deal architect

Engineers rule

As we drive through one of the longest tunnels in the world - Arlberg in Austria - I marvel that I have 4 bars on my phone on the One (now Orange) network in the middle of the 9 mile tunnel.  I marvel that the GPS in the Hertz rental car which had greedily been sucking up signals from 7 satellites just before entering the tunnel was smart enough to know it would lose that signal for the length of the tunnel and as soon as we left the tunnel was ready to grab the signal in a matter of seconds. I marvel that my Nokia 500 also has a handy FM transmitter so I can beam my MP3  to an unused frequency on the car radio and there is no static in the middle of the tunnel. 

Of course, 2 days ago I was ready to throw the Nokia away. I downloaded European maps to the SD card before I left the US, and when I used its Navigation here it tells us where we are, but will not provide driving directions because of some licensing issues. There was no mention of that when I did the download. Fat good it does us to find that out after we land here. We had to upgrade cars to get the GPS from Hertz. And it occurred to me some bureaucrat at Nokia ruined the experience of what his engineers had put together. Bureaucrats at Orange and AT&T ruin the engineering feat of a clear subterranean signal by charging ridiculous roaming rates for that obscure location as any in a well-connected European city.

And I cannot begin to imagine how many bureaucrats tried to screw up the engineering feat that is the Arlberg Tunnel.

Let engineers, broadly defined as product creators and problem solvers, run the world. They could not do any worse than what we have today.  

More New Renaissance

on the innovation blog

The UPC turns 35

Crowdsourcing at the Guardian

Extreme Endurance Flying

The "Gateway Recession"

Weekend Stuff: Neuschwanstein 20 years later

Margaret and I first visited exactly 20 years ago Ludwig II's homage to Richard Wagner. We were back yesterday with our teenagers.

Amazing the changes. No, not in the castle which is frozen in time. In the world.

• It was almost 85 degrees at the foot of the Alps. in 1989 we would have called it a warm day. Today the first thought is climate change, and we had to go through mental gymnastics to do the conversion to Fahrenheit. It did cool down nicely after evening showers.
• The kids and I gave Margaret a hard time for making us ride a horse carriage up the steep hill. In 1989 not sure we worried about ethical anything when it came to animals. Redemption - we did walk down riding gravity. No ethical commentary on way down.
• In 1989 we had driven down the Romantische Strasse which meanders through a bunch of medieval towns and ends at Fussen . This time we flew into Munich and missed most of that but Margaret wanted to retrace some of those roads. Surprisingly, how few Germans today have even heard of it. Of course, our GPS just laughed when we could not provide it a precise town or address.
• Chinese tourists abound - even castle tour books in Chinese. A whole busload returned to our hotel. In 1989, the year of Tiananmen, few Chinese were allowed to or could afford to vacation abroad
• Germany for most items appears far cheaper than Ireland where the family has been the last couple of weeks. Strikingly different than in 1989. And easier to tell since the euro takes away the currency mental gymnastics.

One thing which has not changed. Our teenagers were as impressed as we were 20 years. Disney was so right in picking this palace as inspiration for his castle - it appeals to kids of all ages. 

Cloud: Seven Clear Business Models

“It seemed silly for a software company to own a data center but after six months on the job I realized this was really a fundamental shift in the economics of software”

What do you say about a guy who got this revelation in 1999? Way ahead of his time.

So Timothy Chou has seen most everything when it comes to cloud computing over the last decade and packs it into his new book.

He is a pioneer when it comes to a number of other things in life.  He can talk about catchment systems and solar heating as he wrote in the hobby series on New Florence. And he can regale you with stories about how China has changed over the last few decades.

Forward looking and entertaining – like the book.

More New Florence

On the innovation blog

“Wicked Problems of a New Global World”

Technology at Wimbledon

Sheraton: Putting Social Back in Networking

PC less web printing

3-D “Augmented Web” Magazine cover

Heart of the Matter

Don Henley starts his hit on YouTube with the comment "it took 42 years to write, 4 minutes to sing"

As Oracle kicks off its "100 days of innovation", I hope they like Don have spent the last few years writing the code, not just starting to.

Because it sure seems like they have been more intent on dazzling Wall Street with squeezing margins from acquired products than delivering new product and innovation to customers.

As Bob Evans says in InformationWeek

"as sweet as those numbers are to Oracle -- and to the financial analysts and investors who are rewarding Oracle's terrific bottom-line performance in this brutal economy -- they might or might not be as sweet to the folks paying those annual fees."

I would go further - it's time for Oracle to start singing to its customers

"...forgiveness, forgiveness ...even if you don't love me any more"

Why so difficult to declare victory?

The one advantage you have with a category with Enterprise in the moniker is you get a wide berth. You can claim successes in customer centric areas, product development or human resources areas or generally around team collaboration.

So, it was disappointing to see Oliver Marks say about the Enterprise 2.0 conference last week “The thirst for use cases by attendees at the conference was apparent. However as we found while talking to various end user teams inside large companies for the Open Enterprise 2009 award, the reality is that if a collaboration environment has become a core enterprise component it is therefore also part of that business’s competitive advantage arsenal.”

I was hoping I would be proved wrong when I said the focus of Enterprise 2.0 was more of “feel good” not “good feel”

I liked one thing in Oliver’s post. Unless the agenda for the conference he used the word “social” only once and did not use “media” at all. That’s a small step towards focus on the Enterprise – and hopefully tangible success stories.

Inhibitors to outsourcing

Phil Fersht shared with me results of a survey AMR did with Global Services Media. In the section where they asked respondents about inhibitors to outsourcing, the answers were somewhat surprising.

“While companies are tackling severe economic conditions, priorities clearly get focused on critical management decisions surrounding business focus, ensuring company stability through the volatility and uncertainty. The upheaval of moving complex process over to third-party providers and offshore locations is a challenge we have documented many times at AMR. “

The other problem I see is long transition periods outsourcers quote. 6-9 months are not unusual. Not only does that upfront investment in duplicate labor kill ROI, it also gives the provider a long grace period where SLAs do not kick in. After thousands of such transitions outsourcers have done, you think we would move to more normal of a 2-3 month transition.

Weekend Stuff: The Griswolds come to the Alps

As the kids get older, it's been tough to agree on vacation destinations. So I suggest a drive through the Alps and they look at me funny. Then I say Bavaria, Austria and Switzerland and my daughter says 3 new stamps on passport – cool. I have to correct her and say she already has been to Germany, and Austria is in in the EU. Ok, so how about a night in Czech. And Slovakia to get more new stamps. And I have to remind her  – I am on a US week vacation quota. She responds - and what's wrong with if it's Tuesday, this must be ....

My son’s turn, and I have to tell him Fussen is on the agenda. You know where the Disney castle is. And Salzburg – the city they built for The Sound of Music. And Vienna - where the Lipizzaners of Myakka City near us spend their summers. Cool.

So we are off later this week. Give us a wide berth as we look for Walley World on the autobahn :)

Posting will be light on the blog over the next week or so.

More innovation

On New Florence

POS Peripherals

“The Geek Atlas”

High-tech products as wedding gifts

‘Of pixels and paintbrushes”

Why boxed wine may actually be better

Weekend Stuff: The other “empty calories”

Readers of my blog know I talk quite a bit about IT “empty calories”.  You may also remember seeing my friend and former Gartner colleague Erik Keller on these pages. In his contribution in the hobby series, he talked about his love of gardening.

He has started to blog about it at GroHappy – and one of his first posts is about empty calories from cookies.

Oh and the joy of carrots, beans and slugs!

Weekend Stuff: Of Presidents and Technology

Judith Rothrock of JRocket invited me to her annual “Grape Escape” where she brings some of her clients and industry analysts and media together.

Neat setting – the Old State House in Boston, famous for the “massacre” in 1770. President John Adams was around to tell his perspectives on his peer founding fathers, slavery, his uncomfortable time as the first US ambassador to England.

Then drawing from a more contemporary Presidential event, she served the menu from the Obama inauguration (click to enlarge). For budding chefs out there chow.com has recipes.

Nice to have modern technology discussions in the midst of the technology artifacts from that era. I enjoyed sitting at dinner next to Jeremy Roche of Coda, whose Cloud Pioneer column I coincidentally ran this morning.

Nicely done, Judith.

Photo Credit for menu – Jack Gold

The Cloud Pioneers: Jeremy Roche

When the Open Cloud Manifesto was unveiled recently by IBM et al I wrote "The (Cloud) Bastards say, Welcome"

And I invited several cloud pioneers who have been at it - delivering cloud based products and services or helping evaluate and nurture them for several years - to discuss the manifesto and what they have learned in Cloud Computing over the last few years.

This time it is Jeremy Roche, CEO of Coda who writes about Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) - and the pioneering decision his team took to leverage salesforce.com's platform. Pioneering, as in in the clouds, and more importantly breaking the taboo in the software industry about "outsourcing" such a critical element of your product.

"I always read with interest the posturing of the vendors who sell big ERP and big maintenance as they debate whether they will, or won't, play in enterprise cloud computing. Or how they continue to attempt to redefine cloud computing to suit their business model, rather than seeking to deliver the products and services the market is increasingly demanding. They can try to alter the debate as much as they like, but they should see what many pioneers in the industry have seen for some time: enterprise cloud computing is here, customers of all sizes are buying into it and those customers are seeing real business benefits from it. From within this base of pioneers the next industry gorillas will emerge and companies that stick rigidly to their historic business models will increasingly become irrelevant. Perhaps that is why we have seen the recent about-turn by Oracle.

With my management team at CODA we tracked the emergence of cloud computing for some time. To me it represented huge opportunities for traditional software vendors, but also huge risks if we ignored it and the market moved against us. We decided in 2007 that the time was right for us to invest, but that we needed to have a strategy that addressed 5 key issues to give us the best chance to succeed:

• We didn't want to enter as a me-too player, we wanted to pioneer and to do something that evolved the cloud computing model.
• Simply recreating our enterprise applications on a SaaS platform was not the answer and we should take the opportunity to be creative, take our DNA and build an application that was cloud focused and built from the outset to integrate with other cloud applications as well as traditional applications.
• We are applications specialists, so really didn't want to have to deal with all the heavy lifting required in building the necessary technology platform to deploy cloud applications.
• Headquartered out of the UK, CODA needed to significantly expand its presence and awareness in the US to take advantage of the emerging cloud opportunity.
• Our history of building great financial apps for 30 years was a benefit, but could also be an inhibitor if we didn't allow our cloud business to have its own space.

And our vision was simple, but challenging: to do for finance and accounting what salesforce has done for CRM.

The first set of challenges was solved with one solution. Following extensive due diligence, we elected to build CODA 2go finance cloud solution on the Force.com platform from salesforce.com. It changed the game and make us a pioneer in utilizing someone else's platform - what is being referred to as PaaS - it also meant that we eliminated risk and cost from the project. Force.com gave us access to the platform and tools that salesforce use to service their 59,000+ customers and an infrastructure that have cost us millions of dollars to recreate. Why should I as an applications developer have to worry about the infrastructure, let alone all the other things we need like SAS 70 and ISO 27001 security certifications?

Perhaps even more importantly being a pioneer on Force.com gave us great exposure to salesforce's experience gained from building the leading company in enterprise cloud computing. Salesforce offered guidance on everything from development methodologies through to customer engagement models and that helped us to evolve at a lightening pace.

To address the cultural challenges and to allow a new business model to emerge alongside our traditional business, we established a start-up within CODA. We assigned key staff into the new unit and set out with the mentality to behave like a start-up tech company. Leading that initiative has been invigorating for me and the speed with which we have got to market is staggering thanks to the excellence of the CODA 2go team and the support salesforce and the Force.com Platform.

So just 18 months from announcement, we delivered a full cloud accounting solution, built on the world's most successful enterprise cloud computing platform. Now we are building and expanding our go to market and customer engagement teams as well as preparing for future product expansion.

From the experiences over the last two years, I believe it is not just about the delivery method of business applications. Anyone who views it as such is missing the point. Whilst the delivery method is important what makes cloud computing so attractive in my view is:

• A whole new approach to building agile and connected applications. Using online services and other vendors' applications as part of a solution rather than trying to build it all by ourselves.
• A new way to connect with and build relationships with customers. Just two weeks after release of our Spring '09 version we have live customers in 6 countries on 3 continents.
• A way to bring the benefits of enterprise class applications in a cost effective manner to midsize and smaller organizations. Cloud computing democratizes the applications market more than any previous technology change.

And finally, just as with all pioneers, there is the community spirit. Apart from partnering with Marc Benioff's team at salesforce, we are also working closely with other cloud pioneers, like Chris Barbin's team at Appirio and Adam Caplan's at Model Metrics, who are pioneering new paths in cloud based systems integration. Working together to broaden the applications footprint and connectivity and partnering to ensure our customers succeed changes the game even further.

The big ERP vendors can call it irrelevant all they want, but we are building the future. Only this week,  Paul White, UK lead for Microsoft's Dynamics business referred to our parent company as "having mature but aging products and sees their large installed base as ripe for plundering". For a company with the resources of Microsoft, he should have better competitive information than that. Maybe it's better for us that he doesn't even see us coming, as we introduce his customers to innovative and cost effective applications and a relationship focused on the long term success of their businesses.

Like the other guests here, I have no real issues with the goals laid out in the Open Cloud Manifesto. But that is because I don't think the topic really needs highlighting. Since we are building on the Force.com platform we inherit all the investment that salesforce makes in interoperability with Google, Amazon, Facebook and others, but what is more we are working closely with other cloud "bastards" and building the cloud community. One of the reasons I believe we will succeed is because we designed interoperability in from the outset. We did that because we believed that it is the right way to build a world-class application and it is what our customers are asking for. I cannot think of a successful cloud application that is not designed for seamless interoperability so that means that the market is determining what it wants and making purchasing decisions based on it and successful vendors will react to it.

I am honored to be referred to as a cloud "bastard" and I'm sure there will be many more of us over the next few years."

More enterprise arrogance

Earlier in month, Vineet Nayar of HCL raised a firestorm by saying “most American college grads are "unemployable" It was viewed as an uppity comment by an Indian outsourcer or one to justify bringing in lower-cost Indians on H1-B visas. He explained it as “they're far less inclined than students from developing countries like India, China, Brazil, South Africa, and Ireland to spend their time learning the "boring" details of tech process, methodology, and tools--ITIL, Six Sigma, and the like.”

Contrast those comments to recent ones by Paul Graham of Y-Combinator in Inc magazine that I recently posted on New Florence. He also has a methodology and value system which has allowed the fund to invest in 145 start-ups – with – surprise – young Americans. Hungry ones. Who would likely quit HCL or Accenture in a week if they even bothered to apply there.

I  don’t see Vineet’s comment as racist – but as more arrogance in the enterprise world (as I recently wrote contrasting enterprise software to the iPhone apps ecosystem) where we just continue to pride old methods and ways of working.

Julia King of Computerworld recently quoted me “"Consumerization of technology should be a broad manifesto for change in corporate IT and enterprise vendors. Let's face it -- we are slower, uglier, exorbitantly expensive, obsessed with security and compliance."

I should have added more arrogant.

Let the market speak

I knew I would rile folks by contrasting poor delivery in the enterprise software market to the explosive growth of 50,000 apps in the iPhone ecosystem. Sure enough in the comments several people talk derisively of those apps and how much more complex enterprise apps are. Of course, many of the iPhone apps are juvenile.

But even in enterprise software 20% of features deliver 80% of value. So do we mock underutilized features?

In the iPhone ecosystem, the market will drive worthless apps into oblivion. In enterprise software, poor customers continue to pay for worthless features because they are part of the “standard release”, and then pay for upgrade after upgrade of a mountain of those features.

It could change with SaaS. Those vendors get real-time visibility on which features are most utilized by their customer base and where to continue to make investments.

But even there be it would be nice to have customers vote for features with their dollars, as they will in the iPhone App Store.

The dog days of SOA-mmer

Expect to hear lots about SOA and middleware next few weeks

• Oracle is launching its Fusion Middleware 11g July 1
• On its Flex call this week, I heard Infor invoke SOA several times
• Software AG announced webMethods 8.0 today – more SOA enablement

So, puzzled with this renewed focus on SOA I thought I would ask folks who know about hot days – Mad dogs and Englishmen.

I turned to the Englishman, Dennis Howlett who recently had dinner with folks from Tibco and probably heard SOA a few times. Dennis’ speculation “the promise of SOA was always about re-use and lower cost...I'm guessing that since that's top of mind these days?”

I turned to my beagle, Peanuts. He longingly looked up to the clouds, panting in the heat.

I suspect many customers also are - at SaaS and amazon type of clouds for truly lowered costs

More New Renaissance

on the innovation blog

Re-inventing the home/small office phone

In Korea, all of life is mobile

“Super Angels”

We are celebrating the recession by expanding

Your next battery – ambient electromagnetic radiation

Two ways to deliver a billion lines of code

I know someone who I believe is destined to write a coffee table book on Big Software. He idolizes big, game changing software over the decades like DB2, NT, SAP R/3 as others do with artistic masterpieces. Like a proud brew master he talks of software as "craft". When we talk, we usually argue. He thinks I am too hard of the "craft" of making software. Nothing good comes quick, cheap. My software quality points are trivial etc etc.

It’s time for me to call him for our periodic argument. Dennis Howlett outlines the meandering ways of BusinessByDesign at SAP. I am sure there are other catalogs about what went wrong with MS Vista and is going wrong with Oracle Fusion. In each case 5+ years or so of effort and billions in R&D.

Contrast this to the Apple App Store – 50,000 applications in just over a year. Which in turn is putting pressure on Nokia, RIM and others to develop similar apps ecosystems. 

Is the difference enterprise complexity? Is it the fact that Apple has mostly done it with an ecosystem of young, hungry entrepreneurs? That most of these entrepreneurs get micro-financing - most in the low 5 digit number funding?  Or that in contrast most enterprise software companies hang around other laggard software companies and outsourcers and hosting companies?

Whatever it is, there is definitely some game-changing stuff going on in the industry .

I cannot wait to call Mr. Big Software for our periodic argument :)

“IT Lite”

Julia King writes a timely piece in Computerworld where she is Executive Editor.

“What's in is "IT lite," which includes Web 2.0 technologies and services that are cheaper and easier to implement, mix and match. It also includes software from no-name, up-and-coming vendors; open-source tools and applications; and an ever-widening variety of tools for mapping, chat and more that are available for free on the Internet.”

BTW Julia started at Computerworld 15 years ago around the time I joined Gartner and it is always a pleasure to catch up with her as we did for this article. She is one of the few media folks who has consistently followed enterprise technologies. 

Sesame Street goes to the airport

I am torn between crediting this post to Sesame Street or giving United and RyanAir credit for ever creative fees and charges:

…There's a hole in the bottom of your pocket
There's a hole in the bottom of your pocket
There's a hole, there's a hole
There's a hole in the bottom of your pocket

There's a airline ticket in the hole in the bottom of your pocket
There's a airline ticket in the hole in the bottom of your pocket
There's a airline ticket, there's a airline ticket
There's a airline ticket in the hole in the bottom of your pocket…

There's a baggage fee on the airline ticket in the hole in the bottom of your pocket…

There's a check-in counter fee on the baggage fee on the airline ticket in the hole in the bottom of your pocket…

There's a home on-line check-in fee on the check-in counter fee on the baggage fee on the airline ticket in the hole in the bottom of your pocket…

There's a tax on the home on-line check-in fee on the check-in counter fee on the baggage fee on the airline ticket in the hole in the bottom of your pocket…

There's a surcharge on the tax on the home on-line check-in fee on the check-in counter fee on the baggage fee on the airline ticket in the hole in the bottom of your pocket….

Kids, sing this every time you check in with United and RyanAir and every other airline which nickel and dimes you.

Even better, avoid flying them. Do your meetings via telepresence and watch those Big Bird re-runs at home.

Flex should also include down, not just up

I listened to Jim Schaper introduce the concept of Infor Flex today. Includes plans to upgrade to their SOA solutions, or exchange licenses towards another Infor solution. That is goodness, though the listed discounts and transaction fees will need customer analysis and haggling.

But there is no downgrade path. If customers only want a low-touch plan – some bug fixes, minimal number of support calls, regulatory updates – you have to keep paying at full rates. As I have written before, customer needs and vendor delivery speeds (and their support costs) vary considerably making it very hard to justify a single maintenance rate across the product lifecycle – so my suggestion about letting maintenance rates float

To a question I asked, Jim responded “Unlike what we are reading about our competitors, we are not seeing as much defection in our customer base to SaaS or third party maintenance. Besides we will offer SaaS in several components of our offering”.

In other words, our customers are peachy and not really asking about flex down. Interestingly enough, we hear the same thing from from Lawson, Oracle and SAP with a similar qualifier - “We read their customers (those of our competitors) are asking for it, but not ours”.  A whole lot of reading going on.

With that definition of flex, remind me to not buy any bungee cord from any of them :)

Update: Frank Scavo and Ray Wang are more positive about Infor's announcement. Dennis Howlett less so.

The Real Deal: Nagaraja Srivatsan on Rethinking Product Development in Life Sciences

This continues a series of guest columns from practitioners and bloggers I respect. The category - The Real Deal - describes them well.

This time it is Nagaraja Srivatsan who is Vice President & Practice Leader, Life Sciences at Cognizant, a leading outsourcer – and a sponsor of this blog. He writes about the significant opportunities to rethink product development in Life Sciences

“Among the major strategic challenges facing global life sciences companies today is how to reduce the cost and time-to-market associated with bringing new products to market. The process averages nearly $900 million and 10 years of research and development for every major product.

As many industries before them, life sciences companies are being forced to answer a few fundamental questions: Which business processes are core to operational success, and perhaps more importantly, which are not. If a task is non-core, then it is likely a candidate to outsource to a trusted specialist which by harnessing a lower cost, highly skilled global talent pool can deliver superior outcomes. Taking this approach enables life sciences companies to then reallocate resources to core activities.

Historically, life sciences companies were comfortable outsourcing tasks in the clinical trial process to Contract Research Organizations (CROs). As life sciences companies started to create process standards, they looked at specific functions or business processes in the execution of clinical trials to outsource. This was called the Function Solution Provider model.

Today, the global economic crisis is changing the competitive equation. Amid resource constraints, life sciences companies are facing heightened pressure to speed new molecular entities through the regulatory approval process. They need a mechanism to increase the velocity of outcomes that arise from the clinical trial process to accelerate the transformation of costly R&D into revenue- producing activities. They now realize the “not-invented here syndrome,” which had limited outsourcing to CROs, reinforced an expensive and inflexible cost structure. They now know that not everything previously deemed core to their business was so. As a result, many companies are reassessing and re-defining what is core. And finding several areas which can be moved out including Clinical Data Management, Clinical Analytics and Medical writing, Submissions Management Support, Product Complaint Centers, Safety Case Processing and Safety Reporting.

How can life sciences companies embrace a more flexible business model to handle these newly considered non-core activities? We suggest a framework called “The In (sourced)-Out (sourced), Here (high-cost locations like U.S. and Europe)-There (low- cost locations like India and China)”.  The graphic below shows an example across the 4 quadrants (click on graphic to enlarge)

Here’s how this model could work in clinical operations. Start by examining key business activities, taking an end-to-end perspective. For instance, with Clinical Data Management they need to evaluate activities starting with study planning, set-up, panel recruitment and study execution and through data clean-up, analysis, reporting, closure and reuse. Life Sciences companies then need to decompose these processes into sub-processes and assess the best location where the process should be executed – Here ( in close proximity to stake holders) or There (executed remotely) and also evaluate if this process is core and needs to be executed (inside the organization or outsourced). This must be done for each and every activity.

Core sub-processes stay “Here” and “In”; non-core are moved “There” and “Out” to trusted partners. This is true across the industry, whether product development occurs in high-cost locations in the U.S. and Europe or lower cost regions of the world like India. The challenge is maintaining consistency of process across the product development lifecycle so that product quality doesn’t become a victim of necessary cost containment initiatives. In life sciences, as you can imagine, you cannot tolerate quality short cuts.

So, what are the critical success factors for a successful global service partnership? It’s the usual things (to name a few): proper governance; effective process; resource management; risk mitigation; and of course, delivering value – outcomes that could not be achieved otherwise. Some key steps include:

o Meeting/Exceeding required service levels: Bringing the right domain, talent and the tools can ensure exceptional quality of service.

o Measuring success: By establishing key performance metrics and rigorously measuring and monitoring them, life sciences companies can quantitatively demonstrate engagement success.

o Meeting regulatory requirements: You need to have the right audit process as well as quality system. Domain experience ensures that you are compliant with all audit rigor required by global regulatory agencies.

Judiciously applying the In-Out, Here-There approach will enable life sciences companies to elevate their operational efficiency, reduce costs and deliver higher quality products that sustain competitiveness in any economic cycle.”

He can be emailed at NSrivatsan AT cognizant.com

“The secondary software market”

Add to third party maintenance, SaaS, open source – another disruption to the traditional enterprise software market – shelfware reduction in the form of sale of unused licenses as Ray Wang at Forrester points out.

As Ray points out “This post provides an alternative that must be vetted by proper legal professionals. “ Indeed, don’t expect software vendors to give up without a significant fight. Even if they don’t let you resell licenses, if you can get them to not charge maintenance on your shelfware that would be a huge victory for most organizations. Parking should not only be for cars.

The “citizen help desk”

Four random conversations this weekend make me think if  as individuals we are getting these calls, wonder how wide a range of queries are hitting our IT help desks

• Converse with Mike Krigsman about trying to tether a iPod Touch to a Blackberry. He wants the iPod to do some Bluetooth dances its designers never in their dreams would have thought off.
• I see a Tweet from Pat Phelan “just had an email asking "I would prefer to update twitterfone by text rather than voice, can you do that" WTF”
• I talk to Charlie Bess and he has set up remote diagnostics for his family spread around the country. Would not expect anything less from a HP father - hate to think what help desk issues he has to resolve, though.
• I help my daughter uncover why she could not use dial-up from her grandparent's place in Longford, Ireland. Try doing that when the line is the only one - alternatively used to talk to her and for her to dial out!

Then the sneaking suspicion hit me – may be our IT help desks are not doing much, and we are just relying on each other – the citizen help desk!

Weekend Stuff : Run for the 100s

It’s one of those Florida mornings where the heat and humidity have already started the race about which can get to 100 faster. The mosquitoes and no-see-ums use their own race metric – how many bites they can pack in a day.

Contrary to popular belief, the flying menaces almost never win. They are smart enough to wait for the evening to do their thing :)

More New Florence

On the innovation blog

Reinventing the Coke Machine

Astronomical Clock: 11th century model

Smart Football Helmet

Virtual menus and other restaurant technologies

The data center as computer

Weekend Stuff: Citizen Diplomacy

It has been fascinating to see so many on Twitter change their location to Teheran to try and confuse the mullahs and to tint their avatars green in solidarity with those on the frontlines in Iran. In sharp contrast to the relative quiet from the White House – not helped by our Secretary of State in pain from a fall.

When it is all said and done, it will make a fascinating case study. But as this chat transcript from the Washington Post shows all this traffic may be having an unintended consequence and actually helping the Iranian government. Web sites in Iran are crawling under the traffic – and DoS attacks, and tampering, I am sure by the government.

Also, Iran has had a large and influential Diaspora since 1979. Lots of affluent Iranians out of the country stay in regular touch with friends and relatives in Iran. Many warily even go back to visit every few years. So, the Iranian government is not new to external citizen influence.   What it may not have counted on is non-Iranian Twitter participation. Which we know how most despots turn into propaganda about “external threats”

I don’t think it is a coincidence this week that the Chinese are demanding more controls from Western technology vendors about web access. Every tyrant around the world is being retrained in security briefings about cyber-surveillance, web traffic patterns and disruption technologies.

So as us citizen diplomats celebrate the “Twitter Revolution”, let’s brace for counter-measures around the world, not just Iran.

Business Process Angioplasty: Banking technology

May be I was too generous too soon writing about them on the New Florence innovation blog, but the last 5 out of 6 times the Bank of America ATMs have either not recognized the checks being deposited and just spit them back or they have not recognized the amount of the check and I have had to punch in the amount. And this is across 4 ATM machines in 3 branches – so not just an isolated machine. BTW – all the machines appear less than a year old.  When I went in to the teller inside to deposit the checks that the machine would not take, I zipped my ATM card in the pin pad opposite her, so she should have had all the account information on her screen – and she still had me fill out a manual deposit slip. One of BofA bragging points about the new ATMs – when they work – is they make deposit slips redundant.

Talking about adding labor to a process which should be way automated, my Chase credit card security group loves to call me every few weeks. After years and thousands of transactions most of which are with repeat vendors, their pattern recognition algorithms are either not tuned (recently they asked me to verify  4 transactions, the total of which was under $ 20 – can we talk materiality?)or their security is trigger happy.  Of course, the usual comment is “Sir, it’s for your security” Yeah, then how come Amex which we do even more business with has called us may be once in the last 5 years to check on something – and I tend to use that on my international trips which should trigger more alerts.

PS – I should have mentioned most of the checks I have tried to deposit were written on other BofA branches. Maybe the ATMs are actually pretty smart and trying to tell me something about BofA. I should try a Chase check next :)

#ripoffroaming

Dennis Howlett has started a new tag on Twitter about the atrocious cost of international mobile voice and data roaming.

I have added extracts from some of my tweets below.

Please add your own examples in comments below or at  Twitter – and your creative workarounds to the problem. May be we can embarrass carriers (and folks like Apple which go along with locked SIM cards) and regulators all over the world to pay some attention:

• possible SkypeOut and Google Voice workarounds http://tinyurl.com/mm5da2
• why is EU capping intra-european roaming but letting US telcos continue with ripoff in its domain http://tinyurl.com/nmc6te
•  a 3 min Youtube video on ATT in Europe sets you back $ 40. Rogers for my canadian friends > $ 70!! http://tinyurl.com/mmgrc7
•  costs US companies almost $ 700 per intl trip http://tinyurl.com/mwu48a

“An iPhone Upgrade to Counter the Naysayers”

David Pogue at NYT does a great job summarizing all the new features on the new 3G S. Better camera, A2DP stereo, GPS navigation, hopefully tethering. And how can you not salivate at the 50,000 apps in the Store?

But he ends with:

“…the usual 10 rational objections to the iPhone have been whittled down to about three: no physical keyboard, no way to swap the battery yourself and no way to avoid using AT&T as your carrier.”

Ah, AT&T. Certainly been my objection – even though I have been an AT&T Wireless customer for over a decade. Particularly galling – the global roaming rates with a locked iPhone SIM card.

But the objection is softening. In response to a letter I sent AT&T a couple of weeks ago Melody Renfrow from HQ called and gave me a nice credit. More importantly, and surprisingly, she said AT&T is “learning” from customers like me. I gave her feedback on a bunch of areas they could review pricing (texting for example) and hopefully they will.

Irrespective, though free AT&T wi-fi with the iPhone helps. And hopefully a speedier 3G network to go with S in 3G S.

Just don’t expect me to stand in the rain in New York for it Friday morning.

But may be after a trip to Europe in July. If I did before I am afraid the roaming charges would bring the naysayer back in full force, no matter how persuasive David is :)

Update: Opportune that Dennis Howlett today interviewed Pat Phelan of MaxRoam on "rip-off roaming" charges

Update: Dennis has also started a Twitter tag #ripoffroaming and I wrote about it here

Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto

Secret, secret ..I got a secret…Styx

Now we know why New York Times has David Pogue write about gadgets and devices.  The man’s a machine:

• “My wife once clocked me at 120 words a minute, and that’s including making corrections.”
• “I have a lot of e-mail folders. I also have a lot of “message rules” that file incoming mail automatically into appropriate folders.”
• “I can be online in a car, in the X-ray line at the airport, on a plane stuck on the runway, and so on. My 3-pound laptop is my main machine, by the way, for the same reason—so that I can be productive during any little blob of downtime.”

Seriously impressive how efficient he is…read more here

The cloud data location debate

A growing criticism against Google and amazon in particular is they will not disclose the location of their servers where your data may be stored. Ergo, customers could run afoul of many country laws around data location.

I can see regulators in small towns who have never left their county continue to fuss over data location, but I am surprised folks in IT who travel widely, change SIM cards when they land overseas, may be even have investments in foreign stocks and offshore bank accounts still continue to defend the need for precise data location information.

I am with Lew Tucker of Sun when he says “"It really is who has access to these bits that is the really critical question, not the locale where they reside in"

If I was a regulator I would focus on 2 things

• Look to attract the massive new data centers that will support clouds – get IBM and HP and Google and amazon to bring them to my backyard
• I would look at the mess we have around data privacy issues. As Forbes says “”More than 300 privacy-related laws are on the books, in both Washington, D.C. and state capitals. Privacy-related consulting services provided by law and accounting firms are a $500-million-a-year business and have been growing at double digits. Expenses inside companies for privacy compliance easily run into the billions” Trust me, we have had data location laws on the books for a while and that has not helped data privacy a whole lot…

Readers?

"Don’t sign long-term outsourcing deals"

Glad Gartner is giving advice we have been providing our clients for a while now.  That with clouds and SaaS reducing the time to provision and making bite-size the unit of procurement,  the practice of locked in 5+ year contracts and 9 month procurement cycles will go the way of the dodo.

Till they do, though we recommend clients fight for benchmarking clauses, and to benchmark vendors not just against traditional competitors - but against disruptive market entrants from cloud, SaaS and newer offshore markets. We also add – negotiate early termination clauses aggressively. Make sure they amortize down with the contract term.

Ironically, we have to tell clients not to rely too much on Gartner for IT (or Hackett for BPO) or other “industry leading” benchmarks. We find they lag disruptive trends in markets and are actually defensive of status quo.

Can you make it any cloudier?

Tom Wailgum at CIO interviews Vishal Sikka, CTO at SAP.

And he talks about not 1, not 2, but 4 SAP “clouds”.

His Cloud 1 appears to be the mainstream SAP product today. Cloud 2 is what John Wookey described last week in Amsterdam and I called SAP’s “moat” strategy. Cloud 3 is BusinessByDesign which is the “bear” I think we heard about at Sapphire.  Cloud 4 has more to do with infrastructure - compute and storage capacity.

Why even talk about 1 which would fail so many “It’s not a cloud if…” filters?  Or 4 which is around SAP data and transactions but the infrastructure services are being provided by parties like HP and amazon?

Now Vishal is one heck of a smart guy – has a Ph.D from Stanford. But seriously how many SAP sales folks will be able to present all this cleanly?

And remarkably, in a long interview there is little mention of any significantly improved economics, or speed of provisioning, or turning fixed IT costs to variable – I mean those are the exciting elements of cloud computing. 

Instead it’s all about how complex SAP customers are and need mission-critical support or people can go to jail etc. Sure that will get prospects excited.

Just below the interview with Vishal is a link to another article “The Case against Cloud Computing”.

Touche.

I must have been one of those “drunken frat guys”

Michael Doane describes in his post throwing eggs on the wall. The post highlights some of the problems with Magic quadrants and waves and other highly summarized charts and research most industry analyst firms are famous for.

I am not sure he gives analysts enough credit for having a constant pulse on the finger of specific sectors they cover. So I can confirm that in the 5 years I was at Gartner I did 1,000+ calls with clients each year. They would call and ask about SAP versus Oracle or Bearingpoint versus Deloitte or specialist budgeting or recruiting tools they were looking. Or they would lament about implementation overruns and Y2K budgets. That input usually got reflected in our Magic Quadrants, not just from the vendor provided references.

Now, of course there was a wide divergence in analysts. Some analysts would go out of their way to avoid talking to clients. They enjoyed presenting and traveling and would rather just take raw research other analysts were collecting.

The other big difference was even though Gartner is famous for having recognized the Hype Cycle, the Magic Quadrants did not overtly recognize where a particular market segment was in the cycle. So in a young market, a quarterly quadrant may have been justified, in a mature one may be one each year.

But apart from the inconsistency in analysts and coverage, the big aha I discovered in my second year at Gartner was buyers did not really read our stuff. They were too busy doing their jobs (or in all day meetings and digging out of thousands of emails – the curse of most corporations).

Vendors on the other hand watched your research like a hawk. I am convinced the science of microscopy owes its existence to vendors who compared how much their dot moved from one Magic quadrant to the next. And even more so, how much their competitors moved.

And Michael is right – they had discovered the art of “outrage”. And the one of threatening their friendly analyst salesperson with cancellations if the research was not less outrageous.

Why the traditional software company is toast

Read this Google paper Data Center as Computer to understand why the average software company which cannot talk about PUEs and CRACs is going to be hopelessly outflanked by the amazon’s and salesforce’s.

Read this note by Dennis Howlett on why “not our problem” will be less and less acceptable as an excuse for a software vendor. Operations Management will become as important a competency as architecture, interface design and testing.

Either software vendors will pick up those competencies really quick, or they will leverage the infrastructure and operations experience of one of the pioneers – as Coda is doing with salesforce.

Traditional outsourcers like IBM and CSC could provide both data center and ops assistance to software vendors, but frankly, they have their own catching up to do to be able to deliver the data center efficiencies Google, amazon, Yahoo and Microsoft are demonstrating. And when it comes to ops, their traditional services mindset of throwing labor at problems would likely mess up any software vendor clients even more.

Sticking it to the man

Blame it on Lily Tomlin's character Ernestine, but it is a tradition in most countries: we love to hate our phone companies. Heck Sprint even ran some commercials couple of years about “Sticking it to the man”

Here are other creative ways people are trying to get to the man (or Lily).

• Om Malik: Ronald Lewis, author of a soon-to-be-released book called “Stick it to the man,” has figured out a way to beat the subsidy.
• While the world was slamming AT&T over their miscalculated move, I sold my 16GB iPhone 3G and reserved my 32GB iPhone 3G S for $299. View the slideshow that confirms my pricing. Know what’s funny? I’ve only fulfilled 11 months of my AT&T contract.
• I read about a comment about a Verizon 3G plan for $ 15 for a single day – not very nice of them. The reader said “well at least it has no 5gb limit like their monthly plans. I would show them and upload my entire 1 TB database to a remote storage site”
• But the most outrageous way of sticking it comes from a family which uses their 2 cell phones as baby monitors on nights and weekends when they have unlimited coverage….

One ringydingy, two ringydingy... :)

“You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod.”

Steve Ballmer told Fortune couple of years ago the rule for his kids

Now Fortune reports the same message is going out to Microsoft employees. It will only reimburse data plans for Microsoft Windows Mobile-powered smartphones.

But don’t be too hard on Microsoft.

Happens in every industry:

• I have heard of a UPS employee being reprimanded for taking a Coke can into Pepsi headquarters.
• I have heard of Citicorp rejecting expense charged on Amex cards.
• I have heard of a contractor for Intel having his laptop checked to make sure it did not have an AMD chip.
• A vendor bidding for business at Delta was asked what flight he came in on night before. The Delta exec checked his reservation to make sure he had not flown on the competition.

“We won it fair and square”

No, not talking about Iran. Talking about this article in Managing Automation where ERP vendors basically take the position of “Not sure about SAP, but we sure deliver value from maintenance”.

The only way to say if you are delivering value is to let your customers vote. As I wrote here - “Let it float”. Your customers may go to third party options, or may ask you for a low-touch maintenance plan at 5% a year or may tell you you need KPIs or tell you they are happy cutting you annual checks at current prices.

Let your customers speak. And let unbiased observers certify the results of the poll.

Otherwise expect rioting in the streets, even as you repeat on official TV that you won and are delivering value.

BPO – Paving old cow paths

Phil Fersht shared with me AMR’s findings on Supply Management BPO.

The market has been growing nicely but a shockingly low = 4% set of customers are looking at cheaper applications as they move to BPO.

Phil laments “unless customers think beyond short-term labor arbitrage, and service providers introduce significant process and technology enhancements to the early adopters to help them optimize their delivery.  This "lift and shift" model could well result in customers losing more than they save.”

I agree – but I don’t just blame customers. The major BPO players – Western and Indian - are content to leverage existing software vendors like SAP, Oracle, Ariba etc. They have shown little imagination (or investment) in building their own process automation engines, or leveraging newer, and lot cheaper SaaS offerings – as I wrote here about the recent Wipro-Oracle BPO plans.

So “lift and shift” the labor, but often continue with “daft” processes and with software which at its high maintenance and upkeep is best described as “shaft”