September 22nd, 2009

Is keeping big media alive good for the future of journalism?

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 7:56 am

Categories: Business models, Web 2.0

Tags: Web, Journalism, Media, Advertising & Promotion, Channel Management, Marketing, Phil Wainewright

The spectacle of various media tycoons over the summer proclaiming that paywalls are coming back for news content has felt like watching a car crash in slow motion. I suppose if you’re a news publishing executive you have a vested interest in blaming the Web for killing print media, but frankly I think it’s time to put a stop to the bluster. It’s not the Web that killed their businesses, it was the media owners’ own callous lust for profit during the boom years when making money was easy and good journalism was too hard to cost-justify (especially if you left morals and integrity out of the equation).

So while I applaud the latest initiative by subscription billing start-up Zuora to save journalism, I don’t believe that saving big media is the way to do it — even though Zuora’s platform, in other hands, may play a key role.

Many people are worried that the tradition of fearless, relentless investigative journalism that is one of the guarantors of our democratic freedoms is under threat from the financial bankruptcy of big media and its consequent inability to fund such initiatives. But it was the industry’s moral bankruptcy that killed off investigative journalism and replaced it with mindless reproduction of press releases and spin — all the while diminishing reader loyalty and respect. Good journalism costs money and (like prudent banking) it became a casualty of short-term greed, with the Web coming along just in time to pick up the mantle of convenient scapegoat.

Casting around for solutions, some people feel that investigative journalism in the online era should be Read the rest of this entry »

September 21st, 2009

Computing by the people, for the people

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 3:08 pm

Categories: CRM, Collaboration, HRM, Platform as a service, Social computing, Web 2.0

Tags: Social Software, Computing, People Management, Phil Wainewright

Sometimes you’re too close to the wood to see the forest. Across several different sectors of computing, participants are talking about a trend to add social, collaborative or self-service features to certain application categories. Perhaps it’s now time to join the dots. As I wrote last week, these are all facets of a broad trend across computing towards the democratization of IT — the people that actually use computing, as opposed to those that make or manage it, are taking control.

For those who haven’t seen it yet, here’s a roll-call of the different categories of business computing where this is in evidence.

Social CRM is the term for a new trend in customer relationship management software that acknowledges (in Paul Greenberg’s words) “the customer’s ownership of the conversation.”

Enterprise 2.0 is (in Andrew McAfee’s words) “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers” to allow user-driven sharing of knowledge and information.

People management is another application category where social computing and user participation is creeping into various aspects of HR and talent management, from social recruiting to performance management.

Ad hoc customization is becoming a staple offering in SaaS applications and is an integral component of platform as a service. Meanwhile, cloud computing is making compute power available on demand to anyone who needs it.

What have I missed out? Add your examples in Talkback below.

September 18th, 2009

The democratization of IT

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 6:54 am

Categories: Business applications, Social computing, Web 2.0

Tags: Web, Information Technology, Service-now, Web 2.0, Service Level Management, Channel Management, It Services, Strategy, Internet, It Operations

Earlier this week I attended the EMEA user conference of Service-Now.com, probably the leading SaaS pureplay vendor in enterprise IT service management. Co-founded by former Peregrine Systems and Remedy CTO Fred Luddy, Service-now champions a Web 2.0 approach to systems management, an approach that’s often described as the consumerization of IT. But watching Luddy’s opening presentation, it struck me the term is a misnomer.

‘Consumerization’ is the trend of making unwieldy and complex enterprise software as easy to use as the applications and services ordinary people use on the Web. We dress it up in a long word that implies the industry is doing its customers a favor, but what’s so special about making software people can actually use? Isn’t that what the industry should have been doing all along?

Furthermore, I don’t think the word consumerization is an adequate description of what’s really going on here. It’s a mass media term, which makes it sound as though the IT department has bowed to popular demand and started beaming crowd-pleasing, populist software out to users’ desktops in place of the challenging, highbrow applications it used to offer. The unspoken undertone of the analogy is that the users are dumb couch-potatoes that have to be cajoled and tricked into engaging with their work.

But passive consumption is the last thing Web 2.0 is about. If the media barons of Web 1.0 had had their way, users would have sat in their walled gardens and meekly consumed whatever Yahoo, AOL and the rest saw fit to distribute. Instead, users seized control, told each other what they thought of online content and started generating their own blogs, videos and commentary. Web 2.0 was a grassroots revolution, not consumerization but democratization, and that is the trend that is now transforming IT.

In IT service management (ITSM), which is the market Service-now addresses, that process of democratization has meant giving users the tools to find their own answers to problems instead of leaving them dependent on the availability of a limited pool of IT experts. This is a concept that’s Read the rest of this entry »

September 16th, 2009

Adobe ties web design to business results

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 6:03 am

Categories: Adobe, Content management, Omniture, Web 2.0

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc., Web, Software-as-a-service, Omniture Inc., Web Site, Web Design, Software As A Service (SaaS), Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing, Web Site Development

The more I think about Adobe’s decision to acquire Omniture for a mouthwatering $1.8 billion (Techmeme coverage), the more it feels like a smart move (though I know others are wondering how the deal makes sense). The growth of SaaS and cloud services gives Adobe a looming problem, which depends for its revenues on sales of conventionally licensed software, most of it to the creative people who design corporate websites. Even if those users turn out to be the last people on earth to switch their allegiance to cloud-based applications (as well they might), they’re still going to slow their spending on licensed alternatives in the meantime. Adobe needs a way to tap into the faster growth that’s available from online solutions, and Omniture, which I once named one of The four horsemen of SaaS, will help it jump on the gas.

By the way, some financial analysts are saying Adobe overpaid because competition from the free-of-charge Google Analytics service is already putting Omniture’s revenues under pressure. I don’t think the analysts who are saying that really understand much about business. Omniture’s core customer base are enterprises that spend huge amounts of money on web marketing and their online presence, and who want to measure the effectiveness of and return on that spending. They’re going to rely on a free-of-charge service for such a critical business process? One that’s provided by the same company that accounts for a large proportion of their online ad spend? Puh-leeze!

But back to why Adobe made this move now. Its existing strategy, which I described last year in a post on SAP, Adobe, Microsoft: three monkeys take on SaaS, has been to develop a new line of collaborative applications that compete on Microsoft’s turf rather than cannibalizing its own licensed revenue stream. That strategy continues, but it’s inevitably taking a while to build it out. Hence the decision to open a new front in the company’s transition into online services.

Omniture makes a superb fit for reasons Read the rest of this entry »

September 12th, 2009

Finally, technology is about people

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 2:55 pm

Categories: HRM, Social computing, SuccessFactors, Web 3.0

Tags: SuccessFactors Inc., Performance Management, Tools & Techniques, Business Intelligence, Pricing, Workforce Management, Human Resources, Management, Enterprise Software, Software

Listening to SuccessFactors this week outline its new positioning as a provider of ‘business execution software,’ I couldn’t help being reminded of the early days of what were then called executive information systems. As early as the late 1980s, enterprises started spending large sums of money on complex software whose role was simply to collect information about what was going on in the business and deliver it to top management.

Thirty years later, we’ve finally reached a point where such systems can be democratized, and instead of that information being expensively collated for the benefit of a privileged handful of top executives, SuccessFactors promises to give everyone in the organization the information they need to help them track whether they — and the teams they belong to — are achieving their goals. Perhaps the product should be called a ‘talent information system’.

It’s a characteristically aggressive strategy from SuccessFactors, which aims to thrust it out of the narrower performance management segment and grab leadership of what could be a powerful new category of software. Of course, others may argue that this is just another variety of business intelligence, already a highly competitive field. But the genius of what SuccessFactors has done is to link business metrics to performance goals, putting the business intelligence into the visceral context of, ‘Am I likely to get a raise/make my bonus/keep my job this year?’

What struck me as I thought this through was that here was yet another take on a theme that seems increasingly prevalent in the briefings and stories I’m hearing this year, on the parallel beats of SaaS, cloud and enterprise 2.0. For a long time, technology has been about eliminating the human element — automating processes and systems to avoid human error, and delivering dispassionate analysis of transactions and outcomes so that management can take objective decisions. Now the pendulum is starting to swing back towards acknowledging the qualitative role that human beings play in processes and operations. The technology is no longer trying to keep them out of the equation. Instead, its role is to provide automation that helps them do a better job of collaborating with each other, focusing their motivation and acknowledging the experience, insight and creativity they bring to their roles.

I know that people sometimes feel diffident about embracing the new trends towards social computing, especially in the stuffy old enterprise. The message I want to keep on promoting is that we have now reached a point with Web technologies where we can, finally, use them to put people instead of machines at the center of what we do — and that is the natural order.

September 10th, 2009

Survival of the fit-most

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 2:18 am

Categories: Ecosystems, On-demand, Platform as a service, Utility computing, Web 3.0

Tags: Web, Survival, Cloud, Cloud Computing, Channel Management, Virtualization, Marketing, Hardware, Phil Wainewright

In the emerging Web era, connectedness reigns supreme. Competitive survival is no longer the preserve solely of the strong, the quick and the nimble — the attributes popularly associated with Darwin’s adopted motto, survival of the fittest. The Web emphasizes connections, sharing and community, enabling a further advance in the evolution of homo sapiens as a social creature.

In this environment, the individuals, tools and organizations best adapted to thrive are those best able to connect. Not the fittest so much as the fit-most.

This change may seem to be the consequence of technology innovation — in this case, the Web — having an impact on society. But perhaps the rise of the Web is itself a reflection of a change that was already taking shape, a reaction against the individualist creed that culminated in the 1980s notion that ‘Greed is good.’ Today we see a generational shift towards shared endeavor and a backlash against excessive intellectual property protection.

A fresh example of this emerging collaborative mindset came last week when online backup vendor Backblaze published the specifications it uses to build low-cost storage devices for its data center. Ten years ago, this would have seemed a crazy revelation of a proprietary secret. Today, it looks like a smart move because we have a better understanding of the notion of crowd-sourcing. We realize that Backblaze aims to tap the collaborative expertise of the Web community to hone and refine the savings it can make on its physical storage costs. It’s a rational decision because the company isn’t giving away the operational details of its core service offering — it may even strengthen its selling power by publicly demonstrating the viability of its prices compared to such low capital spending costs (”three-tenths of one penny per gigabyte per month over the course of three years”).

Yet making the most of the doctrine of the fit-most means overturning long-held instincts to act privately and secretly, and instead making a conscious effort to share and use communal assets, whether as providers or consumers. The pressure to conform to deeply ingrained behaviors and customs is hard to resist (Zoho recently became the latest in a long line of SaaS and cloud providers to cave in to the clamor for a ‘private cloud’ option). We know why we want to keep things private — the arguments are well-rehearsed and almost a universal folk memory — whereas the impulse to share is much less well documented and understood.

Sharing and community are nevertheless at the heart of our success as a species, and ’survival of the fit-most’ is all about replicating that success in the cloud computing environment. Instead of trying to do everything alone as a hermetically sealed entity, the cloud encourages us to reach out and utilize the services of others that do what they do better than we can do it ourselves — which is exactly how human civilization works. We are all individually stronger and more potent when we rely on each other.

In cloud computing, survival of the fit-most emphasizes attributes such as: Read the rest of this entry »

August 5th, 2009

Go cloud, young man

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 5:29 am

Categories: ERP, Intacct, Web 3.0

Tags: Job, Web, Accounting, Accountant, Accounting Company, Cloud, Rationale, Recruitment & Selection, Internet, Human Resources

Several times recently, I’ve advised personal acquaintances who find themselves between jobs to investigate any opportunities to put their skills to work online. The rationale is simple. In an economic recession, everyone is looking for ways to save money, and therefore the growth sectors are those that help people and businesses do more with less — low-cost supermarkets and fast-food outlets, second-hand and discount traders, and the subject of this article: any online service that strips out excess costs through automation and remote access to administrative and professional expertise.

By and large, online is cheaper because it eliminates all the time frittered away moving information from one place to the next and moving people from one meeting to another. Imagine how much time is saved when a customer looks up data for themselves and then enters new information directly on an online form, instead of having to phone up and ask questions, then fill out a paper form and have someone re-enter that data on receipt. Think how many more people an adviser can deal with if instead of handling physical paper and attending face-to-face meetings, they can just pick up the phone to their client and discuss documents and data they’re both viewing online.

That time saved is a huge salary cost that an online provider no longer has to bear. It’s a cost burden that keeps prices high at conventional operators. Businesses that transfer custom from their old providers to go online no longer have to pay those inflated prices, so they save money. The online providers still make a profit on their lower operating costs, and as they grow they make even more money. Those cost savings and profits come at the expense of the people who are no longer employed on those wasteful, time-intensive manual processes and face-to-face meetings at the conventional providers. Jobs and profits move from the old providers to the new, which is why I say to my friends, look online for opportunities.

Nowhere is this more true than in the kind of professional work in which most of my personal acquaintances have made their careers — banking, insurance, law, accountancy, sales and marketing, journalism and so on. Yet despite this, most of the people to whom I give this advice completely ignore it, either because they don’t get it or they don’t want to believe it.

What they don’t understand (or refuse to accept) is that the Web Read the rest of this entry »

July 15th, 2009

Users have to wise up to cloud security

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 4:04 pm

Categories: Collaboration, Google, Security, Web 2.0

Tags: Bank, Password, Twitter, Security, Phil Wainewright

Several observers have noted that the theft of confidential Twitter documents (which ended up in the hands of TechCrunch) took place by accessing a Twitter employee’s Google Apps account. Cue a chorus of commentary alleging how this shows that if you want to keep stuff private, don’t put it on the web, period, because cloud security is not ready for prime time and nothing is secure on the net.

OK, so let’s go back to storing confidential company documents on laptops that people leave in cars or forget on trains, or transferring them on computer tape and CD-ROMs that couriers deliver to the wrong address, or backing them up to USB sticks that go missing, or forgetting to wipe them off the hard disks of office servers when we dispose of them (UPDATE: see Michael Krigsman’s post on the same topic for a catalog of examples). Cloud security is no different from real-world security. It’s just a matter of identifying the risks and containing them.

Users really like the convenience of the cloud — far too much for them to give it up — but the trouble is, they also like the convenience of authentication using a simple username-password pair. They haven’t yet figured out that’s far too little to separate your confidential data from a nefarious interloper, especially when the Web means that authentication will work from anywhere, which dramatically increases the threat level. In the Twitter case, as my ZDNet colleague Sam Diaz points out, the security breach exploited “an easy-to-guess password and recovery question,” which is one of the simplest ways to make a username and password combination really insecure. Unfortunately, users they won’t wise up until the cloud providers force them to.

The banks figured this out long ago, and they knew they had to sort it because customers were losing money and blaming them. As a result, I now have to answer ‘challenge questions’ before I can access any of my online banking services. I have to remember a user ID and two passwords to access my personal current account, and to authorise a bill payment I have to insert my chip-and-pin debit card into a special reader, type in the pin number plus some other data and then copy a code that the reader generates into the payment authorization page. My business bank account requires a user ID, a password and a code generated by a separate security device. All this is a pain but I put up with it because I don’t want my bank to make it easy for other people to defraud me of my money. Nor do I want to go back to the days of having to write out checks and put them in the mail or waiting till my statement arrives at the end of the month to find out how much money I have left.

Now it’s up to cloud providers to inflict the same pain on their users — for their own sake — to protect their data. We won’t like it, but we’ll put up with it because at the end of the day we’d rather jump through all those hoops than give up all the convenience the cloud brings us.

July 1st, 2009

WebEx augurs ill for Cisco's cloud ambitions

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 1:04 pm

Categories: Collaboration, Ecosystems, Platform as a service, Utility computing, Web 2.0, WebEx

Tags: WebEx Communications Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Phil Wainewright

Color me skeptical, but I feel the detail behind yesterday and today’s Cisco Live event hasn’t matched the aspirations set out in executive keynotes. I like the vision set out by CEO John Chambers of providing a technology infrastructure that (as Oliver Marks puts it) does a better job of connecting people. I’m highly supportive when CTO Padmasree Warrior looks ahead to a future fabric of ‘intercloud’ interoperability standards — ending lock-in by individual cloud providers — and talks about ‘federation’ between cloud and on-premise. But when I look at the map of where Cisco claims to play in the cloud, I’m struck by how feeble its tenure is at each level, from the underlying foundation all the way up to both Paas and SaaS, where WebEx is its undernourished poster child, as I’ll discuss below.

First, there’s what Cisco calls the ‘IT Foundation layer’ — the underlying hardware and virtualization platforms on which cloud services run. Cisco expects to play a big role here with its Unified Computing System (UCS). I’m sure there’s a huge potential market for UCS among enterprises, telcos, IT services providers and many other established data center operators that want to transition their existing enterprise infrastructure into more of a quasi-cloud environment. But I can’t help thinking that most of them are missing the point when they try to scale up familiar enterprise technology instead of scaling out to a more web-scale architecture.

I’m also suspicious that Cisco is falling into the trap of over-engineering UCS so that it ends up too-clever-by-half to really deliver the promise of cloud computing. I would be more convinced if Cisco had productized the existing web-scale infrastructure that it acquired with WebEx. But just as Microsoft has developed its Azure cloud platform with a whole new set of design objectives rather than productizing the existing web-scale infrastructure it had already built for its Live properties, so Cisco is shoe-horning UCS Read the rest of this entry »

June 10th, 2009

Wookey: SAP's future is on-demand

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 3:42 am

Categories: ERP, Ecosystems, On-demand, SAP, Uncategorized, Web 2.0

Tags: On-demand Application, On-demand, SAP AG, John Wookey, Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing, Phil Wainewright

Citing the spectre of long-forgotten titans of previous generations of business application software, SAP executive VP John Wookey set out the software giant’s commitment to embracing on-demand applications in a keynote presentation at the OnDemand Europe conference in Amsterdam today:

“On demand is the next stage in the evolution of application development … It is absolutely essential from SAP’s perspective that we embrace this change,” he said. “On-demand is what our customers are looking to invest in. If we do our job well and listen to our customers, these are the applications we have to be delivering. We have to drive to leadership in on-demand applications.”

As previewed by articles in the WSJ and FT today, Wookey (pictured) outlined the company’s strategy for bringing on-demand applications to SAP’s existing customer base of large enterprises. This is separate from the more widely publicised Business ByDesign offering being developed for midmarket companies and the BusinessObjects on-demand portfolio, although lessons have also been learned from those initiatives, he said. As EVP of large enterprise on-demand, Wookey heads up a team with a portfolio of on-demand products targeted at large enterprises, including CRM, strategic sourcing and expense management.

The core of the strategy, targeted for availability mid next year, is an architecture where new on-demand applications can be deployed instantly because they’ll inherit the existing policy settings from the installed Business Suite infrastructure. “The on-demand applications we deliver can behave as an extension of the Business Suite,” Wookey explained. “[Customers] just turn it on. They don’t have to redefine anything to the on-demand service.” The principle has already been tested with Read the rest of this entry »