Enterprise hits and misses - March 2
- Summary:
- Jon's cheeky weekly review of which enterprise software articles hit (or didnít) on diginomica & beyond - for the week ending March 1, 2015.
This is a quick-hit "top five" version of hits and misses, with Jon on the road at Mobile World Congress Barcelona.
diginomica five: my completely subjective "top five" stories on diginomica this week- ERP customer experience – Where’s the scorecard? - Brian Sommer takes ERP vendors on a personal "scared straight" initiative, citing several data sources the indicate low levels of customer satisfaction and (relatively) high rates of intentions to swap out software. Sommer wonders if ERP vendors are delivering on customer experience. See his buyer checklist and decide for yourself.
- Competitors from Mars: Tesla batteries invade the grid - Phil with a very interesting piece on how Tesla is poised to (yes, I'm gonna say it) disrupt the home electricity market by selling stationary Tesla batteries. Some potent thinking here on how "alien" competitors can change markets.
- Wearing your HR on your sleeve - Janine has a take on wearables in the enterprise I wasn't expecting: the HR dilemma. Take it away Janine: "Innovative HR departments will do a hell of a lot more than merely policing their usage, and apply wearables to areas such as training, wellness and safety."
- Government IT is about people’s lives – Code for America founder Jen Pahlka’s timely warning - Fresh off a banner week of digital governance heckraising, Stuart is back with an insightful contrast of U.S. and UK government approaches to digital transformation. The potential of local governments to wade through the quicksand faster than their national counterparts struck a chord.
- Enterprise communities – the new management imperative - "In this brave new world, control is for amateurs" - wish I'd thought of that one, but nope - it was penned by guest contributor Rachel Happe, whose deep expertise in communities shines through in this piece which makes as good as case for the business relevance of communities as I've seen. I still have my own conflicts about some of the idealism I find in the enterprise community space, but I really like what Happe is getting at here. Talking about "acceptance of paradox" as a management principle is a good way to win my attention.
Vendor analysis, diginomica style - If you're Salesorce, a sure fire way to get a bump from investors is to report "higher levels of profitability." Stuart has the story in Salesforce hits high on Wall Street as Benioff aims at $10 billion run rate, including some punchy quotage from Benioff on familiar foes, and some outlook on how cloud usage (and SaaS vendor economics) are evolving. Den had a digibyte update on Workday, including commentary on surprising Workday's customer growth in Germany (Workday Q4 2015 beats on revenue estimates, guides past predicted $1bn revenue for 2016).
Derek put on his BS filter to wade through Verizon's optimistic Internet of Things data in Verizon predicts huge growth in IoT – but will companies be ready for new business models? Stuart put HP's big customer win in a sober context in HP cashes in at Deutsche Bank, but services decline continues, and Martin Banks challenged SAP's Irfan Kahn to make the case for vendor-driven innovation (In search of innovation with SAP CTO for customer operations Irfan Khan).
Best of the rest
My quirky take on the top five pieces across the enterprise web. Not the top five most important stories, big difference.quotage: "Has Watson stalled? In contrast to Insights 2014 we saw only little progress on the Watson side. And maybe the InterConnect dates came at a bad timing for the product, but it was disappointing to see the same partners and customer on stage at InterConnect as at Insights. - Holger Mueller
- Holger does IBM (or is it the other way around?) - Mueller's passion for attending IBM events in the glitzy pseudo-glamour of Las Vegas really shines through in his event report, Event Report - IBM InterConnect - IBM makes bets for the hybrid cloud. In his event reports, Mueller does as good a job of anyone getting across the full spectrum of topics, as if you were sitting next to him in the keynotes peering over his Tweetdeck. Plenty of issues to chew on here, from IBM's Bluemix PaaS ambitions to the aforementioned Watson issues to the core of the story in the hybrid cloud play.
- Naomi Bloom doesn't like "faux SaaS" nonsense - Just when #ensw marketers had tentatively tiptoed out from their barracades after Bloom's last missive, Bloom is back again with sterner words in Modest Rant — No HCM Pain/Rethink/Disruption, Then Little Business Gain. If we ever had a contest for the most vendor take downs in one sentence, I just might go with "If any of the vendors proposing to subscribe you to their true or even faux SaaS products say that the new thing is non-disruptive, backward-compatible, just a migration, or similar, run for the hills." So what's the alternative? Read through her recent blog posts and you'll have your answer.
- Stephen O'Grady likes to make predictions - Didn't I recently ban predictions posts for the year from this column? Well, about that, after O'Grady graded his 2014 predictions, he went ahead and made some new ones for 2015 - even though the year is chugging along fine. Well, O'Grady's predictions are really good. Not that he is some kind of savant, but his context for why the predictions matter is a fine read. A line like "Services will be the new open core" is intriguing, no? Oh, and O'Grady is betting hard against Apple Watch - it's the "New Newton" in his eyes. Contrarian alert - I like it.
- Esteban Kolksy wraps up a provocative analytics series - Kolsky wrapped up a terrific three part analytics series with Fixing Predictive, Making Anticipatory Work. For my bitcoins, this is the best in the series as it takes a practical bent. If Kolsky advocates anticipatory analytics, NOT predictive, then he owes us an explanation for how to do it in the real world, right? We get some answers to that in his final post in the series.
- Net neutrality, in context - The FCC's landmark open Internet rules adoption was one of the bigger tech stories of our time, due to its potential impact on business models and the very culture of the Internet. It's also a divisive issue that is further clouded by well-paid lobbyists. If you're like me and want a bit of context, the detailed Putting net neutrality in context is your fix. Bonus: I also liked
Whiffs
I was going to pile on Lenovo for its ludicrous mishandling of its 'crapware' security nightmare (as in: Lenovo's response to its dangerous adware is astonishingly clueless), but then they fixed matters by proclaiming that they aren't going to put any shameware on their computers anymore (shameware is my word for software manufacturers should be ashamed to load onto your device, usually for a handsome fee from unsavory bedfellows).
My question for Lenovo's PR team: if you can take a few moments from updating your LinkedIn profiles, can you explain why you defended junkware loading when you were going to do the right thing anyhow? Random whiffy aside: is there a worse brand tagline than Nissan's "Innovation that excites"?
Finally, we have for our enterprise whiff a textbook exercise in compulsive, cynical linkbait, Salesforce boss Marc Benioff just SLAMMED Oracle and SAP. I don't know what bothers me more: that this World Wrestling Federation approach to #ensw exists, or that it wouldn't exist if it didn't get page views. This is the kind of headline I would expect if Taylor Swift GOES OFF on Katy Perry again. Is enterprisebeefs.com available, or did Business Insider already snap it up? And no, you don't blame the writer for a story like this. You blame the editor who wrote/approved the linkbait, and made sure the piece had the same kind of gravitas as Justin Bieber feuding with Orlando Bloom.
Officially off-topic
I'm sick of typing in a dark room full of mobility journalists cranking out smart phone pablum, knowing that if I just put some CAPS IN MY HEADLINES, I could have been done a long time ago, so I'm out. I may add the off-topic links on Tuesday morning, so check back again Tuesday if you like the off topic missives...
Which #ensw pieces of merit did I miss? Let us know in the comments.
Most Enterprise hits and misses articles are selected from my curated @jonerpnewsfeed. ìmyPOVî is borrowed with reluctant permission from the ubiquitous Ray Wang.
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Disclosure: SAP, Workday and Salesforce are diginomica premier partners as of this writing.