Digital Cat and Mouse

ESPN at Indy 500