Enterprise hits & misses - December 9
- Summary:
- Jon's weekly review of which articles hit (or didn’t) on diginomica and beyond - for the week ending December 9, 2013.
A cheeky weekly review of which articles hit (or didn’t) on diginomica and beyond.
diginomica hit: Salesforce1: platform or puff stuff? Benioff answers by Den Howlett
quotage: 'It is great to see a large company CEO who is more comfortable in marketing going toe to toe with some of the more technical analysts. It’s the kind of dialog we all welcome because it both clarifies our understanding and helps the company see where the critique lays.'
myPOV: After the bluster of a major trade show, lingering questions are hashed in blogs - often without the benefit of any public clarification from the vendors. But Dreamforce 2013 was different. After the show, bloggers/analysts wrestled with SuperPod and Salesforce1 Platform questions. But in this case, CEO Marc Benioff took it straight to the Twitterati (and, in at least one case, in a direct email).
This resulted in candid exchanges; Den pulled the Salesforce1 takeaways into this feature post. The gist? Salesforce1 is not a mobile app (as some mistakenly thought), nor it is a mobile platform. It's an application development platform with a strong mobile emphasis. This matters for reasons Den opines on (and Benioff also, in a quoted email to Ray Wang).
Platforms can make or break you. I want more than just mobility - I want business logic, workflows, collaboration features - and I want multi-tenant cloud apps on the other side. And I want those apps to be interoperable with the vendor's own offerings on that same platform. That is certainly what Benioff sees in Salesforce1, but as Den points out, there is work ahead.
As for the SuperPods questions - many of which centered around multi-tenancy and customer hardware choice, Benioff took that up with our Phil Wainewright on Twitter directly. Phil's resulting piece, True SaaS: any box so long as it’s black, establishes Phil's 'true SaaS position' and clarifies the plans for SuperPods in that context. Speaking of mobile-first, Den posted the slides and writeup on diginomica's own responsive design story.
diginomica pick: Cogitation on innovation by Stuart Lauchlanquotage: 'No industry conference will pass without due deference being paid to that holiest of grails, IT enabled innovation. If you play buzzword bingo at any major event, your card will be filled up pretty darned quickly with clarion cries urging you on to innovate, innovate, innovate.'
myPOV: Speaking of putting questions directly to executives, last week Stuart asked Adrian Simpson, Chief Innovation Officer at SAP UK, 'What is innovation?' No one better to ask than someone with innovation in his job title, right? Credit to Simpson, his lingo-free answer was 'Innovation just means doing things better.'
After digging into Simpson's views, Stuart shares a recent CEB study that underscores the pressure IT is under. Nutshell: CEB found that lines of business (HR, marketing, finance) are now spending over 4 percent of their own budgets on innovative IT projects. Leading Stuart to conclude: 'The CEB conclusion is closer to my own idea that it is line of business in general, rather than CMO in particular, that is getting to grips with IT.'
One implication? Andrew Horne, managing director at CEB, believes IT should stop seeing 'shadow IT' as a threat and more as an sign of (here comes that word again) 'healthy innovation'. For my part, I attempted to cut down my use of the word innovation by 90 percent in 2013, and I may go for 100 percent in 2014. It ain't easy. Using the word is a heck of lot easier than proving it.
Bonus: we've published our share of customer service rants on diginomica (hopefully most with bigger takeaways than venting spleen). One of the best yet is Stuart's npower’s false economy in offshoring customer trust.
Best of the rest
Big (but under-reported) tech stories of 2013 by Brian Sommerquotage: 'Any reporter or analyst can follow a trail – especially one that’s a mile wide. What’s tougher is to spot that lesser traveled trail – the trail that leads to interesting, often overlooked, stories and market angles. So, with that, let’s look at the most underreported stories of importance for 2013 that too few people noticed.'
myPOV: Instead of doing one of those dreaded predictions pieces, Sommer looks back to the stories he thinks we might have overlooked. The result is a tour de force of the obvious (cloud trends) and less obvious ('The battle of little data'), but all drenched in Sommer's own takes (and data) from a year of shows and gigs.
Other standouts
- Supply Chain Management in the Era of Social Business - by Frank Scavo. Bolstered by fresh insights from the Kinaxis user conference, Scavo has a worthwhile take on how collaboration can improve SCM processes, where too much still happens in spreadsheet-like interfaces.
- What Can Companies Expect from Crowd Funding and Crowd Sourcing? -by Greg Chase. Finally, a piece on crowd utilization, based on field experience, that isn't loaded with marketing manure.
- The second heresy: Does SAP have to own the IaaS layer in the HANA Enterprise Cloud? - by Richard Hirsch. Hirsh's 'heresy' series is some of his finest work. This one raises a critical question for SAP to grapple with. Credit to SAP CIO and HEC chief Bjoern Goerke for a detailed and transparent blog comment.
- Deming’s 14 Principles of Management – Are they all still relevant ? (Hint : NO they are not) - by Vijay Vijayasankar. I like this model of going blow-by-blow through an argument and thereby assessing its relevance. I may steal that sometime.
- 21st Century Business - by Luke Marson. Marson hits some vital points that many companies still don't understand, in particular how the proliferation of content in the Internet economy is changing how consumers (and companies) evaluate, buy, and consume products.
Honorable mention: my jonerpnewsfeed readers liked Why Delta gave 19,000 Windows Phones to its flight attendants. I'd add the handy 7 reasons your mobile apps gets uninstalled. Doug Henschen chimes in with Making The Case For Hadoop: Variety, Not Volume, a point (variety over volume) I happen to vigorously agree with.
Multi-media: Constellation Research has shared a replay of their Salesforce1 - What You Need to Know mega-webinar from last Friday. 'CXO Talk' continues to add to their formidable collection of CXO interviews. If you're in the mood for BI, check out my video chat with Derek Loranca on moving from a reporting to an advanced analytics organization.
Whiffs
The consumer tech press wades into enterprise topics from time to time, usually with a lazy bias that elevates the likes of Amazon, Google, and Facebook over SAP, Oracle, or Salesforce. When readwrite decided that Amazon's cloud economics were disrupting the disruptive SaaS players, they had a clever hook: the disrupters get disrupted.
Once during a conference video with Esteban Kolsky, Brian Sommer and myself, Kolsky said to Sommer, 'I agree with your analysis, but not with your conclusions.' I'll flip that here: I agree with the conclusions, but not the analysis. The future argued for here is one where customers truly pay-per-use, and may ultimately pay for services rather than applications - without long term contracts. From a vision standpoint, sounds right. But are we there yet?
Over-excited talk about disruption might be good for some casual page views, but if the alleged 'business disruption' causes no fundamental shift in market share, is it a disruption? Yes, the SaaS players will eventually have to step off of multi-year contracts, and yes, cloud economics work best on a pay-per-use model.
But does Amazon actually have business applications in HCM or CRM to compete in those markets? Because if you don't offer the product whatsoever, you can't offer a different price for it. Just making customers aware of a better business model doesn't by definition force that model. (I guess ReadWriteWeb are not Comcast broadband customers). And who is more threatened by cloud economics, and more prepared to re-invent their cloud models, SaaS vendors or on-premise/hybrids? It's an essential point for context, but a less interesting headline. Headlines over context. Woohoo! Who will get disrupted next? Yawn.
Officially off-topic
For journalism with more elbow grease, I liked Airbnb says this man does not exist. So I had coffee with him. A better look from readwrite is Spotify Demystifies Its Business Model, Sort Of—But Disgruntled Artists May Not Care, a data-based skewering of the big lie that streaming music services provide an economic future for musicians. Technology Review's How Technology Is Destroying Jobs takes those unsettling arguments to a broader scale.
As far as legit-AND-tempting headlines, how about IT Leaders: Grow A Pair, inspired by an actual quote from the interview in question. Win on both counts. 17 Essential Best Practices for Marking Things Happen was the best productivity piece I read this week, by a wide margin.
It was kind of a rough week for social media. I give Facebook credit for finally fessing up to business page owners that the plan has always been to force them to pay for access to users' streams (rather than earn that access through terrific content). Plus we get a new addition to the disingenuous quote hall of fame: 'We expect organic distribution of an individual page's posts to gradually decline over time as we continually work to make sure people have a meaningful experience on the site.'
The biggest social media fails of the year are also making their rounds. I'm picking this one as an FU to the others in tedious slide show format. For something viral that is NOT a fail, check out The World Outside My Window: A Breathtaking Time-Lapse of Earth From the ISS. Zowie. I listened to a slew of live tunes while writing this week's edition - the standout was this sublime, goose-bumps-a-plenty acoustic performance of Wish You Were Here by David Gilmour. See you next time.
Which #ensw pieces of merit did I miss? Let us know in the comments.
Most of these articles are selected from my curated @jonerpnewsfeed. “myPOV” is borrowed with reluctant permission from the ubiquitous Ray Wang.
Image credits: Cheerful Chubby Man © RA Studio, Happy Children © Anna Omelchenko, Waiter Suggesting Bottle © Minerva Studiom, Overworked Businessman © Bloomua, King Checkmate © mystock88photo (keyword search: king or checkmate) - all from Fotolia.com
Disclosure: Salesforce.com and SAP are diginomica premier partners as of this writing.