New Florence. New Renaissance.

Customer Experience-as-a-service

Mei Li of NetSuite is a very generous lady. Every time I see her, she offers me dark chocolates for my wife. On a diet, is my usual excuse. Last time I saw her, she gave me a gift card and said my wife would like it even better. As these things often work out, my daughter Rita used it to buy the nice top in the photo. And when I asked where she got it, she said “Ibex”. Where? “Dad, the store you gave Mom the gift card for”.

Ibex Outdoor Clothing  is a wool clothing company. Its site says “We’re a natural fiber company. A thoughtful design company. An excellence-in-product-development company. We’re a hiking-before-dawn company. A dogs-in-the-workplace company. A bike-to-work company. We’re also a community-supported-agriculture company, a cross-country-ski marathon company, a coffee-in-front-of-the-woodstove company.”

Just navigating their site makes you feel warm as the weather cools down.

It was Mei’s subtle way to introduce me to one of NetSuite’s growing commerce-as-a-service customers. Ibex uses NetSuite to manage customer interactions across smartphones, tablets, PCs and brick-and-mortar stores. The consistent customer experience across channels is a holy grail for most companies these days.

Additionally, NetSuite allows Ibex “30 to 40 percent faster order management and fulfillment, and increased visibility of inventory across 30 factories and distribution across all channels, including its flagship retail store in downtown Boston.”

For many fast growing concepts like Ibex, the pay as you grow SaaS model is ideal, and NetSuite’s wide footprint saves them infrastructure, integration, upgrade and other costs. Ibex was previously on an on-premise Sage MAS 200 and a custom-built Web storefront.

So my daughter asks – That was so easy..does NetSuite also power Tiffany? Apple?

I respond - Not yet. But they are always looking for good salespeople. Want to help them sell their software to brands you like? And, by the way, that way you can pay Mom back for the card Mei meant for her :)

The maturing of mashups

Phil Wainewright at ZDNet

"This five-way mashup is a substantive proof point for applying mashups to enterprise applications. It pools the disruptive economics of at least three separate giants of on-demand: Amazon, PayPal and Salesforce.com. Will any ZDNet reader dare argue with me that you could/should do this in-house and do it better and cheaper? It’s simply not tenable. Nor is it any more practical to think of implementing a similar mashup to Amazon, Paypal and the rest from an on-premise application — leaving each individual customer to negotiate their own gateway access to Amazon, Paypal and the rest, along with the necessary security precautions. It’s a recipe for multiple implementation disasters."

"We want to be the IT Department for SMBs"

After pioneering a series of productivity tools which bring SaaS to the Office Suite, Zoho  announced this morning a HR application.

It joins previously released CRM, Projects and other enterprise modules.

I ran through a demo over the weekend - here's a video - and it really is a no-brainer to set up and use. If you can work with a pivot table in a spreadsheet you are probably overqualified to use this -)

It's aimed at smaller companies, but with a series of  customizable forms, should also work for many a local operations of larger companies. Since many companies outsource payroll and benefits processing, the HR administration piece would fit with Zoho's overall promise - no internal IT department needed.

Disclosure: Zoho is a sponsor for the Deal Architect blog

The Giant Database in the Sky

MySQL CEO Marten Mickos talked about it last year.

amazon is delivering it today....SimpleDB...

$0.14 per Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hour consumed!

Reinventing the General Ledger

Mark Nittler and I go back a long way. And every time we meet, it seems like the conversation drifts to some version of REA (Resources, Events, Activities) Accounting. Could be because when we met I was at Price Waterhouse and we had a tool called GENEVA aimed at manipulating large events databases. Could be because he was at Walker Interactive which provided accountants a very flexible coding block to track various non-accounting perspectives of data.

Mark, now at Workday, has introduced a financial module which incorporates the contemporary concept of "tags" (See Dan Farber's perspective here, and Dennis Howlett's here.) Workday also delivers its software as a service - so in many ways, a long cry from the big mainframe, DB2 driven ledgers Walker
delivered.

The question is are conservative accountants ready for these innovations? 

The Next Big Thing in Enterprise Software

One of the most enjoyable sessions at the Enterprise conference last week (other than the CIO panel, I ran, of course!) was one where executives of 5 up and coming vendors presented for 10 minutes each.

Jason Wood does a nice job summarizing the wares of NetSuite, OutlookSoft, SensorLogic, SOA Software and Zimbra.

"Great Software"

Continuing the "great software" thread from last week, here is InformationWeek's take on great products over the decades.

As I wrote in the previous post, though

"Greatness to me is not just an exciting product - it is also one developed by the vendor and available to be implemented by customers at a reasonable budget."

The industry still has much to do, though a new generation of start-ups is showing a very different set of economics and values.

Continuing the "great software" thread from last week, here is InformationWeek's take on great products over the decades.

As I wrote in the previous post, though

"Greatness to me is not just an exciting product - it is also one developed by the vendor and available to be implemented by customers at a reasonable budget."

The industry still has much to do, though a new generation of start-ups is showing a very different set of economics and values.

Florence during the Renaissance

Welcome to my new blog. Some of you may have read my Deal Architect blog.

I spend much of my time helping CIOs reduce their “utility” spend with large, incumbent vendors and started my Deal Architect blog to focus on efficiencies and savings opportunities. But the more I work with CIOs the more I realize, for an amazingly new set of economics, they can leverage innovation from many new sources, often from completely unexpected places around the world.  While there is so much noise around “consolidation and the death of innovation” and “IT doesn't matter”. If you cut through the fog and the noise, we are really in the midst of a revolutionary time. And so I also started to write posts on the blog about innovative CIOs and business applications.

I  believe all this innovation deserves its own blog - so I am starting a "spin-off".

This is what Florence must have felt like during the Renaissance with so much happening in so many technology areas:

“Mobile Internet” - see this fascinating presentation by Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley as she generates renewed excitement this time around the “new Web”

Open Source - when Kleiner Perkins shows excitement, it is usually a pretty solid endorsement for a sector as this BusinessWeek article describes

BPO - a growing recognition in corporations business processes need to be “commoditized” and the wide array of call center, transaction processing and knowledge work that is being done in India and elsewhere

Sensor Telemetry - somewhat high-faluting term used by Accenture to describe all the neat payback companies are seeing from combining RFID, GPS and wireless technologies

Software as a service - the excitement being generated by AppExchange from salesforce.com and the growing understanding of operational and financial success factors for the model

Digital content and new media - the realities of the on-demand, blogging and podcasting world and how Madison Avenue is changing - and changing us along the way

Analytics - a growing focus on the challenge of master data management and the promise of next generation predictive analytics

Security and Surveillance: All the stuff from biometrics to other sensors to basic security for fraud detection and intrusion management

I did not even mention web services, mesh networks, collaboration, storage and server technologies and a whole bunch more.

Here’s what’s really exciting. This time “Florence” is virtual. Open source excitement from Scandinavia, mobile commerce excitement from Japan, BPO from India. New media in the US. Telemetry payback in utilities and healthcare. Security payback in financial services and government. BPO in insurance claims and mortgage processing.

And for a change, many of the technology initiatives do not require 8 or 9 digit budgets. You see this is why CIOs send me emails like this one ” ..more power to your elbow in driving out waste and excessive premia in our industry”. They all want the “innovation dividend” so they can book that trip to the new Florence. Exciting times!

Over the next few weeks, I will be moving many of the innovation focused posts from the Deal Architect blog .The Deal Architect blog will continue to focus on technology negotiation, process efficiencies and reducing “utility” spend. Look forward to your comments on both blogs.

Hot or Mild SaaS?

Some recent perspectives

Jeff Kaplan writes in BusinessWeek . I had previously profiled his SaaS showplace.

Dennis Holwett compares SaaS with traditional licenses software -areas to compare and contrast.

Don Dodge of Microsoft's Emerging Business Team talks about SaaS vendor's different capital needs.

I wrote on SaaS promises and challenges in the UK magazine Real Finance - see PDF below

Download saas_article_real_finance_apri_06.pdf

37 ways to leave your software vendor

"...the answer is easy if you take it logically..."

with apologies to Paul Simon

37Signals is a neat little SaaS company. Neat because they build web based apps and development tools like Ruby on Rails and proudly say they are "products that do less". Neat because they are based in Chicago away from the hype. Neat because they only have 7 employees. And yet get product out at what BusinessWeek calls warp speed.

They question even Google's definition of constraint based development. I hate to think what they think of Oracle or Microsoft's R&D.  A clue - their site says "Join us and say goodbye to bloated software"