May 9th, 2008
A conversation with Charles Phillips, president Oracle
This morning I participated in a round table conversation with Charles Phillips, president of Oracle, discussing his take on Enterprise 2.0 technologies and how they apply to Oracle’s view of the enterprise applications space. While there was nothing earth shatteringly new in what he said, some nuggets emerged.
Later this year, Oracle will be launching its Enterprise 2.0 salesforce with WebCenter at the heart of what it offers. Despite the cheesy name: “If you can come up with a better one then I’d like to hear from you”, he quipped, Phillips is putting ‘Enterprise 2.0′ style thinking at the heart of how Oracle not only sells but trains its ecosystem of partners. “Training all or a handful of partners on a small part of what we offer is very expensivewhen you take travel etc into account. We want to move to a more collaborative environment for online training”
I was particularly interested in four areas:
Q: How does Oracle see the difference between external facing customer groups and internal collaboration from an Oracle E2.0 products perspective?
A: We think the concepts are the same though there may be differences such as the need for strong security for the internal collaborative communities. So for us it is the same product but with different emphases.
Q: Given that Oracle is developing new communities and tool, do you see the external work that people like Eddie Awad is doing becoming folded into these new initiatives?
A: I don’t want to pre-announce anything but you can expect to see us deliver some exciting developments in this area.
Q: You seem to be spending a lot of time asking customers questions about their readiness for Enterprise 2.0 style applications. Is this informing product development?
A: There’s always a balance to be struck between what customers want and what we can validate putting into development. Right now there is a demand but we’re also getting people to think more about presence as the form of environment in which they operate.
Q: What are your thoughts on embedding E2.0 style applications into business process?
A: We think there are three components: tasks that can be automated, data and collaboration so we’re working on bringing those together. You might want for example to ask questions about expenses incurred, compare it with other similar expenses or see if the cost is within budget. Enterprise 2.0 applications would help in those circumstances but you can explode that idea out to many other business processes.
Contrary to popular perception, Phillips argued that sales people do wish to collaborate but he agreed they don’t necessarily want C-level oversight. Oracle is hoping it can address efficiency among sales led organizations through the addition of social tools that help sale people easily discover content they can use and re-use in their presentations. “There’s a series of tags people can apply. People can look at past patterns of use, who’s used a particular presentation, share it and so on,” he said.
To the more general point about skepticism among business leaders around the value of Enterprise 2.0 approaches, Phillips agreed there is a significant education process to go through. “All businesses should want to find new pockets of demand but we need to show them what can be done. When we get that opportunity, people love what they see.”
Those of us used to Oracle are accustomed to seeing its executives in ebullient mood. I detected that Phillips was offering a pragmatic view of the world, not declaring victory and recognizing the real world challenges of collaborative environments. That’s to be welcomed. Right now I see a surfeit of applications coming to the E2.0 space and sense that business is in a period of both learning and digestion.
Image by Dan Farber via Flickr
May 7th, 2008
Business ByDesign: the Irregular verdict
I’ve hung back on posting my thoughts on Business ByDesign for several reasons. When I wrote my pre-Sapphire08 conference story, it was clear this would dominate the Irregulars’ questions. I needed to get through meeting with all the key executives and view the latest iteration of the product to gain a clear understanding of the current position.
Larry Dignan, Brian Sommer, Bob Warfield and Vinnie Mirchandani each provide different and nuanced perspectives on the situation. Informally, Charlie Wood, Sandy Kemsley, Jevon MacDonald and Zoli Erdos each took positions.
The cognitive problem was one of teasing out the elements contributing to what appears to be a stepping back from what SAP calls ‘accelerated go to market.’ In reality what we’re seeing is a confluence of factors that demonstrate SAP’s cautious move into the market.
Today, SAP believes the economic impact of a race to grab market share would not be financially viable in terms of the likely negative impact on the next 4-6 quarters’ earnings. The main issue is SAP’s internal TCO requirements, something Bob believes needs to go further. Brian Sommer has signalled he will work up a rough financial model to figure the cash bleed rate but in the meantime it’s safe to say SAP is working hard to conserve and grow the general business bottom line and doesn’t want to unnecessarily upset institutional investors. It doesn’t feel it needs to bleed an extra $100 million on an as yet to be general released product. At least not now.
In talking with Peter Zencke the man who led BBD development along with the BBD direct marketing team, it is clear there is more work to do, for the markets SAP has chosen to initially address. There is for instance the need to include support for EDI. Time based resource billing for projects is another piece of functionality that’s required. Then there’s the question of integrating third party systems at the edge - something that was not in the immediate plans some six months ago - but which is very much in SAP’s mind today. Finally, there’s the UI question which James Governor and myself flagged up as in need of urgent attention. None of these issues is trivial and to its credit, SAP is responding directly to customer feedback.
However, when I saw the demonstration I couldn’t help but feel there is little reason why SAP should not pull the marketing trigger and get skin in the game before competitors occupy the vacuum. In the version I saw, BBD looks like a great product for upgrading Sage MAS 90, Intuit and low end Microsoft Dynamics customers. It ticks all the right boxes - including the ability to create UI mashups - and offers a smooth pathway for those willing to bend a little around business process.
But…I sense the invisible hand of God - aka Hasso Plattner - orchestrating development in a way that hinders rollout. The design effort has drawn from NetWeaver but is returning functionality back to the top end Business Suite. That’s all very well but slows the rate of BBD progress. That should not be read as a signal SAP is developing a cloud based solution for the much larger suite. It may come, but isn’t on the horizon.
Fundamentally, I detect the company is deeply concerned about ‘getting it right.’ SAP has a long history of advance notification and then delivering late or flawed product. There seems to be an overwhelming desire to reach some sort of development nirvana yet that’s a pointless exercise. On the basis of what I saw, BBD is ready to go. Performance may not be as good as SAP would like though I understand they have recently achieved the server round trip timings Plattner demanded. BBD may not contain all the bells and whistles some customers want. But it is far and away more comprehensive in functional scope and depth than anything else I have seen in the on-demand mid-market.
I have long felt SAP struggles to understand what it needs to do to build a mid market channel and even now that remains a challenge. It’s puzzling because that expertise can be found and rewarded. Given recent progress by NetSuite and today’s launch announcement by CODA, I can’t help but conclude that SAP is letting a market opportunity slip by.
May 6th, 2008
Diggnation for enterprise?
The cool kids in Silicon Valley think they have all the fun? Check this out: Diggnation for Enterprise featuring SAP’s Bill McDermott, Henning Kagermann and Leo Apotheker at SAPPHIRE08 in Orlando.
In contrast to Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht, this is an altogether more sober gathering. ;)
May 6th, 2008
SAP BPM - business fail?
On Sunday I sat through a day of SAP sponsored discussions around business process management as part of the company’s ramp up to Sapphire08. In and among the presentations, Ginger Gatling, SAP NetWeaver BPM product manager introduced the packed room to Galaxy - aka SAP’s NetWeaver Business Process Management environment. I was less than impressed, given that unless customers are ‘green field’ sites, then there is limited value to be derived from this offering compared to what is already on the table from SAP or from competitors Lombardi and others. This was a view subsequently confirmed by Sandy Kemsley who said:
My immediate impression is that in the near term, they’re creating a BPM platform that’s fairly loosely coupled (via web services) with core SAP applications, which doesn’t appear to provide any advantage over using a third-party BPMS with SAP applications; in fact, more mature BPM suites are likely to provide greater functionality. In the longer term, however, there will be much tighter integration of BPM and SAP core applications, moving to a common process model and platform: this will be a significant driver for the adoption of this product by existing SAP customers.
As companies’ IT infrastructures and systems mature, the need to orchestrate and manage business processes becomes a natural next step. This inevitably moves the discussion away from a pure IT play to one where the business - and not just business architects or process experts - have a major say in what happens. That conversation is barely (if ever) happening yet process bottlenecks represent one of the main sources of operational friction, especially in the supply chain.
While the notion of BPM as articulated is laudable, SAP NetWeaver BPM only addresses the issue of internal and what I call ‘peripheral’ supply chain efficiency. It’s a tidying up job.
Intel, which spoke at the day’s event painted a more interesting picture, pointing to a complex inward facing scenario map that discussed the assessment of process investment. Even so, I’d argue that solves a fraction of supply/value chain pain and may not be a long term optimal solution. There was for instance no immediate evidence of prediction market benchmark testing. I see this as adding huge value into the assessment equation and which can have the beneficial side effect of surfacing the true process experts, not just those tagged in the process maps.
Purists will argue that SAP NetWeaver BPM is addressing a clear and present need for a customer base that is 5 years behind my thinking. That’s fine. But from this vantage point it seems odd that a software vendor should put out a product that, according to one of its kinder critics, will not deliver serious hard dollar value through 2010 for many customers.
To its credit, SAP is positioning BPM as a way of integrating processes regardless of their origin. In other words, SAP has finally acknowledged that it doesn’t own the whole end to end process for most of its customers. Some of us have been saying this for years. Logically, TIBCO and IBM would not have viable BPM businesses if the monolithic myth was true. But sometimes an incumbent provider of core transaction process has to realize that for itself. SAP’s announcement is that recognition.
May 5th, 2008
The changing SAP culture
As Henning Kagermann, SAP’s co-CEO prepares for what will probably be his swansong keynote speech at SAPPHIRE 2008 and Leo Apotheker, CEO-in-waiting prepares for the transfer in power, still a year away, a group of the Enterprise Irregulars were able to contrast the different styles of these two industry leaders.
Henning Kagermann is the consummate business manager. Always careful in his choice of words, moderated in tone and often refreshingly honest. Leo Apotheker is the big ticket sales man. Confident, at times mischevious and almost always ebullient.
Both men said the transition is going smoothly, giving the consistent impression of a steady ship. This was interesting as the questions Charlie Wood put on behalf of the team came in separate sessions. Whether the two leaders were separately prepped is another matter but I doubt it would make a difference. Each is his own man. However, it is what lies beneath that really matters.
Already we’re seeing the hand of the sales and marketing professional guide direction. In our meeting with Apotheker, he made it clear the company needs to be accountable to the market. Business ByDesign (of which more later), has had $100 million shaved from what Kagermann described as ‘accelerated marketing spend.’ In the last but one earnings call, Apotheker talked about spending ‘not a penny more nor a penny less’ than is required to deliver results. The company is clearly looking to ramp margins and increase bottom line results.
I’m not sure whether these are good or bad signs for SAP. Under Kagermann’s stewardship, it has always portrayed itself as playing the long game. Under Apotheker’s leadership, I suspect that will change. When Apotheker said that he wants to see the company give customers what they want and be delighted in the process, Brian Sommer took that as code for price cutting to secure accelerated deal flow. If he can do this without cutting margins then he will have pulled off a great trick. But all that is in the future.
In the meantime, I sense a divide within the company. The people I know who are leading innovation out of Palo Alto have a different mindset to the more rigorous engineering focus customers have come to know and love. The company needs to get much closer to the business yet I was left wondering whether it has the DNA to turn itself into a ‘people’ business. Discussions with Kagermann around Enterprise 2.0 technologies for instance didn’t exactly fall on stony ground but were not met with enthusiasm either.
Any company going through change faces many challenges. SAP is addressing those with its customary emphasis on caution and attention to detail. In a fast moving world, that may not serve it well enough. But many of its customers will want to see a ’steady as she goes’ transition.
Quite how this all plays out has yet to be seen. The ride will be interesting.
May 2nd, 2008
Instrumenting social responsibility
As I’m sitting in an Orlando hotel idly flicking through RSS, I come across this guest post by Stacey Monk on Go Big Always. To cut a long story short:
After all, I’m the perhaps crazy person who, after a trip to Africa last year, left a really successful career in consulting to found a new nonprofit called Epic Change. I don’t go half way, ever. I go big…always.
In its short life, EpicChange has done amazing things:
- 8 months.
- 350 people mobilized. Nearly $40,000 raised.
- 1 Case Foundation award.
- 4 classrooms constructed & open.
- 200 smiling faces
This could not have come at a more appropriate time. I’ve just come off a trip to Boston where a group of NGOs, environmental activists, socially responsible investors, along with SAP, Microsoft, McAfee, Symantec and Adobe met to discuss sustainability, accountability and the relative importance of topics to stakeholder and business. It was a fascinating day that highlighted for me the potential to bring competitive advantage through pursuing sustainable IT. That is a topic to which I hope to return in future.
I am in Orlando for SAPPHIRE, SAP’s annual customer conference. Before the main conference, I will attend a special interest group day devoted to business process, sustainability and measurement. In part these topics will be related to corporate social responsibility. Like it or not, these are important issues and I am happy to be involved, albeit in a pro bono capacity.
Stacey needs help. She’s looking for volunteers in the following areas:
- Accountant/auditor: I’m not sure I can help directly but I can point to some software that might be useful
- Social media strategist: Jeremiah Owyang is always out there in the Twitterverse so, he’s been pinged.
- Social Networkers and Web 2.0 Fiends: We can start with Social Media Today. They have more than a 100 people who fancy themselves as Web 2.0 experts. Surely they can find a few people willing to lend a hand?
EpicChange needs a lot of other things. I’m wondering how the enterprise vendor community might respond. Jive Software has donated a Clearspace instance to help orchestrate Stacey’s work. That will make life a lot easier in not only creating the community around the project but also keeping people up to date while developing a sense of engagement.
I’ll re-post this to the SAP Community Network and see what they have to say. There are a lot of socially aware participants in that community. Some of my Oracle contacts might want to pick this up.
Why am I using these pages to pimp EpicChange? Stacey is using classic socializing techniques combined with her enterprise nouse to kick start this project. That’s innovative. Given my recent and current travels, there’s a certain serendipity in offering a little additional publicity at this time.
I’d like to think that is irregular enterprise responsibility in action.
Disclosure: SAP is covering my T&E for my current round of trips. I am a mentor and blog contributor to SCN.
April 30th, 2008
Why social software won’t dethrone the incumbents
It’s not often I find myself fundamentally disagreeing with Sam Lawrence. He’s a smart guy with a great marketing head. But on this post he’s over-reaching in my opinion. His basic argument says this:
The big IT vendors aren’t taking social software seriously. They can’t. Not even if they wanted to. They’re wedded to a massive install base and business model based on extremely profitable file-based applications. There’s no easy way out.
While it’s fashionable to beat the large vendors over the head with the latest shiny objects in our fashion led technology game, it is a foolish person who is prepared to bet against IBM, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft. The fact they have yet to establish infrastructures that allow them to credibly include the full gamut of social software (with the possible exception of IBM) doesn’t mean they won’t or can’t.
All the above vendors are looking closely at social software and endeavoring to figure out where and how these technologies can be sensibly used among their customers. This is where it is important to understand what those customer bases broadly look like:
- Lotus aside, IBM is not a packaged applications provider but a build to order with consulting thrown in.
- SAP’s traditional strengths lay in large scale manufacturing, petro-chemicals, oil and gas, automotive and pharmaceuticals, along with another 18-20 mostly manufacturing style industries.
- Oracle has strengths in retailing, government, financial services, healthcareand another 16 or so major, often services based industry groupings.
- Microsoft is a lot more broadly based, most often seen serving the needs of mid-market companies for which IBM, SAP and Oracle would be too complex and/or expensive.
These are broad generalizations but they should give a flavor of what these vendors are really offering. So are they doinganythingor is their DNA fused to a vision of the past?
Read the rest of this entry »
April 29th, 2008
EXCLUSIVE: CODA2go on force.com
Today in an exclusive preview, I saw CODA2go’s first iteration. CODA2go is accounting software developer CODA’s first foray at an on-demand accounting application service built on the force.com platform. CODA claims it is the largest development of its type on force.com.
According to Jeremy Roche, CODA’s CEO, the attraction comes in two distinct forms:
- Access to a pre-built infrastructure that includes a security model, workflow, reporting and multi-tenancy
- Ability to gain immediate access to Salesforce.com’s customer and partner ecosystem
“Both of these elements help us get to market much more quickly than would be the case if we were trying to develop an on-demand application by ourselves. On infrastructure, we only had to build a domain model and were able to start application coding within three weeks of starting with Salesforce.com. We’re modeling our go to market on Salesforce.com’s early experience and are already talking with opportunities from five countries” he said.
As part of the go to market strategy, CODA is also partnering with Model Metrics and Appirio, two of Salesforce.com’s consulting partners. CODA believes that early partnering with experienced Salesforce.com partners provides the company with the best opportunity to succeed: “We’ve chosen partners who understand the finance space as much as their proven success as Salesforce.com implementers,” said Roche.
The first business application covers the order to cash process. When the application is released in early June, it will have basic general ledger recording but will not be a full GL since CODA has yet to build the purchasing function. “We want to take this steadily to ensure we both understand how people will use it and give customers an easy entry to on-demand accounting,” said Roche.
CODA believes the sweet spot will be service companies that have time and project requirements. It is going to market with multi-company tax and currency engines pre-built. This will give immediate appeal for those companies trading in cross border environments. In the early stages, CODA is restricting availability to English speaking countries: “It makes sense to start with UK/US though I expect we will provision for mainland Europe and other major languages quite quickly,” said Roche.
Since the entry point is ‘order’ CODA2go appears as a set of additional Salesforce.com tabs. This should mean that it is familiar to existing Salesforce.com users. Since it automatically inherits the force.com platform capabilities, CODA2go has immediate access to some of the newer integrations such as GoogleDocs and Spreadsheet: “We’re working on an early integration between Google Spreadsheet and our own Excel reporting products,” he added. This makes a lot of sense for finance people who prefer the power of Excel for reporting and analysis.
CODA believes it needs six to 12 months in order to achieve a reasonable subscriber base. Roche is clear about what this means for the company: “We see this as the most cost effective long term play for a company like ours that would otherwise find it difficult to reach large numbers of potential customers.”
CODA’s strategy does carry some risks. It ties the company to Salesforce.com’s fortunes and to that extent, it will have to contend with ongoing speculation as to whether Salesforce.com is an acquisition target. Roche does not seem overly worried about this: “There are always risks in this kind of venture but we’re confident that there is enough value for both companies to do well. It’s the kind of thing Salesforce wants to see and it’s a good fit for us.”
Introductory pricing is $125/user/month with a lower, $20/user/month ‘connector’ charge for occasional users. An example would be sales personnel who require access to days sales outstanding data.
April 28th, 2008
SAP Business By Design likely to be delayed
Sketchy reports coming out of Germany are saying that SAP’s Business By Design is likely to be delayed. According to Handelsblatt:
An SAP developer speaking to Handelsblatt claimed (in German) that ByDesign was suffering from performance issues and bugs that would delay general availability until perhaps the end of 2009. That gives Salesforce.com, NetSuite, and other SaaS vendors another eighteen months to keep dominating a market that none of the majors (including SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft) have been able to crack.
This is not a surprise given what Hasso Plattner one of SAP’s co-founders said at the recent Churchill Club discussion between himself and Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com. In a transcript I received from Arma Partners, Plattner said (p.27):
We will take another year, or probably 18 months, to become really so – so complete that we can ramp up and, fine. Then you will see us.
This could not have come at a worse time for SAP. Next week sees the start of its annual customer conference season in Orlando. This is bound to be a central talking point.
UPDATE: SAP may have additional troubles connected to its recent acquisition of BusinessObjects. In a Barron’s report from last week, Pascal Clement, VP of Enterprise Information Management at SAP/Business Objects is reported to have apologized to customers:
“As we look back at the past several weeks, it is painfully obvious that our internal system issues have brought challenges and unwanted distractions to your ongoing operation of Business Objects software solutions. To be specific, many customers have not been able to receive our technologies in a timely manner. You have our most sincere apology for these issues and also our total dedication toward immediate resolution.”
Whether this signals a possible earnings miss has yet to be revealed although in an earlier report, JMP Securities analyst Patrick Walravens flagged up issues in both Business Objects and ByDesign.
April 25th, 2008
Are we headed for a nuclear winter?
Caroline McCarthy’s post on News.com describing the juxtaposition between the party atmosphere underpinning Web 2.0 and the views of certain veterans poses awkward questions:
Amid the drunken revelry and pulsing electronic music, one prominent tech-industry veteran at the party was asked exactly what Chi.mp is. “I’ll tell you what Chi.mp is. It’s venture money getting set on fire,” the jaded observer replied. Surveying the buoyant crowd, he added, “This feels a little like 1999.”
The atmosphere was radically different during the day at Web 2.0 Expo, as talk of economic recession was unavoidable. TechWeb’s Jennifer Pahlka, one of the expo’s organizers, told attendees in a welcome address on Tuesday that she thanked them all for coming to the conference “in this time of budgets that are being scrutinized, and some bad headlines.” Veteran entrepreneur Marc Andreessen was grilled in a keynote interview on his use of the term “nuclear winter” as a justification for his start-up Ning’s new round of venture funding.
Yesterday, I saw a worrying story on Finextra. Entitled Crunch to squeeze sell side spending on technology, it said (my emphasis added):
David Easthope, senior analyst, Celent securities and investments group, says: “In line with moderate expectations for growth and a decreased appetite for grandiose IT projects, operational efficiency and cost-reducing initiatives will be the centerpiece of many brokerage firms’ IT plans.”Risk management, compliance, and portfolio valuation also continue to be high on the IT list. Meanwhile in Europe MiFID will drive some spending on technology over the next few years.
To be well positioned for the short and long-term, IT vendors will have to meet the sell side’s needs for cost-efficient and flexible services and systems in lean times, says Celent. Flexibility in software and services delivery will be an important differentiator for vendors in the years to come.
Financial services has always been a tech spending bell weather so when I hear reports like this, I see it as code for battening down the hatches.
There are many ways to skin the efficiency cat but consumer grade innovation isn’t it. Earlier in the week I was speaking with OpenPages. They have about half their risk solutions business in financial services. OpenPages estimate growth in the near term running at 10-20%, a pretty healthy clip but nothing like the rates I had expected for this nascent industry. But is it all as bad as it seems?
Technology that adds business value is still receiving decent levels of investment. Obopay recently received $20 million in series D funding to support growth for its mobile bank account management platform. The investment was led by the telecomms arm of Essar, an Indian group with many interests.
Earlier in the week, Forrester was bullish about growth in so-called Enterprise 2.0 expenditure but as Vinnie Mirchandani said in a waspish post that attacked Forrester’s definition:
With that broad definition, any tech vendor would qualify. I mean fire your entire marketing team if they cannot get Forrester to call them Enterprise 2.0.
That is if you want to fight for a measly $ 4.6 billion Forrester estimates for the category out of annual technology and telecom spend of over $ 2 trillion.
And therein lies the real crunch. While onlookers may bemoan the party bills at Web 2.0 events, the real problems for enterprise spend lay elsewhere. When I look at the margins vendors like Oracle make on legacy maintenance, it’s easy to see where fat can be cut and oxygen released for the kinds of innovation that drive value. Or what about the mad dash for governance, risk and compliance consulting projects at premium rates? Then there is the whole problem of delivering value from social networking applications.
Regardless of what you think about social networking applications, it is becoming increasingly evident that internal projects will require significant spending on change management. Where will that come from? If we are heading into a spend crunch, then these will be the first projects to be killed off.
Dennis Howlett has been providing comment and analysis on enterprise software since 1991. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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