Enterprise hits & misses - February 24
- Summary:
- Jon's cheeky weekly review of which enterprise software articles hit (or didn’t) on diginomica & beyond - for week ending February 23, 2014.
A cheeky weekly review of which articles hit (or didn’t) on diginomica and beyond.
This is a quick hit 'Jon on the road' edition, live from the Java Monkey cafe in Decatur, GA.
diginomica hit: Microsoft’s Tatarinov: no-one serious is doing cloud ERP! by Stuart Lauchlan
quotage: 'No-one’s doing cloud ERP? The key word here is 'serious' as in 'serious organisation' and that’s a hugely subjective term that wasn’t defined in a quantifiable fashion.'
myPOV: Stuart's account of his sit down with Kirill Tatarinov, EVP for Microsoft Business Solutions cause quite a kerfluffle. It's not an easy debate to settle as Tatarinov did not provide a clear definition of what ERP at scale looks like. I found those quotes unfortunate for several reasons; as a vendor I'd rather be perceived as aggressively pursuing cloud ERP than pushing against it.
But I hope readers check the whole interview as Tatarinov also shares some useful lessons on private versus public CRM clouds. His view that deployment is proving secondary to the business case (and privacy concerns) rings true. Bonus points for frank comments on the impact of the NSA on data security. Also: Stuart's piece on Mastercard's social PR nightmare is a terrific read.
diginomica pick: FinancialForce pushes ERP native on Salesforce platform by Phil Wainewrightquotage: 'To have a complete ERP system that runs natively within the Salesforce platform is an act that inverts the traditional IT order, making the system of record a subsidiary function to the system of engagement.'
myPOV: Strictly speaking, the 'native ERP' we speak of here is not a new FinancialForce.com product but a rebranding of existing solutions. Still, I'm with Phil - this is a significant shift on a symbolic level, as customer-facing cloud systems take precedence and ERP systems are moved to the cloud to support those systems.
I remember when CRM was considered an add-on to ERP; hearing Kevin Roberts, GM of platform and alliances at FinancialForce.com say 'Fundamentally we have dropped the ERP into the CRM' points to a new enterprise world order, where customer engagement is front and center, and systems of record are a given. Struggle for market share is one way to look at enterprise software, but another way is the relevance test. And that's why this FinancialForce.com repositioning is worth a hard look.
More essentials: Den kicked off the week with context on round one of the Oracle versus Rimini Street skirmishes, and also weighed in on Qlik's Q4 earnings. He also issued one of the more original takes on Facebook's What's App acquisition by applying it to SAP's opportunities/predicaments.
Breaking: Derek du Preez debuted on diginomica this morning. Check out UK government CTO Liam Maxwell: the competition nut and see why we didn't rest 'til we got him on our team.
Best of the rest
Oracle's Partial Victory Against Rimini Street and Customer Implications by Frank Scavoquotage: 'Our research at Computer Economics shows widespread dissatisfaction with both the cost and the quality of service for the Tier I ERP vendors' maintenance programs. If there are not viable and healthy third-party maintenance providers in enterprise software, it will just hasten the demise of the traditional software license model.'
myPOV: Scavo's piece is one of the best on the first round of the Oracle-Rimini street legal wranglings. His quote proves why these legal proceedings matter. Scavo is right: vendors are harming their own prospects by attempting to block third party support and protect maintenance streams. A better way to protect maintenance revenue? Innovate the heck out of your offering, and make it easy for loyal customers to consume it. Competition for support revenue is good for customers and ultimately good for everyone - though lawyers feel differently.
Other standouts
- Ray Wang also turned in a good piece on Oracle-Rimini Street which analyzed each of the four customer contracts addressed in the ruling.
- Plenty of folks chimed in on the monster WhatsApp acquisition - I liked how Jason Busch of Spend Matters framed his take from a B2B angle and questioned the types of valuations we use.
- In Please integrate the integrated enterprise platform, SAP BusinessObjects professional Dallas Marks provides a solid example of amplifying community concerns and raising issues for a vendor (in this case SAP) in an informed way.
- Speaking of SAP, Maggie Fox of SAP challenged marketers to get their collective acts together in The Future of Marketing: Business as Unusual.
- Phil Fersht raises a thorny/vital topic in Are some “independent” analysts the worst offenders of pay-to-play? I dropped my own dime on the (worthwhile) comment thread.
Honorable mention: Fellow Enterprise Irregular David Terrar posted an in-depth piece on E 2.0, Agile Elephant at Enterprise 2.0 Summit Report, which hits on both his concerns and optimism about social business. Gartner's Merv Adrian wrote a concise piece on the dilemmas facing Microsoft's new CEO. Richard Duffy shared the right approaches for building partners around ERP and cloud offerings and Dion Hinchliffe dug into The New CIO Mandate. Newsfeed readers liked Forrester's take on the top CRM trends for 2014.
Whiffs
Before I get to more pressing matters, if you post a piece called Blogging is Dead, when you know full well blogging isn't dead, nor are you even arguing that point, then you are heading into linkbait schmuckeryland.
Given my penchant for Facebook bashing, I'm sure readers are breathlessly awaiting my delayed take on the WhatsApp acquisition. Facebook likes may be worthless to businesses, but there's no doubt WhatsApp is not worthless to Facebook. Overvalued, yes - especially when you consider the list of companies supposedly worth less than WhatsApp.
I'm on board with the WhatsApp as existential threat/buy your biggest enemies argument. I'm struck by how Facebook built a platform of enormous complexity, with an arduous method of segmenting your audience into lists that only Robert Scoble likes. Then Facebook is forced to experiment with intrusive advertising to monetize that complexity. Meantime, WhatsApp gives 465 million users a shockingly simple backchannel experience (supported by only 30 engineers!) that Facebook and Twitter are now scrambling to integrate into their walled garden business models. Good luck with that.
The one question no one has asked: 'how badly is Facebook going to screw up WhatsApp'? I'd say pretty badly. Enterprise lessons for UX simplicity and ruthless attention to what customers truly value (as opposed to building your unwieldy, game-changing monster app suite) are plentiful here.
Officially off-topic
Speaking of WhatsApp, the good news keeps getting better: their biggest outage in years occurs AFTER the ink is dry. But for PR fails, it was hard to top the Swiss military this week, which could not dispatch fighter jets after a hijacked plane because the event occurred outside of office hours.
Grimmer tidings came by way of satellite photos that show California's drought is visible from space. Yikes! This week in corporate oligopolies: Comcast made a peace, err, contractual agreement with Netflix that should result in streams not being throttled (not that Comcast bothered to tell anyone they were throttling to begin with).
For the feel-good side of tech, learn how 3D Printing Saved a Child's Life. And with all the tech/civic angst in San Francisco, how about this awesome story of the formerly-homeless Marc Roth, who has now founded a project to provide the homeless with food, shelter, and tech classes for 90 days?
Resources and entertainment: Google stepped up and provided a guide on how not to be a Glasshole. This Open Source Library for Adding Sound Bytes to Print Journalism looks intriguing. Earlier, I was grooving to Guns N’ Roses “Sweet Child O’ Mine” Retooled as 1920s New Orleans Jazz. Neat stuff, but those who used the opportunity to mock the original are being added to my paper.li email distribution list. Enjoy! And 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 - all from Fotolia.com
Disclosure: Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce.com and FinancialForce.com are diginomica partners as of this writing.