November 18th, 2009

Dreamforce: Quick first impressions

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 10:48 am

Categories: CIO issues, CRM, Enterprise 2.0, IT issues, SaaS, PaaS, and SOA, Salesforce.com

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Sales Force Management, Sales, Michael Krigsman

Sitting here in the audience at the annual Dreamforce conference of Salesforce.com, a couple of quick impressions come to mind. This post is mid-stream during the first keynote speech, so there will be more later.

A few observations:

• Salesforce.com is indeed a force to be reckoned with. One of the largest software vendors in the world, with an annualized run rate of $1.3 billion in revenue, no one can deny the inroads that cloud computing has made in the enterprise. 19,000 people registered for this conference, an obvious indicator that something serious is going on.
• The company has developed a vibrant ecosystem. Wandering through the expo hall to see the vendors and partners showing their wares, I was struck by diversity. Notably, I spoke with a system integrator implementing large (over 1000 seats) Salesforce projects. At that scale, there’s real complexity, especially around business process redesign and integration with existing systems. I intend to explore this topic further.
• CEO Marc Benioff emphasized “trust” as key theme. In a slide showing aspect of the Saleforce’s infrastructure, trust was right at the center. Here’s a photo:

The trust issue is big and there’s no surprise Benioff positioned it front and center of his first slide on product strategy. Trust, confidence, and reliability are among the key matters of concern to large enterprise buyers.

This post comes while the keynote is in-progress. More soon…

[Photo by Michael Krigsman.]

November 2nd, 2009

Five definitions toward the maturing of Enterprise 2.0

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 7:14 pm

Categories: CIO issues, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Enterprise2conf, IT issues, SaaS, PaaS, and SOA

Tags: Apple iPod, Fragmentation, Enterprise 2.0, Conference, Miko, Enterprise, Michael Krigsman

The excellent Enterprise 2.0 Conference is currently in full swing in San Francisco. Given the excitement around this conference, now’s a perfect time to re-examine the “enterprise” part of Enterprise 2.0.

In this guest blog post, Miko Matsumura, Vice President and Chief Strategist of Software AG, offers a humorous look at the Enterprise 2.0 movement. In addition to his position at Software AG, Miko is the author of the book, SOA Adoption for Dummies.

Miko’s underlying message is important: to be successful, Enterprise 2.0 activities must remain rooted in the practical realities of real companies, processes, and corporate cultures. I share this perspective. Although the tone and images are funny, I assure you the message is serious.

———–

It’s a cool sunny day in San Francisco. I’m at the Moscone center where there’s some bustle around the Enterprise 2.0 conference. You can tell it’s an Enterprise conference because, unlike the Web 2.0 Conference, there’s no free pass even to the show floor. Also, the full pass is about $2500 bucks.

As I’ve been discussing on Twitter @mikojava and in my blog, here are my top five definitions of Enterprise. Feel free to chime in with your views via Twitter, email or my blog.

One way to define Enterprise is:

en⋅ter⋅prise:
/ˈɛntərˌpraɪz/ [en-ter-prahyz]
-noun

5. Stuff I wouldn’t do unless you paid me.

This definition puts Enterprise squarely in the camp of crime scene janitorial services. It adds a concept of “professional” to the discussion and establishes the Enterprise as the realm of uncomfortable clothing.

I recall reconnecting with Arthur Van Hoff after our adventures in Java and having him laugh at me because I was wearing (in his words) an “IQ Restrictor,” his parlance for a necktie. This definition also puts a dynamic tension between the “Suits” at the Enterprise 2.0 conference and the boho hipsters wearing the Emo Hair.

4. Software that sucks.

This was the definition I evoked in my post “The Human Enterprise.” To be honest, I introduced the idea of “The Human Enterprise” as a direct counter-proposal to “Enterprise 2.0.”

I think the piece that was missing from The Human Enterprise is the extent to which fragmentation plays a role in the essential nature of the Enterprise, which is a theme I’ve been addressing more lately in terms of the effect of sheer size on the Enterprise.

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October 8th, 2009

Workday, SaaS, and failure: 'A matter of trust'

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 6:00 pm

Categories: CIO issues, Cultural issues, End-user impact, Failure 2.0, IT issues, Project failures, Project success, SaaS, PaaS, and SOA, Vendor relationships

Tags: Customer, Workday, Outage, Naomi Bloom, Andrew McCarthy, Manjit, Manufacturing, Michael Krigsman

Software as a service (SaaS) vendor, Workday, which sells human resources applications, recently had a 15-hour outage, during which time its system was unavailable to customers. In an unusual twist, this post is about success and not failure.

Background. The story begins when I heard about the outage through an anonymous source. To learn more, I sent out this Twitter message:

Naomi Bloom, a top HR technology and service delivery expert, responded:

Following Naomi’s suggestion, I checked Workday’s blog for details:

[T]he network attached storage (NAS) device that stores operating system files for our production servers detected a corrupted node within a backup RAID array. Rather than simply log the error, which is what it is supposed to do, the NAS took itself off-line. It is ironic that the redundant backup to a system with built-in redundancy caused the failure.

This type of error should not have caused the array to go offline, but it did. The most important result is that our failover plans worked as expected. Within hours, all customers were live in our secondary datacenter with all their data intact.

Workday gets in touch. Two days later, Workday’s Communications Director, Andrew McCarthy, sent me an unsolicited invitation to discuss the outage, even though I previously never had contact with the company.

The note caught me off-guard because it’s the first and only time a vendor has reached out to me proactively following a failure. I’ve written almost 750 blog posts related to IT failure, and Andrew’s invitation is unique in my experience. Here’s the full text of that email:

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August 31st, 2009

Bake off: On-premise vs. SaaS toasters

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 6:37 pm

Categories: IT issues, SaaS, PaaS, and SOA

Tags: Software-as-a-service, Bread, Software As A Service (SaaS), Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing, Emerging Technologies, Michael Krigsman

To set an appropriate mood while reading, please play the flying toasters video just above.

Blogger and master data management (MDM) expert, Ramon Chen, wrote a clever post comparing what would happen if on-premise and cloud-based software companies each made toasters.

A couple of points:

• Ramon created the entire comparison, which I took directly from his blog
• Be aware that this cute comparison has a strong SaaS bias. Apparently, there is little place for on-premise software in Ramon’s world

I’m not endorsing any perspective, but merely passing along a funny presentation for your enjoyment and edification.

[Flying Toasters video from YouTube. Via @theitskeptic, @MichaelDunham, and @devcorporate.]

August 15th, 2009

Twitter is down...again

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 10:16 am

Categories: Enterprise 2.0, Failure 2.0, IT issues, SaaS, PaaS, and SOA

Tags: Twitter, Blogging, Internet, Michael Krigsman

Update 8/15/09 2:15pm EDT: Seems to back up and working now.

Twitter isn’t working yet again and what a pain in the rear. Here’s a screen capture:

I was in the middle of an interesting conversation with top enterprise blogger, Francine McKenna, and a writer for New York magazine when Twitter just stopped working. Although the writer was looking for conflicts of interest among enterprise bloggers, she was barking up the wrong tree in her search. Unfortunately, we never reached a point of resolution when Twitter crashed.

I’d link to the thread, but since Twitter is down, that just ain’t possible.

June 30th, 2009

Failing with online backup

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 4:03 pm

Categories: CIO issues, Enterprise 2.0, IT issues, SaaS, PaaS, and SOA

Tags: Online Backup, Carbonite, Mozy, Backups, Michael Krigsman

Seeking to back up 350GB in safe, reliable, off-site storage, I tried Carbonite and Mozy, two of the most respected names in the online backup market. Both products failed miserably to achieve my goals, each one in a perversely different way.

Carbonite offers a simple, set-and-forget solution that should make life easy. In my case, something bad happened along the way because I can no longer restore files reliably. This screen capture shows what happens when I try to restore files using the company’s remote access feature:

As you can see, Carbonite can’t find my selected file. Would this message inspire confidence that your backup is safe?

Carbonite tech support was quite helpful trying to diagnose and solve the problem. However, my luck ran out after support submitted the issue to the developers for further research and fixing. At that stage, support essentially said the developers will handle my issue when they want, with no time horizon and not even a pat on the back.

Based on that interaction, I decided to try Mozy instead.

Mozy takes a somewhat more configurable approach to its backup software, which I like. I transferred the first 200GB of data to Mozy with no problems and reasonably fast upload speeds of 1.5Mbps. Recently, however, my upload speed decreased to a level where large backups are no longer practical. This dialog box shows my current upload rate, which is slower than a dialup modem:

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June 29th, 2009

Enterprise 2.0: The Kumbaya irony

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 4:11 pm

Categories: CIO issues, Cultural issues, Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Enterprise2conf, IT issues, Project management, SaaS, PaaS, and SOA

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Tasks, Groups, Current Resource Allocation Process, Dissenters, Michael Krigsman

Last week I attended the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. It’s one of my favorite events, primarily because so many online friends attend from around the world and I enjoy their company. Despite overwhelming good will among participants, the conference exposed gaps between expectations and reality that continue to plague the Enterprise 2.0 world.

Enterprise 2.0 aspirations. Enterprise 2.0 suggests a network of organizational activities involving collaboration, cooperation, and engagement as part of a broader ethos of social interaction in business. Professor Andrew McAfee, formerly of Harvard Business School and currently with MIT, coined the phrase Enterprise 2.0. Andy recently blogged about implications of this new system of thought on managing organizations and leading teams.

Andy’s blog elaborated on a piece in the Wall Street Journal by Gary Hamel, which describes “12 work-relevant characteristics of online life.” The post provides a convenient summary of an Enterprise 2.0 view of management:

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May 27th, 2009

VC perspective: Can enterprise software companies do SaaS?

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 6:01 am

Categories: Cultural issues, IT issues, SaaS, PaaS, and SOA, Uncategorized

Tags: Software, Software-as-a-service, SAP AG, PROJECT FAILURES ANALYSIS Mike, Software As A Service (SaaS), Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing, Tools & Techniques, Emerging Technologies, Management

Recent discussions (including a great summary by Bob Warfield) questioned the impact of established enterprise software companies in the software as a service (SaaS) market. Therefore, I decided to seek the views of an experienced venture capitalist, who is actively investing in SaaS, for another perspective.

Mike Fitzgerald, founder and Managing General Partner of Commonwealth Capital Ventures, has been around the VC block quite a few times. His firm’s conference room is lined with mementos of companies in which it has invested, including Aberdeen Group, Akibia, Centra Software, Compete, Constant Contact, Direct Hit, i-Logix, Tally Systems, Zoom Information, and many others.

I asked Mike whether he thought enterprise companies, such as Oracle, IBM, and SAP, could be successful selling SaaS software. His answer was definite and unambiguous:

These companies don’t get it, won’t get it, and never will. They are hooked on big deals and have a culture oriented around big deals. That culture can’t understand $1000 per month subscription fees.

Mike drew a comparison with previous generations of computing, describing the evolution from mainframe to mini, then to personal computers and smart phones:

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May 15th, 2009

Understanding SAP's Business byDesign SaaS strategy

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 12:58 pm

Categories: CIO issues, Enterprise 2.0, IT issues, SAP, SaaS, PaaS, and SOA, Uncategorized

Tags: Software, Strategy, SAP AG, Tools & Techniques, Software As A Service (SaaS), Management, Emerging Technologies, Michael Krigsman

At this week’s Sapphire conference in Orlando, SAP spoke at length about the status and trajectory of Business by Design, the company’s on-demand, software as a service (SaaS) offering.

To learn about SAP’s SaaS strategy, I talked with several current customers and the following five SAP executives:

• Pascal Brosset - Chief Strategy Officer
• Rainer Zinow - Senior Vice President for ByDesign Innovations
• Jeff Stiles - Senior Vice President of SME Marketing
• Christoph Behrendt - Senior Vice President for Midsize Enterprises
• Frank Iannotti - Vice President for Business ByDesign, North America

During these interviews, I repeatedly cross-checked the main points, explicitly trying to uncover irregularities and inconsistencies. Despite my attempt to find discrepancies, the conversations yielded a consistent picture in several important areas.

Commitment. SAP remains deeply committed to the Business byDesign platform and product. In response to my direct question on the commitment topic, Jeff Stiles answered, “Categorically yes,” and added:

SAP is 100 percent, unequivocally committed to bringing Business byDesign to market for the long haul.

Business model. For the low cost economics of SaaS software to work on a sustained basis, subscription software vendors generally strive to accomplish three goals:

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May 12th, 2009

CEO interview: an insider's look at SaaS vs. on-premise software

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 5:56 am

Categories: CIO issues, Enterprise 2.0, IT issues, Interview, Podcast, SaaS, PaaS, and SOA, Uncategorized

Tags:

Many enterprise buyers view software as a service (SaaS) products as a viable alternative to purchasing on-premise applications, yet there is confusion around differences between these two delivery models. To learn about some of these differences, I spoke with serial entrepreneur David Friend, CEO of online backup services provider Carbonite.

Carbonite is David’s sixth software startup. He previously co-founded Sonexis, FaxNet, Pilot Software, Computer Pictures Corporation and ARP Instruments. David’s background spans a broad range of ventures, including traditional, on-premises enterprise software in addition to SaaS.

To listen to our entire conversation, click the podcast player at the top of this post. You can also read my edited conversation notes and analysis below.

How fast is Carbonite growing?

In May 2006, we sold $12,000 of subscriptions and stored 800GB of customer data. Today, we sell that volume every 3-4 hours and maintain 13 million GB of storage for customers. Revenues in the last quarter grew 36% over the previous quarter, so the growth has been meteoric.

What are the unique challenges of managing a rapidly-growing SaaS company?

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