Enterprise hits & misses - April 21
- Summary:
- Jon's cheeky weekly review of which enterprise software articles hit (or didn’t) on diginomica & beyond - for week ending April 20, 2014.
A cheeky weekly review of which articles hit (or didn’t) on diginomica and beyond.
diginomica hit: On a quest for the future of enterprise collaboration by Phil Wainewright
quotage: 'Of all the collaboration vendors competing for enterprise mindshare, the least sympathetic to conventional enterprise mindsets is Google. The company appears to have an arrogant belief that if it pays too much heed to enterprise demands, it will compromise its offering. In its defense, this may not be so foolhardy a stance as it at first appears.'
myPOV: This is not the easiest read that went up on diginomica this week - it may take a few extra sips of your preferred hot beverage to complete - but it's well worth the effort. Revisiting the state of enterprise collaboration since his last review in December, Phil clarifies the persistent limitations of collaboration that have always bugged me (though I've never been able to articulate them like this).
Between culture blocks, the structured/unstructured information divide, and the scarcity of vendors tackling both internal and external collaboration, the obstacles to collaboration Phil cites are daunting indeed. But he also reviews the latest push from collaboration stalwarts (SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Jive) as well as enterprise upstarts (Box, Dropbox, Google). If there's one optimistic thing I can say about collaboration, it's this: some of these vendors are making sneaky but important progress now that they are out of the 'social revolution' spotlight and the buzzword circus has moved onto big data everything.
More diginomica keepersVendor coverage: Den parsed SAP's latest numbers and went beyond them in SAP Q1 2014: on-prem slide continues, cloud jumps. Where’s HANA? mobile?, then he reported back from his visit to Rimini Street in Rimini Street transforms to innovation enabler. Phil looked at Microsoft's big data strategy and raised some serious questions about individual autonomy in Big Brother and the big data dividend.
Don’t miss:
- Jessica posted a nifty customer use case, Seattle Children’s Hospital finds best medicine in virtual desktops, which examines how CIO Wes Wright is using virtualization to reduce those annoying wait times and make kids' experiences in a difficult situation better.
- Given my bias towards independent consultants, I was stoked by Derek's analysis of the UK Treasury's decision to break up legacy outsourcing arrangements and bring in SMEs. Readers also liked Derek's chat with Conversocial's CEO on getting social out of marketing and into customer service.
- Stuart published several crackling reads this week, including Has the European Court of Justice just holed Obama’s NSA data gathering reform? - an important take on EMEA data privacy with global import - but if I were cornered and forced to pick one it would be his unsparing analysis of the UK government's digital skills charter, and why the underlying issues of education and access must be reckoned with.
Best of the rest
In the aftermath of the news of Infor's Q3 profits, Larry Dignan posted an interview with Infor CEO Charles Phillips digging into issues of note, such as competitive face offs with Workday and NetSuite and moving customers from legacy to cloud subscriptions. Count Phillips in the 'suite will win in the cloud' camp - I'm not so sure - I still think platform is going to win in the large enterprise cloud. But, I recall being wrong before, and not too long ago.Enterprise hits & misses - April 14A cheeky weekly review of which articles hit (or didn’t) on diginomica and beyond. Apr 14 2014diginomica.comquotage: 'The key for Infor is to offer customers deep industry features so they won't have to customize. Ultimately, these customers will move to the cloud and a subscription model. About 150 customers a quarter are migrating. "Migration itself is easy," said Phillips. "The challenge is getting agreement to do it and lining up the different constituencies. Generally we set them up with a sandbox in the cloud to see what's possible.'
Other standouts
- Paul Greenberg put the ribbon on his monster CRM Watchlist 2014 series by opining on the three final (and surprising) finalists: IBM, Solvis Consulting, and the Pedowitz Group.
- My fave supply chain blogger, Lora Cecere, is finding her book writing tedious (hang in there!), so she posted an excellent SCM blog instead, Time for a Mea Culpa.
- Chris Kanaracus added another dimension to the 'Should SAP Fiori be Free' debate by reporting on SAP user group reactions in SAP users rattle sabers over charges for user-friendly Fiori apps. (Den parsed this further with his strongly-worded take on diginomica). I commented further on Den's diginomica post, and I won't repeat that here, but I will say that the attempt by some to claim 'Fiori isn't a UI' is wrong-headed. Yes, Fiori is more than a UI, but it's also been cited as SAP's go-forward UI strategy. My position: companies aren't going to be able to charge additional fees for modern UIs for much longer. We'll see about that.
- Of the various takes on IBM's latest (underwhelming) earnings, I enjoyed ex-IBMer Vijay Vijayasankar's informal and more personal assessment the best.
- Trident Capital's Evangelos Simoudis wrote a terrific piece on why the classic R&D model needs an enterprise revamp in Silicon Valley’s Role in the Re-Invention of the Disruptive Corporate Innovation Model (I also recommend his Insight as a Service series, which I stupidly overlooked, RSS snafu).
Honorable mention: John Appleby penned a smart piece on How to become a great consultant (which I riffed on later in the week), Oracle's Mark Hurd had some interesting things to say about why marketing should pay proper attention to customer experience, and Dion Hinchcliffe outlined the 14 disruptive enterprise products for 2014, though you'll need to brave a slide show to get the full story. Progress Software's Karen Tegan Padir shared the keys to her own success in So You Want to be a CTO? (Hint: get out of the office and get with customers for starters).
On the consumer tech side, this argument for the pending triumph of HTML5 over Flash was the best of the bunch. Readwrite debunked 7 Hearbleed myths, and also provided some context on how the bug was found. (Sidenote: don't know about you, but I'm taking a middle ground between spastically changing all my passwords and posting my passwords online to prove a ridiculous point). I'm not much of a gadget guy (you should see my paleolithic Android phone), but this Surface Pro versus iPad Air rundown was interesting, if unfair (the Surface Pro is almost twice as expensive)
Whiffs
So I met my first Glasshole yesterday (like I said, I'm not much of a gadget guy). To be fair, he might have been a terrific dude in the long run; I didn't get a chance to chat him up much - his Google Glass session conflicted with my own presentation. Putting aside the obvious cyborg jokes, I don't feel nearly as comfortable making fun of Glass addicts now that multiple San Francisco residents have been assaulted or harassed just for wearing them. Perhaps the whiff is mine - as soon as you get dismissive about a technology you stumble upon a completely valid use case.
When I first saw this so-bad-it's-funny-or-maybe-it's-just-horrifying 'Let's Get Social' song from this year's Social Media Marketing World Show, I felt oddly reassured. Surely this smug rendition, complete with train wreck rap segment, represents to social media what Custer's Last Stand represented to General George Custer. Scanning through the content thread, I saw plenty of evidence that folks have wised up to the myth of 'social for its own sake'. The YouTube description was changed to imply that the video was satire, but just like Gymkata, the satire is wishful thinking applied after the fact. Ten years from now, this will look even more like a cult gathering than it does now.
Officially off-topic
If you're going to screw up, good to do it on a week where General Mills (rightfully) stole all the PR fail headlines. Oh, and speaking of whiffs, if you're a senator filming a public safety on trains video, you might not want to stand in the yellow warning area. I'm not totally sure how I feel about Owyang's Life as a Service post, but it makes for interesting reading. Even more interesting is this ape that can make toast, light fires, and roast marshmallows.
NBA on TNT sideline reporter Craig Sager has leukemia, but the tributes of those who rallied around him (including his son serving as his sideline stand-in) were inspired. I'm hoping for more of the same inspiration when the crowds gather for the Boston Marathon today. For now, it's time to check out the Orphan Black season two premier on BBC America. See you next week.
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, Loser and Winner © ispstock - all from Fotolia.com
Disclosure: SAP, Oracle, and Box are all diginomica partners as of this writing.