Interesting musings…

During the last few days – I stumbled on 2 interesting thread.

One from Frank Scavo – where he summed up Nick Carr’s presentation on Cloud computing and how it is changing the IT landscape.  Not much new here from Cloud computing perspective – but I like how Nick uses historical analogy and compare it to the past trend in the Power industry. I have included Nick’s talk on Youtube here.

Second one is from Dave Kellogg – who summed up recent Tom Siebel talk and some of the initiative that he is working on. It is a good summary of some of the larger trends affecting our society in the current day and age. More and more folks are jumping in to help monitor and mitigate carbon footprint we leave behind on daily basis. This influx of both capital and intellectual power will help make the world a better place. It is also becoming good business as more and more bright people jump on the bandwagon to improve energy utilization and work towards providing better alternative sources.

Particularly, I like one of the link that point to Zerofootprint product offering. It has simple calculator that people can use to analyze how much we contribute to the CO2 emission and how we can be more conscious in our daily life reducing the CO2 footprint we generate. Also, it share up and coming enterprise applications for companies to measure and manage their own carbon footprint.   It is not only good from the social consciousness perspective – but also good business.

Enjoy!

Ideas that spread – wins!

Although it is an hour long video – but captures well why in today’s world it is vital for everyone to remain connected with their customers and help spread ideas. Also, Seth has great delivery and captures this topic so eloquently. It is fun to hear some of his usual examples around slice bread or purple cow. Anyway – enjoy.

Market-ing: Make it personal

We live in a time where communicating to broad audience alone one way has limited reach and stickiness. To make a message sticky and gain viral spread – you want to communicate through your audience. You want to foster a community of influencers who can help spread your message and communicate for you.

Ask someone who is running a business and they will more likely suggest that bigger risk they run is not getting adequate market recognition making sales cycle harder for them. Putting businesses in a position to not able to compete effectively in the market place. Unless you are doing some ground breaking invention – not many will cite they run technology/product risk as the primary reason to go out of business. Market risk usually trump over the product risk. Largely products adopts and evolves to follow customer/technology life cycle. At least until it meets a disruptive trend.

Several well known Marketing gurus have suggested how to effectively target marketing message to create the viral adoption taking “Marketing” from job function perspective to “market-ing ideas that spread” broadly. e.g. Seth Godin…around his thought process “Ideas that spread – wins” or Tribal management. or Forrester on its analysis around how to create Groundswell. Web is littered with such case studies and adoption stories – some more successful than others.

It is one of the reason - more businesses from the get go are increasingly embracing social media and encourage employees to rather share ideas broadly. Folks will invest from the start building community of developers/influencer/promoters needed to give business a market edge. Taking the discussion beyond Marketing department to engage every one involved in the endeavor to help promote your business; ideas; product; etc.

At the end of the day ask yourself – who best positioned to spread what you do best and all the creative ideas about your business than your own employees. So start the journey with your team and go get your ideas out…

Business of software

While talking to few acquaintances who are in the business of building different kind of software (Attention based; consumer product; SaaS; or others) than on-premise enterprise software products – it is interesting to observe similar discussion. This is probably the core nature of software business. At the end of the day it comes down to 2 set of metrics driving business:

1. Acquiring new customers/members/subscribers/etc. More and more businesses now run calculations to understand the cost to acquire new customer/member. Cost to acquire new customer usually is much higher than many would guess, if they had no clue. It gets costlier in mature industry where traditional market is about replacing someone else’s product. Also, it can be costlier in the web world where there is now actual cost of  goods sold (think of all the IT infrastructure that goes around delivering a service) as opposed to the cost of CD.

Question usually gets asked: Beside product strategy to attract and differentiate offering from competitors – keep cost of customer acquisition in check; what other ways to generate traffic/leads; foster communities; target competition; create winning buzz; adjust pricing or terms; bundle products/services to make it more attractive; etc. Increasingly more web based product focus on marketing presence on the local/industry circuit from the get-go rather broadly within ranks via blog/communities to earn credibility. Increasing emphasis on Marketing too important just to leave it to dedicated few – every one has to play.

2. Retaining a customer. It is about understanding the likelihood of customers staying on the product. Generally a combination of understanding attrition rate (as some folks leaves the fold) and knowing life time value of a customer/member. Although harder to find, however, there are industry best practice metrics for the type of busines one can use as a guideline. These days businesses (particularly on the web) have a greater understanding of trends among its existing customer base. One suggestion: if you don’t already know about your customer trends – invest quickly and gain better understanding. By the nature of it -Web based businesses know well how many of their customers renew membership; what is their average monthly dues; what %age of customers usually don’t renew; on an average how long customers remain a member; what feature gets used most; demographics details; etc. Likewise, enterprise software products – SaaS or otherwise have similar metrics to help project maintenance or recurring revenue.

Question usually gets asked: What needs to be done to keep a customer happy using our product/services? What features to add (particularly that generate stickiness); what pricing lever to play; how to provide value without disrupting the apple cart; what promotion to have; etc. To find the secret formula that can help a customer retained longer paying healthy dues – is what makes a business sticky and profitable in long run.

So to remain growing – it is about adding more new customers than the customers leaving the fold. Visualize a funnel – add more while few trickle away. A math described easy but takes an organization with a winning attitude to achieve…

Evolving social communities

As Facebook evolves so does the promise of Facebook applications helping business users. This is the chasm Facebook need to cross as it attracts business users. CIO magazine recently published its list of 5 such widgets for business users.  

I like Wiki mono (think ability to collaborate and generate some kind of document say quote, proposal, etc. together) and Sticky notes (think on your face message as a way to follow up). I am excited about the potential here and what it means to the future of enterprise applications as these trends starts to unleash new wave of productivity and collaboration within the organization.

While I am on the Social communities topic, I landed on this humorous youtube clip describing what is “Web 2.0″. Although the picturaization is funny but the punch line remains what Web 2.0 stands for. Check it out…

Can RSS enable new level of productivity in an enterprise space?

I am excited about how various technologies are evolving and shaping up to play in the enterprise space. Like RSS, which has already proven its mark on the blogging side – but it is now touted to aggregate and push the relevant enterprise data to various users within an enterprise. Some thoughts are captured here on the possible use of RSS in the enterprise world under Enterprise 2.0 vision.

For those who don’t know what RSS is – here is a nice video clip explaining it, how to use it and why you should care.

Watch the Video

Tru.vu

Tom Chikoore sent me a note over the weekend sharing he just co-founded and started Tru.vu. This is still a beta site – but I wish Tom and Tru.vu success. He is very hard working, dedicated and talented developer. I remember his passion helping evolve interoperability infrastructure and defining SOA enabled architecture several years back during JDEdwards days when SOA was in its infancy.

Good luck Tom!

Bootstrapping

Entrepreneurs alike who are either looking to bootstrap their business or work with an investor will find reading “Bootstrapping” book by Greg Gianforte helpful. Greg is a serial entrepreneur and currently the founder, CEO of RightNow – which is a SaaS/CRM play in the enterprise arena. Although the book is written in the context of bootstrapping – but every entrepreneur should find it helpful.

Not having much to spend and being frugal teaches key life lessons. It forces an early startup to focus on the true priorities – taking care of customer, sales, quickly adjusting to the “need”, etc. Also, it takes away the general distraction that comes along with any investors and the need to keep them happy.

Bootstrapping is a harder run and not for the faint of an heart – but so is true about a persistent entrepreneur.

Check it out for yourself…

CIO Panel

Yesterday, I co-hosted a CIO panel session organized by the local TiE-Rockies group. We had quite an accomplished group of CIOs in the panel. It included:

• Kamalesh Dwivedi – CIO of TeleTech. A public company in global BPO space
• Tim Graumann – CIO of McData. A public company in Storage space.
• Kumud Kalia – CIO of Direct Energy. Growing energy firm in the North East and Canada
• Patrick Hellman – CIO of Mercury Company. A private company in real estate business
• Session was moderated by Jim Conboy, a partner at Wolf Venture and a local VC.

All are accomplished individuals in their own right and shared some insight of their challenges. Hopefully entrepreneurs were paying attention for opportunities that they can create to help ease CIOs pressure.

Some discussion – pay attention entrepreneurs, if you are looking for ideas or pitching to CIOs – were:

1. Challenge in keeping up with the turn over of employees in certain industries. Having a solution that can enable fast employee on-boarding and quick ramp up of knowledge will ease pain.
2. Integration with various suppliers and systems remains a challenge – particularly in the unregulated industries. Discussion was standardization, common vocabulary and integration. How to quickly enable 360 degree view of customer.
3. Skillset demand in the IT industry is shifting from programmer to more of an analyst who understands business process has business skills, knows/configures/tests the functionality, etc. is more in demand than a programmer.
4. If you are targeting CIOs to sell – don’t start with them. Start with their reports or managers so that you already have a relationship established with the people who will actually do the work and influence the approval process before reaching out to CIOs. This will help you since CIOs anyway will delegate the task of review/analyze to their reports. So start at the right level.
5. CIOs are going to be risk averse from the get go. They are hard at work balancing risk between keeping the business running on everyday basis (can’t stop the business and get fired) as well as ensuring their company can grow/launch/penetrate new market/product (can’t have systems that will prohibit company growth or get fired). So tailor your pitch to CIOs need rather than just another cool invention.
6. CIOs are not too concerned about outsourcing since much of the development anyway is done by Oracle, SAP and Microsoft of the world. They are typically configuring and using a system to the best use for their business processes – which is not a common skill to outsource. Also see #3.
7. CIOs are waiting and watching hosted/SaaS model. On one hand it is good for them as they have a service provider that can be held accountable and need to conform to their SLAs of quality, availability and security. On the other hand of loosing control – CIOs are just too good at deflecting question for now.
8. CIOs are increasingly confident of the secured perimeter around the company. It is strong and hold back external agents from penetration. They are more concerned about fraudulent use of company property by internal folks or company employees leaving their personal data outside of the company – like when visiting a doctor.

A good session with accomplished individuals – who shared their insight for budding entrepreneurs to understand and fulfill CIOs need.

Data everywhere, Information somewhere, Decisions nowhere

Sometime back, I wrote my thoughts around Enterprise 2.0 and how it is about leveraging social communities within an extended enterprise. I was asked whether Enterprise 2.0 is just another round of attempt to deliver on the promises of better analytics and knowledge management. I have already covered my thoughts on why Enterprise 2.0 is more than that. Regardless, I believe progress within analytics/business intelligence space is key towards achieving Enterprise 2.0.

Relevant data that provides everyday vital information is key to making decisions. And it is a powerful notion that influences people behavior.

Various opportunity areas where much progress is happening within enterprise industry are (this is not a comprehensive list, feel free to add others that you see missing) :-

1. Delay between generation of data and for the corresponding action to take place - How to quickly get to decisions? New analytical models around SOA/Events based architecture paradigm are emerging here. How this system will scale and perform as the trend continues to evolve from batch to realtime for widely available 24×7 system with more internal/external end users will be the testament and tipping point for possible Internet scale adoption.

2. Disjointed analytics from everyday business process - How analytical information get closer or be embedded within business applications like billing, accounting, other ERP applications, CRM, etc. so that users have their transactional and analytical information available side by side to take action when things happen. Much progress is happening here on daily basis by the application, analytics and integration vendors trying to bring analytics closer to business processes. 

3. Automate “most” of the regular tactical decisions - How to overcome or provide additional intelligence needed in the data to be able to identify and isolate bad information generated due to the noise from the actionable good information? Today, much of these interpretation happens manually. I am sure some level of human involvement will be needed but the idea remains how to automate “most” of the regular tactical decisions needed to keep things flowing on everyday basis. SOA/BPEL/Events based architecture has the promise to potentially automate “most” of the tactical decisions. But the challenge will be how to eliminate noise before acting on some information. You don’t want some automatic tactical decision being made due to a noise that result into potentially more bad situations.

4. Meaningful presentation of various analytical knowledge – gleaned from wide variety of information at different level of granularity. Information need to easier for human to read, interpret, drill down and act upon. So much progress has been happening here due to Web 2.0 and touted reverence to the dashboards that demos so well. The need here is also to continue to make it pervasive, available wherever needed, and making it available in wide variety of form factor.

5. Ever increasing size of data - Advent of new technologies like RFID and increasing automation of processes has opened up the flood gate of data (structured/unstructured)that needs to be analyzed and aggregated on daily basis. This is growing data size to manage and analyze by leaps and bounds. Increase bandwidth, much innovation in the storage and other industries for faster access continues to push the limit. One hear terra/peta/exa byte much more often in conversations – something not common just few years back.

6. Quality of data that gets integrated and aggregated from various sources - Maturity of the integration/EAI products, better cleansing and aggregation tools, increase automation, etc. are helping keep data fresh, consistent and actionable.

Analytics future is exciting as the technologies are maturing, business use cases are evolving where market is looking beyond aggregated historical trending information to reflect the current or future needs. Companies are asking for front view (real time, forecast data) beside rear view mirror (historical information) to run business. Continued consolidation of the industry – Reporting, Performance Management, Analytics, Data Warehouse, Knowledge Management, etc…will keep this space exciting and help bring several of these information islands closer.

Startup Ideas

Anyone looking for startup ideas that will get famous VC backing – look no further. Here is a list of compiled startup ideas actually suggested by well known VCs that they would like to fund.

It is all about Business Processess…

There are several upcoming technologies that will have much impact to the enterprise applications like SOA, Web 2.0, etc. Various pundits have already touted the technical advantage of all these technologies. To prove the point, every major software vendor today, has a SOA strategy. So how does all this cool technology will help businesses whose only job is to manufacture, sell and service some simple widgets and not necessarily care about what technology they uses. Infect, they probably don’t care whether it is Web 2.0, SOA or some RPG/Cobol on a green screen terminal.

Business deploying enterprise software (ERP, Supply Chain, CRM, HRMS, etc.) uses technology as a business enabler to help them manufacture the widget cheaper/better/faster or service its customer better, etc. Successful companies proud themselves on their business processes making them unique and differentiating them in their respective market. Technology wow factor is usually not the front runner. Much of enterprise businesses remains slow on the technology adoption curve. At best, it may either be classified as “Early majority” or “Late majority” if not outright “laggard” trying to avoid “Innovator” or “Early adopter” technology adoption curve.

So how would all the upcoming technologies help existing business processes of a company? To do that let’s look at the key components of what makes a business process and understand how these upcoming technologies can be applied to make aspects of business process better. One can certainly add or refine the list here.

• Information – Information is critical to any individual executing a business process successfully. As technology continue it improves it is providing new benefits that were not available before like –
  1. Reliable information that provide deeper visibility into what goes on in a business
  2. Real time information when you want it, where you want it
  3. Information from relationships – multiple degrees apart and from extended sources like partners, suppliers, outsourcers, employees, market places, etc.
  4. Information from unstructured sources – capturing knowledge, increase integration with email, files systems, document management systems, etc.
  5. Vastly improved searches for mining the sea of information and analytical tools to come to deliver what you want and understand Patterns, Metrics, goals, etc.

• Tasks – This has been the frontier as industry has been busy automating much of the human tasks aggressively since more than a decade or so. Also, as existing tasks gets automated – new set of human coordination tasks or extended responsibility appears in the horizon. Some benefits from new technologies here are:-
  1. Extending/changing existing tasks without writing code – STANDARDS is the way to go
  2. Easy creation of new tasks as new processes comes to life
  3. Enabling work-flows easier between automated tasks and human tasks
  4. Quick alignment/training of the team to ever changing processes regardless of location of employees
  5. Enables getting tasks done cost effectively without sacrificing quality or customer satisfaction goals
  6. Enables ramping up new people easily and help extend enterprise frontier to newer geographies

• Interaction – A business is net sum of its people accomplishing their individual tasks and interacting with each other. This is their everyday interaction as they formulate, strategize, decide, work, act with each other to take company ahead one day at a time. Much is based on the foundation of real time visibility, availability and ability to engage everyone needed in a dialogue. Huge benefits from new technologies in this space:-
  1. Collapsing invisible walls that were between the parties/individuals as relationship maps become visible
  2. Continue to make world a small place to live, connect and make interaction real within it larger ecosystem
  3. Assess and establish new relationships quickly – expand ecosystem and extend reach
  4. Increased participation of many in decision making as several new communication channels reaching out to all becomes available – enabling the system to operate on power of many
  5. Capture, track and publish knowledge at determined time to feed into everyday work
  6. Speed up information sharing, decision making and rollout to the ecosystem
  7. Speed up feedback from market on decisions and place effective measure to correct

To sum it up upcoming technologies holds the promise of providing new kind of business processes not possible today or refining existing business processes that can help a company to remain differentiated and successful.

Just as an example – think today we enter more trades every day (couple of billions everyday on NYSE these days) than what we used to do in a week couple of decades (couple of million everyday on NYSE in early 70’s) back. All of this due to technology improvement that leverages the same process of placing, reconciling the trade, clearing the trade, settling the trade, invoicing, paying for the trade, etc. But now these tasks are automated, collapsed various walls that were needed in the past to place a trade, and provide real time information to a trader. New processes have evolved around technologies like real time information, increase self service, automatic trade placement, portfolio analysis, etc… that is changing the scale of business.

There are many examples how leveraging the right technology can help things scale quickly that is otherwise not possible. It is this promise with upcoming technologies like SOA, Web 2.0, etc. for businesses allowing them to unleash new level of accomplishment across its social communities – makes enterprise applications an interesting space for years to come.

Does LAMP need its CASE – Open Source in Enterprise

Much opinions have been floating on each side of the discussion why Open Source is or isn’t a good idea for an enterprise. Usual suspect like long sales cycle, implementation challenges, support concerns, etc. are cited as the barrier to entry. While free/cheap, no lock-in concern, open source benefits, etc. gets cited as the reason to support Open Source in an enterprise.

So as in life there is no perfect answer. This one is no exception to that. It comes down to making choices that suits the organization net positively and help accomplish business goals.

In my opinion, Open Source enterprise offering can have some legs. Companies like Compiere or other upcoming venture stand a good chance to replicate say what Redhat has done to further the cause of Linux. At current level of Open Source Company’s valuation this remains a viable business towards a targeted market. Although, some shrewd venture folks may suggest it is a matter of time before Open Source companies starts to get valued as a Service company given the margins are closer to that than a product company.

I would think certain market say where audience has embraced LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP) should be supportive of Open Source enterprise product, if it can be successfully packaged, delivered, deployed, implemented and supported at no worse than the leading vendors. Thought process here, in some regard, is extending the open source stack to its preferred constituents and make it available at an acceptable total cost of ownership.

Figuratively speaking, does LAMP need to be in its CASE (CRM, Analytics, SCM, ERP) for a deeper adoption of Open Source within enterprise?

One example of Open Source friendly market is India. Lately, much news has come out suggesting how various state governments are favoring Open Source as the platform of choice.

Some may ask – Does the economic impact of software cost is more to companies in country like India? It all depends on how many companies can really afford $100s of thousands (after discounting) of software when earnings are not in hard currency? Also, different Enterprise structures adds to the discussion – like how many companies have revenue of $250M or more in India; need of larger number of seats (read more scalable software and support needs) as companies have more employees for a typical say $100M company in US; software cost impact to top line revenue depending on whether it hits operational or capital spending; etc. Some of these factors make Open Source more appealing to the market. One can add low implementation cost to this within domestic Indian market to make the overall implementation of Open Source enterprise software rather cheaper to accomplish.

A gating factor for Open Source success stories will be how it extends and matures the eco system beyond development community – to cover every aspect of value delivery. It is vital for the Open Source model to scale and instill confidence in enterprise customers about their investment in Open Source. Like having enough partners who can effectively implement, sell, support Open Source products in various geographies. Time will tell how successful open source will be in an enterprise market.

So what do you think – do you believe LAMP need to be in its CASE to make Open Source successful in enterprise market?

More thoughts on Social communities within an Enterprise

Facebook on Tuesday added a new feature that RSS feeds changes on a member page to its friends like photos updates, profile changes say address, status, etc. This new feature got strong negative feedback from the user community. By Friday, CEO of Facebook has to come out and say how they messed up here and need to review and modify the feature. Read his blog here.

Anyway, the point here is what I suggested earlier on Social communities and interaction blog around how within an Enterprise a similar relationship can be formed between its social communities.

Like in this case among the end user community and the developer/implementation folks. Currently, within enterprise, this is accomplished in various ways to engage customers/users, capture the need of the end users while building an enterprise software and get user feedback on the feature. Several local or global user groups, customer consortium, product launches, conferences, regular meetings, customer surveys, etc. all try to gauge the need, establish requirement and later feedback on what’s working or not. This works for few customers that participate but misses out on the larger customer base. Also, the process is long and lot gets lost in translation as information changes hand from end user before it reaches developer/implementer.

In some regard, today, it is a discussion of haves and have nots. Today, it is a discussion of which customers have found ways to influence the eco system versus who don’t.

Can Enterprise 2.0 provide similar equalizer to all – small or large, local or global, vocal or supportive, successful or struggling, etc. - with an opportunity to choose and participate in defining enterprise implementation to morph to their need in a quick and efficient way? If done right – I think yes…What do you think?

Enterprise 2.0

Much discussion is in progress about Enterprise 2.0 – including a large cry after “Enterprise 2.0″ was deleted from Wikipedia earlier. Here is my simple explanation of Enterprise 2.0.

Model every day enterprise users activity leveraging Web 2.0 based technologies (like Ajax, RSS, Wikis, blogs, IM, etc.) that can provide increased social interaction (like successful models of MySpace, YouTube, eBay, etc.) and enriched personal experience needed to build highly collaborative geographically distributed company/community (including employees, customers, partners, supply chain and other communities). A foundation that can help generate increase level of productivity necessary to manage both top line growth and bottom line control. Consider this along with other technology innovations (like RFID, SOA, etc.) and wider deployment choices(like SaaS, Licenced, BPO, etc.) – if anything enterprise industry is getting into some exciting time for innovation.

Enterprise 2.0 naturally enhances the current web based computing model that forces developers to think abstract application components rather than facilitating user interaction (say with your customer or salesforce) that is needed to provide the social experience of getting a task completed. BTW, this happens today although in a primitive way – today one person enters the info in a form that stores relevant data in one tableset that either a work flow or by some other trigger mechanism notifies other person who then picks the recordset from those tables; do some work; and put the modified recordset in another set of tables for another user to pick and do something about it. One can make this user interaction worse if you consider integrated legacy applications and best of breed suites in today’s IT environment – where users have to jump from one application to other hoping to find the relevent information needed to progress the work flow. Think about how this behavior of user interaction can be enhanced leveraging some of the successful and other upcoming future social interaction with the web when trying to accomplish a task.

Thre are other interesting scenarios as well that can be thought of as Enteprise 2.0 takes some shape. I can see much improvement in the CRM space to improve customer facing functionality. These new models will evolve in the time to come as technology gains wide spread adoption and as enterprise vendor catches on to capture social experince needed for them to continue to retain and grow their customer base.

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