deal architect

Fun - and funner - customer references

When I met the Infor team last month, I heard about many of the micro-verticals they are pursuing. They are doing especially well in the hospitality business – and as they named some of the customers, I said, be nice to do reference calls with them. Reference visits to some of those properties, actually:)

When I saw the SAP Sports apps earlier this month, I had the  same thought. Be nice to do a reference visit to the  49ers stadium when it opens in 2014.

But after NetSuite's announcement today to partner with eWinery Solutions those references can wait. I want to visit 20 of NetSuite’s wine customers. I particularly want to test the tasting room point-of-sale (POS) systems functionality. Seriously, nearly half of a winery’s revenues are supposed to come from its tasting room. Other features for the vertical are discussed here.

Talking about popular references, its tough to beat the Oakland As. The shot below is from the movie MoneyBall. The GM, Billy Beane, the book and movie revolved around and who is a hot ticket these days for many Big Data and sports analytics events, is also on NetSuite's board.

Photo Credit

One way to solve The Innovator's Dilemma

Readers know I frequently point out many large vendors who brag about cloud this, and Big Data that - they have been doing so for years when their new product revenue is still less than 10% after years. They are clearly not happy about it because they will mask, mislead analysts and journalists about revenue breakdown while spending millions in advertising and PR hoping the market ignores they are addicited to their legacy revenues.

It usually comes down to this. Externally, their executives talk the right talk. Internally, they keep incenting the field to keep selling their old products.

They really should take a page from Fransicso D'Souza of Cognizant. In 2011, even after Cognizant revenues had grown 2.5 times through the deep recession, he was restless. In this blog post, I  described how that led to their 3 Horizons organization

This article provides more color:

As I recall, Frank described Cognizant’s core business as doing quite well,” said Harreld, who retired from IBM in 2008 (and is now at Harvard Business School), remembering the two-hour discussion. “However, they were having difficulty building future businesses. It became quite clear to me that Frank was very worried about this problem, and he was genuinely searching for answers. It was an intense conversation, not idle chit-chat.”

“Sometimes you can lose focus on the next generation of services, keeping your eyes on the future. We thought a lot about this and said we’re not the first company to have ever experienced this problem.”

"“One of the pieces of advice I got was to get some of the most seasoned leaders in the company to move to the Horizon 3 business, so that they could apply their wisdom of years. But they had to be paired with fresh talent that could bring new thinking for the true power of this strategy to work. And that’s what we have done,”

As I wrote in my post that organizational split was critical

“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."

"Francisco said there is now healthy competition internally between his Horizon 3 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. "

How many CEOs are willing to similarly take charge of their innovative new products, rather than let the white corpuscles of their legacy business kill the new babies?

Innovators Dilemma really needs to be tackled from the top. 

Microsoft Enterprise Apps: Good is the enemy of Great

Let me start off by saying if I was walking the halls of Convergence in New Orleans this week, I may have a somewhat more generous point of view. But I am not there so catching up on what colleagues are reporting. And it just reinforces what I have felt for a few years – Microsoft’s always promising in the future what it should have already delivered. For a few years, it was internally focused digesting multiple acquisitions . But with that behind it,  this week’s theme  should be “ Enterprise innovation - delivered”, not “A world ahead”

I mean, with billions invested in the Azure cloud over the last few years, why are customers only now starting to see “hosted” versions from partners? With Microsoft putting so much emphasis on mobility and Surface, be nice for the enterprise apps to lead with those.  With Microsoft’s search, database and other algorithmic expertise, where are the predictive, social sentiment, and other advanced analytics for the enterprise? With acquisitions like Yammer, and collaboration tools like Lync being rolled out, you would expect much more social emphasis in the enterprise apps. 

Ray Wang reports progress on all the SMAC (social, mobile, analytical, cloud) fronts but it could be so much more coherent and market leading. With the experience Microsoft should have gained from eQuantive it acquired (and spun off) years ago and with its Bing and other exposure to CMOs, it should be leading in the exploding Marketing apps space. As Esteban Kolsky describes, the pieces are just coming together. 

Microsoft lives with a (mostly) mid market customer base which is fairly content with “good enough” core ERP/SFA functionality, and a partner base, which while extremely loyal and developing vertical extensions (though if you look at the Expo listings for the event some partners unabashedly claim to service 40+ industries!) ,  is not exactly known for filing for countless patents or other breakthrough work.

Somehow, I always think of Jim Collins’ quote from his bestseller “Good is the enemy of Great” when I think of Microsoft’s Enterprise apps. In my eyes, they continue as a bit of an underachiever.

More innovation

On the New Florence blog

Next-Gen Karaoke

STEM in SOTU

Cool Valentine Tech Gifts

Comcast: The Ultimate Convergence of Media and Technology

Infor HQ – bringing elegance to ERP

10 conversations that changed our world

FastCompany’s Annual Innovative 50

The NODE multi-function remote sensor

Mad Men 2.0

A few weeks ago, writing a guest column on The Future of Work, I found it useful to watch an episode of The Office to see how much things have changed in the last decade. Watching a rerun of a Mad Men episode, it hit me how much more has changed in the Madison Avenue world since that show’s setting in the 60s.

Explosion in media channels : The biggest change of course is how the two smaller screens – web and mobile are the hot new media as the world moves to digital marketing. And yet media which was hot in the 60s – TV, radio, billboards, glossy magazines – continues to evolve.   A poignant reminder of that came when Larry Ellison described in his OOW keynote how Lexus, looking for new spokespersons, monitored “the reach” of athletes at the London Olympics based on live analysis of  over 5 billion tweets. As he presented, I wondered where the people tweeting had watched or read about the athletes. On NBC, NBC Sports Network, MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo, Telemundo, or NBCOlympics.com? On ESPN, ESPN.com, ESPN Radio, ESPN The Magazine? Those in London could have seen it on giant Panasonic and other screens around the city, in pubs offering wi-fi so people could stream to their smartphones,  on the ferry to the Games, at the Games themselves. CMOs expect their agencies to provide such analysis because in many ways traditional media often provides better eyeball reach for the investment.

Globalization: Most agencies help their clients with “brand books” which guide consistent messaging,  icons and legal print around the world. But the nuances around the world are many.  Advertising in Indonesia requires sensitivity to Islamic stickers and icons. In India, sponsoring cricket tournaments will continue to be a savvy marketing investment even as the country has one of the fastest growing mobile markets. VW executives must have explained to countless German peers why US Football ads continue to be one of their biggest marketing expenses each year.

Cutting edge technologies: Agencies have always leveraged the best of technology from Hollywood, music studios and broadcasters. But that has turned up a few notches in recent years.  Ikea got help from its agency McCann as it built an augmented reality app for its catalog. The House of Moves is bringing motion capture from gaming world to commercials. During the 2012 Olympics, NBC broadcast some of the events on a 3D platform (in partnership with Panasonic)

Competitive landscape:  The agency world has always been very competitive. Lots of boutiques and mergers.  Client churn far greater than with legal, audit, outsourcing firms. In the last decade,  given the growing technology in marketing,  many IT centric services firms have become partners, and often competitors. IBM, Accenture, Cognizant and several others have Interactive units. Oracle and Salesforce.com both acquired (smallish) agencies last year. Firms like Sapient and Razorfish have long been comfortable in creative and technology worlds.

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. I listed other examples in a follow up post and here

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 and the scale of the data scientist staff is impressive and they are not just trying faster ERP reporting or pretty visualization here.

Here’s some more:

The ESPN analytics issue

An early warning system for the social web

Big Data and "Minority Report" scenarios

Fan-alytics

Big Data of the Japanese tsunami

 

Lean in – many different directions

Kudos to Sheryl Sandberg on her new book. She is a great role model to my daughter and a number of other young ladies.

But a reality check comes from freshman US Senator Mazie Hirono

"I'm a woman. I'll be the first Asian woman ever to be elected to the U.S. Senate. I am an immigrant. I am a Buddhist. When I said this at one of my gatherings, they said, 'Yes, but are you gay?' and I said, 'Nobody's perfect.'"

Nobody’s perfect – when I was young someone wise told me I was tall and awkward. I was brown. He pointed out other traits for which I would be teased and worse in life.  In other words, discrimination is never one dimensional. It was annoying to hear but his advice – let it roll off your back - has stood me well in life.

I spent a couple of years in Saudi Arabia as a young man and watched highly qualified Filipinos and Bangladeshis paid a pittance because of their passports. I watched Hindus and Buddhists get dramatically lower accident compensation than even Jews (yes in Saudi Arabia) because their religions were not monotheistic. I saw women not allowed to drive because – well they are women. I think I asked why? many times I was there. To myself, knowing no one around me would have a clear answer either.

I moved to the UK where I saw the “public school” you went to early in life made your career. Discrimination is a reality all over the  world and it is not one dimensional. And therein lies the limits of “lean in” advice based on sex or race or religious background or sexual orientation.

Personally, I would rather recommend Whitney Houston to everyone. Learning to love yourself ..is the greatest love of all. Feeling good about yourself for doing your best is the best antidote to any unfair treatment.

And I believe in celebrating the first Black President, the first S. American Pope, the first woman to qualify for a pole position at Daytona 500 and so many other firsts that are happening with increasing frequency.

The Empire Strikes Back

One of the aha’s I took away from the MIT Sloan Analytics event a couple of weeks ago was how various sports are not giving up on their “brick and mortar” – their stadiums inspite of growing fan preference to watch games on TV and computer screens. There were conversations about rethinking season tickets and dynamic pricing for individual game tickets. There were discussions of mobile apps designed specifically to enhance the in-stadium experience.  Plenty of discussion of broadband and entertainment technology at the venues.

Why am I not surprised?

In my last book, I had a case study on how Taubman Shopping Centers has thrived with a bunch of Apple, Bose, Sony and other tech retail stores, and how it has invested in an impressive digital infrastructure – interactive kids play areas, digital holiday entertainment, wi-fi, email marketing – to attract a tech savvy consumer.

BusinessWeek writes “Not only have (real estate) brokers resisted the attack by the Internet’s real estate sites (like Zillow and Redfin) but their fees remain stable. Real Trends, a research firm, reports the average commission paid to the buying and selling brokers was 5.4 percent of the price of a home in 2011, up from 5 percent in 2008.”

On New Florence I have been cataloging how traditional media – TV, Radio, Mail Catalog, Billboards - is innovating in the face of competition from social and mobile marketing, and often offering a better value proposition for audience  reach.

All this reminds me of a quote in The New Polymath from my former Gartner colleague Erik Keller. He now teaches special education kids about the joys of gardening and  said “At the end of the season, you measure success by how much you have harvested and how well you have left the garden for next year’s farmers. The term “ legacy ” is considered a negative in technology whereas in farming it is a positive…. Any new approach (in gardening) has to accept and build on the past rather than reject it….”

Striking how in tech we keep projecting how quickly legacy will fade away. It rarely does, and often strikes back.

More New Renaissance

on the innovation blog

Kevlar Rooms for Space

Solar GeoEngineering

Snow Antidote

Seth Godin on the Creative Entrepreneur

Technology at the Grammys

Scaling Big Data talent

The Big Data of Ancient Languages

The Big Data of BGI’s Genomics

The Cloud as Industry “Unconsolidator”?

Over my technology career I have watched with concern that the smartest IT, sourcing and legal executives who keep checks and balances on their product supply chains, labor unions etc have not done the same with their technology suppliers.

How lopsided is the situation? My research for The New Polymath showed

The top 25 global technology vendors, such as HP and AT & T, now make up more than 50 percent of the volume of the IT amount spent externally. The top 25 global technology buyers (dominated by large banks and government entities), however, barely make up 5 percent of the total spend.

Regulators like the US DOJ and the EU have not made much of impact – they make symbolic moves and block an occasional merger but have allowed concentration of economic power in the tech sector. No wonder, so many tech products from software maintenance to broadband to printer cartridges report over 80% gross margins.

So against this backdrop, I found it interesting that in the recent InformationWeek Cloud Computing survey 66% of respondents say they have between 2 and 5 cloud suppliers. Another 13% report between 6 and 10 suppliers. 

Part of that is the state of the cloud supplier market. Other than Oracle and Microsoft, few vendors can provide the complete SIP - software, infrastucture and platform - as a service. Part of the explanation is the leading SaaS providers are functionally specialized - Salesforce for CRM, Workday for HRM and Finance etc. 

While this will make many procurement folks groan - especially those who like the convenience of "one throat to choke", to me it is healthy "unconsolidation" trend for the industry.