November 15th, 2009

Oracle consulting layoffs: but what's the number?

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 8:07 pm

Categories: ERP, Enterprise applications, implementation, outsourcing

Tags: Layoff, Oracle Corp., TrailMaster, Workforce Management, Human Resources, Dennis Howlett

Speculation took off over the weekend that Oracle is/has laid off sizeable numbers from its consulting organization. At least one source claims 20%, others 7-10% and yet another says 3,000. The difference between the various reports suggests no-one really knows except the tight lipped HR management and the board. Whichever the number, it sounds like the cuts will run deep.

Fellow Enterprise Advocate Frank Scavo noticed something odd was happening when his site started getting pinged on the topic. How? The graphic to the left which comes from his Sitemeter, records shows the ping action:

A quick check of my webstats shows a pickup in web referrals today searching under the key words “Oracle layoffs,” “Oracle Consulting layoff,” and “Oracle layoffs, Nov 2009.” (see image on right).

In the past, this type of activity has been a reliable indicator of Oracle’s workforce reduction actions.

Frank has been following the ERP layoff story for well over a year. In October 2008 he said:

Oracle’s layoffs are baffling. Senior consultants with Oracle experience are reportedly in short supply. If Oracle’s sales are as robust as Oracle says they are, they should be hiring such people, not firing them. Perhaps this is an early warning that Oracle sees softness in its new sales pipeline, and without cutting headcount it knows that consultant utilization will fall. In professional services, utilization is the key to profitability.

The current round of layoffs are equally baffling at one level yet eminently understandable. On the LayoffBlog, a person named ‘NAC’ comments:

OCS needs to rationalize their Billing Rates to survive in this competitive market. Gone are those days when you could charge the Customer @ $250/Hr. Customers these days have become really smart and they can get good quality experienced Resources at a much cheaper cost. Instead of laying off the Delivery Consultants, OCS Senior Management should aim at cutting down the Administrative Overheads such as the Resource Analysts and Admin Assistants who generate No Revenue at all.

Another one bites the dust says:

The long awaited hammer finally dropped on me today. Got my “bonus”, time to look for independent work. The funny thing is, OC price itself out of the market with a single minded goal of “margin”. There is plenty of work out there. Plenty of them I have seen from the PJR that went unfilled because of botched negotiation. time to grab those.

TrailMaster adds:

Today is my last day. 11 years with PeopleSoft Oracle and I was on a billable project till April. Go figure!

These comments have a ring of truth about them. I have seen this before in Europe, accompanied by staunch denials or handing off to middle management who couldn’t possibly answer the tough questions. It is standard Oracle procedure. Here’s how it goes:

• It’s coming up to quarter end, the numbers are probably going to look bad, let’s give Wall Street something to cheer about.
• Oracle can’t lie about the numbers but will avoid bumping up against the WARN Act if it can. I suspect the latter’s what’s been calculated here.
• Since projects are ongoing and people within those projects are also being RIF’d then I also suspect that at least some of those same consultants will be re-hired as contractors. I saw that in Europe on a number of occasions. There’s no reason to doubt it will not happen in the US, especially if the numbers being RIF’d are high and possibly indiscriminately. The short term effect is that Oracle can legitimately call headcount numbers as lower which will please the financial analysts but will mask what’s really going on.
• Customers lose out. Pulling consultants off projects mid-way through is disruptive for all the wrong reasons. If Oracle projects are billed on time and materials, then there’s always the chance that Oracle can get away for a few weeks at least by having people on the job billed out in the usual manner even if they’re really coming up to speed and not being productive. Alternatively, Oracle can offshore the work in the hope that any project delays can be compensated by short term over staffing in cheaper locales while maintaining the outbound contracted billing rate. Customers lose out either through delays for which they pay or substandard work requiring later re-work. Oracle doesn’t need to factor in the additional margin immediately as it can provide against the cost leverage it is able to get from sending work to cheaper locations against possible rework. Whichever method of accounting it adopts, it can afford to be cautious and still come up smiling

POV: Once again (but like others in the ERP market) Oracle is squeezing the P&L account. Oracle’s masters are the Wall Street analysts. Oracle knows it and plays the game masterfully. It is one reason analysts consistently think Oracle is a winner while SAP is a loser. They are mostly wrong despite Oracle having a brilliant acquisition strategy and execution team.

You can’t keep chasing margin at the expense of the two most important communities (customers and implementation consultants) and expect the business will go on producing stellar results forever and a day. It’s neither logical nor possible without something blowing up along the way.

While this layoff may be significant, it is too early to tell how customers will be impacted. My guess is there will be short term disruption that Oracle will paper over by parachuting Oracle Aces in where needed.

From comments I’ve read and people who’ve spoken with me about Oracle in the past, it seems this is a company that has layers of fat that could be usefully excised. More than one of the commenters to LayoffBlog has said as much. In the past, acquired Peoplesoft staff have told me Oracle represents a relatively comfortable and well paid meal ticket. The fact we are seeing a repeat of the past suggests Oracle is not managing the intermediary layers as well as it could.

More broadly, the combination of the recession, better value offerings from SaaS vendors and an increasingly well informed buyer community able to negotiate better terms is biting hard into the big ERP vendor pocket books. Blended rates are plummeting yet Oracle needs to maintain its margins. More productivity is one answer. Deflecting attention to headcount is another.

Oracle’s RIF is just the latest manifestation of an industry that has yet to come to terms with a new reality. For what it’s worth, I am hearing repeated rumors of a potential re-organization at SAP planned for January 2010 with another sizable chunk of people due to be RIF’d. There will be many more stories of this kind in the coming months before the recessionary tide turns.

PS - I have sent a request for details on the RIF to Oracle. It’s a weekend so I don’t expect a response in the next few hours and I am preparing for a long travel day so may not see a response the moment it lands into the inbox. Therefore much of what is being said can only be regarded as reasonably well informed rumor. I will update this post as soon as I see a response or other facts emerge.

UPDATE: Oracle’s response is: ‘no comment.’

November 10th, 2009

Epicor Perspectives: the analyst view

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 11:54 am

Categories: ERP, Enterprise applications, implementation

Tags: Epicor Software Corp., Software As A Service (SaaS), Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing, Emerging Technologies, Dennis Howlett

A thousand customers and 1,500 total attendees may be 20% down on past years but represents a good effort by Epicor to get the faithful out to hear the latest and greatest when compared with other vendor led events where attendance has been down 30-40%.

Unsurprisingly, blockbuster announcements were thin on the ground. The emphasis was on assuring customers that Epicor is here to stay and that customers should be thinking about moving to Epicor 9, which was introduced last year.

Epicor has shipped around 890 copies of Epicor 9, has 60 live and been successful in attracting 275 new customers. However, the go live rate is anemic - stated as six per month. Epicor says this will accelerate dramatically as we come to year end, probably doubling the number of go-live customers by December, 31st. Watch this space for an update.

One surprise was the quiet discussion around Epicor Express, a SaaS offering currently in beta with a handful of customers and likely to ship early 2010. Aimed at small jobbing manufacturing shops, the solution sounds compelling but I’ll need a much deeper dive before making the inevitable comparisons with SAP Business ByDesign. More surprising is Epicor’s low key approach to SaaS. It realizes it left the smaller customer behind some years ago and recognizes a potential opportunity to fill a large white space with a cost effective solution. However, it is not pushing the marketing gas pedal and doesn’t believe it will see significant traction in 2010-11. I think that’s a mistake because SaaS can offer significant advantages for SMEs.

Notwithstanding, analysts seem upbeat. In this video, Ray Wang of Altimeter/Enterprise Advocates and Nigel Montgomery, AMR Research EMEA provide complementary and contrasting views on what they’ve seen so far.

February 5th, 2009

Blagbert's view on SAP certification

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 7:27 am

Categories: ERP, implementation

Tags: Certification, SAP AG, Blagbert, Quality, Training And Certification, Business Operations, Dennis Howlett

Following on from my last post about certification, Alvaro Tejado Galindo aka Blag wrote an impassioned response. He also drew a nifty cartoon (reproduced above)

Bear in mind that Blag lives and works in Peru, is not a native English speaker, that he’s an SAP Mentor and a top contributor to information on the SAP Community - something he does for free. I’ve also met Blag and he’s a super smart and affable fellow. This is his current understanding of the system and the effects of any new certification drive:

My prediction is that if SAP successfully implement this policy, mainly only Certified people is going to be hired…Which means only 10% of the local ABAPers…That’s not good, because that 10% are going to ask for more money claiming that they are better because they hold and SAP Certification…Then the other 90% is going to feel forced to get Certified, so eventually we’re going to have 100% of Certified people…Things are going to get back to normal, because with kind of offer, prices are going to reach their normal peak…But as human beings are greedy, they’re going to look for more Certifications…And it’s going to be a war having people trying to get the most Certification they can…Prices are going to get higher, then lower…and so on…

As with all good intentions, there are many bridges to cross and minefields to be negotiated. I hope those who manage certification are listening to this kind of critique. It’s the kind of thing that vendors with in-demand skills need to address head on.

January 29th, 2009

When will we learn?

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 10:10 am

Categories: ERP, Enterprise applications, implementation

Tags: Industry, ERP, Buyer, Mike, Eric Kimberling, Panorama Consulting Group, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Enterprise Software, Software, Dennis Howlett

When I wrote my tongue in cheek How to be less stupid in 2009, I picked on Mike Krigsman when I said:

Get an RSS device implanted with Mike Krigsman’s IT Project Failures blog. Have you ever known anyone who could get a long running blog based on the simple premise that IT projects mostly suck? Yet they do. Mike has and is essentially repeating the same story with different factual twists.

Having just come off a webinar hosted by Eric Kimberling of Panorama Consulting Group, I’m even more convinced of the need to get that implant.

Kimberling used the recent Shane Co bankruptcy as a backdrop for explaining why, in his firm’s experience, ERP projects continue to deliver less than stellar results. As I listened to the explanations given I could not help but think back to around 1995, the year I really started getting my teeth stuck into SAP. It seems that buyers have not learned the lessons of the past. Why? It was a question I put and to which Kimberling posited that many buyers just don’t have enough experience when wrangling with buyers. Frank Scavo, in a tweet message to me said:

Unfortunately, many ERP buyers today weren’t around to learn lessons of 1995.That’s why they should listen to old guys like us.

and…

In fairness though, I find many ERP buyers are much more sensitive to implementation risk today than 10-15 yrs ago.

I’m not so sure. Kimberling notes that benefits delivered and project over-runs remain the norm.

Panorama specializes in consulting to the SME sector which its defines as companies turning over less than $500 million. Its research in that segment says that:

• Average ERP duration is 19 months
• Implementation cost is $8.5 million
• Represents 9% cost of sales and
• Delivers 39% of potential benefits

By any set of measures, this is a massive failing on the part of the industry and its customers. Yet time and again we continue to hear the same tune. How many times has Gartner talked about the large percentage of project failures?

Mike Krigsman likes to refer to the Devil’s Triangle of failure. Kimberling believes that when failure reaches catastrophic levels, the customer has a lot to answer for. He also says that in the current economic conditions, sales people will go out of their way to extol benefits if that’s what it takes to get a signature on a contract. The flip side is that there are deals to be done.

It has been hard to get customers to accept their level of culpability. It’s easy to see why. Vendors have way more firepower than buyers in the buy cycle. Once you’re hooked into a deal it can be a heck of job to untangle, especially when you’ve spent months in the selection and evaluation process. But I suppose the biggest difficulty is one of pride. Who wants to ‘fess up to screwing a major ERP implementation?

Are there bullet proof answers to be found? That would be a stretch for anyone to assert. I have said that on the vendor side, a lot more could be done in the area of quality. It’s something I’m quietly plugging away at. In the MK article I reference above, Brian Sommer says:

Customers should hire smaller firms that are focused and take a very strong advocacy position. You’ve got to have a lot of discovery time at the beginning of a project to flesh out detailed work plans, so everyone knows what’s going to be accomplished and there are no surprises. You also need to develop a great contract.

He’s right. Brian, Mike, Frank, Vinnie Mirchandani, Ray Wang and I have all at various times been busy enough attempting to solve these and similar problems in projects of all sizes. When I call up Vinnie these days he’s breathless from either jumping on or off some plane.

When I think back to the massive oil and gas tents at SAPPHIREs past it’s hard to resist the siren call of being in one industry club or another. Yet I also know that if you scratch the surface, CIOs will tell you the unvarnished truth. They will reveal their battle scars.

So here’s some ideas:

• If your ERP is going pear shaped, it is better to seek help now rather than try continue swimming in mud.
• Use your industry peers. They will talk reality.
• If that means a brutal assessment then go for it. It only need happen once and you’ll thank the bringer of bad news. Management will also appreciate your honesty.
• Make sure the people you’re hiring have got the stones to stand up to the implementers AND the vendors. That could mean some tough talk but should mean a better outcome.
• Make sure the people you hire are truly independent and do not make their primary living from scratching the vendors’ or implementers’ backs. That could be tricky but there’s a few names to play with here.
• As Kimberling says: never be afraid to say ‘No’ and stand your ground.
• Get your vendor and implementer to understand you’re looking for a partnership - not a transaction. If all they see are dollar signs then it’s fair to say you’re on your own. That’s not a good place to be on any project.

I’m sure there are more tips but that’s where I would start.

January 29th, 2009

Honey I just blew up the ERP

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 7:25 am

Categories: ERP, Enterprise applications, implementation

Tags: Innovation, Business Process, Accounting, Crowdsourcing, ERP, Sig, Dick, Steve, Effectiveness, Operational Planning

Sigurd Rinde, one of my Irregular pals is also one of the sharpest people I know. He constantly challenges the status quo in a creative way. This morning’s offering made me smile:

Good thing about working from home is that I can watch webstreams from conferences - these days it’s the fun they’re having up in Davos.

Obviously much is about the crisis, what happened, how to fix it and how the heck did it happen. More and better regulation being one of the main themes of course, following the human inclination to grab more control when things goes… ehh…. out of control!

But one thing is missing from the discussion - finding the root cause for it all. Is there a single thing that lies behind it all? If found all would be much easier, at least the issue of how to avoid such calamities again.

Is there a root cause? And if so, why is it not discussed?

So why is it not discussed? Because sometimes we take some things for granted, we cannot imagine the world without that something, we in fact forget or even cannot answer this simple question:

What assumptions are we making that we do not know we’re making?

And the root cause could be what? Allow me to posit that it is:

Double Entry Book Keeping.

Not the accounting reports as such, I’m fine with those, it’s the method of capture and representation of facts that I see as the culprit.

Sig has been poking away at the notion of accounting for several years now. He’s right to do so. A system invented some 600+ years ago and which hasn’t evolved since then can hardly be the basis upon which modern decision making is taken. Or is it one of those immutable ‘truths’ to which we cling in life?

As one who was trained as an accountant, I know how hard it is to give up things that seemed for so long to make perfect sense. But then time and again we see failures and question marks that have their root cause in something accounting related. Sig amplifies his argument with numerous examples, some of which I see others, I think are fraught with problem. His assertion for example that:

That is how a few well placed misplacements or closed eyes at Satyam could make them pretend to be much richer than they were.

…sounds a bit of a stretch when what we’re really seeing is a web of deceit that encompasses many actors. Even so, the fundamental technical flaws that allowed Satyam to occur are there. For instance, the ability to allegedly inflate the number of employees, pay them and not have that register as an operational blip is a function of what you can do with book-keeping trcikery. It’s called ‘pass through’ and is relatively easy to manipulate and hide from prying eyes when there are lax controls in place or where it is possible to fool people.

Sig’s counter argument is to question the whole way ‘we’ represent transactions in systems:

Instead we need a direct and dynamic representation of the “transactions”, something that is real time and where changes anywhere in the chain are precisely and immediately reflected everywhere independent on principles and rules.

In Sig’s world, answers come by defining ‘objects’ according to their attributes and then ascribing relationships to them - example: widget (object) and transaction becomes a ‘changed relationship.’ It’s a very simple but powerful notion and one that has huge ramifications.

For instance, yesterday Dick Hirsch was noodling on the intersection between social computing and business process. He starts by asserting:

Processes are usually static entities with a certain number of steps / tasks that may be spread over various roles / individuals. Of course, there might be various paths through this process but these paths are known. This static quality is necessary to assure that corporate “behavior” in the form of processes is repeatable and thus, measurable. Without this structure, “chaos would reign” and employees wouldn’t know what to expect when confronted with a problem.

Dick is a business process expert at Siemens with whom I have worked. He is super bright, intensely analytical and able to parse complex problems in ways that most people will readily understand. He’s also handy in the code writing stakes. Back to the plot.

Dick’s view is fine except that’s not how life tends to work in the real world. Or at least in Sig’s. Process locks us down and prevents us from finding optimal or new ways of looking at the world. Only rarely do processes change for the better, usually on the grounds that inter-dependencies are too complex to risk changing ‘the system.’ Well yes and no. Dick attempts to come up with a solution that requires something of an intellectual leap of faith into the world of Web 2.0 style technologies:

…dynamic process definition would lead to process evolution in which more efficient processes might be more likely to survive. Such an evolution is only possible if a newly designed process could somehow be saved and performed again. Thus, there must also be an avenue to move these newly defined processes into the existing process landscape. If this is not done, the benefits of this new process might not be widespread. Therefore, these Web 2.0 tools need tight integration into existing process technology to support this transition.

This is the point where I disagree with Dick. There seems to be an implicit assumption that processes need to be in a continual state of refinement or lockdown when experience suggests that 80% of issues arise because of defects in process or unusual situations that cannot be addressed with pre-existing process definitions and tasks.

Capturing and acting upon the semantics of what defines those issues is where I believe Sig and Dick’s thinking could usefully intersect. Sig prefers to talk about Barely Repeatable Processes (BRP) where the unusual requires attention but may be at the end of the long tail of process repeatability. Dick makes the intellectual leap to assert that social networks can be used as a pathway to solving those problems through crowdsourcing. I’m on the fence.

I’ve seen little evidence that crowdsourcing of that nature has any real value but then we are in the very early days of understanding how these networks operate internally to the organization. I’ve been in teams where crowdsourcing among a handful of the right people DOES work but I’m not convinced that is a proven model. It may be the start of some model that can be articulated and acted upon. It is one that will require considerable help from organizational social psychologists on a scale many will find intimidating if not downright intrusive. In the meantime, SAPper Steve Winkler also expresses disagreement with Dick:

…this kind of innovation is not for the faint of heart, because there’s a decent chance you can get lost along the way. You can try something new and find out the short cut is actually a long cut.

aaah - the ol’ status quo argument. Steve’s point is well made in the context of organizations having spent millions on defining and refining business processes with the intention of driving efficiency. But in the 21st century, efficiency isn’t enough. If it was then we would presumably see less layoffs? Effectiveness is what’s called for and that almost certainly requires levels of collaboration and innovation that we’ve not seen in the past.

I’m sure Oliver Marks has plenty to say on this topic but I’ll stop here and leave the ZDN community with these questions. What if Sig AND Dick are right? What if this means we can leave behind the highly constrained world of process built around rigid principles? Could this allow business to flourish in a world of constant innovation and if so, where is that best undertaken?

January 20th, 2009

SAP's Kagermann to retire early

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 6:38 am

Categories: ERP, Enterprise applications, implementation

Tags: SAP AG, Leo Apotheker, Heise Online, Yahoo Finance, Sales Strategy, Sales Force Management, Workforce Management, Sales, Human Resources, Dennis Howlett

Reports coming out of Germany say that Henning Kagermann, co-CEO at SAP will retire earlier than expected. Heise Online says that Kagermann will leave at the end of January. The company has chosen not to comment on this event but “Market sources confirmed however the particulars.”

I’m not surprised. SAP is going through one of the toughest periods in its 36 year history.  Yahoo Finance reports the company may miss its margin targets in 2009, sending the shares down in morning DAX trading:

Shares in SAP fall 5.5 percent, making them one of the top decliners among German large-caps, as Capital Magazine reports the software maker may push back the timetable for hitting its margin targets and not give a 2009 sales outlook this month. SAP declined to comment on the report. ‘What the magazine reports is fully realistic,’ says a Frankfurt-based trader.

In these circumstances, it makes sense for Kagermann to step aside and hand over the reins of leadership to co-CEO Leo Apotheker. Difficult times demand strong leaders who can take decisions unencumbered by the need to consult extensively.

The Guardian notes:

The report in Capital also quoted Apotheker as saying SAP had to reinvent itself, be nimble, eliminate red tape and become more international.

I’m glad to hear that. That leaves open the question as to what shape any restructuring might take. Frank Scavo, who has been monitoring layoff rumors said earlier in the month that:

SAP layoffs: A source reports that SAP is making some deep cuts in SAP’s Strategic Growth Enterprise (SGE) unit (focused on the SMB space).

Update: a comment on this post indicates 300 sales-related positions were affected in North America.

I’ve heard all sorts of numbers but until Apotheker details the steps being taken, it is hard to know what’s really going on.  I am surprised about talks on SGE because of recent murmurings that ByDesign will be relaunched at SAPPHIRE in May. That would be tough going if there are deep cuts in the SGE group.

I expect Apotheker will be a lot more aggressive in getting things done. He can swing the ax hard and early in the knowledge that he will have a short period of grace during which his battle skills are assessed. Those who have met him know he’s a tough sales person. My hope is that he can solve the 2-speed conundrum that exists within the company and which must be a drain on management time while figuring out what to do with ByDesign. He would also do well to find ways of addressing the continuing partner quality problems that bedevil contracts. The good news is that the company has a rich seam of talent and a rapidly evolving ecosystem that can serve it well if managed sensibly.

My one regret is that I won’t get to shake Kagermann’s hand one more time as an officer of the company.

October 14th, 2008

SAP's forced march may be good news

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 6:49 am

Categories: ERP, implementation, pricing

Tags: SAP AG, Leo Apotheker, Roi/Tco, Finance, Managerial Accounting, Dennis Howlett

At SAP TechEd Berlin, Leo Apotheker, co-CEO reinforced the message that the enhancement packages will significantly reduce the amount of testing that customers need undertake as part of an upgrade. However, consultants disagreed.

Jim Spath of Black and Decker for instance said: “There is no way we would apply any new code without full regression testing. Our compliance procedures would not allow it. The risk that it breaks something is too great.” Christian Guenther, senior consultant at RealTech added: “While some organizations can get away without significant testing, you really don’t know what will happen until the package is implemented. In one case I have worked on, the client ended up with a confusing interface they had not expected. That meant we wasted three months implementation time.”

However, it may not be all downside risk. Oliver Kohl, solution architect at MIBS said that “Once enhancement packages have been implemented, they cannot be uninstalled but remember they do bring enhancements that you probably don’t want to configure unless you have a highly customized environment.” This could be good news for customers that are embarking on an SAP project or which are relatively new to SAP and have not coded many customizations. How much relief this provides in the wake of the planned maintenance price is another matter.

Apotheker emphasized the value that customers will get from the maintenance price rise. He said the value that can be got from the solution manager alone more than justifies cost increases because customers will achieve a better rate of TCO.

The current level of uncertainty and economic pain being experienced by companies across all industries makes introduction of any price rise problematic. As Apotheker noted, no-one wants to see a price rise. Instead, he continues to hold the line on value delivery as the justification for the price increase. There was no talk of price reduction or cost increase deferral, despite continued rumbling among customers.

October 3rd, 2008

Mac ready for the enterprise?

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 8:47 am

Categories: implementation

Tags: Lid, Apple Macintosh, Apple Inc., Computer, Productivity, Keyboards, Desktops, Notebooks, Corporate Governance, Hardware

Larry Dignan makes a spirited argument as to why Apple should be working much harder on getting Mac kit into the enterprise. I know it’s a Friday (afternoon for me) and we’ve already had one false alarm earlier today that got everyone a-Twitter. Only the other day I managed to spark off a furious debate when I suggested that Mac might make a suitable alternative to Wintel.

But this morning (my time) a friend and fellow Mac Fanboy IM’d me in a blind panic about an issue with his MacBook Pro. “Black screen on boot - apparently common problem where video logic board is hosed and apple is unresponsive.” Common problem? The one I am most familiar with is the mysterious ‘just-out-of-warranty-and-the-battery-fails’ classic that requires me to shell $129+ tax to get a new one.

My friend pointed me to this thread on Apple discussion forums. Started on 9th April, it goes on and on and on to the point where a moderator steps in, locks it down on 26th September and it promptly starts all over with the last post 2nd October. The first post goes like this:

Let me explain the setup first. 95% of the time, my MacBook Pro (2.2 GHz Santa Rosa) is running lid closed connected to an external 20″ Cinema Display, keyboard and mouse. Normally, the laptop will go to sleep after 5 minutes of inactivity, noted by the glowing light on the latch.

I restarted my MBP last night, and it proceeded to go through the shut down process and restart. The starting chime can be heard, but there was no image on the monitor, just black. I opened the lid to start troubleshooting the issue. Blank screen on the MBP as well. I held the power button down and forced another restart, to no effect. Still a blank screen. I disconnected everything from the MBP and tried again. Still a blank screen. I’ve reset the PRAM, and also the Power Management setting. Still not working.

From as best I can tell, the MBP is booting up with no problem, I just have a black screen, so the computer is currently unable to be used in any capacity. I let the computer start up, and run for several minutes. I then sent the keyboard command to log off, and I could hear the computer activity increase.

I have not installed anything recently, I did note that there was a firmware release yesterday, but I’ve yet to install it.

One thing to note is that the light on the latch is very bright when the lid is closed, but grows much dimmer when the lid is opened. Maybe I haven’t noticed this before, but it struck me as unusual.

I’ve not attempted to count up but there must be hundreds of similar complaints. What makes it worse is that Apple doesn’t seem to understand the real nature of the problem in that there is no clear solution on offer. Worse still, its Genius staff are just as clueless in reported cases. Or at least that is what my reading of the threads suggests.

Now before floods of Apple folk come piling in with counter arguments, I’m the first to acknowledge this is a self selecting group and that once a problem is amplified in this way, it takes a life of its own then snowballs rapidly. This is especially true among those who are passionate about their equipment. Heck - I’m one of them. I love my MacBookPro.

Even so, it begs the question as to whether Apple is making laptop equipment that is fit for purpose, and, in the event of something going wrong capable of responding in a positive manner. Forget Larry’s discussion about standardization. This is about break/fix or replace in business critical situations. No company is going to forgive a supplier that is consistently incapable of solving problems. In this case, if we assume it first surfaced in April, 2008 then a full 6 months has elapsed and there is still no concrete solution. If that was Microsoft, they’d be hung out to dry.

Perhaps the more important question is not whether Apple can get into the enterprise. Does it want to? If this example is typical - the battery issue has been well understood for some time and remains unresolved - it would appear not. If so then why would any CIO put his/her faith in Apple?

September 29th, 2008

Ballmer needn't fear the Mac...just yet

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 10:00 am

Categories: implementation

Tags: Apple Macintosh, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft Corp., Desktops, Microsoft Windows, Hardware, Operating Systems, Software, Dennis Howlett

Boutique analyst firm Freeform Dynamics took a run at standardizing on Macs but the switch was not worthwhile. They’re now back in the Windows fold. Their report starts by posing a series of questions about business benefit. They found that when pressed, business users were hard put to come up with anything other than woolly answers. So what usually happens when an average business user switches to Mac?

With the world and his dog essentially standardised on Microsoft Office for business, how does the average Mac user in a mainstream commercial setting handle that? Well, they typically run a copy MS Office in a Windows virtual machine using Parallels or VMware Fusion. Most say they flip to this to do a lot of their more ‘boring’ work such as messaging and collaboration via the Exchange server, and participation in the document production/review/approval cycle with colleagues, clients, suppliers and so on, then do everything else in OS X. Of course the big question then becomes what does “everything else” actually translate to – accessing corporate applications and the Web through a browser probably – i.e. things that the desktop OS has little bearing on.

What happened in Freeform’s case?

The answer is actually pretty simple – we found that as a business, we were far more reliant on Microsoft Office under Windows than we had anticipated, and while most of the other productivity and business apps we use had native Mac equivalents, this was not true for all of them. The end result was that we couldn‟t get away from Windows, so ended up with a hybrid Windows/OS X environment which got in the way of productivity.

In other words none of:

• Improved uptime compared with Windows Vista
• Fewer critical security patches
• Ease of networking
• Faster operating (at least natively)

…could overcome the lock that Microsoft has placed in their business? That seems short sighted.

I’ve operated solely in the internet ‘cloud’ for some three years now with nothing other than the occasional glitch. The only time I use desktop applications is when Google or Zoho can’t ‘read’ something, most often from a PowerPoint deck. I’m not alone.

OK so I’m a one man band and accountable to no-one but myself. Yet both Google and Zoho are picking up plenty of business. All the indications suggest that the inevitable price pressures arising out of the impending IT spend squeeze would favor a re-consideration of those Microsoft licenses. That’s what GE thinks.

Of course you don’t need Mac to make that sort of switch but as anyone will tell you, both IE6 and IE7 present challenges when working with internet applications. Users could switch to Firefox as the day to day browser but most will simply use whatever they’re given.

The question then comes down to TCO. The Mac acquisition cost is an order of magnitude more expensive than Windows machines but as my Irregular colleague Zoli Erdos said last month:

I started to chronicle the hassle of just running a Vista PC and dealing with random, unexplainable failures, but more or less gave up.  Compare this to the anecdotal evidence of my Mac-user friends, who, despite occasional hiccups all agree: it just works.

And that’s the point. As someone who is constantly creating content of one kind or another (including accounts data) productivity matters. A lot. I’ve never had a Mac equivalent of BSOD, rarely need to power down and reboot (though I do so more these days as an energy saver) and have never had any real problems other than crappy battery life.

I’ve not seen any recent comparative studies about Mac v PC TCO but my experience mirrors that of my Mac using colleagues. Macs work. Period. Whether it is possible to generalize our experience to fully networked operations is another matter. All I know is that my Express based wifi home network works just fine.

Given the SMB sector is Microsoft’s bread and butter by volume and recent news that Apple’s laptop products are doing rather well, perhaps Ballmer should have something to worry about. But only from those who are prepared to view a move to Mac as an opportunity to completely re-evaluate how they are using IT to run their business. For some that will be a breath of fresh air, for others their Wintel addiction will be too powerful.

The full Freeform Dynamics report is here.(PDF)

August 27th, 2008

Now that the HP-EDS deal has been consummated

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 5:15 pm

Categories: implementation, procurement

Tags: Hewlett-Packard Co., Electronic Data Systems Corp., Mergers & Acquisitions, Outsourcing, Investment, Finance, It Operations, Business Operations, Outsourcing & Subcontracting, Dennis Howlett

The Irregulars draws its ‘crew’ from a wide and varied group of technology interests. One is Charlie Bess, an EDS Fellow. These are the brightest of the brightest among EDS thinkers and we are honored to have Charlie’s insights. Now that the HP-EDS deal has been consummated, Charlie felt free to comment on how he sees the merger and its potential. With his permission, I have lifted his eloquent post on the topic for reproduction here:

For about 10 years, I played trombone in a circus band for about a month out of every summer. One of the things I witnessed every year was the trapeze. In this act, there are catchers and flyers. Catchers catch and flyers fly. The flyer needs to let go of the bar and not focus on catching but on launching themselves into the gap, in order to achieve greatness.

EDS has historically been the catcher. In this merger with HP, EDS needs to change its mindset and become the flyer. It’s not an easy thing to do. The bar may seem like a safe place, but it prevents you from reaching your potential.

There is a quote from Marilyn Ferguson that comes to mind:

“It’s not so much that we’re afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it’s that place in between we fear. There’s nothing to hold on to.”

From the limited interaction I have had with the folks working on the merger activities, the HP-EDS team should have an advantage. EDS transitions people into the company all the time - that comes with outsourcing. EDS is made up of people who have had to let go of the bar before. After all, catchers can only catch people who let go of the bar. The company consists of people who have flying experience. The HP-EDS team needs to seek out the “fliers”, listen to their perspectives and the merger will be successful.

Everyone I’ve talked to views this as a great opportunity. EDS and HP have strengths in different areas, through this diversity of perspective it will be stronger than either organization would be alone.

People have been asking me why I don’t comment on the merger in the blog, and that’s because generally I don’t think I have anything unique to say, but this is an exception.

Earlier in the year, Vinnie Mirchandani had this to say:

HP could use a better services arm - while it has some marquee clients like P&G, it is inconsistent in most outsourcing deals. EDS could use a layer of cover. The company which just about defined outsourcing has been running hard to stay even - flat growth over the last decade…

…If I was Mark Hurd, I would spend $ 5 bn towards a smaller infrastructure player like ACS (or even better one with footprint in emerging markets) and spend the rest (plans to spend $ 12 bn on EDS) on a BPO and an application outsourcing play. In fact around infrastructure, I would think even smaller and buy a cloud computing player and use HP’s vast channel to build market on top of it.

So now there are two perspectives from within the Irregular camp. There is a third.

HP does have money. Organizations that can finance change can support clients in a quite different fashion than one that only has good intentions and a proven track record of taking on large and complex problems. Even if that is not always with the success EDS would have liked to see expressed in the public domain. EDS could do that kind of thing in the 90s but between the lack of financial skills and the decline of industry focus the company lost its way. Under HP’s stewardship EDS will have a chance to get back on the road its clients need. That, I suspect is the hope of all those transitioning to the new environment. Anything else would be a wasted opportunity.