deal architect

Emulating Eric Schmidt

On his Google+ page, Eric Schmidt, the Chairman writes

“Like the people who moved from PCs to Macs and never switched back, you will switch from iPhone to Android and never switch back as everything will be in the cloud, backed up, and there are so many choices for you.”

and proceeds to provide a page long script of steps to make the switch.

For a few years now I have wondered why SaaS vendors (and by that I also include products like Oracle Fusion and SAP BYD) do not make switching from last-gen software this mindless – or at least not as dependent on service providers.

The source file formats (PeopleSoft, SAP, Lawson etc) are fairly well defined, integration of legacy systems with the destination has been done at thousands of sites, training modules and test plans can be leveraged from so many predecessor projects. Many of these steps should already have being codified – so come to a new project as “service-as-a-software”.

For many SaaS projects, the initial migration cost and risk is a ROI killer and a major gating factor. There may be other reasons not to move – the SaaS alternative may not be as functionally risk, there are cloud security concerns, or the customer is happy with the as-is (like my family is with  the iPhone). But after years of SaaS projects, the mechanical migration should not be a gating factor.

Don’t forget Eric is asking individual consumers to do the steps themselves, maybe with help of a Verizon or Sprint rep. In a SaaS migration you will have plenty of IT, vendor and  SI resources involved. So, given the level of professional talent involved, the normalized complexity is not that significantly higher.  

More innovation off the beaten path

Innovations from various parts of the world we don’t usually expect innovation from

Big Bertha – Seattle

Aviation Powerhouse – Dubai

Tweet Experience Hotel – Spain

Starchase – various US police departments

Breaking the mold – UK, Denmark, Thailand

earlier posts in this series are here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here

Disruptions and Innovations for 2014

Have 2 interesting sessions coming up:

On December 3, Phil Fersht and Ned May of HfS and I will have a fireside chat at their Blueprint conference in New York on “Five Disruptions Shaking the Foundations of the Modern Enterprise”.  A preview of the themes is in this post.

On December 10, for a change I get to stay home and welcome Bill Kutik, Naomi Bloom and Brian Sommer in the Workday sponsored Predict and Prepare videocast. A preview of some of the themes is in this post

Look forward to seeing you at both!

Forget SAP

InformationWeek has a nearly 1,500 word column about a session with Bill McDermott. And he talks about the younger, greener SAP. And he talks about HANA and he talks about Oracle. What’s striking is there is no mention of SAP customers. Well, ok he talks about  B2B2C – but just to emphasize a new vertical like sports teams.

Last week at Dreamforce, I counted at least 9 non-Salesforce technologies front and center during Marc Benioff’s keynote. Not sure I have in recent times seen a SAP executive overtly talk about or display non-SAP tech. Well maybe a wave of an iPad. Usually, it’s about HANA most of the time.

At Oracle OpenWorld, Mark Hurd raised a firestorm with SAP fans by saying “Forget SAP”. His point was it is a still a small player with 2,000 HANA sites compared to Oracle’s 400,000 database customers.

Actually that would be good advice for SAP executives. Time for them to forget SAP and talk customer and partner products a lot more.

By association that should reflect well on SAP.

Enterprise blogging at the crossroads

I looked around the room during Marc Benioff’s press conference at Dreamforce, and felt pride that bloggers were the ones asking the smartest questions. They are banded together at ZDNet, Constellation, Forbes and Diginomica or stay solo like Brian Vellmure and Denis Pombriant and are fairly respected in tech world.

Seven years ago, I was a founding member of the Enterprise Irregulars. The moniker was a tribute to the stray kids that only a few bright minds on Baker Street knew about. We have come a long, long way since.

And yet, in many ways, the world has not stayed steady. Industry analysts continue to thrive, magazines are rebounding, books are not dead and all kinds of new media are emerging guided by savvy technologists like Pierre Omidyar and Jeff Bezos

Here are some areas enterprise blogging could do better at

We are not in touch with corporate tech

A Forrester analyst tells me he does not spend much time on Twitter. “My corporate clients are not there.”. Bloggers in contrast seem to live on the social nets, merrily tweeting away from every event to the benefit of each other. Bloggers also seem to have little interest in all the innovation happening at GE and GM and Daimler. They seem primarily interested in vendors and tech investors.

We are narrowly focused

The iPad in particular with its awesome color saturation and platform for interactive content is giving magazines a chance to be reborn. And many of them are covering a wider range of technology. Fortune's latest issue, for example, covers global technology as China looks to build its own airliners, the technology at the San Francisco 49ers as they plan their new stadium, medical technology at Mayo Clinic and more. As I look for posts on New Florence, magazines are  becoming a major source of posts. Bloggers in contrast tend to pick a tech category – be it HR or CRM. Nothing wrong in specializing - but we should not be extarpolating to the rest of the world from just that POV.

We are not creating much long-form content

At Dreamforce it was good to spend time with Jeff Kaplan and talk about his cloud marketplace. It is good to see  recent books from Scoble/Shel and Leander. It is good to see videocasts from Jon Reed. Books or other distinctive IP require extensive research which fewer bloggers appear to be investing in. It is depressing to see many bloggers just tweet others' content.  

I could go on. Bloggers have come a long way. But we have lots more to do.

Anon has become a grumpy old man

“Books of quotations are cluttered with sayings attributed to Anon, and these scraps of truth and wisdom have earned Anon universal recognition and immortality” says this essay which celebrates the prolific author.

Problem is the essay was written before the WWW and blogging. Anon has increasingly become nasty and jealous and bitter as this post on Dreamforce vividly shows.

Anon has never been welcome on my blogs – not in the comments, certainly not as a guest columnist. Not unless he sends me a private message he is stuck in Iran or another place where it would be unsafe to reveal his identity.

I leave snarky comments back on Anon posts like I did on one above “Hey writer, I don’t blame you for wanting to be anonymous. If I pissed off N. Korea leaders I would also hide”

and I call out PR folks who encourage Anon when he is mean to a competitor. They naively forget Anon can turn on them in a heartbeat.

How a bad technology decision can bite for years

Kelly, the flight attendant, saw me shake my head as I entered my connecting flight to the Bay Area this week. I recognized the plane as an older Southwest 737-300 plane with no wi-fi. An email a few days prior had promised wifi on this flight so I had paid the fee for the day. Now I would need to apply for a refund. To her credit, she remembered and offered me a free beverage when she brought drinks. I did not ask SW for a credit but instead sent in a compliment on Kelly.

The problem is countless customers like me and countless crew like Kelly have had to deal with poor or non-existent wifi on SW flights now for 3 years.

It goes back to a SW decision to go with Row 44 as its service provider while the rest of the industry went with GoGo. As I wrote in my last book, Aircell provides the GoGo service with air to ground service using towers that go back to the last generation of airphones in the 90s.

The constraint is the coverage is only over land (ok, so about 100 miles out to sea). SW was thinking ahead to San Juan and  Hawaii flights and went with a air to satellite service provider.  Talk about tail wagging the dog. SW still does not have flights to Hawaii, and less than 1% of its flights are to/from San Juan.

For the vast majority of its flights, Row 44 service has been poor or worse. Many customers I know file for refunds after most flights. In recent months, SW has also switched on Dish TV streaming – which makes you wonder even more if relatively steady satellite beamed TV can be watched with a lot more contention (the SW demographic on many flights has more traveling families than business people who are working on flights), why can even slow web service not be counted upon?

Also most SW employees are not like Kelly. They have gotten numb to complaints about wifi. They will just shrug or lie about it. Their customer service keeps saying the service is improving but refuses to provide service level data. These days you can get on-time, baggage loss, age of plane and all kinds of performance data. So why not share wifi performance data? SW has had a chance to do plenty of benchmarking – it acquired AirTran which has continued with GoGo. Soon, as JetBlue and others roll out the ViaSat (also air to satellite) service SW will be  forced to benchmark against its much better service.

SW is stuck with a poor decision. It is ignoring the fact that for a growing number of passengers wifi availability is a major decision factor in picking a flight as much as price and convenient time. Even worse, it has underestimated the huge morale impact on its staff for having to continue to defend a poor technology decision.

Enterprise Software has its perks

You think it is all boring? See what 3 of my friends in the industry got to do recently

Mini Peiris at NetSuite got to ring the closing bell at the NYSE

 

Fred Studer gets to star in this really funny Microsoft commercial

 

Parker Harris at Salesforce got to audition for the  next Fast and Furious

 

A passion for manufacturing

4 years ago, in The New Polymath, I quoted Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE  “I believe that a popular, thirty - year notion that the U.S. can evolve from being a technology and manufacturing leader to a service leader is just wrong.” GE, of course, has been embedding all kinds of technology as it makes its turbines, locomotives, aircraft engines. MRI scanners and other products “smarter” in its vision of the “Industrial Internet”.

But Immelt was prescient even for other US companies. The energy boom thanks to fracking, and shifting global labor and shipping economics are returning plenty of manufacturing back to the US. While Apple continues to manufacture heavily in China, its designers (yes, designers) are pioneering a revolution in massive scaling of precision machining, solid state welding and other next-gen manufacturing for their Unibody and other innovations. Meanwhile in Germany, as my summer book project showed there is excitement about Industrie 4.0 –  humanoid robots, additive printing, augmented reality shop floor training, wearable computing. Japan, faced with an aging workforce continues to pioneer with shop floor and other innovation and produce sophisticated equipment to allow Apple and others to evolve their craft.

Manufacturing  is going through a remarkable Renaissance.

So, I was happy to reschedule and join a Plex sponsored afternoon with several of its customers and its own manufacturing savants (like Jason Blessing, CEO and Jim Shepherd and Louis Columbus. ex AMR Research). Plex, from the heartland of the US manufacturing industry in Michigan, is one of the few cloud ERP vendors with a focus on manufacturing.

Kelli Stokes from Caterpillar deserves the credit for the title of this post. She used the word “passion” often as she described Caterpillar’s own global near engineer-to-order manufacturing and their own version of smart machines for the Internet of Things.

Jeni Britton and Charly Bauer described the configuration, seasonality and traceability challenges as they deliver artisanal, ice-cream flavors with carefully sourced ingredients such as rare vanilla and Snowville milk at growing production volumes.

Bob Greenberg of Active Power and formerly of Dell and AGCO described how telemetry is reshaping manufacturing and the diversity in manufacturing talent around the world.

Ray Wang moderated the conversation which meandered in many directions from integration and security in the cloud to mass customization to algorithmic impacts on plants . An artist from Imagethink nicely captured the range of topics during the session – in photo below.

And as if the session not invigorating enough, we were treated to a variety of Jeni’s finest flavors. A bite of the Salty Caramel ice cream sandwich is guaranteed to generate even more fiery passion for manufacturing!

Photo Credit Jessieedwards.com. Click to enlarge.

Full Marcs

I do not think I have ever seen Marc Benioff blush. He is usually busy talking in hyperbole, and slapping backs to be slowed down by much. But Sheryl Sandberg teased him and had him agape during their Lean In interview last night at Dreamforce. The whole conversation around sexual equality is an uncomfortable one for most audiences but Marc did not stray from the focus of her recent book, even though he and the audience were dying to hear a bit about Facebook futures.

Even more than his always interesting keynotes, I like to observe Marc as Charlie Rose. Last year he let Richard Branson discuss legalization of pot – again another uncomfortable topic for a tech conference. He handles heavyweights like Colin Powell and Jeff Immelt with respect and a child like curiosity.

Marc is also unafraid to talk about charitable pursuits and implore audiences to open their wallets and calendars to support worthy causes. His time on Haiti and the SF Children’s Hospital easily added up to an hour of valuable prime time conference time this year.

He is a patron to all kinds of music. Genres from Will-i-am to Green Day to Neil Young have graced various Dreamforces.

But I really like how he handled a press conference this year. He engaged with a room full of over 300 journalists, financial and industry analysts and bloggers. He repeatedly overrode his PR folks and kept allowing more questions. He was humorous, sarcastic, respectful in turns. Given how tired he must have been after a draining keynote and other meetings, it was a masterful performance. 

I worry about many aspects of Salesforce as a company, but it is a pleasure to see so many aspects of Marc as dynamic executive, mature industry leader and a passionate human being.