deal architect

Why is HP such a punching bag?

Stupid question, right?

From Apotheker to Autonomy,the pissing contest over Itanium and now the ill-advised shot about Dell – the wounds at HP appear self afflicted and never ending.

But….talk to CIOs about their really unpopular vendors and about products they would love to eliminate in their budgets and other larger vendors come up more often than does HP (ok, many do complain about EDS)

More positively, look at a metric important to me as an innovation watcher – percent of revenues from products introduced in last 5 years. HP towers over most other enterprise tech vendors when you look at the 3PAR storage, Virtual Connect networking gear, Vertica Big Data analytics , PageWide printers and many other products it has introduced in the last few years.

Time for HP to take the bull by the horns:

a) If IBM can continue to milk Watson for years after the Jeopardy! showing even with little overt commercial success, surely HP can show off some of the intelligent infrastructure, immersive experience and other research at HP Labs

b) If SAP can line up fanboys to cheer at every HANA pivot, can HP not do the same with its Pathfinder ecosystem?

c) If Verizon can claim credit for third party innovations, surely HP  can start to leverage more of its VAR and other networks?

There is enough positive press in HP products and customers. HP just needs to quit being defensive about itself and whiny about others.

More New Renaissance

On the Innovation blog

Indoor Positioning Technology

“Freeloaders”

Big Data and Florists

The GE Global Innovation Barometer

The 787 Turbulence

The New England Patriots: Butts in stadium seats

House of Moves: Allergy as a video game

Samsung in the Enterprise

The Real Deal: Narinder Singh on The Davos Excitement about Technology

This continues a series of columns from practitioners I respect. The category "Real Deal" describes them well.

Narinder Singh and the firm he co-founded, Appirio (and where he is now Chief Strategy Officer) have graced the pages of this blog often. Somehow, I have been remiss to not have invited him to contribute to this series. When I saw he was at the WEF in Davos, Switzerland recently, I invited him to write about his impressions as a first time attendee at the event where the truly powerful and influential convene.

“My most vivid memory of late 1999 involves a friend’s engagement party and a tech company I was at that went public (IPO). Our stock soared to more than $300 a share as I was attending the engagement party with a litany of doctors (both partners were children of doctors).  They hung on my every word and hoped I would guide their children away from medicine. Of course, when I was reunited with the group six months later on my friend’s wedding day, the tech world had crashed and with it my new found popularity. 

Last week, at The World Economic Forum 2013 Annual meeting at Davos, it felt like technology had returned to the big stage - not for its association with high flying stocks, but as an agent of change.

As a technologist attending the event at Davos for the first time, a session on the Past and Future of the Universe struck a chord because of the science behind finding the origins of the universe and how the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland was advancing research in that area.  As a cloud advocate I was fascinated with their taking 40 million pictures a second and collecting more than 25 petabytes of information in just the last year (estimated at 20-50% of all of Dropbox, 5-25% of all of Amazon). However, it was in the presenter’s enthusiasm for driving new knowledge and in their approach - collaboration amongst scientists from more than 100 countries - that I found both innovation and inspiration.

Stories of technology changing the future permeated the event. In a seminar about the online disruption to education, luminaries including Bill Gates, Larry Summers, the President of MIT and CEOs of Coursera and Udacity vividly articulated the pending disruption to education, but were outshone by 12-year-old Khadijah Niazi.  Khadijah had used massive open online courses (MOOC) to join a class of more than 100,000 and master advanced college physics from her home in Pakistan. As Tom Friedman of the New York Times interviewed her in front of the live audience he said, “Actually, I’m really nervous, because if I mess up this will go viral on Youtube.”  Her story showed how technology and a hyper-connected society could change how we communicate, what we are allowed to learn, and how we relate to one another as people. 

While technology as a change agent was everywhere, there were substantive debates and fears around its rapid impact on science, society, and nations. In a session about online power, I debated the future of online voting with one of the pioneers of collaboration on the Internet - his position being it was too fraught with potential for corruption. Another session brought forth studies from academia (at MIT) that shows that directed magnetic waves could change a person’s moral judgment.

In addition, numerous parts of the program highlighted the potential for specific kinds of innovation to drive efficiency and contract jobs - one of the factors leading to more than 600 million youth being unemployed across the world. The match between what was needed and the expectations that youth had (6/10 millennials consider themselves innovative) was itself noted as a function of technology and the social fabric. Technology had the power to change everything from people’s minds to their prospects for employment.

In a blog I wrote before the forum I’d discussed “the hubris to change” often associated with technologists and their approach to the world.  The Forum changed this to “the will to change”, likely out of sensitivity to criticisms of the elitism of Davos.  Yet, the almost irrational confidence to overcome obstacles is in fact the draw of technology -  and what's necessary to attempt to tackle the big problems of the world. 

This year’s World Economic Forum Annual Meeting highlighted that despite the risks, technology has pervaded the highest levels of companies and governments because it is seen as clear path to dramatic change. What comes next is fully dependent on our ability to translate that potential into impact. “

Narinder can be reached at narinder AT appirio DOT com 

My guiding “Magic Quadrant”

I often get nice compliments like “where did that insight come from?” or “how could you rattle off so many case studies around that technology trend?”

In reverse, I find myself disagreeing with fellow bloggers and analysts and when I examine why, it’s usually because we look at the same problem from very different lenses.

My “guides” are spread across 4 quadrants

Technology “switch-hitters”

I like to study how non-tech enterprises embed technology into their products and services. And in reverse how tech companies become leaders in operational, non-product areas. So, It could be a restaurant using iPads as menus and as bathroom mirrors or it could be a city with smart parking with sensors embedded. Given a choice I would rather spend a day with software engineers who are part of Mercedes product engineering than software engineers who support its SAP systems. There is a certain thrill in hearing about a project or product which little of the media/analyst world will ever write about.  In reverse,  while most attention goes to their products, I love to examine Apple’s retail channel, Google’s clean initiatives,  Amazon’s Kiva robots in its warehouses. To me, “switchhitters” – enterprises which consume  and produce technology equally well - are really interesting.

Thought leaders

I stay in touch with a  group of VCs, professors, journalists, executives who are not very active on social networks or the conference circuit, but have over time shown me they are always in the thick of emerging technology trends. I also like to go to 2-3 new conferences (to me) a year. One coming up next month is the MIT Sports Analytics event.  Every sport is taking the Moneyball ethos to new levels as they analyze athlete performance. They are leading the way in facilitating  social analytics. I bet a Borders or a Blockbuster  could have learned from how many of these teams continue to fill their “brick and mortar” stadiums when the digital competition via TV and web is so compelling.

Horizontal, Large tech vendors

These tend to be large tech vendors which typically show up in the top right of Gartner Magic Quadrants for their software, hardware, outsourcing categories.  These are obviously important – and I go to many of their briefings and events - but find they get more than their fair share of coverage from Gartner, Wall Street and bloggers. Even smaller analyst firms who could differentiate themselves will pack their webinars and events with reps from these “safe bets”. Many of my disagreements with fellow bloggers and analysts stem from the fact that they spend much of their time in this box. So,  they will continue to watch  for what IBM Watson is doing 3 years later when there are so many other fascinating advanced analytics projects to follow. Often that leads them to extrapolate quarterly results of vendors to project where the industry is headed as with this Social Enterprise conversation.

Vertical and “Offbeat” tech vendors

Some of the most interesting innovation is happening in vertical markets.  Look at retail and you see depth sensors to manage shelf space. scanners to give customer better fitting clothes, next-gen POS, Big Data to manage product mix and so on. Same with insurance as they use advanced analytics to cover risks around crops and ski trips they could not a few years. I love to get to know products and vendors who help with these innovations. Also other vendors “off the beaten track”. It could be a disruptor – someone who offers third party software maintenance, cheaper global mobile roaming etc. It could be an outsourcer in E. Europe or Africa. It could be an innovator in a new category like NetSuite was in 1998 way before any one had thought about cloud computing.

Yes, my insights can be different. Some would argue what I hear from so many sources is a lot of noise. I like to think I am blessed with a curiosity antenna which can pick up many varied signals.  If my little iPhone can keep Bluetooth, GPS, voice, data and many other signals straight, so should I.

The Surface Pro: My next “tab-top”?

Ed Bott has a nicely done review from of the Surface Pro – lots of things which caught my attention – 2 lbs weight, stylus, 5+ hour battery life, DisplayPort connector, Touch cover.

I had considered waiting for it as my replacement for my travel Toshiba, which bless its heart, is really beat up with a missing D cap on the keyboard and worse. In the 4-5 months of waiting I have tried a Chromebook, a Win 8 Ultrabook, and iPhone 5/iPad 2 and a Surface RT for my travels.

And I have come to some fairly basic conclusions:

a) I am not an ideal candidate for touch screens due to my grubby fingers. I need a stylus, and ideally a physical keyboard. That’s a negative against extensive use of  iOS devices.

b) Airline and hotel wi-fi are still flaky so a mostly cloud centric device like the Chromebook can be frustrating

c) The Surface RT was too castrated and could not run many applications I need on the road

d) Win8 takes some getting used to as I wrote here and my Toshiba Ultrabook  is giving me that practice

So, I can see one of 3 scenarios a) The Surface Pro is reasonably successful over the next year, and between Microsoft and the user community plenty of kinks are worked out and I am more comfortable with Win8 Pro on my Ultrabook. b) New form/factors – what I term “tab-tops” like the Lenovo Yoga  - continue to emerge and mature c) The Surface Pro does not do too well commercially, and I can pick up the device and accessories at a significant discount in a few months.

My gym trainer talks about “muscle confusion” – different equipment and exercises every few minutes. I think we have entered the age of “brain confusion” – move from one device to another a few times a day.  

More data heroes

In my post So you want to be a (Big) Data Hero I highlighted several examples of impressive payback from projects around predictive maintenance of railcar wheels, hurricane tracking, crop insurance, water leakage etc. As I continue research on my next book I have been posting several other examples on New Florence. 

The primary data sources used in each case are unique, the volumes of data often mind boggling and they are not just trying faster ERP reporting or pretty visualization here. Also, very few of them talk about the underlying tool, the focus is on business payback.

Coke’s Orange Juice operations

Google’s HR Analytics

DARPA’s ARGUS-IS Super Camera

Basketball player analytics

The Audubon annual Christmas Bird Count

Many more to come….

When I grow up I want to be a …

HANA consultant? Android developer?

Nah, Here are some really interesting jobs

• Next Big Sound Data Journalist
• NASA Curiosity Driver
• 3M Staff Scientist
• EA Environmental Scanner
• Tumblr product manager
• ESPN Statistician
• Spotify Machine Learning Engineer
• Shapeways 3D Printing Materials Manager
• Novacoast Ethical Hacker
• Legoland Designer

Private Dell: More or Less Conservative?

As Dell seeks to go private, it makes me ponder if that is another symptom of an organization which has played safe for the last decade, or will the cloak allow it to make larger, riskier bets again?

As I wrote in my book when it comes to its hardware

(Dell) manufactured mostly what was ordered and even paid for in advance. Apple raised the bar by showcasing a new product, guesstimating likely demand, and tuning its supply chain day by day and hour by hour. It broke traditional rules of demand forecasting—because there was little historical data to forecast from for a version 1.0 iPod or iPhone or iPad. It balanced the risk of overproducing or increasing buffer inventory and taking write-offs versus underproducing and losing customers to the next competitive product just a few weeks away. It took that risk, time and again, and made the rest of the industry do the same. And the risks are not small when you are talking 3 million iPads in the first quarter of introduction. The Dell model has been “out-Delled.”

As I blogged a few years ago about its outsourcing

Dell is today much more of a services player but it has not shown the ruthlessness to optimize the service chain. What is the opportunity? To drive traditional outsourcing pricing from $ 3 a gb a month for storage to 20c that cloud computing models are showing. Instead, as Dell points out elsewhere in the interview he is content to sell equipment to cloud providers.

Not just in the data center, there is a huge opportunity to optimize deskside management  - it is embarrassing that to some companies BestBuy's GeekSquad can provide a better outsourcing solution than established infrastructure outsourcing players with massively more scale. Ditto with IT help desk, asset management etc - areas where Dell has shown early signs of competence.

My bet is Dell will continue to play it safe. The Microsoft investment will likely continue loyalty with an old partner. With an estimated $ 15 billion in debt in the new configuration, I suspect it will be stymied in the capex game which is increasingly needed for scalable cloud computing.

Would love to hear of scenarios how a private Dell becomes a dominant, differentiated industry player again.

Win8 – like a first time visit to WalMart

I have been playing with my Win8 Ultrabook for the last week, gradually exploring its features. My friend Louis Columbus tells me Microsoft has bought into “Personas” in its development philosophy simulating how different roles navigate its software.

I think they forgot one persona – that of a tourist who enters a US WalMart on a Sunday after church visit. Lots of crowds, few employees to help you navigate the store even for the staples you are looking for.

My shopping trip:

a) I try a DVD to make sure an external drive works with the Ultrabook. Nothing. It recognizes the drive but Media Player will not play The Big Bang Theory. I am about to return the drive, when I learn the DVD player is only available in the new Media Center. So I upgrade for $ 69.99 to Win8 Pro and sign up on a Microsoft page to get free codes for the DVD player. They don’t arrive till the next day, when I realize the Pro upgrade already included the DVD player. To make me feel even dumber, a friend shows me a site  where I could have got the Pro upgrade for $ 39.99. If I had bought a Win7 machine, the upgrade would have been even cheaper. Thanks, Microsoft for penalizing your early Win8 adopters.

b) I am surprised the machine does not have Skype pre-installed, now that it is a Microsoft property. I sign into my Skype account and try to download Skype for Win8. The link  takes me to the Microsoft Store where it says Free Install. Except there is no button to download anywhere. I Google Skype for Win8 and navigate to the same page. I give up and download Skype for Win7

c) Not exactly a staple (though many bloggers say it is Microsoft’s best single product ever), but the search for Windows Live Writer turns in to an Easter Egg hunt. I email and tweet the Microsoft WLW handle for the 2012 version download page – no response. Several fellow bloggers sent me links where to find it - Windows Essentials, Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Live Spaces. Other Microsoft employees say “oh  yes, it is still alive” but not provide the download page . The Essentials page throws you off by saying it is the XP version. When you run the exe. if you are not careful it installs many more apps  than the Writer. Best single MS product ever? Not so sure after this experience.

There were plenty of other little surprises. During the initial set up, the process takes you through several pleasant pastel colored screens, and then bang –blank screen. You have to do a hard restart. It is a reported problem  but machines keep getting shipped with  it. Basic features like Restart and Safely Remove Hardware require you to consult the user manual or surf the web.

As David Pogue wrote in the NYT,  Win8 tries to be too many things for too many people with its TileWorld AND its traditional desktop UIs. In its infinite wisdom, Microsoft has chosen to release not 1, not 2, not 3 but 4 versions of Win 8– RT, Basic, Pro and Enterprise. I guess all the personas whispered their conflicting demands in Microsoft’s ears. So Pro deserves a DVD Player because those users fly more and need that functionality? Basic users stay at home and use streaming video more than Netflix DVDs so don't need the DVD player?

Like WalMart, Win8 is dense. There is so much there. Just finding it is frustrating. It gets better as you spend time in the store. You learn where your brands are, you learn to avoid certain hours, you learn to self-check-out.

In the meantime, my wife listening to me cuss through the week reminds me: Run down to WalMart and get us a Win 7 machine  before they disappear. Yes to replace the XP machine we bought before Vista crowded them out.

The Real Deal: Art Mesher on ENTRUSTS – the next Big Thing in Supply Chains and SaaS

This continues a series of columns from practitioners I respect. The category "Real Deal" describes them well.

I first met Art Mesher in 1995. We were both freshmen Gartner analysts and in class and bars he  would passionately talk about “federated networks” and supply chain “visibility and velocity”. I knew he was ahead of his time, and actually understood him a bit more when the conversation turned to salmon fishing and his home in the cliffs of Wisconsin, which he was equally passionate about. He left Gartner a few years later to implement many of his ideas at Descartes.  

I caught up with him a year ago and asked him what he thought of modern networks, especially social ones, which while voluminous, seemed casual about credentials and commerce. He has clearly been thinking of them, because he recently penned a white paper (see link below) and I invited him to post a shorter version on this blog.

“Virtually all supply chain and enterprise applications created prior to 2011 will become obsolete because they were designed to be “permanent platforms” that ignore today’s rapid acceleration of business processes, technology and networks. While these systems won’t go away, they will not offer businesses competitiveness either.

To remain competitive, companies will need to adopt technologies that let them keep pace with this acceleration. Specifically, competitiveness will require businesses to be able to harness presence on networks, leverage ubiquitous distributed wireless communications and computing and extend these legacy systems and platforms. The notion of replacement cycles for technologies will need to become replaced by continuous investment cycles.

“Form follows function” in technology and I believe we’re seeing a new type of company – the “Entrust” – that will help businesses guarantee outcomes and insure against failures.

An Entrust is a process-enabler, not a technology or logistics service provider. An Entrust is trusted by a community to facilitate consistent, predictable transactions. An Entrust is a federator, bringing together other member enterprises and networks to streamline processes. An Entrust authenticates and issues credentials to participants to ensure that the community operates safely and securely. An Entrust insulates its members from the continuous investments needed to modernize, harmonize and effectively harness new waves of technologies. An Entrust provides shared service environments for a community of players with varied technology capabilities. An Entrust provides broad access to a community to allow members to rapidly assemble, disassemble and reassemble its supply chain relationships with speed and grace. An Entrust will distinguish itself on consistency, predictability and fairness to a community. An Entrust will guarantee delivery of expected service and provide warranties with respect to failures. Entrusts will start in highly-specialized communities, such as high-tech component manufacturers and suppliers, food distribution, CPG/copacker food production or freight forwarders/airline cargo.

Not everyone can or will be able to be an Entrust. Many existing businesses will lack the technological infrastructure or community trust to be successful or accepted as an Entrust. Entrusts will be powered by a commitment to newly-architected operating systems that facilitate the security, scalability, reliability and collaboration required in community-based distributed computing. The operating system will be designed to standardize transactions that automate multiparty processes across the community – both in the physical logistics supply chain sense and the technical business process management sense.

As mentioned earlier, winners in this new era will be business models that network together, harnessing technologies to cleanly and elegantly assemble and disassemble themselves and their business processes/relationships with speed and grace. There are a number of Entrust providers that are emerging.

Here are four examples:

Nulogy - Nulogy integrates the community of CPG brand manufacturers with contract packagers (co-packers).

E2Open - The E2Open community is comprised of brand owners and their suppliers, particularly in markets with short shelf-life products, such as consumer electronics and apparel.

SPS Commerce - SPS Commerce allows retail trading partners to manage and fulfill orders by running a trading partner integration center.

Descartes - Descartes operates the largest federated network for logistics, comprising a community of influential shippers, logistics intermediaries, carriers and government agencies across multiple modes and geographies.

If you would like to understand more about the market dynamics that are creating the need for Entrusts and the types of Entrusts that are emerging please follow this link.”

He can be reached at amesher AT descartes DOT com.