Enterprise hits and misses - IBM gets Red Hat, the tech media goes trick or treating

November 1, 2018

Dyslexia mode

Summary:: In the latest “road burn” version of hits and misses, Jon picks the highlights from the week’s biggest shows, the highs from the enterprise web, and, as always – your weekly whiffs. Plus: separating the best IBM - Red Hat analysis from the rest.

Diginomica picks - my top three stories on diginomica this week

Digital and delivery - McDonald's growth accelerators that are paying off - self-order kiosks, mobile app pickup, delivery - this isn't your grandpappy's ~~wait in line for trans fats~~ McDonald's. Stuart applies the digital checklist to a brand in transition: "While I still can’t imagine the circumstances in which I’d want to order a McDonald’s delivered to my home; clearly there is a market for that." Go figure...
Thomas Otter on owning your HR tech strategy - are you a sunflower or a daisy? - I never thought of HR tech strategy as a sunflower, or daisy, or even a daffodil for that matter. But - At HR Unleashed, Phil caught up with HCM analyst Thomas Otter, now with his own advisory practice, and guaranteed to stir the HR tech pot. Otter time: "A vendor can’t build a strategy for you. The vendor strategy, whoever they are, is to sell you more stuff. But you need to own your strategy."
Forget celebrity influencers - reach micro-influencers who impact your brand - Have we turned a corner in influencer marketing, or are we still vying for attention from gurus, rock stars and reality TV accidents? Barb explains the smarter path: reaching the micro-influencers that have cred with your market.

Vendor analysis, diginomica style. The silly season is winding down, but we're not (yet). Den posted the SAP TechEd season wraps:

SAP TechEd 2018 Barcelona - turning the corner, aligning business with IT - with links to on-site podcasts and more.
Döhler moves foodstuffs at webspeed with SAP - how it's done - a cloudy-but-practical SAP use case.

Meanwhile, Jess was on the ground at SuiteConnect West. Kurt added an Oracle OpenWorld thinkwrap:

Phil filed a pair of use cases from recent forays:

We wrap the event week with my excursions to New Orleans (Tableau) and Nashville (Sage Intacct):

Jon's grab bag - Jerry calls a collective BS in Who are we kidding? Silicon Valley was built on the business of war. Stuart wins the headline of the week honors for Zuckerberg's annus horribilis continues as Facebook growth slows. (Annus horribilis sounds like a medical condition I don't want any part of - guessing Zuckerberg feels the same).

Best of the rest

Waiter suggesting a bottle of wine to a customer

Lead story - IBM buys Red Hat, pundits pontificate in perpetuity

MyPOV: Halloween came early for the tech media this year. Some got tricked; others got a treat. IBM bought Red Hat at an eye-watering $34 billion for one reason: in enterprise software, relevance is expensive (yes, you can earn relevance too, but that's another convo. If you're buying relevance it's going to co$t you). Alas, relevance is no guarantee of future success. All it means is: you're in the game. I couldn't possibly gather all the analysis in one place, and only a fraction of it was useful anyhow. I'll spare you that, and share six that influenced my thinking:

How the cloud wars forced IBM to buy Red Hat for $34 billion - ZDNet's Larry Dignan says this deal is about hybrid/multi-cloud. He's right. Beware ZDNet's ~~user-hostile desperate UX-FU~~ autoplay video though.
Market Move - IBM buys RedHat - A bold move for hybrid cloud and PaaS - Constellation's Holger Mueller dusts off his patented blow-by-blow press release analysis format. Mueller says IBM including Linux revenues as "hybrid cloud" is a stretch.
Red Hat Acquisition Will Be Key to IBM’s Future in the Cloud - The New Stack reminds that IBM's acquisition of Softlayer didn't go so lovely.
Big Blue Puts on a Red Hat: IBM Acquires Red Hat – Red Monk's Stephen O' Grady is in his wheelhouse on this one. Yes, this is a bet on the relative staying power of on-prem data centers, but it's also an OpenShift/Kubernetes cloud play. In other words: it's complicated.
IBM’s Old Playbook – Stratechery's Ben Thompson has a skeptical angle on this one: "Microsoft has actually spent the money on infrastructure their ability to extract money from the value chain is correspondingly higher; IBM has to pay rent."
IBM/RedHat: A grand play at out-sharing Microsoft’s open source economy - Phil Fersht with an acerbic point we shouldn't forget: "There’s also the interesting inference to make that IBM has taken a decided pivot away from poster-boy AI giant Watson, to go back to its enterprise IT core and solve real challenges for real people – and in the modern world, that will always involve cloud."

Beyond IBM-Red Hat - three more best-of-the-web picks

Bleedingbit zero-day chip flaws may expose majority of enterprises to remote code execution attacks - Yet another enterprise security wake up call, tying back to - you guessed it - unmanaged devices and IoT vulnerabilities. Sidenote: my buddy Mrinal wants to do something about IoT security, via blockchain.
IT Outsourcing Agreements: 3 Details Many Negotiations Forget - UpperEdge gets into the nitty gritty of managing outsourcing SLAs. Fight for your right - to terminate.
Supply Chain is the New CRM: Digital Transformation, Customer Experience, and the End of the TLA - Josh Greenbaum combines a think piece with a howl into the wind. But he's not alone: customers seem to be howling also. "CRM and HRMS stakeholders tell me similar stories: They’re being sold on speeds and feeds and bells and whistles for their specific TLA domain, with barely a nod towards the bigger integrated picture of cross-silo processes stitching all the pieces together."

Whiffs

Always ambitious to narrow to three whiffs, but that's my job again this week. First though, two of the wackiest article titles of the week:

Stolen inflatable colon found in vacant home, Kansas City police say - Found! You can take me off suicide watch...
Journey cassette tape forces brief evacuation in uptown Charlotte - but was it the cassette, or the fact it was Journey? And who decided that a Journey cassette was non-hazardous?

On to the whiffs. Seems no industry is immune from customer experience woes:

Ontarians fed up with cannabis delivery delays are complaining to the provincial ombudsman https://t.co/kd99SbgbWi -> looks like the "Cannabis customer experience" is going up in smoke...

— Jon Reed (@jonerp) October 29, 2018

This is the kind of thing that makes performance reviews awkward:

Porn-Watching Employee Infected Government Networks With Russian Malware, IG Says https://t.co/ArVXR6MWkx

-> brings a whole new meaning to "not safe for work"....

— Jon Reed (@jonerp) October 29, 2018

Finally, this bit of dystopia from journalist James O'Malley on China's individual citizen scoring in action:

Here's a dystopian vision of the future: A real announcement I recorded on the Beijing-Shanghai bullet train. (I've subtitled it so you can watch in silence.) pic.twitter.com/ZoRWtdcSMy

— James O'Malley (@Psythor) October 29, 2018

Blockchain evangelists are surely hoping China doesn't put this one on the blockchain... See you next time.

If you find an #ensw piece that qualifies for hits and misses - in a good or bad way - let me know in the comments as Clive (almost) always does.

Most Enterprise hits and misses articles are selected from my curated @jonerpnewsfeed. 'myPOV' is borrowed with reluctant permission from the ubiquitous Ray Wang.