New Florence. New Renaissance.

"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"

salesforce.com's transparency

Nice move by salesforce.com to show key up-time and other pefermance metrics for all to see. If you click on the red button for service disruption on February 8, you can see details of what happened.

As I predicted this is the year "SaaS models will come under increased scrutiny from buyers about stringent SLAs and business continuity plans.". I still expect larger customers will want to perform more detailed due diligence, but it is a gutsy move by salesforce.com to building confidence in SaaS.

Nice move by salesforce.com to show key up-time and other pefermance metrics for all to see. If you click on the red button for service disruption on February 8, you can see details of what happened.

As I predicted this is the year "SaaS models will come under increased scrutiny from buyers about stringent SLAs and business continuity plans.". I still expect larger customers will want to perform more detailed due diligence, but it is a gutsy move by salesforce.com to building confidence in SaaS.

SaaS Showplace

Jeff Kaplan, ex IDC and Meta, and who runs THINKStrategies has always been hot on managed services, utility computing and SaaS.  He has set up a nice resource on the growing list of SaaS providers in the SaaS Showplace.

It supplements names in ecosystems being set up by salesforce.com and NetSuite. I was pleased to see Jeff has more vertical solutions in his showplace, though we still have a long way to way both in breadth and depth.

Jeff Kaplan, ex IDC and Meta, and who runs THINKStrategies has always been hot on managed services, utility computing and SaaS.  He has set up a nice resource on the growing list of SaaS providers in the SaaS Showplace.

It supplements names in ecosystems being set up by salesforce.com and NetSuite. I was pleased to see Jeff has more vertical solutions in his showplace, though we still have a long way to way both in breadth and depth.