deal architect

The best features in Office 2010…

…will be its price points – when Microsoft finally gets around to disclosing them.

Here’s the market reality.  Most Office components are decades old. Yet, majority of Office users do not use (or only occasionally use) advanced features such as pivot tables in their Excel spreadsheets or watermarks in their Word documents or animations in their Powerpoint presentations. Even a smaller percentage will use new features coming out in 2010.

So, CIOs are waking up to the fact that for 30, 60, 90 % of their user base Zoho or Google Apps are good enough. And telling Microsoft to match their price points or lose those user counts.

With Office 2010, Microsoft will acknowledge that to the world at large as it rolls out pricing for its own SaaS versions.  And it better be practicing its best Fred Astaire moves to justify why its on-premise versions continue to deserve a premium for those “casual” users.

“Technology is becoming too cheap to meter”

says Chris Anderson at Wired. And he encourages “waste is good” by invoking Moore’s Law and the impact it has had on cheap personal computing.

Two basic flaws in Chris’s arguments

a) Moore’s Law does not apply consistently across technology spend. Outsourcing and telecomms in particular, and most software do not have a “lower prices increase volume” mentality. You have beat it out of them. Microsoft list prices for its Dynamics or Office products have not changed much for years. You have negotiate higher discounts each year to get any semblance of Moore’s Law out of them. Most outsourcers have inflation clauses and fight like hell to pass along any productivity gains in their performance. HP continues to charge $ 5,000 a gallon for ink for decades old printer technology. AT&T’s international roaming charges are the ultimate salute to Moore’s Law – salute as in flipping the bird by refusing to budge even as around them Skype and alternate providers can deliver at a fraction at their rates.

b) He extrapolates what we can get as consumers to corporate world. You and I can get storage at $ 100 for a ITB. For that price, I know several corporations that pay that much for 1 GB over 3 years. Sure, it is Tier 1 storage - much different grade than what you and I get, but that’s also 1,000 times the price. You and I can get a single Geek Squad visit if we have a home computer problem. Most corporations sign up for multi-desktop, multi-year support contracts at massively higher price points.

I look forward to the day when enterprise technology is too cheap to meter. Because that will be the day I am out of a job and I can go fishing full-time…

How Apple is “wrecking” wireless

Larry Dignan summarizes Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett who says it’s laughable that the wireless industry is anticompetitive and the Feds don’t have to worry about wrecking the wireless industry—Apple already has.

My instinctive reaction was this is similar to periodic pronouncements from SAP and other ERP vendors that their new tools will kill “outsourcing” scope and fees.

The only thing they wreck is their customer’s TCO.

I posted this comment back:

“While I agree the government inquiry may come to nothing, Moffett's argument is ingenious. By agreeing to a locked SIM, allowing AT&T to continue to play games with 3rd party apps like Skype and continuing to not push AT&T on documented service coverage issues and a slew of other areas, Apple has not wrecked much in wireless.

The reality is after 9 years of 3G rollout the US still has an unbelievably low 3G coverage, and for all the talk of 4G the rollout will be similarly slow. That is where the government needs to be become more interventionist.  In our system of checks and balances we need the executive branch to offset the strong lobby telcos have in our legislative branch. But the agenda needs to be broader than just device lock-in. It should be how does the US have the speediest and widest coverage at the lowest price.

Sorry but Apple so far has not done much to change that goal and in fact may have hurt it by agreeing to some of AT&T's pricing and practices.”

Introducing a New Blog Sponsor - NetSuite

I am pleased to welcome NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N), a leading vendor of integrated, cloud computing business management software suites for small- to medium-sized enterprises and divisions of large companies, as a sponsor to the blog. 

Given the disruption theme of the blog, readers should have noticed increasing focus in this blog in the past couple of years on SaaS (Software as a Service) and Cloud Computing. NetSuite, headquartered in San Mateo, CA has exemplified SaaS for over a decade – indeed way before the term became popular.

NetSuite enables companies to manage core business operations in a single system, which includes accounting / enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and Ecommerce and to integrate legacy systems as needed.  NetSuite's patent-pending "real-time dashboard" technology provides an easy-to-use view into up-to-date, role-specific business information.

It's good to have them join the gallery of innovators and disruptors who sponsor this and the New Florence. New Renaissance blog.

European Travel Technology Observations

When I travel overseas I like to take notes on differences in technologies airlines, hotels, car rental companies offer compared to what we have in the US. Last week’s planes, hotels and automobiles in Ireland, Germany, Switzerland and Austria gave me several data points. Not just for personal curiosity, but from how it affects productivity and economics for many of our clients.

Wi-Fi Hotspots

Free hotspots – a fixture in many US hotels and airports – continue to be a rare breed in Europe. Only the Marriott in Vienna offered me that perk – and only because I was upgraded to an executive floor. Its cousin in Munich wanted Euro 20 a day, but its business center offered free wired access so there I went. Worse, there is no universal Wi-Fi provider which covers so many countries. I had hoped my Boingo subscription would allow me to log-in at 18c a minute from roaming locations. I could only at 4 locations. It happily signed on to the Eircom hotspot at Dublin Airport, but no where in Longford where there are other Eircom hotspots.

I bet T-Mobile would do better in German speaking Europe and signed up for a month. Again, could use only at 4 hotspots though Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It was really frustrating when Delta had to cancel its flight from Munich and I scampered to find alternative flights. I tried 4 different locations in Terminal 1 and could not find a strong enough T-Mobile signal. Another annoyance – when I did get a strong signal, still could not use Skype (probably breaching some T-Mobile fine print about VoIP)

Moral of the story: Get a mobile data card – if you can without needing to sign an annual contract

Mobile Roaming

Even in the middle of the 9 mile Alpberg tunnel in Austria and through most of my travels the mobile voice coverage was outstanding. Data wise, as in the US, 3G availability was mostly near major cities. And during the trip a European Union law cutting mobile-telephone roaming prices for text messages and Internet use by more than 60% took effect.

Did not help me on my AT&T plan which has outrageous roaming charges. What I did do was use my son’s phone for a few calls. My wife had bought him a prepaid phone in Ireland and even when roaming in Germany it was far cheaper than AT&T’s rates. I wish I had the phone on the way back (my family went back to Ireland while I headed home) as I tried to find alternatives after Delta canceled my flight and I could not get T-Mobile hotspot coverage. Not looking forward to that day’s bill from AT&T.

Airline check-in process

Check-in kiosks are common the world over, but I was intrigued how European airlines handle the ID scanning issue given the much wider range of passports/travel documents they encounter.

Lufthansa’s Quick Reader kiosks automate the whole check-in, passport entry, baggage tag process. Pretty impressive.

Aer Lingus had 75% of its check-in lanes automated with FastPass kiosks. Smart enough to selectively let members of a group check in (my wife was returning car so I only checked kids and me). And pay for the checked in bags ( (yes, the RyanAir disease is spreading), go to the baggage lane and scan your passport and it prints your baggage tag. Except they should scan your passport as the first step. It did not accept non-EU documents. So we went through the whole process and then had to go join the manned lines to check bags. Added 20 minutes to process.

Air France offers its own kiosks. But as their rules show, too many exceptions to what they can handle by kiosk. Which is why most passengers head for their manned booths.  And frankly they need to re-engineer CDG airport – they have full-time employees doing nothing but telling passengers where to check-in. I had to ask 3 of them where exactly to check in for New York. Imagine if I was going to New Guinea! 

In-flight technology

Since I first saw interactive maps on a Swissair flight in 1989, that has become my favorite distraction on a long flight. 20 years later most airlines still have the ragged old cartography. JetBlue started using Google Maps a few years ago, but hardly leverage the drill down they could provide what we are flying over.

So I was excited to see the in-flight magazine say “Air France, in conjunction with the European Space Agency, offers the most beautiful images of the earth viewed from space”. But not on the flight to New York. Same poor resolution maps – 1989 vintage.

I was even more excited to see in the magazine “ Exterior cameras give you a pilot’s view of takeoffs and landings, as well as the landscape below.” I was crushed when the flight attendant clarified only on 777-300s and we were on a 200.

The short flights on Aer Lingus and Lufthansa did not have any digital entertainment. Lufthansa on its long-hauls was a pioneer offering web access with Boeing’s Connexion, but after that shut down has been looking at alternatives.

Road tolls

I was not looking forward to a repeat of our Italian experience a few years ago – amazing number of toll booths to stop at. Would have been nice to have had transponder technology there. Germany, Austria and Switzerland keep it somewhat simple by making you buy “vignettes” (available at border gas stations) and placing them at specific points on the windscreen. We only had to stop at one toll – at the exit of the Arlberg tunnel – through our long drive. 

Of course, commercial traffic even in those countries is using toll tag technology so I suspect in a few years, even non-commercial vehicles will enjoy that “privilege”. That should work out cheaper in Switzerland. They make you pay for a year-long vignette even though you only tax their roads for a few days. And the vignette is perforated in a series of concentric circles to make sure you don’t peel and reuse on another car!

Ireland has launched eTrip for frequent toll road drivers, but as a casual visitor you better hope your car rental company tells you about the “post payment” option. Lots of confusion about that.

GPS/traffic technology

I was looking forward to using the European maps on my Nokia 500. Infuriatingly, it decided to tell me there was some licensing issue when I tried to use in Ireland, not when I was downloading the maps to the SD Card back in the US. So, it would happily track where we were, just not guide us to any destination. The GPS in the  Hertz car in Germany was excellent. It handled the demands of countless roundabouts, language expectations, road naming conventions across Europe extremely well. I would have bet a lot of money it would take a while to triangulate after we came out of the 9 mile Arlberg tunnel, but it was on the ball in a few seconds.

One area where Europe leads the US is road congestion information with TMC (Traffic Message Channel). Could not get that to work in the Hertz car though.

Car Return

Let’s face it – it is stressful renting cars overseas. Driving on wrong side of road, autobahn speeds, strange road signs, roundabouts. But all that pales compared to the mysteries of rental car insurance coverage. Your credit card companies will not cover you in Ireland and there is fine print in most other countries.

So in addition to the attendant who processes your return and receipt on a mobile printer, I was delighted to see a Hertz lady walk around the car and enter information on a PDA. I asked her if everything was ok and she shook her head. Only thing better would have been for her to show me what she had entered. But it is something we should also adopt in the US – given this USA Today article about post-rental surprises for so many rental customers.

So, if I were to summarize what I expected after years of harmonization across Europe and what I saw:

Positive surprises

• GPS Maps and directions well homogenized across countries – impressive given all the regional differences

• Voice roaming no-brainer – with all the local telcos that handoff to each other – and you can use one prepaid card across countries.( but I had to not use my AT&T phone much – that roaming charge is outrageous)

• Easy to find internet cafes even in small towns

Negative surprises

• Wi-fi coverage – surprised even consolidators like Boingo have not managed more coverage across Europe

• Interlining check-in across airlines even within Skyteam or other groups still evolving

• Toll tag technology inconsistent across countries

• In-flight tech in some ways worse than in US airlines – and I thought ours was behind times

Bloggers are “cynical”

Says Roger McNamee

I wish Roger were right.

Read Dennis Howlett’s take on fellow bloggers’ lack of cynicism about Google’s ChromeOS announcement

Go to Twitter and see prominent influencers regurgitate press releases and “research” from their vendor clients. The only cynicism they show is for the intelligence of their followers.

Now Roger is one savvy investor and has been a tech industry fixture for a long time. In fact he was on Gartner’s board for a while, so understands the influence game pretty well.

Catch him over a cold one or relaxing after one of his guitar sessions, and he will likely say “I don’t want influencers to be cynical about my portfolio companies. But yes, I do want them to be cynical about everything else”

Register.com: How not to handle a crisis

I seem to encounter the dreaded  DNS lookup errors at least once a year as my multiple personal, business and partner emails change ISPs, upgrade etc.  Few hours where your email seems lost in ether. But never a week as with Register.com's recent upgrade.  But one which could have been softened by better customer communications. Something the DDoS attack earlier in year should have prepared them for, but apparently not.

Last Sunday I was alerted by a "welcome to your new upgraded email" message. A test message to that email address bounced. And the on-line access showed a weird reply address for me. The bounce I thought was temporary - common DNS issue. The latter I wanted to make my account had been hijacked.

So I called Register, opened a ticket - and provided them a back-up email and cell phone number to communicate with me. I followed up again Monday morning because someone from Register had sent me a test message but the weird email address persisted. Also the bouncing continued. The call center had no clue who had worked on it or what he had done. I called Monday afternoon and begged the lady at the call center to give me her email and asked if I could stay in touch as I was leaving for Europe and could not afford to keep calling in for updates. She did give me her email address and I thanked her.

Tuesday, the CEO Larry Kutscher, sends to my alternate email address a broadcast message "Unfortunately this past weekend as we attempted to complete the final batch of customer migrations, our systems became overloaded – causing many of you to experience email login and availability issues." He goes on ""Every available resource in the company has been deployed to address the problem.".

Apparently, his memo did not reach the lady I had asked if I could ping for updates. I sent her 3 emails with the ticket number over the next few days  - and never heard back from her.

Wednesday, I posted a comment on their site with my ticket ID hoping that would get noticed, and I get an email back "In an effort to maintain the security of information, we cannot update the incident using this email address." You morons, if your email does not work, how else can we communicate if I do not provide an alternate email? And if your CEO can communicate with me there, why not you?

Thursday, I Twittered them asking for help, and I did a response but it just pointed to a status update website.

Friday, finally some action - get an email at my alternate address  "please provide details of the bounceback message you are getting". Guys, I provided all those details when I called previous Sunday and Monday.

So, in terms of my open ticket, I would say at least 5 Register.com employees saw/worked on my ticket but did not appear to do much. In the meantime, I was getting calls from business associates and friends informing me my emails were bouncing. They took the time to personally communicate to me - something after so many attempts to reach Register via phone, email, website and Twitter would have been appreciated.

Email is limping back, but yesterday the CEO sent another email. "Stabilizing email service is our number one priority."

8 days later, not there yet. For an application where 15 minutes of downtime is too long.

Sourcing Far and Wide

I groaned when my wife suggested we walk up a steep hill to go see a Benedictine Abbey in Melk, Austria. I mean monks are austere - what could be of real interest there? I am glad she persisted. We saw the most stunning library I have ever set my eyes on and the baroque church would impress even the most hardened tourist who has had his/her share of ABC (another bloody church!).

Readers of this blog know I constantly caution against vendor consolidation strategies. My other New Florence blog is always telling readers to look for innovation from left field - scour the world for it.

Time after time this week, my wife took us away from the big cities of Munich, Zurich and Vienna we could spend our vacation in (or even just one of those 3), and picked a bunch of places to visit I would never have and I am so glad she did:

• The amazing medieval arcades and statues in the Old City of Berne
• The lovely farmer's market across the Chapel Bridge and hundreds of swans and ducks on the edge of Lake Luzern
• The Landtag - the striking new Parliament building in Vaduz in tiny Liechtenstein
• The town center - the Hauptplatz in Linz - one of the largest in Europe where Adolf Hitler walked as a young boy
• The highest little town in beautiful Bavaria, Fussen

Yes, it took more effort for the car and our feet to get to these places, but just reinforced my view about looking far and wide even in technology to find delightful solutions and not just depend on safe, well-known brands.

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?