Recent headlines about Toyota have no doubt been music to the ears of its major rivals — especially Ford and GM. From a giant recall for gas pedals that stick (making the Audi 5000’s sudden-acceleration PR woes look tame by comparison) to botched hybrid braking systems, Toyota’s image has slid downhill faster than just about any automaker in history. Which is precisely why, if you’re a contrarian, it might make sense to go out and buy a Toyota. Stay with me for a minute here. In fact, the strategy of contrarian buying is one that we should all consider more often in our procurement careers. First, let’s consider the case for plunking down your hard-earned dollars on an automotive brand that can’t seem to get either acceleration or braking right.

Over on a CBS.com blog, Jill Schlesinger recently opined that “the Toyota recall will be a great buying opportunity…

Related articles by Zemanta

• Toyota Dealers Pull Ads From ABC Over ‘Excessive Stories’: ‘Punishment For Reporting’ (huffingtonpost.com)
• VW Says U.S. Discounts Aimed at Toyota ‘Predatory’ (Update1) (businessweek.com)
• Toyota’s once-golden resale value gets dented (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Toyota’s Recall Troubles Not All Good News for Its Competitors (seekingalpha.com)
• Audi’s 1980s Scare May Mean Lost Generation for Toyota Sales (businessweek.com)

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

Read the complete article @ SpendMatters

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

Read the complete article @ The Connected Web

This weekend, it was announced that Leo Apotheker was leaving SAP immediately. Leo had been SAP’s CEO. Replacing Leo would be co-CEO’s Jim Snabe (focusing on technology) and Bill McDermott (focusing on sales). Also announced was the elevation of Vishal Sikka, the company’s CTO, to SAP’s Executive Board (the management board).

Recently, it had been widely rumored that Leo’s contract would not be renewed, and that a new CEO (or co-CEOs) would be brought in to replace him. Names bandied about for his replacement included:

• Wendelin Wiedeking, a former CEO of Porsche, currently being investigated for insider trading,
• Jim Hagemann Snabe, head of products at SAP, and a member of the executive board there,
• William (Bill) McDermott, head of the field (sales and services) at SAP, and a member of the executive board there, and
  
• John Schwartz, former CEO of business objects, and a member of the executive board of SAP.

Apparently, the rumor mill was fairly efficient this time.

This morning, SAP had a conference call led by Hasso Plattner, and including the SAP executive team. While I couldn’t participate, thanks to the magic of twitter, I was able to follow along. Below are some of the key tweets that came out during the call – definitely gives a good flavor of what happened, although not quite a transcript:

twailgum #leogone I said it last night, and I’ll say it again: “SAP, Who Are You?” Hasso offered direction this a.m. We’ll see where this all goes.
rwang0 #leogone gives #SAP a chance to start a new. Focus needs to be on products http://bit.ly/9mEuQ0
rwang0 Not sure why Plattner references Oracle’s best years with Ellison and Ray Lane #sap #leogone
monkchips “we made legal and political mistakes. we made a mistake, now we need to work to regain the trust of customers” #sap #leogone bout time!!!
hschepp Hasso: Customers have to maintain and innovate. SAP will help them to achieve both! #sap #leogone
sig With Hasso at the helm I expect to hear a lot about “massive..” this and that technology from #sap until further notice #leogone
yojibee Hasso: It would be wonderful to be a startup company without a history #leogone <<>
hschepp Hasso predicts “significant changes” in enterprise computing #sap #leogone
yojibee Hasso’s answers to why Léo left: “I decided I will only make forward looking statements.” #leogone
yojibee Bill and Jim will keep their responsibilities, but increase the scope of their roles. They won’t be just CEOs #leogone
amitsharma1382 Is anyone thr, is anybody out there who still feels #SAP is not a cmpny which respects employees, #leogone is your answer .salute 2 candid
paulhamerman #SAP #leogone co-CEOs have been used before at SAP, usually as part of a transition of power. Seems to be a bit different this time.
yojibee Hasso: I am responsible for making the change. #leogone
yojibee Co-CEO was never a short-term strategy. One is focusing externally on customers/sales and one is focusing internally on development #leogone
hschepp Hasso: In order to be profitable you have to be a happy company #sap #leogone
paulhamerman #SAP #leogone Kudos to Hasso for his candor about the trust issue.
MichaelKroker Plattner: “Have to re-establish trust between differenz parts of #SAP, ie. Management, Supervisory board, Employees & Customers” #leogone
yojibee Hasso: Thank you customers. To endusers: please trust us, we haven’t forgotten about you #leogone
monkchips to end users: “please trust SAP, we have not forgotten you”. is Plattner reading from Renault’s script? #leogone
paulhamerman #SAP #leogone New in memory DB will be showcased at Sapphire Orlando.
hschepp Hasso: Now talking about ByD. “Looks good now. Optimistic this year will be very good for ByD.” #leogone #sap
yojibee The lack of success of ByD was not a reason why the contract with Léo wasn’t extended #leogone #sap
yojibee Hasso: We have strengthened our focus on on-demand solutions. (mentions @12sprints) #sap #leogone
hschepp Hasso: No disagreements about strategy with Leo. #leogone #sap
yojibee Hasso: Focus is on growth, margin and innovation #sap #leogone
hschepp Hasso: All areas of SAP has to accept the strategy of change. #sap #leogone
paulhamerman #SAP #leogone Ernie Gunst, COO of SAP, has left for health reasons.
monkchips so Hasso runs SAP. tell us something we didn’t know. #leogone
yojibee Hasso: We will have changes in management style. For instance: Agile project teams #sap #leogone
hschepp Hasso: Radical changes have to take place in development where necessary. #sap #leogone
MichaelKroker Hasso Plattner: “No difference in opinion between Léo and me on Strategy”, “No Problems with Business By Design” > Wonder why #leogone then?
paulhamerman #SAP #leogone Hasso: SAP must reestablish trust among all parties, must change this quickly.

Blogs sprung up over the weekend, speculating on the changes and what they mean. Some of the key posts were:

• SAP’s CEO Léo Apotheker Resigns
• SAP changes leaders: Time for innovation

Of course, now that the conference call has happened, I’m sure there will be a new set of analyses popping up, and the Enterprise Irregulars blog site is where you’ll be sure to find the best analysis.

So, what is behind all these changes? My opinion, for what it’s worth: Hasso Plattner wants to drive a great deal of technological innovation at SAP, and did not believe it could happen under Leo’s leadership, and without Hasso’s very direct involvement. Hasso has a great deal of confidence in Vishal Sikka’s technology perspective, and Vishal was appointed to the Executive Board as part of this change, pointing to Hasso’s desire to unleash a new wave of innovation at SAP. Jim Snabe will be given the opportunity to bring all of SAP’s products under one head (both development and product (“solution”) management). Bill McDermott has certainly already proven that he can run SAP’s field, so there is not much risk in this change. Perhaps the biggest risk is on the product side. The product organization is full of conflicting technologies, conflicting interests, and conflicting agendas. Driving change in this kind of climate will be very challenging for Jim and Vishal.

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

(Cross-posted @ Next Gen Enterprise)

When I first tweeted that Jack Trout’s new book “In Search of the Obvious” had arrived from Amazon, my mate @euan suggested his (excellent) blog is actually easy to find. He called it “The Obvious” because when he started writing about the application of new technology and social media in organizations, he felt that, actually, he was saying pretty obvious things – even though they are important, and often missed by the many. Jack Trout’s book has a similar theme around today’s complex marketing mess and era of killer competition that we now live in. A good marketing strategy should be founded on an obvious idea that makes common sense, when too much of today’s marketing messages try to be clever, and complex, with advertising that is more like entertainment.

If you haven’t read Jack Trout, you have been missing something. Jack Trout and Al Ries have written some of the best and most influential marketing books of the last 25 years. They wrote Positioning, and Marketing Warfare, and the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. Al went off to write some excellent books with his daughter Laura, and Jack carried on with things like Differentiate or Die. A lot of the key themes and case studies here in The Obvious come from, or are an extension of what Jack wrote in the earlier books. If you haven’t read them, then this book would be a good place to start and get a refresher on the laws of practical marketing. If you have read some of the others, this is still an excellent and entertaining read. He has related the messages of focus, leadership, resources, category divergence, and differentiation to the main theme – your strategy should be obvious and full of common sense. He quotes Robert R. Updegraff writing in 1916 to set the scene in the first chapter:

“The trouble is, the obvious is apt to be so simple and commonplace that it has no appeal to the imagination. We all like clever ideas and ingenious plans that make good lunch-table talk at the club. There is something about the obvious that is – well so very obvious!”

The book expands on Updegraff’s straightforward messages from all those years ago, and Jack’s earlier ideas contrasting the clever and entertaining ads that might be very memorable (but do you remember the product?), with the boring or even irritating ads which definitely leave you with the product in mind. He shows same great examples of confusing and wordy mission statements that are so generic, they could be any company doing anything. I wrote earlier about one section on the law of the ear – does a picture paint a thousand words? The book is full of good case studies, and spot on analysis of the current state of Wal-Mart, Coke, newspapers or the beer business. It has some great guidance on how you should be thinking about getting back to basics, and constructing sensible and obvious strategies. I think it is a great antidote to some of the current muddled thinking that you see from some marketing departments – an entertaining read that is well worth tracking down.

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

(Cross-posted @ Business Two Zero)

When I wrote my post titled An Angel Investor Group Move That Makes Me Vomit I expected to write my little rant and be done with it.  A month or so later Jason Calacanis picked up the mantle and started a Jihad against the idea of angel groups charging entrepreneurs to pitch to them.

The result is the Open Angel Forum.  I participated in the second event last week in Boulder.  I thought it was spectacular and the twitter stream from #OAFCO reflected this sentiment.  About 20 active (at least four investments in the past year) early stage investors (angels and seed stage VCs) attended.  Six entrepreneurs presented their companies in short seven minute pitches.  Five sponsors underwrote the food and drink at the event.  There was plenty of networking before and after.  That was it – small, intimate, and highly relevant to all.

Most of the presenters wrote blog posts about the event which will give you a great feel for what they experienced.

• Odojo – My Experience presenting at The Open Angel Forum
• FaceFile – Open Angel Forum Colorado
• Grogger – OAF: Things Getting Better for Entrepreneurs
• TeamSnap – TeamSnap presents at Open Angel Forum
• Kijubi – Kijubi @ Open Angel Forum in Boulder Colorado

The events continue with Open Angel Forum San Francisco on March 4th and Open Angel Forum New York City on April 8th.  If you are an entrepreneur or an angel investor in either city, check them out.

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

(Cross-posted @ Feld Thoughts)

Bloggers and Twitters alike are buzzing today with news that enterprise giant, SAP, announced a leadership change today.

The official press release itself is terse:

[T]he SAP Supervisory Board has reached a mutual agreement with CEO Léo Apotheker not to extend his contract as a member of the SAP Executive Board. Léo Apotheker has resigned as CEO and member of the SAP Executive Board effective immediately.

The SAP Executive Board, in agreement with the SAP Supervisory Board, has appointed two Co-CEOs: Bill McDermott, head of field organization and Jim Hagemann Snabe, head of product development, both already members of the SAP Executive Board.

In addition, Vishal Sikka, Chief Technology Officer, has been appointed to the SAP Executive Board. At the request of the SAP Supervisory Board, Hasso Plattner, Co-Founder of SAP and Chairman of the SAP Supervisory Board, will continue to play a strong role in advising the new leaders on technology and product development.

“The new setup of the SAP Executive Board will allow SAP to better align product innovation with customer needs. The new leadership team will continue to drive forward SAP’s strategy and focus on profitable growth, and will deliver its innovations in 2010 to expand SAP’s leadership of the business software market,” said Hasso Plattner.

The SAP Supervisory Board thanks Léo Apotheker for his enormous contribution to the success of SAP, which he joined more than 20 years ago, and wishes him all the best for the future.

SAP has suffered in recent years from a combination of strategic missteps and the bad economy. As a result, the company has experienced weak financial performance and lost several public relations battles.

Jim Hagemann Snabe is a product guy while Bill McDermott represents sales. In theory, this combination could work to SAP’s benefit, but, of course the devil is in the details.

My take. SAP needs a clearer, stronger sense of leadership and direction at this critical point in its history. The company face large competitor, Oracle, on one side and a host of smaller software as a service (SaaS) competitors on the other.

It is now up to Snabe and McDermott to enact customer-friendly SAP legislation and bring product innovation to the market.

[Photo of Léo Apotheker by Michael Krigsman.]

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

(Cross-posted @ IT Project Failures)

Photo credit: Dan Farber

I was in a session last year with Dave Girouard of Google, when I asked him if he still believed in the statement he made 3 years prior about enterprise software. Without batting an eyelid, he asked me “Are you from SAP?”

Leo Apotheker is gone as CEO of SAP. Let’s take a moment to compliment the man for the juggernaut he built in the sales field. As he pointed to me in a heated exchange last year “I’ve been in the field all my life. That monster out there (the field) is my creature. Loyalty is to the customer. The obligation is to the customer”

But the reality is the customer has been forgotten in enterprise software, not just at SAP. It’s about squeezing as much out of old technology as possible. As I wrote earlier in the week…

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

Read the complete post @ deal architect

That was the fun part.  After all, it’s Sunday.  Now read the story here:

• News Analysis: SAP’s CEO Léo Apotheker Resigns
• SAP: Apotheker gone, co-CEO’s appointed

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)

(Source: Michael Krigsman http://blogs.zdnet.com/projectfailures/)

Rumors began circulating early this weekend that Léo Apotehker’s contract would not be renewed.  The highest level sources had confirmed this early in the morning and the afternoon press release provided confirmation of the details.  A few key facts:

• SAP moves back to Co-CEO management structure. Bill McDermott, head of field organization and Jim Hagemann Snabe, head of product development become Co-CEO’s. Point of View (POV): For undisclosed reasons, Leo’s contract was not renewed. Both Bill and Jim have extensive experience at SAP and have been hard at work revitalizing the organization from both the sales and product sides.  Many observers may be surprised not to see former Business Objects CEO John Schwarz in the running.
  
  
• Executive Board elevates role of products and technology. Vishal Sika, chief technology officer (CTO) now appointed to the SAP Executive Board. POV: Vishal has the trust and ear of Hasso Platner and Jim Snabe.  The net result may be more unified road maps, better prioritization of R&D assets, and less issues with product development.

The Bottom Line – Timing Is Everything, But SAP’s Inflection Point Is Good News For Customers

Though a seasoned executive with over 20 years with SAP, Leo was in the wrong time wrong place.  He was responsible for doing a bang up job in sales when Henning Kagermann (i.e. the former CEO) was around.   In fact, he made Henning look good despite the difficulties in launching mySAP ERP 2007, SAP ByD, and a host of other failed projects.  Unfortunately, he entered a down market while in charge of a sinking ship.  Low morale among the Walldorf engineering team, the issue with Enterprise Support and maintenance, and uncontrollable poor quarterly performance proved to be factors beyond his control.  Customers over the past 2 to 3 years began to wonder how to tap SAP’s innovation.  A clear need emerged for having more technologists at the helm.

Putting McDermott as Co-CEO makes sense.  He is an excellent sales guys but the issues is not sales.  It’s products.  Snabe and Vishal will need strong product vision to right SAP and point it in a forward direction.   Engineering and products need more attention to bring out trapped innovation at SAP.

Your POV

Are you an SAP customer?   How do you feel about the transition?  Would you like to learn more about:

• Building a next gen SAP roadmap?
• Improving your SAP apps strategy?
• Augmenting SAP with SaaS?
• Putting third party maintenance and optimization to work?

Please post or send on to rwang0 at gmail dot com or r at softwaresinsider dot org and we’ll keep your anonymity.

Related Links And Resources

Here’s a list of resources.  They will be added on an ongoing basis and updated as appropriate.

Official SAP Press Release

• 20100208 Wall Street Journal – Vanessa Furhmans ” SAP Chief Quits; Co-CEOs step in”
• 20100208 Associated Press – Matt Moore “Shares slip on CEO’s ouster; questions”
• 20100208 Computerworld UK – Elizabeth Heichler and Mike Simons “SAP CEO Leaves”
• 20100208 LeMag IT – Reynald Fléchaux “SAP : Apotheker évincé, Plattner place la jeune garde sous surveillance”
• 20100208 Wall Street Journal: All things digital – John Paczkowski “SAP Board to CEO: Auf Wiedersehen, Sweetheart”
• 20100208 IDG News Service -  Joab Jackson and Chris Kanaracus “SAP Hits Reset Button With CEO Change”
• 20100208 ComputerWeekly – Warwick Ashford “SAP moves to restore customer and employee trust”
• 20100208 Information Age – Pete Swabey “SAP CEO Steps Down”
• 20100207 Wall Street Journal – Archibald Preuschat “SAP Returns to Co-Ceo Leadership, Apotheker resigns”
• 20100207 Information Week – Doug Henschen “SAP CEO Apotheker Resigns; Co-CEO’s Named”
• 20100207 Managing Automation – David Brossell “SAP CEO Resigns Suddenly”
• 20100207 ZDNet Irregular Enterprise – Dennis Howlett “SAP: Apotheker gone, Co-CEO’s in place”

Copyright © 2010 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC. All rights reserved.

(Cross posted from A Software Insider’s Point of View)

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

After we heard from Gurbaksh Chahal, the rest of DemoCamp proceeded as usual. We were in the Ted Rogers School of Management, part of Ryerson University, in a really great lecture hall space that seats a few hundred people; it seemed like most of the seats were filled that night.

First up was Albert Lai of Kontagent. Albert demoed at the first DemoCamp and has appeared at at least one other. He seems to get a bit of a pass from the organizers: this time, as with the last time that I saw him, he had no actual demo – which is typically a requirement – but a lot of slides talking about social games.

After that, it was mostly Facebook night at DemoCamp: four of the five demos that followed were Facebook applications.

Next up was Mark Zohar of Scenecaster, showing the My 3D Cards application on Facebook. It uses the 3D foundation that they’ve built for enterprise projects, and used it to to take Facebook content and other rich content (video, photos, external links) to create a 3D rich media greeting card, displayed in a 3D application running in the browser using a custom Flash viewer. The idea was to show an immersive, engaging presentation of content for a specific purpose. The second app that he showed was Causes, which creates 3D content posted to your Facebook wall related to charitable causes. For causes such as Red Cross and WWF, it shows an “I donated” card with your picture, links to video about the cause, and a link to the donation site. They’re also working on an app for virtual gifts, using animated 3D, supporting multimedia and user-triggered animation; in the future, they’ll be looking at branded virtual gifts, too. In addition to their own apps, they’re syndicating their apps to other developers for other vertical applications; the first of these being developed is a 3D yearbook. These will be premium offerings, directly monetized within Facebook. They have a team of 5-6 dedicated people, using AWS, EC2 and S3 cloud-based content, composited at the client.

The demo that gave me this post’s title was by Greg Thomson of Tall Tree Games, showing their Fish World Facebook app: you can buy, raise and feed fish in a tank. (The friend I was there with turned to me and said “hey, my son plays with that!”) The focus of the demo was on monetization, a key subject for Facebook app developers: in this case, tanks are monetized through a variety of purchases, including fish, themes (including seasonal and holiday themes), plants, music and food. It uses two currencies: Facebook internal “coins” and fishbucks, which are actual purchased currency, at 5 fishbucks per $1. They find that they need to release new content a couple of times per week in order to maximize consumption; this is often done by creating a need (e.g., tank gathers algae, friends can steal fish), then selling a solution (e.g., algae-eater, security fish). They’re using analytics for targeting specific audiences, and in spite of my friend’s comment about how her son (who is under 10) plays with this, Thomson said that their primary demographic (75%) is women 20-35 years old. Huh?

Greg Balajewicz of Realm of Empires was up next, showing their massively multiplayer online strategy game on Facebook: you start with a village, build it up, recruit troops and so on. Everyone in the game is an actual person, with the game ongoing 24×7, and you can collaborate with others to plan battles and other campaigns. They have about 80k monthly active people in the game, 20k active daily, and although the game is free, they monetize with premium features that save you time in the game (e.g., a larger map view), but don’t explicitly advance your position in the game. They also have a standalone app, currently not monetized although they might offer a premium feature like this within the game, that allows any player to get a world view of all villages. They’ve done this with a small team and the three founders, with most people working remotely from each other and communicating using Skype. The game is targeted at men aged 25+; it can be played effectively in as little as 15 minutes per day. About 60% of their current players are in the US, 30% in other western countries, and a significant southeast Asia population at 7%.

Oz Solomon of Social Gaming Studios showed us their two seasonal apps: My Year in Status, and My Year in Photos. My Year in Status allows you to capture your year through your status: select a style, add a caption, and it generates a (text) collage of your status updates from 2009; you can customize and publish it to your news feed. My Year in Photos picks 16 photos from your 2009  photos (you can choose others if desired), then generates a photo collage for your news feed and photo album. Unlike the other apps, which are looking for steadier, constant growth, the seasonal apps had to spring into action for only a short period over the year end. They had 11M people use the app in a three-week period, with over 45 collages generated every second; it was the 3rd fastest-growing Facebook app for the week of Dec 21st after being covered by the mainstream media. About 80% of the users are women. They started work on the app on November 13th, launched it four weeks later, then had to do three server upgrades in a week to keep it up and running: they are using their own dedicated servers rather than cloud infrastructure. They found that seasonal apps are good for capturing viral streaks, but it’s best to build them on frameworks and code that you’ve developed for stable apps (such as their existing Status Shuffle app) in order to allow for fast development. Also, you can typically reuse these apps the following year, with some minimal-cost tweaking to keep them fresh. One interesting thing that he pointed out is that for the My Year in Status app, they fixed their #1 complaint, which was the lack of ability to choose which statuses were used, and found that although it reduced complaints by 80%, it only increased conversion rates by 2%: keep in mind that your most vocal detractors may not be that important to your bottom line.

Last up was Roy Pereira of ShinyAds.com, with the only non-Facebook app of the night. ShinyAds is a self-service advertising platform for web publishers that passes through more of the ad revenue to the publisher than other ad platforms such as Google AdSense. It’s not an ad network, but a tool for the web publishers to interact directly with advertisers. Advertisers can create their own advertising banner using a wizard-like interface: add or create a banner image, set the ad budget, set the click-through destination URL, set start and end dates, and target by geography. Once the ad is approved by the publisher, it’s inserted into the publisher’s ad server, or can use the ShinyAds ad server. Payments are made automatically to the publisher based on actual metrics, with the publisher interface includes a view of metrics and analytics.

All in all, a great DemoCamp, and the venue was excellent. I had stopped attending after a few disastrous nights in too-small venues (usually pubs) with crappy AV and wifi, but this has me back as a convert.

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

(Cross-posted @ Column 2)

Are SaaS products starting to hurt On-Premise vendor revenues?

Thursday, NetSuite announced its fourth quarter earnings. In recent weeks, we’ve seen Oracle and SAP do likewise. What we all should be watching are:

- signs that traditional on-premise ERP revenues are softening or declining
- signs that SaaS (software as a service) ERP providers are gaining
- customer defections from on-premise to SaaS

Here’s what I’ve observed.

- Three things caught my attention re: NetSuite. First, total revenue for the year and for Q4 were up. Annual revenue was up 9% (approx. $167 million) and Q4 revenues were at a record $43 million. Second, the company posted increased sales in spite of the downward sales trend of some on-premise vendors. Third, they announced that RedBuilt, a SAP R/3 user, has dropped SAP to run on NetSuite’s application software.

- SAP’s 2009 numbers are interesting, to say the least. Software revenues are down 27% year over year. These are down about 1 billion Euros. Support revenue, the largest source of SAP revenue, is up about 11% (or approx. 500 million Euros). Subscription revenues, the kind one gets from SaaS or leased applications were also up but on small base. These were up 16% (approx. 48 million Euros). See slide seven of this SAP earnings presentation for more.

- Oracle’s numbers fall somewhere in between. Oracle breaks out new sales from in-fill sales. The former revenue numbers are down while the latter are up (see graphic below – data provided by Oracle).

On-premise vendors may see some growth in sales but shouldn’t we ask why? SAP admits that sales of Business Object products are doing very well today. Oracle’s in-fill sales are doing alright, too. Does this mean that real revenue growth is coming from cross-selling acquired products or that existing customers only need a couple of add-on products?

The affect of acquisitions is something that makes ERP market forecasts tough. Oracle, SAP and even NetSuite have made acquisitions. Oracle is far and away the leader in the sheer number of deals done (e.g., Sun MicroSystems, Hyperion, IRI, Datalogix, PeopleSoft and many more). SAP has made fewer, usually smaller, deals. NetSuite has acquired both OpenAir and QuickArrow.

Real growth of the core ERP applications (e.g., Accounting, HR) does appear to be in decline for the on-premise vendors and replacement SaaS revenues in these firms do not appear to be making up the slack. Yes, SAP saw new product sales increase in its last quarter but maybe all of the prior sales declines may not be solely the fault of the economy.

In research I’ve been doing the last few weeks, I’ve spoken with CIOs and key executives at many large firms. These people are buying SaaS applications from firms like Workday and Salesforce.com . They’re not buying on-premise products. One executive told me how he even had a license for an on-premise application from SAP but Workday’s SaaS application had a far less expensive five-year TCO. SaaS vendors need more complete offerings to really hurt the on-premise providers but they are using their platform technologies to create all new apps quite quickly.

This market appears to be moving and we’ll need to watch more earnings results and sales announcements to see the trends unfold.

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

Read the complete article @ Software & Services Safari

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

Read the complete post @ deal architect

I read the Financial Times most days. Over the last 18 months or so the news has been mostly bad, so I have to say today’s tech digest made for very pleasant reading. You don’t need a sophisticated sentiment analysis engine to see a trend here….

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

(Cross-posted @ James Governor's Monkchips)

With its latest quarterly earnings announcement from last week, Ariba appears to be on a roll. While I plan to examine some of the details from the call and the earnings report in more detail next week along with the yearly and quarterly performance of other providers (the Capgemini/IBX news from this week took priority on Spend Matters), I thought I’d put on my contrarian hat this Friday and offer up a few thoughts on what could still hold Ariba back from building additional momentum. Now, don’t get me wrong; Ariba put on a good show with its numbers, and much of the trending was headed in the right direction. But any time I see the general market latch on to a binary (i.e., good/bad) view of a provider, I feel it’s worth taking the subject off the pedestal and offering a more balanced viewpoint. So just as I defended Ariba’s strengths when its earnings reports and forecasts did not delight investors, I’ll offer for consideration a few points on areas in which Ariba still needs to focus to take its performance to the next level.

First, Ariba still needs to fully nail the SaaS P2P integration story for larger customers with complex, heterogeneous environments. If Ariba won’t eventually punt all of its P2P business in in the $7.5+ billion customer range to Oracle and SAP, it’s got to nail enterprise SaaS, including, most important, complicated systems and process integration. CD upgrades for legacy customers are a good interim step, but there will be no reason for large customers to stay on Ariba P2P relative to SAP and Oracle if Ariba doesn’t develop a proven core competence and market reputation around enterprise SaaS. The network and associated services may prove essential as part of the value proposition for enterprise SaaS — especially since Ariba has been largely unsuccessfully at selling its network and connectivity services into ERP P2P environments — but the most critical element for this will clearly stem from integration and configuration proof points that companies can run a large, highly complicated, global purchasing environment with an even nastier looking back-end in a SaaS model.

Second, Ariba’s pricing needs to remain as competitive as it has been over the past twelve months (and especially the past few quarters)…

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

Read the complete article @ SpendMatters

Phil Pavitt, CIO for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), the UK tax department, recently spoke out against huge IT projects. Some of his comments are extraordinary.

Pavitt had choice words to describe the UK tax authority’s £9.75bn ($15.3 billion) ASPIRE project being run by Capgemini. Here are his comments, as reported in Silicon.com:

There have been cases of HMRC’s internal IT team taking on work that should have been carried out by the outsourcer, resulting in the department “paying twice” to get the job done, the HMRC CIO said.

“We have a complication where the role of who does what after a number of years of being outsourced is complex and it does blur,” Pavitt told the GovNet Government IT 2010 conference last week.

“It’s time as an industry, and with my partners it is time as an outsourcer, that we began to reduce dramatically those programmes to sizes that can be understood, swallowed and delivered,” he added.

Pavitt subscribes to the belief that no IT outsourcing contract should be larger than £100m.

“£100m is never £100m – in an £100m programme people forget why they started and the people responsible at the outset are rarely there at the end,” he said.

Pavitt goes on to describe the bizarre incentives that push toward higher, and likely wasteful, IT spending (emphasis added):

However, cost-cutting does not always bring rewards for a CIO: according to Pavitt, Whitehall doctrine specifies it is the IT chiefs who spend the most in Westminster that set IT policy for the whole of government.

“In my first few weeks of the job I was visited by leading members of the Cabinet Office,” he said.

“In that conversation with me they mentioned I am in the top purchasing club… That means you have tremendous influence on buying power, buying ideas and management and so on.

“I said ‘If I reduce costs by 50 per cent what happens?’, ‘Well, you leave the club,’ I was told.

“So here I am relieved of my ability to influence government’s ability to purchase if I am clever and do my job. It’s one of the most perverse things that I’ve heard.

“We don’t have a ‘demonstrable reduction of cost club’, we have a ’sheer size of spend club’. Surely this is the wrong way round.

When Redmonk analyst, James Governor, alerted me to this story, he said, “I think you’ll find your post for today just wrote itself.” Well, James was right.

What do you think about huge projects and the impact on IT services?

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

(Cross-posted @ IT Project Failures)

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

Read the complete article @ Dion Hinchcliffe's Next-Generation Enterprises

Great post by one of my favorite economists, Uwe Reinhardt, in the New York Times’ Economix blog:

They would be stunned not only by the sheer length of the invoice and the total amount billed, but also because so many line items would be expressed in either Latin or Greek and thus be completely incomprehensible to most parents. Upon requesting a fee schedule from the dean of the college, the latter would patiently explain that different prices had been negotiated with different parents and that all of those fees are proprietary information.

Read the whole thing. So true.

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

(Cross-posted @ The 40-Year-Old Freshman)

I’m an IT guy. I love my (Mac) computer. Most other IT people I know love their computers too, be they Mac, Windows or *nix based. Of course you would when you are typically working on them 8+ hours per day.

We take pride in our computers – how fast they are, the latest software/widget we installed, etc.

One boast I hear regularly, is how long it is since their last re-start. This can be a measure of just how stable the operating system is – if it hasn’t crashed or needed a re-start in weeks/months then it must be really stable! This is an way-of-thinking which needs to change, quickly.

The problem with this, of course, is that it means people are not shutting down their computers and are therefore needlessly consuming electricity (using more energy and emitting more CO2).

Power strip with switch

Modern browsers remember all the windows/tabs you have open when you quit them so there can be no reason for not shutting down your computer every evening.

Shutting down, mind you, not simply putting it to sleep.

And not just the computer either, the monitor (if you have an external one), the printer, external drive, etc. – all the peripherals.

Having all your devices plugged into a power strip with a switch allows the power to be cut to all of them in one easy go.

The badge of pride now should be how long it has been since you left the computer on overnight – obviously longer = better!

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

(Cross-posted @ GreenMonk: the blog)

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

Read the complete post @ deal architect

Capgemini’s recently announced acquisition of IBX got me thinking this week about what it will take for procurement outsourcing to go mainstream. Fortunately, the timing of my analysis (not to mention the deal timing) could not have been better, as it coincided with a last-minute visit from an expert on the subject who happened to be in Chicago the day following the acquisition. I had the distinct pleasure of catching up this week over some firewater with my old friend and colleague, Phil Fersht, of Horses for Sources fame (or would that be offshore infamy?) Phil knows more about trends in the overall outsourcing market than just about anyone I know, and he’s got some fairly strong — even survey-informed — views when it comes to procurement outsourcing specifically. In a recent post on his blog, Phil spilled the BPO beans on some survey data that sheds some insight on procurement outsourcing.

In his new study, Seeking the New Normal in Outsourcing Delivery, Phil managed to get 1,055 outsourcing executives across customers/service providers and advisors to share their views on outsourcing and their intentions for 2010. In this rant, I’ll share some of what he found, and offer up my own perspective on the situation. In Part 2, next week, I’ll offer a no-holds-barred prescription for curing what holds back procurement BPO today (and how providers are just as guilty as companies when it comes to getting the sourcing/purchasing/payables outsourcing equation right)…

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

Read the complete article @ SpendMatters

Here is this week’s Friday Green numbers round-up:

• Scant Arctic ice could mean summer double whammy | Reuters

  Scant ice over the Arctic Sea this winter could mean a “double whammy” of powerful ice-melt next summer

  tags: greennumbers, arctic sea ice, arctic ice, ice melt

• Tibet temperatures hit record high in 2009 | Reuters

  Temperatures in Tibet rose last year to the highest level since records began for the remote Himalayan country, which scientists say is particularly vulnerable to global warming, state media reported on Friday.

  tags: greennumbers, tibet, himalayas, global warming, temperatures

• 10 Animals on the brink of extinction

  The 10 animals that are in the most danger of extinction – surprisingly high number are cats

  tags: extinction, greennumbers, animals

• Shackleton whisky recovered after 100 years in polar ice

  “Five crates of whisky and brandy belonging to polar explorer Ernest Shackleton have been recovered after being buried for more than 100 years under the Antarctic ice, explorers said Friday.

  The spirits were excavated from beneath Shackleton’s Antarctic hut which was built in 1908.”

  tags: whisky, brandy, greennumbers, antarctic, shackleton

• 25 Percent of U.S. Nuclear Power Plants Are Leaking Radioactive Chemicals : TreeHugger

  The Associated Press recently reported that at least 27 of 104 nuclear reactors across the United States are leaking potentially dangerous levels of tritium into the groundwater around the plants.

  The scope of the problem surfaced after the recent discovery of a leak at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. According to the AP, new tests have shown that the levels of tritium in the wells at the Vernon, Vermont site are more than three-and-a-half times the federal safety standard.

  tags: nuclear power, tritium, greennumbers, nuclear reactors, groundwater

• China doubles wind power in 1 year – BusinessWeek

  China doubled the amount of energy generated from windmills last year, a report from the global wind industry said Wednesday.

  The Global Wind Energy Council said the sector grew rapidly last year — with total wind capacity up 31 percent — despite the economic downturn.

  The market for new wind turbines was worth $63 billion in 2009, it said.

  China became the biggest market for new wind turbines last year, as it doubled power capacity from 12 gigawatts to 25 gigawatts

  tags: china, Global Wind Energy Council, greennumbers, wind energy, wind power

• Obama Seeks to Cut $38 Billion Coal & Oil Subsidies Out of Budget : TreeHugger

  “We’ve heard this one before; Obama threatening to sever subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. He called for ending the subsidies during his SOTU, and was doing so even before that. Now, he’s proposing that $36 billion worth of those subsidies for oil and $2.3 billion for coal (both get $70 billion a year in total) get stripped from the budget–which would be great. Too bad special interests will almost certainly keep this from happening.

  tags: obama, subsidies, coal subsidies, greennumbers, oil subsidies, lobbyists

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

(Cross-posted @ GreenMonk: the blog)

As the Startup Visa initiative continues to pick up momentum, we are now collecting stories from immigrants who have either started or tried to start their company in the US.  We are interested in any aspect of your story and – while we’d like to be able to have your contact info – recognize that some people will want their story to be anonymous (which is ok with us.)

We’re looking to collect as many stories as we can by February 27th (11pm) so that we’ll be able to put them together in an appropriate format for the Geeks on a Plane trip to DC on 3/4/10 – 3/6/10 which will include a delegation of folks (including me) talking about the Startup Visa.

If you have a Startup Visa story about your immigration challenges to tell, please help us out!

Related articles by Zemanta

• The USA Debate a Visa For Start-up Entrepreneurs (thenextwomen.com)
• Opening Door to Foreign Entrepreneurs (online.wsj.com)
• Immigration policy for recent grad school grads (sethlevine.com)
• Supporting A Movement Towards A Founder’s Visa (techdirt.com)

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

(Cross-posted @ Feld Thoughts)

Chart courtesy of Seeking Alpha

During the recession, we all started minding our spend — companies, nonprofits, families and individuals included (governments, of course, got a pass). Of course, if you’re a family or individual lucky enough to be gainfully employed, and you cut back your consumption, the result almost certainly leads to increased savings (or at least debt repayment). I found the chart that consultant Edward Harrison recently shared on Seeking Alpha to be a great reminder of the power of recession to put us into savings mode. Looking at historical U.S. savings levels from 1947 onward, what’s most interesting is that until 1995 the quarterly savings rate (based on a rolling 4-quarter average) was awlays above 6%. In the ’70s and early ’80s, saving peaked at nearly 12% during the inflationary cycle, only to begin to fall off a cliff in 1982.

But after 1995 (and specifically after 2001), the U.S. savings rate plummeted to less than 2% at various points…

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Real GDP Story: Forget That V-Shaped Recovery (seekingalpha.com)
• Savings Rate Increases: Americans Saving More In Weak Economy (huffingtonpost.com)
• Personal Income, Savings Rise (benzinga.com)

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

Read the complete article @ SpendMatters

Warning: some people may find this video offensive. Please watch the whole thing before passing judgment.

Bloggers, analysts, journalists, and other influencers are an important component of the enterprise software ecosystem. Vendors seek high ratings from analysts and influencers because many buyers use reports to inform large purchasing decisions.

The video embedded below brilliantly captures, and simultaneously mocks, the power and influence of industry analysts and their effect on enterprise vendors. Although the video specifically targets Gartner, the largest enterprise analyst firm, it offers deeper lessons applicable across the spectrum of industry influencers.

Jonny Bentwood, who works in Analyst Relations (AR) for public relations giant, Edelman, assembled this great piece of enterprise comedy. Jonny’s Technobabble 2.0 blog is a great source of information about the changing world of analysts.

As an aside, I’m proud to be number six on the Technobabble 2.0 list of analysts who write blogs.

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

(Cross-posted @ IT Project Failures)

I know I sound like a broken record going on and on about OmniGraphSketcher, but it really is an essential tool for econ students. At least ones who refuse to turn in hand-written homework.

But I thought I’d mention the other Omni app that helps me remain King of Nerd Mountain: OmniOutliner.

I take notes (admittedly handwritten) during class and then organize them into an outline using this awesome app. It does all the normally outliney stuff, which makes it great for organizing hierarchical information. And come test time, I just bust out the One Outline to Rule Them All and kick some ass.

So, thanks, Omni.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Omni Group bringing the Omni apps to the iPad (tuaw.com)
• Five Best Outlining Tools [Hive Five] (lifehacker.com)
• Review: OmniOutliner Professional 3.9.1 (macworld.com)

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

(Cross-posted @ The 40-Year-Old Freshman)

Stephen did his usual excellent job of explaining the the VMware Zimbra acquisition with a Q&A. Seriously – read the analysis. I already fed some of my thoughts into his post, but there are a couple of other things I wanted to mention.

Zimbra’s awesomesauce

Zimbra remains probably the single best implementation I have seen of real plasticity in a GUI, where information pops in context, without needing to move to a new screen or click through. Addresses turn into Google Maps, or sit up and beg to become Contacts. Zimbra was designed to be a plastic front end – not just for email, but any kind of back end web service.

RedMonk actually ran on Zimbra for collaboration for a while but the performance of the system was disappointing. This was because of the third party host we were using, rather than the Zimbra architecture itself. I know for example that Headshift ran its own server, and it was blazing fast. Another reason performance may have disappointed was that this was before the browser performance war really started heating up, driven by competition from the awesomely speedy Chrome browser.

On Premise Good?

As I just mentioned, Zimbra was never designed for cloud only deployment- on the contrary it can work just fine as an on premise open source email, messaging and collaboration server. Oh yeah- works well with Outlook too! Yahoo never seems to have decided one way or another what to do with its acquisition. VMWare has a much clearer view: Zimbra will fit neatly into a hybrid cloud play, potentially with an associated storage play for parent company of the parent company EMC.

Channels

Just before the VMware deal was announced I met a UK Zimbra reseller called In-Tuition. I was pretty skeptical about making a play to compete with Microsoft Exchange with a piece of software owned by Yahoo, which is not exactly renowned for its enterprise chops.  But they must have known something we all didn’t…

Suffice to say Zimbra is and always was designed for enterprise class deployments. Its very much a business tool.

Summing Up

The collaboration market is in play again – customers are fundamentally reassessing strategies defined in the 1990s. Lotus is back. Google is making headway. Microsoft is not going to give up without a fight. And now VMware has a play. Different buyers? Perhaps. But the same people that make virtualisation decisions also make Microsoft infrastructure decisions. VMware CEO Paul Maritz wanted a pushback if customers decided to can VMware in favour of Windows Virtual Services. Now it seems he has one.

I am looking forward to seeing what happens when Zimbra meets SpringSource (another recent VMware acquisition): That could be back end to front end goodness, and a growing set of Java APIs for VMware to steward and grow a community around.

For an enterprise looking for a mail server – Zimbra can definitely do a solid job. But its where it goes from there that’s more interesting. Java and Javascript is increasingly common as a skillset and programming approach. Zimbra was architected to the pattern.

As I said in a recent post

Products like IBM WebSphere Portal and SAP Netweaver Portal were supposed to bring much improved user interaction models to enterprise IT, but unfortunately traditional systems-focused IT departments, rather than user interaction specialists and their web brethren, did the work. People like Josh Porter generally weren’t invited to the party. Portals were built to support IT systems and data, rather than users

Its not just email that’s up for grabs. The 1990s portal is also looking tired. I wouldn’t be surprised to see VMware make a plasticity play.

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

(Cross-posted @ James Governor's Monkchips)

I spent some time this morning working with SAP’s new 12Sprints collaboration service, which was announced earlier this week. Available free in open beta immediately, it’s a cloud-based service that’s a cross between Basecamp and Google Wave and is ostensibly designed for team collaboration.

Not incidentally, 12Sprints is also clearly a social application and it includes viral invitation, extensive commenting and discussion capabilities, and interesting new twists on measuring community opinion such as real time consensus tracking.

Make no mistake, 12Sprints shows its SAP heritage and comes across as a sober-minded business tool, even if it’s not necessarily an enterprise-wide solution. It joins the ranks of a growing number of new next-generation enterprise collaboration efforts from major vendors that take social computing and Enterprise 2.0 seriously, including IBM’s new Project Vulcan, Google Wave, Salesforce Chatter, TIBCO’s Tibbr, and arguably Microsoft SharePoint 2010.

Not that 12Sprints is neither as large and complex as SharePoint nor a grand unified vision like Project Vulcan or Chatter. Instead it has a solid focus on on-the-ground collaborative decision making, group discussion, and project planning. It’s clear though that it can grow far beyond these functions with its open architecture and flexible structure and will likely do so as it matures.

12Sprint’s activities for social collaboration

The basis of operation for 12Sprints is the activity, which can be one of the following types below. An unlimited number of these can be engaged in at any time and a search function and various timelines are offered to make large amounts of activities manageable and navigable.

• Prioritization Activity. Create shared goals/objectives, rank them, and capture the final outcome
• Project Planning Activity. Define a timeline, project objectives and goals
• Decision Activity. Define a situation, set options, gather consensus, reach a final decision, obtain sign off
• Discussion Activity. Define a topic for discussion, build a threaded discussion, capture the results
• Meeting Activity. Arrange a meeting, record notes, capture decisions and action items, and define next steps
• Research Activity. Define a research topic, collect and share relevant artifacts
• Blank Activity. A freeform slate for collaborative activities.

It’s important to note that 12Sprints doesn’t try to be the best at everything, a fault that’s endemic to large enterprise application suites and which is wisely avoided here. It does however integrate with best-of-breed services where it makes sense, whether they’re from SAP or not. This includes WebEx, Evernote, and Scribd, with the first two custom-integrated and the latter as part of their extensions program. With extensions any developer can onboard their functionality to 12Sprints, which offers users an experience not dissimilar to an app store and makes it possible for anyone to enhance the platform.

Who will find 12Sprints compelling? Those who have traditional, non-collaborative desktop and communication tools. E-mail and instant messaging is an obvious competitor for many of the tasks that 12Sprints targets, while Microsoft Project, Web conferencing, and knowledge/document management tools are as well in terms of more directed and less open-ended apps…

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

Read the complete article @ Enterprise Web 2.0

Image credit: Cato Institute

Whether you’re an American or Chinese citizen — or a resident of just about any other country for that matter — chances are more than likely that your government represents far and away the largest spender within your borders. Of course, as private sector professionals, when we think of procurement and sourcing we often think of dropping savings to the bottom line (and meeting the aggressive targets our bosses set for us). But in government, the entire concept of savings is a bit more nebulous. After all, if you achieve cost reduction on purchased goods, the amount you’ve saved quite often disappears from your budget allocation the following year, and in government, the less you have to spend, the less power you have. Fortunately for those who represent us in Washington, Beijing, New Delhi, and just about every other capital, there’s still an awful lot of spending going on, even if certain budgets aren’t surviving at current levels from one year to the next, thanks to the few savings-focused government employees who think like us…

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

Read the complete article @ SpendMatters

Vivek Wadhwa has a strong article in BusinessWeek today titled Addressing the Dearth of Female Entrepreneurs. He makes the argument that “There are too few women running high-tech companies; that’s too bad, considering evidence shows female-led businesses outperform those run by men” and concludes “[I] hope that when I revisit this topic in subsequent years the percentage of women launching IT companies rivals the percentage of women going into law, medicine, and higher education. The outcome would benefit us all.”

Vivek worked with the National Center for Women & Information Technology – an organization that I’ve been chairman of for five years – to analyze data on the background and motivations of 549 successful entrepreneurs that he had previously published research on in the article Anatomy of an Entrepreneur: Family Background and Motivation. Only 8% of the sample was female and there were some very interesting conclusions from it that Vivek summarizes in his BusinessWeek article.

The fundamental assertion that Vivek makes – that the dearth of female entrepreneurs is a societal issue – is consistent with the ideas I’ve developed around this over the past five years of my involvement with NCWIT.  My assertion around the importance of this issue is simple – in the US we need more women involved in computer science, IT, and entrepreneurship to maintain our country’s long term leadership position in innovation.

When I sit in a room, like I did last night at the Colorado Open Angel Forum (which was spectacular), and see only one woman out of about 30 people, this issue is just reinforced.  It’s not that the event wasn’t open to women, or that we filtered against women, it was just that very few applied.  As we like to say at NCWIT, “it’s a pipeline issue.”  As a society and a country we’ve got to start working today to get more women into the pipeline for 20 years from now.

While there will always be people who say this is a gender equality issue (and come out either for or against this dynamic as a result), I think they are missing the real issue.  This is about innovation, competitiveness, and entrepreneurship. I’m glad Vivek highlights this issue and am especially proud of all the work that NCWIT is doing.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Is Workplace Advancement Gender Neutral? Men and Women Disagree (blogs.wsj.com)

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

(Cross-posted @ Feld Thoughts)

Those of you who have read the 4th edition of CRM at the Speed of Light know that I’ve taken Thomas Vander Wal’s brilliant “Social Stack” concept, and added “context” as a characteristic to it. I’m increasingly convinced that the idea of ”social characteristics” is somethingthat has to be considered when it comes to the future of enterprise software design.

(Source: Thomas Vander Wal)

The idea is simple. Beyond the mere features and functions of operational software – especially at the enterprise level, software now has to take into account the actions and relationships of individuals and networks. The software’s job would be to extract and then to some extent, mirror the characteristics of human behavior so that, as a business, you will have far greater insight into your individual customer’s behaviors and their behaviors as a member of a network that consists of other potential customers. What that means is that you have to be able to root out the relationships that customers have with other customers, prospects, other companies – and not only that they exist but the strength of those relationships. It also could mean for example, that the software will locate in real time where you are and what you’re doing and even who you’re with.  The earliest incarnations of the embedding of social characteristics has been the software that promotes collaboration, groups and sharing as activities among people.  These are social characteristics that are a layer that rests underneath features and functions of contemporary software – especially that identified as part of the world of Social CRM.

More recently, I’m seeing a new trend which seems to be emerging from a variety of vendors that fits nicely into the framework of social characteristics. That would be companies that are providing what I have to presume to be sophisticated algorithms to ferret out the influencers both in the B2C space and the B2B space that would be valuable to a company. I haven’t reviewed their applications but intend to. I’m not aware of any of the larger vendors doing this as of yet, though I don’t doubt its in some of their plans.  But their existence indicates that software providers are beginning to understand the value of the reproduction of human activity within the software.  This means that the software will increasingly mirror the actual way that people live and will provide the actual information that people want to know.  As opposed to a pure feature/function approach which basically does no more than manufacture automated processes – though, as Seinfeld said, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Thomas V. has a great definition that mirrors this in a recent post on his terrific blog Personal Infocloud.

“This often leads me to use social software, social tools, or social computing as a means to distinguish the tools that better map to how humans, in their life and work, need to interact with others.”

Here are some examples of companies that have one way or the other incorporated some social characteristic or characteristics in their applications.  As a caveat, I’m not reviewing these companies, I’m not judging the quality of these companies or their applications here. I’m just mentioning them as companies that are cognizant of incorporating what I’m calling social characteristics into their applications, whether they call it that or not. Needless to say, a lot of the social software vendors are doing some of that.  In fact, the entire “social” category is defined by the adaptation of social characteristics which are embedded in the way the software works. Here are some examples of companies that are aware of that integration – though I doubt the vendors are seeing it in these terms.

Reputation (Influence), Relationships – Bereleveant, Pursway (both of these are specific to identifying key influencers in social nodes)

Collaboration, Groups, Sharing – Socialtext, Oracle, SAP CRM 7.0, Jive, (these are more in the realm of “social business” with tentacles into the “Social CRM” world)

Groups, Sharing, Conversation – INgage Networks, Lithium, RightNow, Helpstream (this bunch are focused strongly around communities and social networks)

I’m thinking about this right now a lot. Social characteristics, while I don’t have the idea fully fleshed out yet, is something that I think is really important to the future of the technology industry and in particular CRM. At least I now know there’s a reason why I keep saying that CRM is the only science of business that attempts to reproduce an art of life – which of course is based on the value and values of human actions and interactions.

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

(Cross-posted @ PGreenblog)