August 2007

Gene Marks, owner of a small CRM consultancy provides some great tips for acquiring software at BusinessWeek. Most of these are well known in the industry but it is always good to be reminded. The same is not quite so true if you are thinking about an on-demand or saas solution unless you are negotiating a large number of users in a single deal. The problem for on-demand vendors today is there is not enough service delivery experience to be certain whether a particular pricing profile is appropriate or otherwise. Direct price/cost comparisons are not straightforward, but they’re not impossible to calculate. Volume unquestionably has a part to play but the extent to which on-demand vendors will engage in discounting remains to be seen.

Wearing my curmudgeonly hat inside the Enterprise Irregulars Google Group, I’ve been calling into question the stuff Oracle’s president Charles Phillips said to long time colleague Stuart Lauchlan…. Other colleagues Josh Greebaum and Anshu Sharma parsed and moderated:Dennis Howlett of AccmanPro called the claims outrageous leading to a debate on Enterprise Irregulars – and Josh Greenbaum who writes a ZDNet blog, in a rare feat, wrote the following response arguing for the facts in favor of Oracle and I quote him (with permission):Rising to the defense of Charles in a disagreement with Dennis almost sounds crazy, but here goes:The only really outrageous statement comes in the first graf:We’re not trying to preserve something from the 1970s like SAP is. As a company, we were in infrastructure first, then we moved into applications.Correction: SAP is not preserving anything from the 70s (except some of its founders, who ARE relatively well-preserved. And Oracle was NOT an infrastructure company first: they started in database, moved to applications (in 89) and then went into infrastructure.I have no problem with Josh’s remarks – it’s all part of the ebb and flow of debate among people of passion. I’ve since used that discussion as part of a more broad based post about how the ‘new’ meets the ‘old’ in times of technology transition over at ZDNet. So yes – I’ve spun the discussion – but in a different direction.Internally to the group, the discussion has continued with Josh discussing the mess Peoplesoft got itself into and how Charles Phillips – then one of the Wall Street analysts an outsider could rely upon – trashed Peoplesoft and what happened once Dave Duffield, founder and CEO passed the baton to Craig Conway…. Total Ownership Experience — aka totally oversold excrement.Too often in IT I see mutton dressed as lamb, companies with pig’s ears trying to turn them into silk purses or, as seems to be Oracle’s MO – just plain BS’ing your way through…. They’re not the only ones but they are the most egregious.Such forms of marketing begs yet another question: Why, if you’re doing well – as Oracle is – does it remain necessary to puke over the competition, make claims that are blatantly incorrect or wring every ounce of spin from outlying facts?

One comment of note:…the only financial statements I ever saw at Microsoft were quarterly reports (as a shareholder), and even those were a mystery.That’s a monumental failure on the part of management. US quarterly reports take a certain skill to fathom and to deny staff an opportunity to understand what they’re reading is not my idea of being a good corporate citizen…. You’ll have much more influence over the development of an infant than you will a 30 year old, and the rewards should be commensurate.- If you refer to your company in the third-person, or have to ‘beat’ the system to be productive, it’s a bad sign. (One rumor at Microsoft was that your group should spend exactly 100% of its budget/headcount, otherwise ‘they’ would cut next years.)- Make sure your whole company feels like one team. Ballmer once joked at a company meeting, “Why do the different groups only clap for themselves?”- Be as important to the company as it is to you…. Be able change it!- And finally, to quote Paul Glen, “Never underestimate the power of free food.”I would extend the advice this chap offers with minor tweaks, to any SMB…. I’m currently thinking that social software – stuff like wikis and blogs – can go a long way towards allowing processes to develop naturally rather than be force fitted based on available software or proscribed management techniques…. This should not be news because when I read the biographies of the truly great business leaders, they all understood this at a deep and profound level.

Jason Corsello notes that:50% of employees are being block from accessing Facebook at work, according to a new survey by Sophos, a world leader in IT security and control…Keep in mind, Sophos has a vested interest in the results as “[their] WS1000 appliance defends firms against web threats, and allows IT departments to block access to unapproved sites…. A few weeks ago, I tried to log onto Facebook from a Fortune 100 clients site with no success — it was blocked.It is a testament to the advances in management thinking over the last 20+ years that we still seem to be driven by the knee jerk reaction of attempting to kill something new. IT is a master of this and every time I hear such stories, I wonder what kind of infrastructure is IT running that they are afraid something like Facebook will break their existing systems. If you want to get data out of Facebook then you need an application capable of doing that…. The company has recently responded to criticisms about it letting developers create spamming applications. Ergo, the chances of someone compromising corporate data are at worst slim and at best remote. Of course there will always be some enterprising hacker who will find an entry point but honestly – how hard are you going to work to get maybe a handful of names? And yes, there have been the odd occasion when Facebook security has been breached.