deal architect

Microsoft’s “Connected Tissue”

Mike Ehrenberg, CTO for Microsoft Business Solutions was describing his new CEO Satya Nadella’s management style – the senior leadership team meets twice a week. “It plays havoc with planning international trips, but allows us to iterate rapidly as a company”

Kirill Tatarinov, EVP of the Business Solutions group says they have moved from Steve Ballmer’s “hub and spoke” management style to much more of a “connected tissue”. It’s allowing Microsoft to evolve to a “single P&L”

Sidebar conversations during the Fall Analyst Event this week showcased the evolution of “One Microsoft” that I had described here. I like to write about Polymaths and Microsoft is a formidable one with competencies in

• Operating Systems
• High Value Apps
• Hardware/Nokia
• Cloud Services
• Machine Learning
• Natural UI
• Consumer/Enterprise (comfort with both)

Of course, analysts like to carve the market into neat acronyms, and most customers still buy discrete pieces of technology, so the event mostly showcased Microsoft Dynamics ERP and CRM customers and product evolutions. In a q&a, Satya invited us to keep reminding Microsoft about the broader opportunity and under non-disclosure we heard of newer examples similar to Delta where Microsoft had pulled together retail, mobile, cloud technologies to deliver their in-flight POS

What was nice was even the ERP/CRM customers who presented during the event reflect a “New Age” economy:

• Trupanion– provides pet insurance and their actuaries use Big Data to price premiums by breed, age etc.  I hope to profile them on New Florence after a call with one of their data scientists
• KEXP – a non-profit radio station in Seattle which invites new bands to perform live (an impressive list including Nirvana and Death Cab for Cutie to Shovels & Rope and Macklemore & Ryan Lewis) talked about how Youtube has expanded their audience and funding sources beyond just the local market.
• True Blue – a temp agency described how texting and other mobile technology is reshaping blue collar work assignments
• Microsoft Retail – described point of sale and other innovations they have pioneered in over a hundred stores and how that feedback has helped evolve omni-channel industry features in Dynamics
• Carrefour –the grocery/retail industry is evolving with same day delivery and a new set of tech savvy competitors

Another changing marketplace is that of IT services. Microsoft showcased a spectrum of 6 partners ranging from $ 28 million in revenues PowerObjects to ABeam Consulting ( a SAP SI strong across Asia which is doing two-tier Microsoft projects) to $ 100 billion revenue-strong IBM.

Microsoft has invested significantly in lifecycle management tools around its applications and it was interesting to see the enthusiastic attitude about these tools from the smaller partners compared to that of the bigger ones.

Microsoft sells Office and other tools to white collar workforces but it has also seen massive scale efficiencies from machine learning and cloud infrastructures. Satya responded to my question saying he wants customers to “become software companies” by creating unique, differentiating code and reducing labor needed for back office functions.

That is the another major opportunity and challenge for Microsoft: to prevent a repeat of what bigger SIs and offshore firms did in creating a massive labor intensive economy in spite of SAP’s ASAP , Solution Manager and other tools and methods.

All in all, an invigorating couple of days on the shores of Lake Washington. As a dog lover, I particularly liked the Woodmark Hotel’s resident pets and Trupanion bringing two canine panelists to their session.

I hope  to profile some of the newer “One Microsoft” customer examples on New Florence as soon as the non-disclosure embargo is removed.    

Have you hugged an Enterprise Blogger today?

Enterprise conference season is in full swing and it gives you a chance to catch up with so many smart people who make this industry a reality – Stan Swete at Workday, Charles Phillips at Infor, Mike Ehrenberg at Microsoft, Steve Miranda at Oracle, John Wookey at Salesforce, Seth Ravin  at Rimini Street and so many others.

For me, though, I cherish the time to spend time with fellow bloggers. Hard to believe but we hardly talk about the industry. Brian Sommer and I have a standing  reservation to share Hot and Sour soup at Fang’s in San Francisco. A common topic – the state of railroads. I look forward to history lessons particularly about the Civil War, from Denis Pombriant. Tales of exotic global trips from Brian Vellmure. Philosophy (Roger Bacon in particular), single malts and book publishing from Paul Greenberg. Teslas and taxes from Ray Wang. Spain and Italy from Frank Scavo. Joys of walking with Esteban Kolsky (my FitBit loves him). Photography from Michael Krigsman. Cricket from Dennis Howlett. More with Zoli Erdos, Jason Corsello, Jevon Macdonald and so many others

And when we talk about the industry, we usually argue

Next time you run into an enterprise blogger, resist the temptation to discuss your company or your competition (unless they want that on the agenda, then by all means have a crisp conversation). Engage more about their passions.

I think you will walk away realizing they are smarter than you thought. I usually do.

Omni-channel this!

We are one step closer to release of my book on the SAP economy. The edit is done, the next steps are the inside layout, eBook conversion and prep for printing. Assuming all moves well, the media review PDFs should be available by Turkey Day, the eBook on Amazon and in soft cover by middle of December, and the hardbacks in January.

From book being largely written to market availability that’s about three months. Too long for bloggers like Dennis Howlett who asks me “Amazon and Kindle versions to start are your friend - no?” (and even for me - seriously, as a blogger I see how quickly we can get content out). Sure, you can upload anything quickly and make it available as an eBook, but if you want any semblance of consistency with the printed versions, the formatting and design does add time

Why bother with printed versions? Here is the unspoken truth in book world. Business books still sell largely in print. Speaking engagements, marketing campaigns etc all order 00s of copies. Fiction books are bought on an indie basis and ideal for eBook world.

Amazon still has not made bulk distribution of eBooks easy. It would be so easy for an event organizer to hand out gift cards with the book image. But Amazon will not restrict the card to the book being promoted so why would the organizer subsidize some other product? Also consider this - if you order 50 copies of a book, Amazon’s book ranking algorithms still treat it as one copy sold. Someday, Amazon or someone else will make bulk eBook delivery a reality but we are not there yet.

So, you still have to live with offset printing, warehouses, UPS deliveries. Print on demand works fine – again for small orders, and sometimes the quality of the content is compromised.

And you have to live with multiple prices. Amazon encourages eBooks to be priced under $ 10. Print on demand with soft cover does well under $ 20 and hardbacks under $ 30.

Talk about inconsistent UX across channels :)

Here is the good news – three months is a significant improvement over six months Wiley took for previous books. And in that time I have lined up another three case studies for the book.

Almost there, folks – thanks for your patience

Dreaming of the next generation of clouds

Dreamforce this week had an even more festive feel than ever. Pennant fever gripped the town as the Giants played October ball. The Beach Boys sounded as youthful as ever during Benioff’s keynote. The many school kids invited in the keynote audience and Hillary Clinton’s talk of babies provided an even more youthful and optimistic tone.

It was good to see visions of next-gen customer service featuring Honeywell’s internet of things thinking and Coca Cola drone deliveries. Digital agencies, social marketing, customer analytics, and communities were the talk on the expo floor and in many a session.    

I had excellent conversations with Salesforce partners like FinancialForce and Kenandy and their customers. It is good to see robust transactional functionality mature on the Salesforce platform.

And yet I left with a bit of an empty feeling

I am haunted by my summer research for the book on the SAP economy. So many of the SAP customers I interviewed asked me why there are not many robust cloud offerings for their industries. Not just spray painted features – deep retail merchandising, utilities billing, electronic medical records, pricing/promotions/assortments for CPG markets. insurance claims processing and on and on.

Last week, I was reminded what Bill Ruh at GE told me during one of  interviews: “we are transitioning from IT to OT – as in Operational Technology”. At GE’s Minds+Machines event everywhere you walked there were constant reminders of operational  metrics that companies are monitoring and optimizing  - ionizing radiation doses, optimal pitches of wind turbines, granular in-flight data and on and on. It’s what CEO Jeff Immelt calls the junction of “physics and algorithms”

At Dreamforce I walked by TCS booth with reminders of its 300,000 consultants, and Deloitte Digital with its own armies. Time for them and other IT vendors to help evolve clouds beyond finance, HR and CRM functionality.

Salesforce, Workday, NetSuite, Amazon and so many others have done an amazing job over the last decade. But we need to raise the bar for clouds. Not only because thousands of SAP on-premise customers beckon, but even bigger optimization opportunities are screaming for attention in so many industries.   

GE: Give us your “Dull, Dirty and Dangerous Data”

Rajesh Gill, Group Chief Pilot Technical and Efficiency at AirAsia, shared his version of “data visualization” at GE’s annual Minds+Machines day in New York. He expresses to fellow pilots the impact of certain maneuvers such as shutting down an engine while taxiing to the gate as savings in “pints of Guinness”. AirAsia is one of the most efficient airlines in the world (cost of 2.5c per available seat mile compared to more than 10c for most US airlines) and is constantly looking for small fuel and other improvements.

At lunch with him and several executives from GE Aviation, there was plenty of talk of our favorite and not-so-favorite international carriers and airports. But even more fascinating was the talk of analytics around continuous descents, the huge amount of flight operations data GE’s sub Austin Digital has access to, the economics of meal service on flights, the NOCs airlines run and the complex scenarios they simulate for weather and other other system-wide disruptions.

During a break I ran into Almis Udrys and talked to him about City of San Diego’s use of GE’s LightGrid technology and analytics to manage the LED street lighting. We talked about  smart parking, video analytics and other apps many local governments are trying out.

On a panel, Lisa Laurent, CT Medical Director at Advocate Health described analytics around ionized radiation doses in their 280.000 annual CT scans.  John Murphy, Chief Mechanical Officer at CSX talked about how much smarter locomotive operations are with GE’s TripOptimizer software. He said he would love to get to the state GE Wind is at in being able to remotely monitor and tune turbines and other assets. Matt Fahnestock, VP of IT at Columbia Pipeline Group talked about maintenance and asset management analytics around its billions of investment in compressors and pipelines. Gerrurd Wallaert, head of asset planning at E.ON Climate and renewables talked how GE’s PowerUp is increasing productivity of its wind farms. I have written about some of these technologies in previous books, but it was nice to hear these executives talk passionately about results, not just promise.

Over the summer as I have written my book on the SAP economy, I have talked to many about HANA. Over the last few weeks of “events season” I have heard about data-as-a-service, fancy visualizations and analytical clouds from a number of application vendors. The majority are focused on white collar – marketing, financial, HR, spend – data. The GE value differentiation was brought into focus when John Lizzi of its Distributed Intelligent System Lab showed off service robots which do “dull, dirty and dangerous” tasks. Actually the whole day was about dull, dirty, dangerous data from the  field, the lab and the shop floor.  Not only does GE sell the equipment – scanners, turbines etc – which generate much of the data, it also has deep domain talent like the aviation focused group at lunch. Most IT vendors want to sell you tools and expect others to provide the context.

Bill Ruh, head of GE Global Software, summarized it well when I interviewed him for the SAP book. He said we are transitioning from IT to OT (Operational Technology). And that means “Really Big Data” as was in display in slides and wall charts such as

• 146 TB of annual data from over 13,000 locomotives
• 340 TB of data from 25 airlines

That mass of data also forced GE, according to Bill, to focus on

a) Dramatically reducing cost of managing a TB of data

b) Dramatically reducing time to ingest data

Those two principles are in vivid  display in GE’s Industrial Data Lakes thinking.

Two other design principles were woven through out the day:

• GE expects thousands of analytical apps across sectors it plays in (like some we describe above) and is looking to open up its Predix platform to third party developers in an iOS like app store
• Industrial security requires an exponential of IT security paranoia and controls  – given the junction of what CEO Jeff Immelt calls the  junction of ‘physics and algorithms”

Immelt kicked off the day with “If you went to bed thinking you are an industrial company, you woke up this morning as a software & analytics company”.  The rest of the day showed a very different vision of a software & analytics company than the mainstream IT industry delivers.

Photo Credit: GE

Moby Dick 2.0

Sure as the sun rises in the east, Larry Ellison tweaked SAP in his OOW keynote on Sunday. And sure as you are born, SAP fans are up in arms.

Honestly, what should bother SAP fans more is he waited so long (see 42:00 in video below) to talk about HANA. He picked on Salesforce.com and Amazon and Workday way more and way earlier. What message is that when both SAP and Oracle are emphasizing clouds?

What should bother SAP is it does not (yet) have slides which can match the 49 marketing,  113 service, 47 industry specific and many other cloud apps Larry talked about. That its own data centers have a small fraction of the 400 petabytes Oracle claims to host in its data centers.  SAP is the world’s largest enterprise apps vendor – but that does not seem to bother it. But take a shot at HANA, and SAP Nation goes crazy. Shows how far SAP has pivoted even as its customers faithfully send it billions a year in maintenance dollars to invest in applications.

In another thread, John Appleby at Bluefin, a SAP partner tweeted about my forthcoming book on the SAP economy “Do you think that you can offer an objective perspective when your sponsors are SAP's competitors? Seems ethically tricky.”

He said that without access to a preview copy. He has not read the book which has perspectives from over a hundred SAP customer executives, analysts, alums and even current executives. It has data from 25 years of archives. It is balanced – explains the rocket ship that was SAP in the 1990s, and the many failures in its economy. It does root cause analysis and presents a wide range of SAP customer coping strategies.

John speculates about what SAP’s competitors may have told me. For the record, I spoke to several of SAP’s competitors for the book. Most were generous to SAP, when they could have easily thrashed it. Many I ended up  quoting from press sources and events – and there where they emphasize their differentiation.  They did not jump at the opportunity to give me any specific dirt about SAP. Frankly, it gave me  a warm and fuzzy feeling about the industry that these executives chose to not go negative.

I wish SAP would quit being obsessed with what its competitors say.  It’s success and its problems have little to do its competitors.    In the book, I have  a “small” section on this obsession.

You get the sense Oracle has worked its way under SAP’s skin. It’s Melville’s Captain Ahab and Moby Dick all over again. While the whale was fearsome, many readers would say Ahab was actually the villain with his relentless obsession and reckless use of his ship and crew in chasing the whale.

But that is a side bar. Most of the book is about conversations with SAP customers. After reading the book, I expect SAP fans like John will continue to question my “ethics”.

My hope is they listen to what SAP’s customers told me, not worry about what its competitors may be saying or not.

Oracle’s “Modern” Apps

Steve Miranda led an excellent session this morning on Oracle’s growing hortizontal apps empire. Set on a stage with a sweeping view of downtown San Francisco and the Bay it reflected the expansive portfolio it has built and acquired. The session was crisp and covered wide ground in three parts – a) an update on current on-premise products b) messaging around the new cloud apps and c) a panel with four customer executives

In a) Steve comforted EBS, PeopleSoft, Siebel and JD Edwards customers there was no intention to hustle them to the cloud. It was reassuring with slides showing thousands of new features and new in-memory and mobile apps and blazingly fast performance on the in-Memory database for each of the customer bases. As I wrote yesterday, these customers are in a pole position, and Steve’s slides likely reassured them even more.

In b) he shared growing cloud customer and product volumes (see below) and three value points of its cloud apps – “Personalized” (“works as well as my teen’s apps”), “Connected” (Oracle with so many organic and acquired products better be thinking about thorny integration issues) and “Secure” ( 19 Tier 4 class data centers around globe, other benefits of its growing IaaS and private cloud footprint)

In c) he  had executives on stage from BG Group, Marriott, atradius and GE. They represented complex and global challenges – GE is rationalizing over 100 ERP instances from Oracle and others, Marriott talked about social interaction with over 47 million loyalty members, atradius manages collections of over a billion in worldwide debt for its 14,500 global customers, BG Group has HR shared services across 20 countries.  And in different ways they discussed speed – GE put in Fusion financials in Mexico in 48 days, Marriott has cut in half social data ingestion time it used to take its agencies with significantly better data quality and atradius talked about a rapid three month SFA project.

So, Steve could have added “Sophistication” and “Speed” to his three value points in b)

Definitely one of my favorite sessions at OOW!

Bonus - I got to meet another executive at Marriott which has been my home for 4 years of lifetime stays - seriously.