August 28th, 2009

Weekend fun: Gartner Hype Cycles revista

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 2:05 pm

Categories: humor

Tags: Gartner Inc., Courtesy Corp., Dennis Howlett

Courtesy of Euan Semple.

Courtesy of Vinnie Mirchandani

Go figure the difference..if any

August 26th, 2009

Enterprise 2.0: what a crock

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 8:53 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Community, Pharmaceutical Company, Enterprise 2.0, Dennis Howlett

I’ve been following the so-called Enterprise 2.0 meme for some time and you know what? It’s a crock. Forget Dion Hinchcliffe’s pretty failure pictures or Mike Krigsman’s guest post of failure. Examine the basics and look back at history.

Some years back I was a hack attending an IDC (I think) conference where Western Digital presented their use of forums as a way of getting customer feedback on what they were offering plus improvements they could make. At the time it was deemed a success. No-one bothered calling it Enterprise 2.0 or anything close. It was part of doing business. Fast forward to the present. We’re regaled with reasons to ‘do’ the E2.0 thing. But what has changed out there in enterprisey land?

We’re in a recession the likes of which no-one under the age of 75 has seen. That means unless you’ve got access to people who lived through the depression of the 1930’s you’ve got no idea what is going on in corporate America - or in the Global Corporate Environment. Pretending otherwise is a lie.

Regardless of what you’re told by the E2.0 mavens, business has far more pressing problems. The world is NOT made up of knowledge driven businesses. It’s made up of a myriad of design, make and buy people who -quite frankly - don’t give a damn about the ‘emergent nature‘ of enterprise.  To most of those people, the talk is mostly noise they don’t need.They just want to get things done with whatever the best tech they can get their hands on at reasonable price. That doesn’t mean some wiki, blog or whatnot. More likely they’ll be investigating sensor tech.

In 2008 I attended Enterprise 2.0 and spoke with Andrew McAfee at length. He admitted that case studies for his notion of the emergent enterprise were thin in the ground. Nothing I’ve seen in 2009 changes that perception. Business wants to find the most efficient ways of satisfying customers - and if you think that’s going to come from some new fangled community then think again.

Example: regardless of the failure of the automotive industry, Ford was one of the first to create an internal business community capable of delivering value back to customers. The result was the Ford Focus (in the UK/EU) where the design was initiated from the US, the drive train and the engine came from other manufacturers. It was a model that Honda - as both designers and supply side builders followed. They understood they couldn’t do everything and were prepared to outsource the pieces that mattered to achieve a coherent whole. At the time - it worked. It had nothing to do with customers but everything to do with efficiency.

Let’s think about another industry - pharma. This is an industry that lives and dies on innovation. But can you imagine inserting a new process to pharma without FDA sanction? It would cause a hissy fit in Washington and rightly so. There is a reason why processes exist to validate what pharma wants to do. Can community oil those wheels?  Perhaps but I’ve not seen the proofs to suggest that is a long term win.

Read the rest of this entry »

August 21st, 2009

Friday rant: Software maintenance; it's all Manny's fault

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 9:02 am

Categories: maintenance

Tags: Software, Grandchildren, Tools & Techniques, Management, Dennis Howlett

I love it when a CPA comes out batting for the buy side. In Business Week, Gene Marks CPA points the finger of blame for software maintenance firmly in the direction of Meir M. “Manny” Lehman:

It all began in the 1960s, when Lehman predicted that changes in software were inevitable, and that they’d be brought on not by bugs or poor programming, but because of user requests for more features and functionality.

It’s a good theory, but oh, the injustices it spawned! If only software users could count on regular updates that make the product more useful. Instead, Lehman’s research has been used by software vendors to justify annual maintenance fees that do more to boost vendors’ bottom lines than they do to improve products.

Curse you, Manny Lehman! May your children and grandchildren be stuck using Microsoft’s Windows Vista for their lifetimes!

Mr Marks then goes on to detail some of the ingenious strategies that SME buyers are employing to force the issue such as:

• Letting maintenance lapse so the supplier crawls back pleading
• Picking up black market licenses (very naughty)
• Buying in other names and then tacking onto existing (also naughty)
• Negotiating multi-year license/maintenance deals with upfront payment

What he didn’t suggest but is one of Vinnie Mirchandani’s favorites is the idea that maintenance/support is relatively high in early years and trends down as the product matures and as the client gains confidence in what they’re doing.

I’d recommend: establish centers of excellence so that you can become independent of your supplier. This only works if you have a solid IT presence.

And of course there is always the third party maintenance option that both Vinnie and Ray Wang like.

But in the meantime, to repeat Mr Marks:

Curse you, Manny Lehman! May your children and grandchildren be stuck using Microsoft’s Windows Vista for their lifetimes!

Hat tip to James Governor for the story link

August 20th, 2009

Jeremiah Owyang quits Forrester

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 9:06 am

Categories: Social computing, Social software

Tags: Analyst, Blog, Forrester Research Inc., Jeremiah Owyang, Ray Wang, Blogging, Benefits, Internet, Human Resources, Dennis Howlett

Some will parse this as an exodus but following on from Ray Wang’s departure from Forrester, we now learn Jeremiah Owyang is on his way to pastures new. From the Interactive Marketing Professionals Forrester blog:

Nearly two years ago, I heard that an influential blogger was interested in an analyst job at Forrester. I had just taken over management of our interactive marketing team and to my complete pleasure was able to hire that blogger — Jeremiah Owyang.

And so it’s on a bittersweet note that I share that Jeremiah has decided to leave Forrester at the end of this month. All of you who connect with Jeremiah through his reports, blog posts, and tweets know that he is an enthusiastic teacher, a client advocate, and a creative force. We will miss his exuberance and his contribution to the Forrester “Idea Factory”. We will miss him. What’s next for Jeremiah? He’s going back into the field to apply the trends. I expect that he’ll still sleep in shifts so that he can stay connected. :-)

It’s obviously a shock to Forrester, coming so soon after Ray Wang’s departure.

I’ve known Jeremiah a couple of years and while we’ve had our share of tetchy ‘moments’ (I am not a fan of the incessant consumer facing social media hand waving) his enormous stature as a consumer facing social computing analyst cannot be denied. I had a sneaking feeling something was afoot when he reached out to me a couple of weeks back - we’d not spoken in ages. I hasten to say that nothing was revealed at that time.  I also have a feeling he’ll be learning about enterprisey stuff in early course. But we’ll see.

So what’s going on in the analyst community? When Ray departed, Vinnie Mirchandani provided a solid insight:

Analyst firms like Gartner and Forrester, unlike investment banks, do not really encourage “superstars”. Ray’s compensation was likely less than 10% of revenues he was  directly or indirectly bringing to Forrester. It’s funny because I had the same realization precisely a decade ago about how under-compensated I was.

It isn’t just about compensation and despite what Vinnie says, I remember the days when getting a press call with a top flight Gartner analyst was like pulling hens teeth. At conferences, you’d literally have to mug them to get an interview. Folk like Jeremiah and Ray have gone out of their way to make themselves available - even to curmudgeonly old fools like me. Why would they do that?

I sense there are several things at play. The analysts firms are starting to realize that clipping the wings of their brightest and best just ain’t going to work. Blogs are too easy to set up and use, they provide a great channel for their thinking and a solid way of gleaning feedback in real-time. That’s enormously valuable to the firm and unquestionably drives business.

We’re also seeing the emergence of the personal brand - Ray and Jeremiah have that in spades. It’s something they work ridiculously long hours at, taking huge risks along the way. Why would they give all of that up to the larger firm when there is so much more they could do in the wider world? It’s a non sequitor.

Changes in the compensation model may help retain the next rock star analyst but somehow I doubt it. The analyst firms are going to have to get used to their brightest and best viewing the analyst bench as but a stepping stone for greater things. That has to impact the business model and quite how the firms respond remains to be seen.

In the meantime - congratulations to Jeremiah. Job done.

Jeremiah’s own announcement

August 19th, 2009

Rimini Street ups the support ante: expands international support

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 12:10 pm

Categories: Enterprise applications, maintenance

Tags: SAP AG, RiminiStreet, Taxes, Free Trade, Personal Finance, Regulatory Compliance, Financial Planning, Finance, Human Resources, Policies And Procedures

Rimini Street has announced the global expansion of its tax and regulatory compliance services to more than 100 countries, beefing up its expertise in the process with the appointment of Greg Prowe as group vice president, global tax and regulatory strategy and research.

From the release: “Greg brings the perfect blend of international tax and regulatory expertise and deep business experience, making him uniquely qualified to lead the global expansion of our tax and regulatory offering,” said Seth Ravin, president and CEO, Rimini Street. “Rimini Street already serves clients around the world, and the expansion of our tax and regulatory coverage under Greg’s leadership will allow Rimini Street to build on its momentum as the leading third-party support provider for clients operating anywhere in the world.”

I caught up with Mr Ravin to discuss what this means and why Rimini Street is making this move: “If you look at the maintenance terms provided by the big vendors they come down to pretty much two lines - we provide you with support. What we’re doing is making sure customers understand the full range of support services they need and how we provide that. There’s a long check list of items that right now customers have to go figure what they need to deal with and what the vendor is going to supply. We don’t think that leads to good value for your maintenance dollar.”

Rimini Street claims it is seeing a sea change in the way companies are prepared to contract for support services: “We are now seeing what you’d call very conservative Fortune 500 type companies coming and recognizing they have mature systems they want maintained but they know a new way of keeping a GL isn’t going to make a difference. They see the 91%, monopolistic margins the software vendor is getting and are saying they don’t want to pay for it. It makes doing other things that add value much more difficult, especially in this economic environment,” said Mr Ravin.

It is hard to argue against that given the outcry we have seen over maintenance in the last year or so but I wondered whether companies like Rimini Street really can compete when the incumbent can always market itself as the established ’safe pair of hands’: “Contrary to what everyone thought, SAP EC6 support is our fastest growing line of business. SAP hasn’t understood that even if you break it up into small pieces, customers don’t want to pay. Right now SAP is 20% of our leads volume and we think it will dwarf our Oracle business over time,” said Mr Ravin.

But that still begs the question whether companies like Rimini Street can build a strong business the market generally can trust. “We’re relatively small right now for sure but if you look at our average deal, we’re signing companies up for five years. The majority of our deals are for 10 years because these companies understand they have a stable product, yes it needs support, but they want it at a price that makes sense. I think in taking this aggressive step, we’re signaling that you can have a higher quality of support that is delivered at the right time to market and at a cost that makes customers like but without locking them in. We’re not increasing our prices but hopefully delivering more value to the market.”

It is perhaps a sign of maturity that just four years into its existence, Rimini Street is providing support for 18 European countries, has a footprint in China and is talking about South America. It is expanding its physical presence in Europe and is in the process of hiring key personnel.

August 17th, 2009

Gartner financial apps MarketScope

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 8:54 am

Categories: Enterprise applications, cloud computing

Tags: PeopleSoft Inc., Small And Medium Enterprise, Oracle Corp., Financial, On-demand, Gartner Inc., Sage, KashFlow, Managed Hosting, Smb/Sme

Earlier today I saw Oracle crowing about getting a top slot in Gartner’s Marketscope for financial applications. They weren’t the only ones. SAP took a similar top slot. But then all the others Gartner looked at: Epicor, Lawson, Microsoft, Exact, Infor, Sage and Unit 4 Agresso scored ‘positive.’ Odd you might think. Even odder, the remark made about Oracle:

Oracle scored below average in the reference survey, and was slightly above the bottom-rated vendor. Of the products, EBS fared best, followed by JDE. However, PeopleSoft fared worst in the reference survey, with below-average scores in all categories, which were significantly below average in the service and support category, primarily with regard to ease of upgrade and ease of applying patches.

And this about Sage:

Sage scored very well in the reference survey, being the highest-rated vendor overall. Sage’s scores were above average in all categories, but were significantly above average in service and support, which is indicative of the strength of its partner channel and the close relationship these partners build with their clients.

I won’t go into the nitty gritty of the report which was otherwise a reasonable thumbnail of each vendor but I don’t understand how after how many years? it would seem Oracle has managed to mess it up with PeopleSoft. I recall the days when founder Dave Duffield (now founder of Workday) would proudly shout customer satisfaction numbers at user conferences and appear personally mortified if they were off even a 100 basis points.

I’m nothing like as close to PeopleSoft as I should be but I can only imagine that the emergence of the more nimble on-demand Talent Management category, exemplified by the likes of Taleo and SuccessFactors, has deflected attention from HR management and PeopleSoft financials in its wake. But I could be wrong.

On Sage, I think the analyst is over emphasizing the role of the channel. The company has been working like crazy to ring fence its customers as the company watches license sales either flat line or fall. It emphasizes service at every turn as it tries to maintain or increase its support and maintenance charges for products that are beyond mature, they’re ossifying. Following the last channel conference I heard rumblings about the lack of anything truly new to offer.

One bright area in the report was an attempt to cover the on-demand/saas financial market. Due to the way Gartner defines the market, it was inevitably restricted to the likes of Intacct, Workday, NetSuite and Twinfield with an honorable mention for CODA2go and a passing mention of Exact and SAP Business ByDesign. The glaring omission was Intuit which recently made some interesting moves into the open source space and which is moving more and more to morph over to the on-demand space. The impression I got though was that Gartner is trying to figure out how to cover this segment.

Color me cynical but right now, the likelihood of Gartner drawing any significant revenue from the on-demand players is almost nil. Several vendors have contacted me recently complaining at the $25,000 to $40,000 ‘entrance fee’ which for many of these players is a tax too far. Some are withdrawing subscriptions altogether. This is a pity.

Nigel Rayner, the lead analyst for the report has been in and around financial applications for as many years as I can remember. He knows the on-prem market inside out and is an ace on business intelligence. I do sense though that on-demand is proving a tad more challenging. There wasn’t a lot of ‘bite’ around his on-demand analysis. Perhaps he was putting a stake in the ground.

We’re in the very early days of growth and while the companies he has covered are all doing well, it ignores many I know that are thriving, albeit in the SME market. FreshBooks counts more than 800,000 sign ups, Xero has 10,000 paying customers, 4,000 of which are in the UK where it had none two years ago and represents 1000% growth since March 2008. My old start up FreeAgent has just had a nice write up in the New York Times via GigaOM on its analysis of the freelance market in which it specializes. KashFlow has a potent one man marketing machine that is driving tremendous growth. Still others are emerging almost on a monthly basis. They’re all playing in the SME space today where revenue is much harder to earn, but the vibrancy of this market should not be under estimated.

They won’t be consulting with Gartner - at least not for the foreseeable future - but they should not be ignored. Instead, we should recognize they are attacking the SME incumbents indirectly while filling a much needed space just a little further up the food chain. This time next year, that landscape will look very different again.

Before closing out, I should throw a bone to my friend Vinnie. At the top of the report, Nigel says:

This is a mature and established market. The functionality of modules, such as GL and AP, has been developed during the past 25 years and will remain largely unchanged in the future. However, changes will come in the underlying technology as service-oriented architecture (SOA) becomes a reality and as new delivery models mature.

Another stick with which to beat up the vendors on pricing and maintenance?

Disclosure: CODA2go, Xero, FreeAgent and Twinfield have all been recent clients and sponsor my personal weblog.

August 12th, 2009

Enterprise software sales and Social CRM

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 9:46 am

Categories: CRM

Tags: Subject Matter Expert, Customer, Sales, CRM, Public Relations, Marketing Research, Enterprise Software, Marketing, Corporate Communications, Software

I had planned to riff on the emerging discussion around Ross Mayfield’s Social CRM iceberg and social software post but Paul Greenberg has done a great job of bringing that together. He’s the CRM subject matter expert among the Irregulars so it’s his play.

Even so, the discussion brought me back to a conversation I had with a soon-to-be-ex-mainstream analyst (no names, no pack drill) the other day about deal terms and a similar conversation I had today with a soon-to-be client. The conversations were very similar. A couple of slightly reworked snippets that are family friendly and convey the essence:

“Yeah, we’re in the final stages of getting this deal done and now it’s just a case of getting them to take out the clause that talks about them being a referenceable customer the moment the ink is dry on the contract. Can you believe  but it’s proving to be a sticking point? How crazy is that?”

“I remember writing those terms where the customer was not only referenceable but committed to turning up at user gigs at least twice a year for the next three years and tell the assembled audience just how great we are and signing off on our press releases. Absolutely insisted on that and got it during those crazy heady days when customers would sign anything put under their nose.”

How times have changed and I am convinced that part of the reason is because some of ‘us’ ain’t going to stop advocating for the buyer side until the big software vendors ‘get it.’ There is no hiding place for those of us who long ago realized that the PR tsunami that leads the marketing way is a busted flush.

As I’ve bleated for more than 15 years: I don’t care what your marketing or PR is like, no-one speaks louder for you than the customer who speaks candidly and in unfiltered fashion to your potential customer. Now we have the social-ized means to facilitate that and why not? Peer-to-peer has always been more valuable than anything I can say as hand waver/analyst/PR wonk/blogger/consultant/trusted adviser. As Vinnie Mirchandani says:

The world has moved on - as I wrote there are often a thousand points of influence in a complex technology decision -  but seems like AR folks want to cling to a narrow (and shrinking) definition of market influencers.

My hope is that one day, Ross’s interpretation of the 1/9/90 rule is turned around so that the 1 is 10, as he believes it will be. As Paul says:

If done right, the customer experience is such that they can and will become advocates.

What could possibly go wrong? Oh yeah - those pesky referral terms go out the window, legal has less to do, customers are happier…

August 11th, 2009

FaceFeed: the enterprise perspective

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 4:02 am

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Facebook, Twitter, Channel Management, Leadership, Marketing, Management, Dennis Howlett

Having seen some of yesterday’s jocular references to the marriage between FriendFeed and Facebook (hence FaceFeed in the title) it got me thinking about the enterprise perspective - if there is one. Earlier in the day and before the announcement, I was listening to an old buddy of mine. We were discussing marketing as it relates to an add on play for JD Edwards and he jokingly said: “We could always start up a FaceBook Group: Old Farts From JD Edwards.” We had a good giggle at that given that both our relationships with JD Edwards go back to the days of Ed McVaney, one of the founders. Then the announcement came which got Silicon Valley’s twitterati and assorted pundits in a lather.

I’ve been in and out of Facebook a few times. It doesn’t appeal to me though I retain an account to keep in touch with friends and family who don’t use Twitter. As currently iterated, I see Facebook as little more than digital vomit attempting to support an as yet to be proven ad sales model. Then I read Om Malik’s thoughtful analysis where he alludes to the real battle: Facebook v Google. In other words search:

The impetus behind the deal is twofold: our ability to publish more and more information in real time and the resulting explosion of data on the web. These two trends will soon make it nearly impossible to deal with the resulting information overload. I call this the problem of plenty. As a result, the current seek-search-consume popularized by Google will eventually hit its outer limits — and when that happens, Facebook wants to step in and take the leadership baton…

…FriendFeed’s unique ability is to foster conversations — not a massive user base. If Facebook can take this capacity to “converse” and marry it to its mobile clients, what the company will have on its hands is a true interaction platform, befitting today’s always-connected life.

The fact FriendFeed is stuffed full of ex-Google rockstars seems to be the current impetus for the deal but the search angle intrigued me because it resonated with another part of the conversation I was having earlier in the day around real time.

I’m not a huge fan of current thinking around the real time web. We’ve had it in enterprise for many years. It is well understood as not being about ‘in the moment’ but at the ‘right time.’ For some that will be nano seconds after an important event occurs, especially in financial services and utilities. For many that extreme time compression makes little or no difference to decision taking. Real time in the real world is often measured in hours, days or at the extreme end of some long run processes: weeks. Even then events often need parsing against trend analytics in order to gauge impact assessment across multiple alternative scenarios. As time progresses, I may yet live to regret that last statement but that’s where we’re at for the foreseeable future. The way I read current thinking on real time web implies an overload of garbage and nonsense that I have little choice but to wade through. That’s why I actively curate my inbound Twitterstream and stay away from Facebook and FriendFeed.

Some argue that Twitter’s problem is a lack of history but you know what? I can capture what I need and maintain a persistent search in  Seesmic desktop or retain a history in Cover-It-Live. That provides me with the context I need that in turn helps avoid the chaos of the data stream. There are enough links in most Twitter entries for me to contextualize for myself what matters and what I can discard. That’s fine for me as a researcher but doesn’t scale well in its existing form in an enterprise context.

Last year I was part of a group developing an embryonic ‘Twitter for enterprise’ - ESME. One of the original design requirements was the ability to group, archive and tag so that I could maintain context because context is vital in an enterprise setting. Those elements provide me with the essential controls through which I can manage and curate an enterprise form of Twitter at multiple levels while continuing relevant conversations inside process flows. We proved that as a concept albeit one that by today’s standards would be regarded as crude.

I also saw the detail from InsideFacebook which talked about real-time search where it said:

With the new Facebook Search, which is still accessed by entering search terms in the box on the top right of any page, users will now see the latest status updates and shared content from both friends and all users who have made their profile open to everyone – in addition to more static types of results like applications, pages, notes, and groups.

Facebook may say that but my experience has been abysmal. Where topics are under populated I end up being shown ads and where there is plenty of material, it is hard to contextualize everything I am seeing.

Enterprise search remains something of a Cinderella. Again, returning to the conversation with my old pal, he said that like many, his company is trying to solve the problem of including unstructured data into the business intelligence/decision support domain. As I’ve come to increasingly understand, that’s a horribly complex problem that exercises the minds of engineers every bit as smart as Googlers. It involves contextualizing search terms. A hard trick to pull off in an automated manner.

There may yet be lessons for us enterprisey types out of what happens at FaceFeed and frankly, I hope they emerge in a way in which we can benefit. But of one thing I am certain, the compute requirements to blend what happens in the right time unstructured world and that of transactional systems is going to require serious rethinking. As far as I can tell, no-one has yet cracked that nut, even though many acknowledge that it is at that intersection where there is the potential to release enormous untapped enterprise value. When I think about the supply chain, that runs trillions of dollars alone.

In the meantime, we should at least cast the odd glance FaceFeed’s way. Watching how they develop new products and observing the impact with an eye on what this means for enterprise does us no harm.

August 11th, 2009

TIBCO and SAP: place your bets

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 4:00 am

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: TIBCO Software Inc., SAP AG, Brian, Public Relations, Mergers & Acquisitions, Corporate Law, Marketing, Corporate Communications, Investment, Finance

Yesterday, Larry Dignan asked my opinion of persistent rumors that SAP is in the middle of taking a tilt at acquiring TIBCO. I rolled my digital eyeballs. How many times has this one gone around the block? As Brian Sommer yelled:

ONCE A POTENTIAL ACQUISITION IS PASSED ON, IT RARELY IS CONSIDERED AGAIN.

I’ve advanced the case both for and against such an acquisition. In 2007, I made an extensive case against such an acquisition based largely on the fact the company was in the throes of digesting its BusinessObjects acquisition and that it would be a significant cash drain. Earlier this year I tipped the other way for many of the technical reasons I thought right in 2007 but also noting Software AG as an alternative. As we now know, SAG has strengthened its game with its IDS Scheer acquisition. I also noted that TIBCO senior management told me they feel comfortable as ‘last man standing’ in the middleware game, especially as they’re in the middle of rolling out Silver to public beta.

Brian offers the view that SAP could take TIBCO out to prevent a competitor buying it but let’s look at the options:

IBM: already has a substantial and good business with WebSphere. The only reason to buy TIBCO is to acquire its arch enemy’s user base, let TIBCO wither and then migrate them to its own stack. IBM doesn’t need to do that.

Oracle: has its plate full trying to make Fusion Apps work and get them out the door - or some semblance of achieving that - in time for Oracle Open World. I can’t see it needing a TIBCO in the short term and in any event, to do so would be tantamount to a PR gaff given it has only just announced Fusion Middleware.

Microsoft: it has to go in the mix though I doubt Microsoft would know what to do with a middleware play if it came and smacked them in the face. It’s not called the joker in the pack for nothing (sic) although some might advance the cloud governance play as attractive.

…which only leaves SAP - if we’re being close to realistic. Infor doesn’t need it, neither does Lawson or any of the other tier two general business applications players. That’s not to say there isn’t room for either a private equity play or specialist buy. But then if I was in the Walldorf boardroom, I’d have my eye set firmly on what SAG is up to before making any decision.

As I’ve said before, one new attraction at TIBCO is Silver which provides SAP with instant credibility in the ‘cloud computing’ space if for no other reason than it fits well with solving the murky and as yet not well thought through issue of cloud governance. That is potentially an enormous space from which SAP could jump ahead in the PR stakes under Vishal Sikka’s leadership. We already know from conversations with Vishal that contrary to what the naysayers think, ‘cloud’ is very much on SAP’s mind. We all agree it sounds messy as currently articulated but that doesn’t stop Palo Alto and Walldorf from getting on with developing for the cloud across multiple domains.

Even so, IF SAP is to have a fresh tilt at TIBCO, then it needs to articulate the deal very carefully. There are still plenty out there who think this is a crock and in PR terms, the last thing SAP needs is to be seen as blowing $1.5bn plus on a defensive play.

As I said in the title to this post: place your bets; but please don’t look to me as the bookmaker.

August 7th, 2009

Oi! Are we invisible or something?

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 6:47 am

Categories: Social computing

Tags: Women, Social Media, Case Study, Gender And Diversity, Human Resources, Dennis Howlett

This starts as a guest post from fellow Irregular Maggie Fox. She’s one of the pioneers over at Technically Women and this is a re-run of what she says. My comments follow:

What Does it Take to be a “Top 10″ Social Media Speaker?

I’m not going to hash and rehash the controversy around the TSG all-male list of speakers on social media, or the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Summit conflagration about the same issue not long before that, or… well, you get the picture. The absence of women on podiums in proportionate numbers has been an issue for quite some time. [Click on that last link. Srsly.]

What I want to know is – what does it take to get on these lists, and what can we, as women in tech, do differently to get there? Clearly there’s something going on.

I think part of the problem is many of us suck at two things: valuing our skills and engaging in healthy self-promotion. There may be a good reason for the latter, which is what I want to focus on: when it comes to social media in particular, self-promotion so frequently trumps actual accomplishments that we have a saucy little word for it – douchebaggery. No one wants to be seen as a douchebag (except for the douchebags, and that’s because they don’t know any better).

So, let’s say you want to be on The List. What does it take to be a Top 10 Social Media Speaker? In my humble opinion, the following are tablestakes:

1. Demonstrated thought leadership. You write original stuff that other people link to, quote and share. You’re so far ahead of the game, you’re defining the space.

2. Blue-chip client list. Who are your clients? What did you do for them? For how long? Who else are your clients? (i.e. one big client does not a real business make).

3. Results. Third-party, independently validated reports that demonstrate the value and impact of the work you have conducted. Prove that you moved the needle for a client. Having awesome testimonials is also great.

4. Speaking experience. I’d like to see that you’ve spoken to business groups and your peers about social media, at national conferences that are highly respected. Case studies are A++.

5. Press. If you’re the real deal, you should have attracted lots of press attention by now.

Are we in agreement that this is a fairly comprehensive itemization of the basic things that need to be in place for one to be considered for such a list? That a person demonstrating all of the above should definitely be recognized as a leader in their space, and included on such or similar lists?

Good. I thought so.

So here’s the punchline: I meet all of those criteria. (Check out the links for yourself).

How is it that lists are produced, identifying top social media speakers and… I’m not on them? Clearly, I need to get better at healthy self-promotion, because I refuse to believe anyone would be so stupid as to not consider me because I’m a girl.

Read the rest of this entry »