deal architect

Did he actually say that?

My jaw dropped a few times during Seth McFarlane’s MC of the Oscars. But I fact checked most of his snarks, and while he should have stayed away from many of the digs,  they are based on incidents that actually happened.

In the last month, people have brought to my attention tech industry “can you believe he/she said that?”, and true to form, I chuckle, then fact check them.

Here are a few:

Deepak Chopra talking about his new Dream Weaver glasses at an SAP event said ““I got the idea for these during my first LSD experience at the age of 17”  (fact check – that would have been 1963. LSD was not banned in CA till 1966 and later around world. He also told Conan it was during medical school.)

On Valentine’s Day, on the regular SAP sponsored column at Forbes, a writer talked about “fornicating fowl” (fact check – the ponds near us are filled with recently hatched ducklings)

On Jim Cramer, Bill McDermott made several interesting statements (see video). (Fact check – many of the statements are “forward looking”. The 49ers will not move to their new stadium till 2014. To my knowledge SAP does not have sentiment analysis tech today to offer to Budweiser. In  fact, the salesforce marketing cloud showed its young Clydesdale commercial made it the most mentioned brand during the Super Bowl. EU 2 bn cloud revenues by 2015?  Be really nice. Best of breeds are losing? Maybe he is talking about the future of Ariba and Success Factors?)

Moral of  the story – I will chuckle at most anything. But when you are not looking I am likely to ask Google and Siri and Snopes to check them out:)

 

“The Customer Company”

Marc Benioff has always been respectful of consumer tech pioneers. In  my book, The  New Polymath I quoted him saying “ We stand on the shoulders of giants like Jerry Yang [founder of Yahoo!], Pierre Omidyar [of eBay], Jeff Bezos [of Amazon], and Biz Stone [of Twitter]. ”

So, I was not surprised when he started talking “cloud computing” a few years ago, and then “social enterprise” as terms which reflect Apple and Facebook impact on our lives.  I would have guessed he would next spin some version of eBay mobile or Google Big Data into his messaging.

I am sure he will continue to use those as sub-themes, but I was pleased to see him move to an overarching Customer Company theme at a New York event this week. It’s been a long time coming for the CRM category to evolve beyond sales force automation. Salesforce.com’s own investments in customer service and especially recent ones in marketing areas are giving it a broader “customer company” profile.

I was not at event but I heard the Unilever (and how it built a Facebook campaign in real time around Oscars with salesforce’s Buddy Media) and the Obama campaign (and use of salesforce Chatter and Radian 6 social monitoring tools) use cases drove home the new customer world.

I was a few blocks away with Francisco D’Souza, CEO of Cognizant describing a world where his IT services pedigree firm is now the agency of record for some clients and where global brands are using his tools to organize their growing digital marketing  libraries. More customer company use cases.

And Salesforce.com is well positioned as a leader and glad its messaging now points that out. As Marc asked in NYC:

“How do you listen to every customer?” “How do I engage them on every channel? How do I service customers through the retail store? How do I create communities?”

It’s a new customer world.

Cognizant: Run Better AND Run Different

It is on Fortune’s World’s Most Admired List. It is on Forbes Fast 25 Tech list. Its revenues grew 2.5 times through the deep recession. Things are peachy.

So why has CEO Francisco D’Souza been tinkering with the company over the last couple of years using the Three Horizons framework he outlined in the 2011 shareholder letter?

It is to apply to his own business the advice he is providing his clients. You have to keep running better, but that’s not enough. You also have to run different.

I had a chance to listen to him and other executives present at the company’s BPS Connections event. I also had a chance to sit down with him one on one and also spend time with Alan Alper from Corporate Marketing during the day. Notes from each:

a) The formal portion of the day revolved around Cognizant services in four vertical markets – life sciences, insurance, healthcare and banking. Cognizant chose to not aggressively pursue horizontal BPO services in  the last decade – accounts payable, hr, call centers etc, but it has been offering a number of clients vertical BPO services to support activities such as pharma R&D analytics, insurance claims processing, healthcare enrolment and  investment banking operations.

Additionally given the regulatory and globalization pressures and technological opportunities in each of these verticals, Cognizant has been positioning consulting and advisory services to help envision the “run different” opportunities. So the day presented “to be” examples of smart auto insurance providers using telematics to reach out to owners when the car reports a mishap  and smart health care scenarios where sufferers of allergies get proactively alerted about predictions of high pollen days. It also gave the opportunity to showcase unique IP and tools Cognizant has been developing for these markets.

Two really interesting sessions during the day focused on evolving commercial models and a customer panel. Cognizant has been experimenting with a number of non-headcount, outcome based pricing models and  mechanisms like JVs to monetize unique vertical IP to benefit both the clients and themselves. The customer panel had 5 executives from these verticals (several big names from each,  but Cognizant requested their names not  be publicized)  and fielded a wide range of questions that ranged from their reaction to non-FTE based pricing, to IP and governance challenges of sharing unique vertical expertise with an outsourcer and in turn, their competitors. I asked the panel what they thought about Cognizant going after several verticals. One of them said there were benefits from learning from adjacent industries like banking and insurance. Another said they were glad Cognizant was not chasing after every industry like some of its competitors. (Cognizant is stronger in services verticals like financial services, healthcare and media) No clear trends but the answers were honest and reflect a remarkable maturation of the outsourcing market beyond back office and IT infrastructure.

b) The one on one with Francisco was fascinating as it brought up names like Scient, Viant, Sapient and other firms which were prominent during the eBiz boom of the late 90s. It had shaken up the systems integration market back then, and Francisco has been worrying about new entrants in  the new world of SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) for a while now.  He was clearly prepared to discuss several new players I have written about in this note. I learned Cognizant is the agency of record for some of his pharma clients (seriously an IT services firm as a digital  agency?). He told me about couple of large global brands which are using its Assetserv tool to manage large digital marketing libraries and as their “brand book”. He talked about the advantage Cognizant has with back end integration skills and deep vertical knowledge in building mobile apps. He mentioned their TRUZIGN tool which facilitates mobile payments by scanning a QR code and sharing necessary payment data with the merchant ìn real time. He talked about how Cognizant competes with specialists like  Mu Sigma for advanced analytics and Big  Data projects. He talked about their Cloud360 tool which helps in provisioning, managing, and monitoring heterogeneous. (Separately, Cognizant’s Chief Innovation Officer has been helping reinvent many internal processes as he described in this guest post) 

Most of these new engagements are “Third Horizon” activities Francisco has personally taken leadership for. He says it’s his way of tackling the “Innovator’s Dilemma” that could  afflict Cognizant. “Any time a market is in transition, newer projects tend to be smaller and need more unique skills. The Cognizant field would likely have ignored smaller mobile or social opportunities”.  That is a significant point - Cognizant has only 800 customers which average $ 10 million each in projected 2013 revenues so the field is more aligned with larger, more defined opportunities.

He said it has led to other transformations – many of  his staff are behaving entrepreneurial. The idea for the TRUZIGN tool above came from two Amsterdam based consultants. In turn this is putting pressure on their managers to also pay more attention to Horizon 3 opportunities in  their verticals/geographies. Francisco said there is now healthy competition internally between his Horizon 3 and efforts and those being adopted by field. Which suits him fine – that is the ideal way to fight the Innovator’s Dilemma when the incumbent organization itself learns to innovate.  To punctuate the point I heard his acronym EBA (emerging business accelerator) repeated by others several times during the day.

c) I sat through most of the day’s presentations with Alan Alper and got to see his reaction to the vertical messages that were being presented. He also talked about a number of thought leadership activities the corporate marketing group are working on and how Cognizant client proposals and presentations are becoming much more interactive (like the “to be” vision videos his group is helping many of the verticals craft) and differentiated from the long RFP responses and hundreds of Powerpoint slides so common in the industry.  

I came to learn about how Cognizant helps clients “run different”. I walked away with as much on how Cognizant itself is running different.

More New Renaissance

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Yves Behar – a serial designer

The Big Data of Groundhog Day

Google’s HR Analytical Rigor

Innovating Innovation

What your hotel knows about you

The Big Data of Coke’s Orange Juice

The Mythical “Traditional CIO”

Dion Hinchcliffe talks about the growing shift of tech dollars to the CMO, and even more shrinking of the CIO’s role.

Several reactions:

a) Marketing is only the latest buying center to come to the attention of tech market watchers. Few people seem to acknowledge the CMO has long used TV audience monitoring, POS data, search engine optimization, email campaign and other technologies. Often without much IT support. With social analytics, mobile advertising and bigger consumer and product data sets, the marketing technology is more prominent, but it’s certainly not a brand new technology buying center.

b) For a long time, way before Nicholas Carr, people have been screaming “end of IT” as various C level execs bought their own technology and hired their own specialists. At Gartner, I saw supply chain execs turn more to their 3PLs, customer care execs turn to external call centers, HR to external benefits administration firms. In research for my last book, I found just about every company building tech skills in their product engineering groups, as they make products “smarter” with sensors, software and satellite support.

c) The CIO and IT staff portion have been shrinking even within the IT budget. Only 10-20% of IT and telecom budgets are spent on internal staff. So while the CIO and IT are the continued “punching bag'” for everyone, they really should be picking on the vendors which make up the bulk of the budget and move slowly on productivity, innovation and other traits expected of IT

d) Most CIOs I know do not like the current IT status quo, and some are pretty vocal about it.   Filippo Passerini, CIO of P&G laments in the latest issue of Information Week about the “hub and spoke” software vendor model. ” The software vendor pitches what it’s selling and what’s possible with technology, then a would-be customer tells the vendor what it really needs. FedEx, Boeing, BP, Disney, Goldman Sachs, GE — they all go through the same exercise as P&G, one on one with the vendor”.  Randy Mott, CIO of GM is bringing thousands of outsourced IT staff back on to its payroll.  Many CIOs around the world are using Google Fiber benchmarks in Kansas City in their own telecom budget review. 

During last night’s Oscars, Samsung ran several Tim Burton inspired commercials which featured unicorns. A few of the spots had stereotypical IT staff talking BYOD and other standards. My reaction – that right there is the unicorn. A mythical character everyone loves to portray as a gatekeeper.

The CIO and IT have long been morphing. And hearing greatly exaggerated rumors of their demise.

Celebrating storytellers

Nothing against Denzel or Bradley or Ang, but I hope Lincoln does especially well on Sunday night. Spielberg/Lewis and co. did a masterful job bringing out the President’s amazing knack of telling stories - to entertain, to diffuse tension, to convince.

We need more story tellers in technology. We have way too much jargon, product reviews, methodology papers, sound bites, tweets. In fact, Mr. Twitter, Biz Stone recently told Charlie Rose "we shouldn't lose the value of the long-form conversation."

Some of the best “long-form” conversation in tech I have seen or heard have been “stories”

• 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.
• Captain “Sully” Sullenberger presenting on leadership but weaving in story of the Hudson river landing. He had a few slides and a video of the flight path as props but it was mostly him telling in vivid, suspenseful detail of calm actions of his crew.
• As I scrounge the world for postings on New Florence, some of my most enjoyable readings are “stories” folks like Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Lewis write in the New Yorker or Vanity Fair.

Of course, not everyone likes stories. In the movie, there are plenty of characters who grimace and even protest when Lincoln kicks off another of his stories.  At the Burgum talk, a journalist sitting next to me was livid : "I came here to learn about his product strategy, not about the story of time"

But it makes my day as when I was talking to a European tech executive recently and he said he really enjoys reading what he calls "use cases". He cited Tom Peters and Search for Excellence. His version of "stories"

So I hope the movie Lincoln gets well rewarded tonight. For bringing out Abe's amazing skills at the long form of conversation.

More Netsuite “service as software”

Google “Workday NetSuite Integration” and you find talent like Dell Boomi Integration Services Experts and implementation services to build a “list of business objects for the integration”. Can be labor intensive when you extrapolate across the wide number of customers who need to accomplish the same task and keep the integrations updated as the source and destination evolve.

So I was pleased to see Informatica announce a “pre-packaged Cloud Integration Template (which) empowers customers to use accurate and up-to-date Workday data in their NetSuite environment, with minimal support from IT or outside consulting services”

Curious, I asked NetSuite what other templates were available to integrate with other services. CEO Zach Nelson has long has the vision of baking repeatable implementation and support tasks into code. He calls it “service as software”.

Turns out, Informatica has also built an SAP Connector, and an Oracle connector aimed at MNCs which are deploying “two-tier ERP” – NetSuite at various country subs. There are several other NetSuite use cases in the Informatica Cloud to connect to Salesforce and other services.

Only the paranoid survive

I have made a personal resolution – avoid watching shows like Homeland and 24. I find myself paranoid after watching them.

Not sure, though, I can avoid conversations like below:

a) I hear the term “paparazzi drones” from an exec. iPhone controlled Quadracopters were a hot holiday toy. They are now being deployed to eavesdrop on Hollywood stars. This exec has a bigger interest in drones to monitor wide expanses of remote real estate, but the FAA has been cautious about allowing commercial uses of drones. I point to a case study in my last book about a drone with a expansive dictionary to hack into most networks and a 4G card to eavesdrop on mobile calls from above.

b) He tells me about the infrared and other cameras they currently use on small planes to do their monitoring. The conversation drifts to next-gen surveillance and the 1.8 gigapixel Argus super-camera, and the analytics around the massive amount of video data that generates.  

c) I talk to another exec about security software and how it is evolving beyond blacklists and known virus signatures to assuming everything is suspect. And I read about 7 years of sleuth work done by Mandiant in looking at suspected Chinese cyber-crime.

d) Breaking into IT and bank vaults is one thing. Even more terrifying is vulnerability of SCADA and industrial control systems in our utilities and strategic plants. Closer to home even common criminals are learning to hack into home security, automobiles, healthcare equipment.

And it hits  me. In real life, we need to be more paranoid than the characters in Homeland. How depressing  is that? 

Are Mark Hurd and Thomas Kurian Oracle’s best salespeople?

I heard Mark Hurd and Thomas Kurian today in an Oracle webcast about its recent Eloqua acquisition. I was impressed Thomas did most of the talking about how it will integrate with Oracle’s other CRM acquisitions – RightNow for service management,  its social CRM tools, its Siebel and other SFA capabilities. He talked about how Eloqua will be enhanced for global marketing campaigns with different privacy and spam laws across countries. Eloqua has long had a “Digital Body Language” vision – with Oracle’s other assets it has a better chance to evolve beyond an email campaign tool.

A few weeks ago, they presented to a more technical audience in another Oracle webcast about its Cloud – particularly its Platform and Infrastructure as a Service.

At OOW last year, in a one on one I asked Mark if there was a particular business function he felt most comfortable with and he rattled off compensation planning, logistics and marketing scenarios. At another point he mentioned out he dealt with 750 business processes at HP labs, supply chain and other units.

In another OOW session I was impressed with Thomas’s knowledge of vertical processes around various Oracle products like Retek for retail and Flexcube for Banking.

Their command of such a wide range of Oracle’s wide, in many ways unwieldy, product portfolio and their ability to talk in business and technical tongues must make them a huge asset in sales situations.

A world without constraints?

I was talking to a tech executive at a multinational and he was describing the labor pools he had access to in India, E. Europe, S. America, China and he said “I don’t think technical talent will ever be a constraint for us again”. I was talking to a banker about Dell’s large debt load as they go private and he shrugged his shoulders and said “Capital is cheap”. I talk to a number of Big Data pioneers and they gush that memory and storage is no longer a constraint.

Against that background it is so good to see ambitious, almost heretic, projects. Google Glass, Fiber in Kansas City, autonomous cars and more. eBay’s remarkable transformation into a mobile commerce and payment giant to the point where its original auction business is almost a rounding error. China’s massive infrastructure investments in high speed rail, airports, dams. Projects to map the human brain. 

I could go on, but then I see much more constrained thinking.

HR executives who go wow when they hear about Google’s HR analytics or GE’s recruiting savings, but instead of saying “Why are we not doing that ourselves?”, ask “When will my HR package vendor deliver that?”. Accountants who are drooling over cloud based Excel and ledgers when they should  be working on predictive maintenance projects with their asset management teams. Vendors who constantly watch over competitors in their “magic quadrant” and do not want to step out of that box. Telcos who talk about “their innovators” when they don’t have a line item for R&D in their financials. Outsourcers who talk cloud when they have little capex in their financials.

Dennis Howlett  often accuses me that I “exhaust peeps like (him) who are trying our best to  get peeps to go from point A to point B as  a stepping stone to your point C/D.”

The problem is it’s not me defining point C or D. Plenty of projects are doing that around the world. I am just impatient with so many folks who are only setting Point B as their goal in a world with shrinking constraints.