Enterprise hits and misses - Microsoft Teams, Slack screams, and Oracle closes... NetSuite
- Summary:
- In this edition: Microsoft announces Teams, Slack freaks out, and collaboration turns a corner. Oracle's pursuit of NetSuite is (mercifully) over, but the UK fallout from Brexit and Uber isn't. Smart ideas provide an antidote to security hack hype. Your whiffs include a couple of bloggers who left two ingredients - effort and passion - out of their writing recipe this time around.
diginomica hit: Assessing the state of collaboration as Microsoft "Teams" up by Phil Wainewright
quotage: "[Collaboration] tools in themselves have no value if the people don’t know how to make use of them. Price tells me that at Atlassian’s recent user conference, a newly introduced session track on ‘team and culture’ proved hugely popular — an acknowledgement that even the company’s most avid fans of its products are still eager for advice and learning on how to use them well." Phil, Did Atlassian just crack the code on digital teamwork?
myPOV: Phil uses Atlassian’s recent iteration of its Team Playbook to assess the state of collaboration. Phil has fastidiously compiled a digital transformation framework of his own, the “frictionless enterprise” that informs diginomica’s approach. I enjoy contrasting the frictionless enterprise vision with diginomica’s own dysfunctional use-and-discard cutting edge approach to collaboration. We have our exceptional days and our exceptions. As Phil asserts, no matter the size of the team, the tools are only as good as the culture behind it. That's always where the work is, eh?
Phil weaves threads from use cases and deep thinkers. Digital transformation is dead in the water without collaboration, that much we know. But what stands out from Phil’s review is how agile and DevOps have taken hold. No, this doesn’t mean organizations have been flattened in a surge of holacratic idealism.
It does mean that even in the largest organizations, autonomous teams are getting it done. Take Haier - which has divided its 60,000 workforce into 4,000 micro-enterprises of 15-20 people (!). Leadership isn’t gone, but it’s distributed. Bloated management layers are threatened, but team-directed management is needed. Management-as-a-service anyone? That sets up the Microsoft Teams announcement pretty nicely eh? Read on…
diginomica four - my top four stories on diginomica this week- Slack killer? Microsoft Teams couldn’t care less - So Microsoft announced Teams, and Slack had a panic attack, err, I mean a full page ad in the New York Times. Phil notes the real key for Microsoft - its massive ba$e of 85 million monthly Office 365 users. Phil also points out that collaboration can be super swell fun (like Slack can be) and not necessarily deliver the result. I’ve got more questions bonking around in my head, such as: is this a concession that Yammer is too clunky? Let's punt that down the column.
- JustGiving wants to reinvent fundraising (again) through the use of data - JustGiving isn’t exactly a newcomer to Internet fundraising. But as Derek reports from Microsoft’s Future Decoded London event, it’s time for reinvention - via data science and machine learning. Azure and PaaS fit into the picture also - check it out.
- How much weight will a new Weight Watchers CEO give to digital? Weight Watchers has been loading up on digital like it was running loose at a fry bread festival. No one better than Stuart to assess this crossroads; he’s been tracking Weight Watchers’ digital forays for a goodly while.
- Facebook tumbles on 170% profit rise as greedy Wall St panics about 2017 ad slowdown - Leave it to Facebook to figure out how to make a 170% profit and disappoint investors. Ladies/gents, we need Stuart to sort this pickle. He gets practical: “Those levels of meteoric ad revenue growth couldn’t go on forever.” Things ain’t so bad for Facebook. Shoving them out of the mobile ad market would be damn-nigh impossible. And: they’ve got more revenue tricks up their sleeve than Google does.
Vendor analysis, diginomica style. Here's my three top choices from our vendor coverage:
- digibyte – Oracle wins NetSuite on its own terms - mercifully, it's over. Stuart: "Attention will now turn to what happens next and a raft of as yet unanswered questions, such as will the NetSuite brand live on or will the firm be absorbed into Oracle’s cloud operation? And what will the future roles be for key NetSuite senior management figures."
- Precision toolmaker drills down on PeopleSoft costs - Phil with a Rimini Street use case: "While the company is keen to invest in cutting-edge technology elsewhere in its business, it sees no reason to replace or update an on-premise ERP system that still meets its needs perfectly well."
- New Tableau CEO bets the farm on subscriptions, but is there still time to play the long game? - Stuart on a former vendor darling now regrouping: "It’s clearly early days for Selipsky and there’s work to be done on transitioning to his own way of running Tableau internally, never mind the external offerings. The question is whether investors are going to give him the time to execute on his plans."
Jon's grab bag - So The UK courts have ruled that triggering Brexit via Article 50 is not possible without the consent of Parliament. Huh? Den explains what the heck this means to technology buyers. And Kurt thinks since both Microsoft and Apple are doing the pay-for-the-privilege laptop design thing, it’s time to take another look at the virtual desktop. Or, as he puts it, “Uberizing PCs.”
Barb wants content teams to shake up our strategy before boredom infects them and their readers. Derek’s got some provocative security stuff in National Cyber Security Centre Director – ‘I want less scare tactics, more data’, with a message of less fear and more root cause analysis. But wait - what about sensational hacks for page views to the max?
Close it out: Den returns to the Uber and gig economy skirmishes in What happens if the Uber fueled gig economy destroys earning potential? Why should diginomica bother debating with Uber detractors and automation utopians? Den: “We will continue to watch this unfold because the broader implications for independent contractor working practices will have a profound impact on business models” Yep - that’s why.
Best of the rest
Slack versus Microsoft - by almost every analyst who can typequotage: "Slack’s success highlights a key problem for our existing collaboration software options. They are more difficult to use than they should be. On top of that, the digital workplace is a mess. Alongside whatever we use for team collaboration, we access a whole host of disparate corporate systems with differing interfaces to get the job done." - David Terrar, Microsoft Teams and Slack point to the future of collaboration.
myPOV: Of all those who weighed in on Microsoft Teams, I picked Terrar's quote because it reminds us: users like what users like. I don't see how many of today's enterprise collaboration tools will prosper; they've just too clunky. Microsoft must think so. After flirting with buying Slack they develop teams even though they already had Yammer. This piece - Microsoft Teams vs. Yammer – Should You Be Worried? - does show how Yammer and Team can co-exist, in a Microsoft fanboy kind of way, but we'll see.
Fisticuffs don't dictate much. Microsoft Teams will find its niche with Microsoft users. Slack will be fine, be it acquired or standalone. The real winner is the customer - who will ultimately get much more effective/intuitive collaboration products. ZDNet's Ed Bott goes to a similar place by arguing the two have very different markets. And Holger Mueller didn't pass up the chance to evaluate a satellite version of the launch - from a grungy location to boot. I'm with Holger - the best briefings I get are a bit grungy...
Even if vendor beefs aren't worth the clicks, I did enjoy Josh Bernoff's Slack dismantling in The Slack letter to Microsoft is built on meaningless platitudes. That is more than a shishkabobin' - Bernoff put Slack's PR shrimp right on the barbie.
Other standouts:
Security in the cloud and DevOps era - it was a good week on security issues over at The New Stack, with two pieces that reframed how to think about security, starting with The DevOpsification of Security, which argues that security is still stuck in the dark ages of enterprise IT, building a moat around a castle with a single point of entry. Security in the Cloud Native Era takes on the same issue, but translates classic security principles to new cloud approaches.
Honorable mention
- Role Of Services In Artifical Intelligence - We don't need another ERP welcome wagon of consultants happy to load up on your project. But without services, customers lack predictive know-how they might need. Here's some ideas on why AI will be different than ERP - it better be.
- So long, app silos: And welcome to the digital workplace hub - Silos stink. So does trying to work across five to ten tools - maybe there's some answers here.
- Accenture, NTT, IBM, Cognizant and TCS making the early moves with Blockchain Services - Good, but a bit too sensible - where is the "blockchain is changing everything" hyperbole or "blockchain is a slow database" hot take contrarianism?
- A 'Tumultuous Decade' Rolls On... More Lost Generations Of Journalists - devastating stuff, and a reminder that disruption isn't a win-win fairy tale: "We have failed to construct a sustainable economy around a vital resource."
- Mesoscale Meteorology Localizes Weather Forecasting - weather has made more predictive fools - or fools out of those showing off their predictive tools - than any other medium.
Whiffs
Just wondering - how is corporate morale over at Samsung these days? (Is Your Samsung Washing Machine in Danger of Exploding? Check Recall Eligibility Here). Samsung design thinking session: "let's make a list of things we can make that don't explode or burst into flames."
Den has already nailed the Macbook Pro down, but this headline pours the vinegar: Apple is now officially a dongle company that happens to make smartphones and computers (17 different dongles?). Nice job on the Internet-of-Unnecessary-Things Apple.
If you've read my content strategy series, you know I advise companies to only publish kickass or deeply relevant/helpful content. This week, two posts crossed my transom that were neither kickass nor helpful. Check how this cotton candy post on BYOD by Solid Gear Group quickly devolves into an advertising circular. The author's bio indicates a passion for technology - hopefully next time that passion will be directed towards writing about technology as well.
Interested in the rise of the chief data officer? Then don't read this post, The Rise of the Chief Data Officer. Though I do give the author credit for classifying the post as "miscellaneous." During the short time it will take you to read this strange, oddly self-important post, you could have added "analytics" to your LinkedIn profile, or re-checked someone's marital status on Facebook. You could have voted - twice. Maybe go do that now.
Over to you, Clive.
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. 'myPOV' is borrowed with reluctant permission from the ubiquitous Ray Wang.