deal architect

Billionaire AND Mechanic

Julian Guthrie’s new book catalogs the improbable path that brought together the billionaire, Larry Ellison and the radiator mechanic, Norbert Barjurin and their runs at the 2003, 2007 and 2010 America Cup.

With the amazing come from behind victory of the Oracle USA Team in this year’s Cup set alongside Oracle OpenWorld this week, I got a glimpse of Ellison, himself as mechanic.

Couple of weeks ago I had posted about the materials science, sensors, analytics, telemetry and wearable technology that the sailing has innovated. But the comeback has required some ingenious tweaking and nimble footwork

Russell Coutts, CEO of Team USA, tells the NY Times about the adjustments

“The guys on board changed a lot. For sure there was a use of the technology change where we manipulated the force or manipulated the balance of those forces, but the guys on board the boat changed their technique, so there’s this fantastic human element to this which really won the day in the end, which is great.”

John Fowler, described in a keynote with Thomas Kurian, and later in a breakout session with a few of us, the intensity Larry brings to the hardware and software side of the business. Intricate coordination of elements across the stack and an ambitious push to keep Moore’s Law going and double silicon performance every two years. Two of his slides below showed off recent Oracle engineering prowess.

Several folks bitched that Larry Ellison missed his second keynote to be at one of the pivotal races this week. If they only knew about the engineering this mechanic has also overseen on the other venture…

Oracle Cloud Apps: Slow and steady

The M6 32 TB machine, the in-memory switch, a growing network of IaaS data centers soaked up the sun at Oracle OpenWorld this week.

There were also plenty of on-premise apps sessions.  In the shadows were Oracle cloud apps which are quietly on a $ 1 billion a year revenue run rate.

Oracle shared some of their cloud application customer stats

• 650 Fusion Customers – about 220 live
• 1400 RightNow customers
• 1200 Eloqua customers
• 900 Taleo Enterprise customers (another 4500 Business Edition and 720 Learn customers)

In a panel, 9 customers described their experiences across this diverse set of apps. Many had bought these apps before Oracle acquired the vendor and did not report much disruption. On-premise customers (Siebel, PeopleSoft) I talked to at the event, seemed comfortable with where they are and their ability to gradually evaluate cloud options. As one said, its an annual ritual to evaluate whether to move certain apps to the cloud.

The customer pace and comfort seemed in marked contrast to analyst/media questions why cloud apps revenues are such a small portion of Oracle revenues.

Actually it contrasted to Oracle’s own attempt to showcase cloud apps. With a growing  “conference within a conference” emphasis, the human resources and customer facing apps had their own tracks at the event.

Customers get more billing at OOW

Oracle OpenWorld has always been an engineering showcase. Lots of feature/functions, speeds and feeds. This one is no different with lots of wow around in-memory, cloud and engineered systems

But a nice addition this year has been more profiling of plenty of customer cameos either live on stage or in high impact videos. Many are complex companies talking about next-gen technologies. So, Mark Hurd highlighted Airbus and its plans to stream massive amounts of sensory data from its planes , NYSE with its continually evolving volume, speed and security requirements, UL with its testing labs and several others. Michael Dell during his keynote showcased Ancestry.com with its global growth, and growing data formats, the CX keynote had a really lively Lego presentation on social engagement of customers. In the breakouts there were more - Steve Miranda had a panel of executives using a wide range of Oracle cloud applications.

I have requested Oracle provide video snippets from the keynotes. I will put up a collage of these stories on the New Florence blog once they become available.

Beyond Big Data: Big Themes

While Joe Tucci of EMC was clearly in sales mode, but his relatively short keynote at Oracle OpenWorld touched on several major themes that need lots more industry discussion

Big Data is not so much about existing, internal, structured information but partner provided and external video and social data

75% of existing security investment goes into anti-virus, firewall etc, when much bigger threats are coming from state sponsors, organized crime

The Digital Natives – Google, Amazon, Yahoo! etc – run massively scaled IT infrastructure that most enterprises can only dream about. Need a new generation of platforms and tools 

Of course Joe would love customers to buy products from EMC, VMWare and Pivotal - where is Chairman, but even importantly we need more of an industry focus on these themes

Can we refocus on SAP customer needs?

Reacting to the Oracle in-memory switch announcement, Vishal Sikka of SAP has commented “ it hasn’t been released yet, so please come back and talk to us when it is available”

He is right.

Makes for a lot of idle media gossip when we should be focused on SAP’s 200,000 application customers, many long-term ones, and whose maintenance checks continue to keep SAP hale and hearty.

Let’s ask where are the mobile, social, vertical apps for these customers?

Let’s ask why these customers continue to pay SAP partners ounce for ounce 4, 5, 10X in storage and server costs that Amazon and other IaaS customers have paid now for 5+ years

Let’s ask why these customers continue to pay SAP partners ounce for ounce 4, 5, 10X in application support costs that NetSuite and other SaaS customers have paid for 5+ years

Let’s ask why these customers cannot get multiple releases a year, and have them implemented quickly like Workday customers have been able to for 5+ years.

Let’s ask why we keep focusing on HANA when less than 1% of SAP’s customers have adopted it and may be saying – thank you,  but please fix the items mentioned above before we commit to buying even more from SAP?

Yes, let’s wait for Oracle’s in-memory switch to become available. In the meantime, let’s focus on SAP’s incumbent customer needs which have been waiting to be addressed for a while now.

Oracle’s iPhone moment

During his OOW keynote last night, Larry Ellison invoked the iPhone to make fun of his own product naming prowess. In doing so he announced to the audience what I was thinking throughout his speech. Game Changer.

The in-memory switch with the expected analytical efficiencies with the simultaneous row and columnar data availability and the more surprising update efficiencies once indexing is redundant changes the rules. Of course we need to see field benchmarks and the economics of the new database world (impact on RAC and other elements), the companion M6 machine with 32TB of memory Larry announced etc.

But in the mean time expect plenty of mocking and sniping as did the iPhone (full disclosure – I criticized Apple’s mobile carrier choice and its miserable network during the launch).

A bit less impact on video, social, sensory and other growing unstructured data which may not always be accumulated in an Oracle database, but for most structured enterprise data this will have a significant impact. If you are trying to sell analytical tools to the finance, billing, order management, logistics, HR, asset management areas this will clearly affect you.

Hopefully we will not see the dismissive reaction from those vendors similar to that Microsoft, Nokia and Blackberry had to the iPhone.

Steve Jobs waited for the follow up product – the iPad - to announce the end of PCs. I expect Larry to similarly announce – the end of the relational age. Relational as we have known it for 4 decades.

 

Oracle OpenWorld – Some Amazing Facts and Figures

Oracle has shared some of the factoids behind the giant event which starts Sunday. What a logistical feat!

• Expecting 60,000 attendees and more than 2.1 million viewers online ( btw, they are showcasing a People Counter at the event - an interesting use case for the growing Internet of Things)
• Generates more than $120 million for the Bay Area economy
• Attendees hail from 145 countries
• More than 500 partner exhibits in 300,000 square feet of space
• More than 2,500 sessions for attendees across 15 venues featuring over 3,500 speakers
• 48,000 gallons of filtered tap water served to attendees in compostable cups or reusable water bottles
• 150,000 cups of coffee
• More than 64,000 lunches served (boxed and hot lunches)

Also some interesting “green facts”

· 777 metric tons of waste was diverted from landfill by Oracle and event suppliers through event recycling, composting, and donation programs since 2008.

· 85% of menu ingredients served at major functions are sourced within 250 miles of the bay area, helping support California growers.

· 69,355 water bottles eliminated, saving one ton of plastic, by using water refill stations since 2008.

· 97% of all event signage is reused, recycled or repurposed post-event.

· 14,400 lbs of gently used event supplies were given to 17 different local charities in 2012.

· 8,000 square feet of non-recyclable cling signage was eliminated in 2012, enough to over 4.5 volleyball courts.

Not your dad’s outsourcer

Readers of this blog know I have been cataloging massive changes in outsourcing for the last few years – many new entrants driven by mobile, social, cloud technologies; changing business models to non-linear, usage and outcome  based; changes in delivery models and locations.

Reading the latest version of the Cognizanti magazine that editor Alan Alper sent me (you can register here to get a copy), summarized well how dramatic the changes are. The issue focuses on “everything as a service”, “the future of work”, “Code Halos”. There is no sight of SAP, project overruns, staff turnover and other dirty words that have become synonymous with last-generation outsourcing.

Just clever marketing? Not if you look at their experience and detail behind every article in the issue.

Cognizant shared with me examples of 19 BusinessCloud offerings across several verticals – proprietary IP that is available to clients to license as a service. The Code Halo case studies and methodology are being codified in a book and a mobile app (and have been profiled in a series of guest blogs earlier in the year).

Earlier in the year, I sat down with the CEO, Francisco D’Souza and he told me about his 3 Horizons – his quest to shake Cognizant  from the invariable grip of the “Innovator’s Dilemma”. The Cognizanti issue shows the many ways his vision has changed the firm – and its clients.

As the leaves turn…

In a world where we are bombarded with a relentless stream of emails, slides, webinars, it is so nice to get a crisp, rapid update on product “delta”

In April, I wrote “There is something very reassuring when Stan Swete, CTO of Workday signs off a presentation (as he did today) on the latest release of his product with "we look forward to doing this again in 4 months"”

Sure as the weather cools, this morning Stan led a presentation on Release 20. The slide below provides highlights and the quick demos during the session. One hour. Well paced. No travel needed.

One change next time. Workday is moving from 3 to 2 annual updates. That’s what customers want. But in the Technology Summit last week, I asked them if that meant a slow down in new features.  No, was the answer. Fatter updates.

Which may mean a longer session for Stan.  Given how efficiently his team marches through these product updates, I will gladly make time for that.

The “Customer Company”

People scratched their heads when Marc Benioff started talking about the “Customer Company”. Having written a few guest posts for their blog in the last few months (see some linked below), I have been exposed to the wide range of webinars it sponsors and the eBooks it publishes. Across a wide range of sales, customer service and digital marketing/advertising themes.

Then you look at internal assets like its digital agency Buddy Media, and  its ecosystem of partners like LiveOps which is pioneering customer service BPO using home based agents you realize it is not just selling customer facing solutions. It is also sponsoring a wide range of thought leadership and innovation around "”Customer Company” - collateral that is available to its customers and prospects for free.

While many folks love to hear Marc pick fights about clouds, I for one am glad to see a functional/best practice emphasis at the company. It pioneered enterprise cloud infrastructure, and continues to optimize that, but the real value to customers comes from a process focus.

Some of my posts – with a thanks to the editor Amanda Nelson (@amandalnelson) for making them interactive

How to reinvent your traditional advertising investment

The New Mad Men

If Rip Van Winkle had been in customer service

Hit a Sales Grand Slam with lessons from Moneyball

The Cloud as a Processing Reengineering Platform