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!

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.

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…

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…

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…

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

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!

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…

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.

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.