PracticalSOA

Music to our ears:

“Other partners, like one of my all time SAP favorites, Bridge-X demoed their wares. In the case of Bridge-X it was Sales360 which as they emphasize “moves information, not data.” What that means is that can capture and analyze multiple sources using pointers basically. The pointers show where the data is and allow it to be analyzed and aggregated on a dashboard. They do a great job as they did for Lincoln Electric(demonstrated by John Goetz of Lincoln E.) and other customers.”

That feedback (scroll down below the section titled “CRM 7.0, Messaging and Mobile”), coming from a CRM thought leader, made our entire team very, very happy today.

Are you attending the SAP Insider CRM 2010 conference in Orlando this week?

It is an especially satisfying moment for all of us here at Bridge-x Technologies to be at the event. Some of our customers will be in attendance at the conference and they all have very nice things to say about our solutions and what they mean to their business!

“Rooftop Marketplace” may be an unusual name for an enterprise tool (it’s only a prototype at the moment) but the demo is worth a look. (Link to SAP’s SDN forum; via SAP Web 2.0)

The promise of applications like Rooftop Marketplace is powerful: the ability to string together a collection of widgets, thus letting users (or IT) create a full application workflow.

But to me, the more interesting challenge lies in figuring out the “use case” for such tools. “Application workflow” is an abstract notion. Users don’t think in those terms, of course. However, “Purchase order approval” is a real business scenario. So the implication of having tools like “Rooftop Marketplace” (or indeed any composite application builder) is that IT must help define both the problem and the desired solution differently than they do today.

(With apologies to Mr. Letterman, of course)

10. Salespeople must log into CRM, ERP and a data warehouse system to find all the information they need about an account or a prospect.
9. Salespeople spend hours gathering account information instead of selling.
8. Salespeople have no real basis for their revenue or volume forecasts, other than “gut feel”.
7. Your Sales VP has no easy way to monitor key sales metrics on a daily basis.
6. Salespeople spend half a day collecting their sales territory data for the status Call with the Regional Sales Manager on Friday.
5. Regional Sales managers spend all day Friday collecting sales reports for the Monday morning status call with the VP.
4. Sales VP spends all Monday collecting sales reports for the status call with the company’s President.
3. Sales expenses and sales activities cannot be correlated.
2. The supply planning team complains of lack of verifiable demand forecast.

And the #1 sign that your business needs a 360-degree view of sales:

1. Salespeople do not clearly see the link between their actions (sales efforts) and results (variable compensation).

SAP gets its own category on Alltop. (It’s probably been there for a while, but I noticed it only today.)

An absolutely stunning example of hi-tech ingenuity:

“…a system that composes a realistic picture from a simple freehand sketch annotated with text labels. The composed picture is generated by seamlessly stitching several photographs in agreement with the sketch and text labels; these are found by searching the Internet.”

Think about it - the software allows you to create a montage (i.e. a “visual composite”) by simply tagging the various elements of a freehand sketch!

You can read the abstract and get more details on this amazing piece of technology. (Link via Metafilter)

Now, why isn’t enterprise IT this easy?

The good news? We will be immortal in 20 years. (Link to CNET)

The bad news? Think of how much you will be paying toward those pesky annual maintenance fees to software vendors.

Still want to live forever?

Courtesy Vinnie Mirchandani’s blog, a most informative post on ZDnet on the evolution of the packaged software industry:

“….selling software as a continuously updated service, on a pay-as-you-go subscription, seems like an anomaly. But the accepted status quo is in fact merely a quirk of history, brought about by government action.“

(Emphasis mine)

I wasn’t aware of this fact at all. If you work in the packaged software business or in the implementation business, you should read the full post. You should also check out Vinnie’s post on this topic.

In our business, we too are experiencing something similar. It may not yet be as noticeable as in the case of some SaaS providers, but it is undoubtedly felt by all of us.

We develop solutions on top of SAP’s Netweaver platform but we do not implement any of the back-end products from SAP (such as ECC or CRM or SRM). So in that sense, we are not a packaged software provider nor are we - strictly speaking - in the implementation business. But customers expect our solutions to deliver features and functionality, just as they would from a software product vendor.

Interesting times, to be in the enterprise software business right now.

According to Thomas Siebel, a man who certainly knows a thing or ten about enterprise software, Information Technology simply isn’t where it’s at, both growth-wise and career-wise:

No new technological advances, he believes, would impel I.T. customers to replace the computer technology they already had: “I would suggest to you that most of what’s going on today is not very exciting.”

(Read the article in the New York Times.)

I am sure almost all IT practitioners will heartily - and quickly - disagree.

Some very basic (anecdotal) fact-checking. In our business, we *are* seeing customers questioning the wisdom of software upgrades. Developing the business case for moving from one release of CRM to another is a longer cycle than it would have been in, say, 1999 or even 2006.

So in that, Mr. Siebel is indeed right. Naturally, such data points tempt us all to compare IT with mature businesses like electric utilities. When did you last comparison-shop or voluntarily replace your electricity provider?

But like all most generalizations, that sort of straight-line extrapolation is wrong. Only because the straight-line assumes a static, unchanging business environment, one in which all existing IT investments will soldier on bravely, never complaining about increasing transaction volumes, new markets, mergers, acquisitions, new regulations etc.

Let’s forget the enterprise for a second and look at ourselves, the private consumers of technology. Have *we* stopped bringing more technology into our lives? Television manufacturers want us to splurge on their latest offerings but a website wants me to stop viewing TV on my TV. Another website wants me never to buy another CD download another MP3 and simply stream what, when and where I like.

My point simply being, technological advances *are* continuing, they are changing us and they are changing our buying behavior. Just because everyone has a cellphone or an iPod or a laptop is no reason at all to discount and dismiss the future. Who could have predicted the (re-)emergence of the Netbook in 2009?

Similarly, just because all large companies already run ERP, CRM, data warehouses and portals is no reason to believe this is the end-state.

Even today, every new conversation with a customer or a prospect leaves me a little surprised at how much there is still left to be done in enterprise IT. And how can it not be? After all, the business environment is not standing still. It is morphing and evolving all the time. Is there a CIO on this planet who truly believes he or she has achieved a blissful state of equilibrium with the business?

Could it be that the current model of IT - not just the infrastructure but everything - is reaching it’s logical conclusion and will be replaced by something better? Contrast, for example, the Internet and web-based applications to the mainframe software applications from the 1960s, the so-called Golden Period of IT. That is exactly the stuff of entrepreneurship and innovation.

Well, I am still optimistic and I say Thomas Siebel is wrong. Companies are and will be motivated to replace and upgrade and to solve familiar problems with new ideas and approaches.

How all of this gets packaged and delivered to the user might be far more simplified in 2015, but this business of packaging and delivering will go on for a long, long time.

In case you’ve been marooned on a desert island, a certain four-letter word starting with the letter F has got everyone in a tizzy these days. I mean “free”, of course.

Recently, Chris “Long Tail” Anderson’s book about “Free” (read it for free here) was reviewed by New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, in which he wondered why the idea of selling for free was “being elevated to a philosophical principle”. Good point. Maybe “free” is simply a pricing strategy.

My company plays in the SAP world and naturally, it’s hard to imagine anything being sold for free here.

Like any other business application, our solutions and services are are evaluated by individuals from business (Sales, Marketing, Supply Chain Management), IT (ERP, CRM, BI), Security, Governance and of course, Finance.

The reason for that is partly functional (”does it meet everyone’s needs?”) and partly for impact reasons (”does your solution introduce yet another layer of complexity for my database administrator?”).

So even if we gave some things away for free, the customer would still have to worry about details like interfaces and if those interfaces would break when SAP introduced the next enhancement pack and so on.

Just because they don’t have to pay for the software doesn’t mean it will run for free. What CIO would like to explain a possible CRM system crash to the Sales VP by saying “well, it all began when we downloaded this free software….”? Not in a million years.

The problem isn’t one of enterprise vendors not being creative enough to “sell” things for free. It’s that companies won’t buy free. A contract and a price tag are a promise of accountability. That’s the way it has been and that’s the way it will be.