deal architect

CIOInsight has an annual "value from IT vendor" survey where it polls IT execs about which vendors deliver business value, reliability and quality (and loyalty).

Here is the gallery of its the Top 40 vendors

The Top 5 - RSA Security, Google, Checkpoint, Cisco and Dell.

Microsoft, Oracle and SAP come in low at ranks 29, 33 and 34. AT&T and Verizon come in at 37 and 40. Of course, readers of this blog should not surprised by the low ranks - given the survey's emphasis on value for money.

On the New Florence blog

A social network of cars

Country, er Global, code 883

Nike's social network

Most promising technologies - MIT Technology Review

India over - and on - the moon

I must be in a generous mood having written a similarly titled note about Oracle earlier in week.

Two things I like about AT&T Wireless

a) you can retroactively go back to the beginning of the current billing cycle and tweak your plan. In reviewing our account on-line, I noticed one of my kids had run up a large number of text messages way above their plan limit. I called, fortunately a day before the billing cycle ended, and changed the plan to unlimited for a fraction of what the per message overage would have been. Of course, I don't plan to tell my kids they now have unlimited texting - next thing I know they will be Twitter addicts :)

b) AT&T has a concept of rollover minutes, where if you do not use all your voice minutes they roll them over for up to 12 months. Cingular, which AT&T acquired, pioneered it and AT&T has retained the feature. Helps smooth out the monthly bills.

They do not allow rollovers on business plans, but they allow pooling across groups of employees as a smoothing technique. And you have to watch AT&T - if you reduce the minutes in the plan you lose the rollover even though you had 'earned" them.

As with Oracle, the flaws are many - but credit where it is due.

No, not this toolbox which floated away from the astronaut.

AT&T discloses the iPhone is being groomed to become a modem you can tether (or not via Bluetooth) to your laptop. It has been a glaring weakness for the iPhone, and ironically a feature that Microsoft turned Apple-like and made very easy to use with its Internet Sharing in Windows Mobile 6.0. In the previous incarnation its DUN feature was dunning with its unfriendly scripts.

I use the feature occasionally on the road when I cannot access a hotspot. But is it worth $ 60 a month that AT&T expects for such tethering?

Maybe if you travel as much as that floating toolbox :)

I remember the title as the theme of our annual firm get-together when I was as a young PW consultant. We had a couple of major projects gone bad and the firm's leadership thought it wise to bring a more acute qa focus through out the firm. Back then we were all hunters AND farmers so the message sunk in pretty easily - badly designed sales were worse than no sales.

In today's world of segregated sales from delivery, stories such as those Mike Krigsman reports about IBM's issues in Texas are all too common, especially in multi-year outsourcing. The sales team disappears after the transition period of 3-4 months and re-appears a few years later when the contract renewal is up. In between, the delivery team uses duct tape, grit and heroism to keep the project afloat.

I still see the hunter-farmer blend in many small consulting firms. But it is a fading breed in larger services firms. And part of the reason their delivery quality has steadily slipped.

"EAL6+ High Robustness ... means that the government has put Integrity through the most rigorous hacking and security tests to determine if its strong enough to meet the needs of the most sophisticated and critical computer systems, such as those that support electrical grids, power plants and banking systems." ZDNet

In the meantime, we cannot make the Blackberry secure enough for the most powerful man in the world?

John Hagel, in his usual professorial manner, writes about "strategic cost reduction"

I have a simple, non-strategic, non-high falutin' addition to his list.

Assign an analyst to look at gross margins of your suppliers and target those with 60%+ higher than yours for re-negotiations.  Voila - bunches of software maintenance payments, international mobile roaming and other tech line items will float to the top.

Then target those with 40% and print supplies, outsourced storage and bunch of other tech items will show up

Target 20% above your own margins and you will be surprised that even so called low-cost offshore vendors generate that.

Give Pareto credit if you want for the savings.

Heard on Wall Street and Main Street

"This is worse than a divorce - I have lost half my net worth and I am still stuck with my spouse" :)

Whatever you may have thought of Joe the Plumber, to me he highlighted the fact that backbone of the US economy (and indeed most economies around the world) is the millions of our small businesses.

Each one of them needs accounting software, and Intuit and Peachtree and others traditionally sold to them via various retail channels. In the new world of SaaS, the web becomes the store front.

So, I was intrigued with a conversation with Jerry Jalaba, VP of Channels at Intacct - he told me about the successful hybrid model they have evolved. They have relationships with a number of accounting firms like LarsonAllen, one of the largest CPA firms in the US (and others like SS&G and Haney)

These firms leverage Intacct's accounting SaaS to offer services to a wide range of SMEs without needing to install software at each client, fedex a bunch of papers to clients and back - traditional ways in which accountants did business. When I started my career with PW, we did not even have Fedex:)

I was intrigued because Jerry came to Intacct from Postini (now part of Google) - where his channel was obviously web-centric. And here he heavily leverages a more traditional go to market channel to sell a web service.

BTW - I have a feeling Joe the Plumber is going to come up over and over again as tax debates rage on in the new administration. The accounting firms don't mind that focus on taxes :)

My friend Brian Sommer has a theory about employees - 5% of them cause 50% of heartache for their managers and supervisors. Spend too much time fretting about them and you lose focus on the employees you really want to groom and encourage.

The President-elect has a similar problem and if he is not careful he will similarly be mired in the camp of whiners. In different ways we can all help him make sure he spends a minimal amount of time on these whiners by slapping them for pouting and cutting in line again and again.

They come in many flavors and in different ways have already cried for his attention in the few days since the election:

Whiner world regions: As I have written before, the Middle East is one spoiled child. Constantly seeking attention. Focus on the winners - the dynamic Asian tigers, the fiercely pro-democracy new East European countries, Africa to balance the attention China has bestowed on that continent.

Whiner industries: Like clockwork automobiles, airlines, banks and local governments have a crisis every few years. And cost taxpayers and customers plenty. Obama should spend way more time on winner industries - from technology to health care which are making life better for people, helping our exports, and not tincupping.

Whiner issues from the right and the left - from religious conservatives to aggrieved minorities of every sort. We hear you, but there are mainstream issues which help all of us - including you - which deserve far more attention.

The President has a mandate for change. We all owe it to ourselves to make sure the whiners do not get too much of his attention.

On the innovation blog

"Wynnovation"

RIP - Michael Crichton

Can the Chevy Volt save GM?

Bucky - Carbon Nanotube - Paper

Wi-Fi Thermosat

"I'm going to repeat something that I've repeated before - this is NOT a company that I thought that I'd be liking or even without that, seeing as a leader in the CRM space because they understood what contemporary customers are looking for."

Paul Greenberg - who writes nice things about what Anthony Lye at his team have done around various Oracle CRM products.

In my day job, I hear very few positive things about Oracle as clients express dismay about lack of information about Fusion applications, are under budget pressure to negotiate its maintenance rates down or look at decommissioning strategies after years of headbutting with the vendor - but as Paul says, credit where it is due.

David Bank who used to cover enterprise software for the WSJ moved over a couple of years ago to an organization called Civic Ventures which is "reframing the debate about aging in America and redefining the second half of life as a source of social and individual renewal."

He recently showcased 17 winners of the “My Encore Moment” story contest - professionals who changed technology, health care and other careers to much more community oriented work.

Inspiring stories.

James Governor has an elegant, if too long, a list of "disqualifiers" for something to be called cloud computing. Now, others jump in and finesse that.

Here's a time honored tradition in technology: if it is faster, cheaper, better than a predecessor, a technology will be disruptive.

Cloud computing is faster - in provisioning time. Cut out of all the procurement, IT, delivery, set-up, certification delays so common today.

Cloud computing is cheaper - per unit of storage or processing and in making fixed costs variable.

Is it better?

I guess we will need multiple debates on multiple blogs to figure the last one out. The SaaS debate has raged for years - even though it has won the faster and cheaper battle - kept alive by on-premise vendors clinging to their model. I expect the Cloud debate will similarly have many outsourcers and old-school data center folks clinging to theirs.

Two dramatically different perspectives on China:

Scoble writes from his trip last week to China

"Americans are being fed only the negative stories about China and that is lulling them into complacency. The largest book store in the world is in Shenzhen. The largest city hall I’ve ever seen is here. The largest library I’ve ever been in is here. This is an increasingly educated workforce that’s just starting to get going."

But while it would have been heresy to even raise the issue during the Olympics when China could do nothing wrong, in light of the global turmoil in the last quarter Lisa Reisman at MetalMiner writes:

"But today we will share three articles which raise some doubt on China’s ability to sustain an economic super-cycle. "

Microsoft offers zero percent financing for 36 months on its Dynamics products.

What I want to see is the rebate schedule (in addition to the usual discounting so common in software)

And as is happening in the auto business, get clients the better financing AND the large rebate.

I hear complaints my Nokia 500 will not pair with an iPhone. I say it's just making its point that it is a stud.

I mean it commands GPS signals from 7, 8 or more satellites which the US military spends gazillions to maintain. It takes over access from my Tilt to the gazillion dollar AT&T network with its bluetooth capability. It overrides signals from gazillion dollar radio stations with its own FM transmitter to pipe calls or music to the car stereo.   In Europe it would also command a signal from the gazillion euro Traffic Message Channel (TMC). It would even reluctantly get off its perch and entertain your child with a gazillion dollar Hollywood production on its video and MP3 player.

So, if it wants to be a Taxi Driver, I say it can have its way. iPhone, go find your own ride.

On the innovation blog

"The Global Math Elite"

Technology and Election

Night Broadcasts It's raining user interfaces

John Chambers on Market Transitions and Collaborative Responses

Google's "Sustainable Computing"

As with this list the WSJ blog put together, there appears to be no shortage of candidates the Obama team has to sort through - for a position which may not even get created.

But the majority of proposed candidates come from vendor world. Personally, I think a Gary Reiner from GE or a Rob Carter from Fedex would make a much better candidate. They have shown years of experience keeping runaway IT projects in check, delivering appropriate innovation, keeping tech vendors in line - all that our government tech needs in spades.

BTW  - I hope the CTO is given a wide berth, cross-departmental access - so allowed to nudge the FCC when necessary to get telcos moving, make the TSA more electronic in its security, the DOE more green, take what NASA is innovating across departments etc.

Last time I blogged about John, it was a bit of a shock as he was leaving Oracle in a hurry - I would say its Fusion apps have still not recovered from his departure.

Now he shows up at SAP. Not exactly a shock since I caught up with him a few weeks ago and he told me he was talking to them - with his Oracle non-compete over with (so no IBM-Apple or Oracle-SAP TomorrowNow redux likely)

What's more interesting is the market segmentation his role suggests - he will run On-Demand Programs for Large Enterprises. Nothing to do with its SaaS offering - BusinessByDesign. And presumably make SAP much more comfortable with data centers and hosting.

I look forward to catching up with him once he settles in.

Whenever I talk to my friends at SAP about the legions of runaway implementation costs around their projects, they look hurt or defensive. It's "those darned systems integrators" or "those partners don't do anything illegal"

Lost in all that is customer empathy. The fact is its their customers who end up with the large bills and SAP should have taken the ecosystem bull by the horns a long time ago. (Or as I have previously referred to it as SAP's "egosystem" - there's almost pride in some SAP folks at the large budgets their projects call for)

Instead it may be getting worse.

Bill McDermott is quoted as saying "SAP also plans, in some ways, to get back to its roots in licensed software applications and distance itself from the hosted computing business, handing more of its hosting relationships over to business partners such as Accenture, AT&T, and British Telecom,"  and "It doesn't plan to run the data centers long-term for that SaaS product, either -- it wants its partners to do that job. "

Just a few months ago Peter Zencke and Henning Kagerman told several EIs it was important SAP controlled the whole delivery chain when it came to SaaS - at least in the beginning so they could learn how to fine-tune support and operations.

So why the quick turnaround?

Because according to Bill "The more hosting we do, the more it dilutes our margins. For [partners], it's perfect, because it's in line with the margin model they have."

I am sorry but that just sounds like abdication given the track record of many of its service partners. Even its so-called low-cost offshore partners have jumped on the band wagon and have premium rates because their consultants can "talk SAP".

The least SAP could do is recruit a new generation of cloud computing vendors like an amazon or a Rackspace. Or articulate how the old-school outsourcers will deliver the infrastructure services at less than $ 50 a user a month from the $ 149 it plans to charge for BBD (if you assume SAP wants a third for its license/maintenance and another third for the application/Basis support).

I was a bit skeptical when Marc Benioff answered my question at Dreamforce that he could manage with 3 data centers even after 3 years - given the rapid growth he and his Force partners are experiencing.

But, you know what, I admire his determination to finely optimize that part of his operation rather than just hand it off to a third party. And hope and pray. Or worse, continue to look hurt or defensive after over a decade of well-publicized issues with its service ecosystem.

Dean Bubley makes a good point about telcos who constantly brag about "telco-grade" and "5 nines" in their SLAs

"And it's amazing that many of the so-called "telco grade" mobile broadband networks have distinctly non-Internet grade DNS lookup capabilities. Loading a MySpace page with all its plug-ins might mean resolving 70+ IP addresses, and again, if you do it over mobile the critical factor isn't the operator's core network.

The bottom line is that vendors and operators continuing to use the "carrier grade" and QoS arguments are often missing the point, or are being disingenuous. Why over-invest in "quality" in one part of the network, when basic radio coverage, IP network internals, or customer service are the "weakest links" on your customers' overall perception of service reliability and performance?"

And he writes in London - if he was in rural England or US the term "telco-grade" would be even more laughable

Similarly, while outsourcers have some very demanding clients with 24x7x365 uptime SLAs, the majority of their contracts have plenty of evening and weekend downtime hours where their SLAs do not even apply. It is ironic that many outsourcers brag about "enterprise grade SLAs" and actually look down on Google and other SaaS availability as consumerish and amateurish.

Even though, as Dan Druker at Intacct points out many SaaS vendors offer SLA 2.0. In addition to much more demanding uptime and response time metrics required in multi-tenant world, Intacct also provides guarantees around:

• The quality and timeliness of their professional services engagements
• Proactive notification of system availability and roadmap changes
• Proactive communications with monthly product updates and quarterly roadmap updates

on New Florence

Facebook, SAP and college class scheduling

"The Paperless Paper"

The "Kindness" Lab

High-tech Haunted Houses

"7 Wacky Wi-Fi Gadgets"

When you "validate a market and then vacate it" - Phil Wainewight's words for SAP's delay around BusinessByDesign - you end up with some interesting "friends" in the vacuum

At Dreamforce last week, Marc Benioff of salesforce.com invited SAP to join Coda and others and dump its internal development and start using his Force platform.

Zach Nelson CEO of NetSuite, in turn says "We expect (SAP) are eager to help their customers reduce costs during this difficult economy...One sure way they could significantly lower the overall total cost of ownership for SAP R/3 customers would be to embrace NetSuite as a complementary, division-level solution within their installed base."

In the meantime, the poor product is actually starting to look good - see Dennis' recent analysis  - but is getting only lukewarm internal support from SAP. As David Terrar reported last month from the SAP TechEd event in Berlin:

"In this year’s keynote BusinessByDesign appeared on one architectural slide diagram at the end of Leo’s pitch, but wasn’t even mentioned in the words. In a subsequent press and blogger conference, when asked about the product, Leo gave a primarily political sounding answer saying as little as possible and referring the questioner to announcements earlier in the year, and that there was no change. If I was a Business ByDesign customer or partner, I would be pretty worried by the lack of comment in the current strategy vision or compared to previous events. "

As they say with friends like this, who needs enemies?

The electronic bill is dated October 18. The email notifying us is dated November 6. The due date is November 12 and the email contains an ominous "Please schedule your payment at least 3-4 days prior to your bill due date to allow time for processing and avoid late payment charges"

Not an aberration - the dates follow a similar pattern each month.

Why do I get the sneaky suspicion the Verizon postman who takes 19 days to deliver an electronic mail also has a revenue target?

It happens in IT staffing and systems integration markets. You are sold the A team, and gradually the A players get moved to other accounts.

It may also be happening in telcos.

I noticed a few weeks ago when someone was demoing using their Verizon broadband card and a message kept popping up suggesting a nearby Wi-Fi hotspot. It got irritating after the first few times as Verizon basically kept telling the user not so subtly "get off my 3G network. you will do better on Wi-Fi"

Then I read Om Malik write about why he thinks AT&T recently bought Wayport, the hotspot vendor.

"AT&T already requires iPhone users to use their Wi-Fi connection to download files from iTunes and prohibits bandwidth-intensive applications such as P2P sharing. Part of the reason for this is the limitations of its HSPA network. While fast, it isn’t designed to handle the continuous streams of data a song download or video upload requires. 3G is still designed for voice traffic, which is intermittent and much less bandwidth intensive. The network has a data overlay, but that, too, is designed for bursts of data rather than continuous streams. If too many people that require continuous streams of data get on, it clogs the network, leaving other subscribers unable to access it."

Of course, it does not stop AT&T from running all kinds of Bill Kurtis ads aimed at laptop customers and promising them the same 3G access.

Apparently, the Internet cannot hide, but the A players can :)

Can you imagine a private equity firm investing billions in a company and keeping incumbent management and running business-as-usual? So with seemingly every industry tincupping, should not taxpayers have much more influence?

So you say how in the heck could millions of taxpayers try to run AIG or GM?

Well, here's an idea.

"MyFootballClub has about 31,000 members/owners from all over the world (including the author of this article), all of whom pay an annual subscription of about $60 to be a member of the nonprofit trust that owns “the Fleet.”

The club is run on the principle of one person, one vote for every decision, major or minor. Ebbsfleet recently made headlines in the British press when members voted to sell John Akinde, a talented young striker, for about $250,000, the first vote of its kind."

"Less than one-third of the membership participates in the weekly votes, and most who do choose the option to let the coach do the dirty work."

Time has a gallery of the First Dogs who roamed the halls and the lawns of the White House.

My beagle, Peanuts thinks it's time for his breed - his playful and boisterous breed should be the antidote for the dreary economy. 

I told him the electoral college for that election is only 2 votes -  he better start a mail-in campaign to the Obama girls :)

Over the last few years, GE has done a masterful job selling at the head-of-state level to emerging economies - bundles of complex systems and projects covering power plants, aircraft engines, their maintenance and other large infrastructure items. It has helped generate tens of billions in export dollars.

Sounds like IBM is gearing up to do something similar in the technology market around the world. As the prime contractor on "smart infrastructure projects around the world, from a traffic management network in Stockholm to electric grids in Texas."

Clearly it has the resources and gravitas to compete for such large projects. But can it continually innovate its product lines, compete ruthlessly on cost where it needs to, adopt a quality and continuous improvement mindset (like GE has with its Six Sigma culture)? While I have confidence in its hardware and engineering disciplines and in its global sales organization, I am not convinced its software and outsourcing units - the bulk of the company today - can consistently compete or deliver at that level. So, it may end up becoming a general contractor with everyone else providing the bulk of the value. 

I hope I am wrong - because I would love to see IBM do well for our the sake of our trade balance.

SAP emulates Oracle's Applications Unlimited strategy and announces "Effective immediately, SAP is extending its maintenance offering to provide a total of nine years of support, delivering maintenance for SAP's latest offerings through 2017"

Hey, Rip enjoy your nice, long nap. Just allow us to direct debit your bank account for the annual maintenance bill. Plus some inflation of course. You know with labor and oil and taxes and all going up.

And we will gladly put the "Do not disturb" sign on the way out. Least we can do for you.

Michelle Slatalla at the NY Times describes her experience giving up her cell phone. What struck me was how incredulous the Verizon rep and the spokesperson for the wireless association CTIA were she would do THAT!

I was talking to Robert Scoble at lunch at the Dreamforce conference about mobile phone bills. Recession or not, he said their family mobile phone bill was not going down - particularly that of his tech savvy son. I told him I thought most of middle America would downgrade plans, curb teenage texting, ringtone downloads etc. As Michelle says, not anti-tech, just much more judicious questioning of what we need versus what we want.

Similarly, business telecom spend exceeds all software, IT services and hardware spend put together. I believe many businesses will move to a fixed monthly mobile allowance and tell employees to manage their cell bills to that allowance or they will outright quit paying for employee mobile bills. And negotiate harder for other telco spend - and waste - in the form of unused lines, duplicate and overpriced services.

Either we are going to see aggressive bundling and discounting in the telecom space, or the industry is going to have to deal with Michelle's logic "“I knew about oxygen, of course, and water. But I didn’t realize survival of the species was dependent on texting.”

Stephen Guth writes about software maintenance and uses the great analogy of inflation in tipping and in maintenance. I linked to his post from Frank Scavo who has been sniping at high maintenance fees as long as I have.

I also spent a delightful hour with Ray Wang of Forrester yesterday at the salesforce.com conference. No, we did not spend all of it on discussing maintenance. But he is headed to the SAP UK User conference next week to present his findings on customer perspectives on SAP maintenance. He will meet up with Dennis Howlett there who in his own way has been  questioning the value from maintenance spend.

What can I say - we are just cheap tippers :)

on the innovation blog

Aah...The Refurbished Car Smell

Diwali and Technology

Google Earth on iPhone

The Economist on Cloud Computing

"Entrepreneur Journeys"

Every few years I go to a tech campus or event where you can can just sense the optimism to well, change the world. I felt it at a SAP conference in mid 90s. I felt it at the Infosys campus earlier this decade. I got the same vibe from Dreamforce this week.

Charlie Bell of amazon Web Services ( a new partner salesforce introduced at the conference) called the event Woodstock. There was rock-n-roll (though Neil Young showed up with his new electric Linc Volt not his guitar).  There was plenty of love ( a "love continuum" is how a salesforce exec described how they treat their growing armies of partners). And there was mind-altering stuff ( 4+ hours of high-energy, high-entertainment Marc Benioff in his key note and then a press q&a).

But above all there was confidence. The confidence which comes from being able to promise new customer websites at a small fraction of provisioning time and cost incumbent vendors and IT deliver at. The confidence which comes from high-availability which blows away SLAs even large outsourcers provide to individual customers. The confidence which comes from having been hardened by hundreds of due diligence visits from some of the most sophisticated security and business continuity teams of its customers.

And plenty of of youthful exuberance. Marc saying his 3 data centers should do him fine for several more years even as he and his ecosystem try to replace applications and infrastructure at customers who have over 200,000 data centers of their own. Proudly introducing ISVs like Coda and Glovia as "native" as they used the Force.com platform to SaaS-ify their applications - even as the term "native" morphs as salesforce exposes its customers to amazon and other clouds, and social networks and developer communities like Facebook. Focus on these  innovations while customers were asking "when are we going to hear about the boring CRM stuff we paid for?"

But I nitpick.

As I left the conference this afternoon a street vendor at 4th and Howard was doing brisk business selling Obama t-shirts.  At prices higher than those for the nice Tommy Bahama shirts salesforce gifted the conference attendees:)

I have a feeling for the next few years, one of the few brisk business areas in tech will revolve around Marc.

Change is in the air.  Peace, dudes!

While Marc Benioff reeled off a series of new innovations - Force Sites, integration with Facebook and amazon web services, several ISVs who have used Force to re-platform their applications, for me sessions salesforce arranged with Polly Sumner and Bobby Napiltonia highlighted 2 innovations that deserve mention.

The first is the ecosystem of next-gen systems integrators salesforce has cultivated including Appirio, Astadia, Bluewolf and Model Metrics. They are dwarfed in resources - most only have 100-300 resources - by firms like Accenture and Deloitte who were also represented at the show. But their fees are also dwarfed - they offer much more reasonable software/services cost ratios through use of iterative development and offsite "virtualized" teams. They also offer more web savvy than the bigger firms.  The new Scients and Razorfishes. With one big difference - they don't make their revenues from dot.coms, but much bigger corporate customers of salesforce. And in a sea of corporate T-shirts, Bluewolf ladies stood out with their baby blue scarves, and their gents with their blue ties.

The second was how salesforce is moving into verticals. They are targeting ISVs in retail, healthcare and others that do not want to be acquired by Oracle and cannot compete effectively with SAP, and using product engineering firms like Symphony and Persistent to "SaaS-ify" their old architectures at surprisingly low investment. They are also using corporate customers to drag such vendors along. Dell, a big salesforce customer, nudged Glovia, which it uses as its ERP platform at a number of plants, to make the move. At the conference, salesforce.com had booths for verticals where its CRM products have had traction from financial services to media.

I have a feeling next year, these booths will showcase a much broader range of applications beyond CRM. And there will be many more verticals represented.

At Dreamforce, salesforce has bloggers in row 1 of Marc Benioff's key note.

Ahead of press and analysts:)

Bruce Richardson of AMR walked up from behind and I had to duck. I thought he was going to punch me for the weekend post about him. Nah, he is too nice a guy.

Other bloggers in row 1 are Robert Scoble, Dan Farber and fellow EIs, Phil Wainewright and Michael Krigsman.

So expect plenty of live blogging especially from the first two prolific bloggers

Michael Krigsman has more photos from the keynote

A few years ago, on a flight in India I did a back-of-the -envelope calculation and told my client traveling with me "If you could be like GE you could drop $ 1 billion to your bottom line each year". Every tech and BPO vendor we visited on that trip had a GE unit listed somewhere on its customer list or conference room. In India, in Mexico, in E. Europe, in China GE has done a masterful job working with waves of low-cost country outsourcers and captive units. And there was little angst about it - given how global GE business is and how much it exports, its tough to criticize GE about being "unpatriotic" about its global sourcing. The icing on the cake - GE took equity positions in many and added that payback to its cost savings. They were disciplined about it - unit CIOs had bonuses tied to specific metrics on usage of those low-cost providers. And I mean waves of such suppliers - the early ones included Infosys and Wipro which decided in the late 90s GE business was not profitable, but in a honest moment would acknowledge GE had validated them for a number of other customers and had disciplined their operations with its anal Six Sigma and other process excellence initiatives.

A few years from now, I have a feeling I will be telling some other client "If you could be like GE...you could drop a billion to your bottom line through aggressive use of SaaS and clouds".

At the Office 2.0 conference, Dr. Sukh Grewal presented on their SupportCentral initiative - and he later told me about the role GE saw for SaaS vendors like Zoho. GE also recently announced plans to use Aravo for a role in managing 500,000 suppliers.

Don't get me wrong - its SaaS and clouds are still at the edges. GE continues with several on-premise implementations around Siebel and Oracle. And Microsoft still dominates their desktop. But GE has shown it is not afraid to try out smaller vendors (and invest in them to get the upside if they take off) and has enough internal pulleys and levers to make sure its vast network of business units fall in alignment and adopt on a widespread basis when it makes business sense.

I once asked a Big 5 accounting firm alumnus at GE if his alma mater got invited to any of his services business. He gave me an incredulous look "My low-cost country options could fxxx up 5 times, and I would still be ahead"

If you are an incumbent tech vendor, that should be sobering. GE can shut the door as tight to its incumbents as it can open them to newer vendors. And what GE does gets discussed on airline napkins around the world.

Earlier in the year, I heard Tom Brokaw compare the 2008 election to the one in 1968. Tumultuous years both. Poetic as he was, this New York Times column this morning captured even better (without its traditional liberal bias) so many of the images and emotions of the long Presidential campaign.

"In the final hours, there's some sense in pausing, pulling back and taking the broad measure of a contest that's sure to affect this country's civic life but also its emotional and psychological landscape for some time to come"

On Tuesday there will be all kinds of tears, but look at the realities that have smacked us during this campaign:

• There's "The most famous black man in America isn't dribbling a ball or clutching a microphone"
• There's' McCain, who at 72, has shown everyone younger not to be intimidated by brutal, exhaustive journeys like the campaign was.
• There's "Come Tuesday will (Hillary supporters, women in particular) be haunted anew by what may have been?"  
• There's Sarah Palin, conservative as they come, proudly showing off her "pregnant, unwed, teenage daughter"
• There's Joe the Plumber who shows us much as we talk about Fortune and Forbes lists, the country's backbone is small business. Then there is the other face of Joe as we cling to the past and "why should I be taxed more?" in the face of the worst economic disaster since the Depression.
• There's continued talk about threats from Iran but in different ways we woke up this summer to the much bigger global ambitions of both Russia and China
• There's "the multicultural, post racial society so often discussed in the news media but so seldom affirmed in public life was now, literally, the face of our nation."

As I read the column on my flight this Sunday morning I teared up.  Embarrassed, I fumbled for the airline napkin. I also had tears when I heard Brokaw earlier in the year. Both times, they were tears of pride. Ugly and wasteful as the campaign has been, it is a reflection of that unique, evolving experiment that is America.

On this morning's flight, I also read about B.J. Hall who has been walking from California to Massachusetts over the last few months and has filled several notebooks with messages from people he met along the way. He plans to hand them to the next President - the sum of our hopes and fears.

And hopefully, the personal catharsis this process has brought each of us even if our choice does not win.

on the innovation blog

Google on Mobile Productivity

"Chilling in the sun"

The Digital Birth Certificate

Future Cities

Jetblue's new JFK Terminal 5

Scoble summarizes the many announcements from Microsoft's PDC last week and ends with

"You just saw Ray Ozzie turn the creaky old cruiseliner hard to port and damn, it is impressive."

The reader comments are a bit less glowing along the lines of:

"I see nothing here but vintage Microsoft: announce products that are months if not years from shipping but whose descriptions are still wet on the paper."

What do readers think?