Computerworld on Microsoft vs. Google: The Truth from the Cutting Room Floor

Ryan Nichols

Computerworld featured an interview today with Microsoft's Tom Rizzo that featured a set of unusually bold (and misleading) statements about Microsoft vs. Google in the enterprise.  We thought it would be funny to take an editor's pen to the interview, "marking it up" based on our real-life experience helping enterprises adopt Google Apps. You can see our full set of "edits" here, but here's a summary of what really bugged us about this interview:

• Misleading statements about Google's intentions:  Tom's comments about Google Street View, Google's advertising-supported email service (which is different from their enterprise business), and Google's vanilla terms of service are complete red herrings-- no company that we've worked with to make the switch to Google has been impacted by any of these issues.  Companies that have "Gone Google" say that Google Apps is more reliable and more secure than the on-premise systems that they're moving from.  And Google's rate of innovation with its Apps portfolio proves that it is investing (and serious) about the enterprise. 
• Misleading statements about Microsoft's position:  Of course Microsoft continues to have dominant market share in the enterprise-- they've spent years building it up, and are doing whatever they can (including giving away their product) to lock enterprises in.  Microsoft has yet to even make a fully competitive solution generally available-- Office 365 won't ship until next year.  And look at the leading indicators of enterprise adoption... what small company these days sets up shop and buys an Exchange server?  Google's market share in startups and in higher education is a great leading sign of where the broader IT market is headed.  

There's always a lot of debate (which we've covered in the past) about whether Google's corporate culture is "enterprise ready."  That discussion misses the bigger point— the corporate culture of today’s traditional on-premise technology vendors is no longer “enterprise ready.”  So enjoy our "truth from the cutting room floor," shared here: Computerworld - Truth from the Cutting Room Floor

Panel discussion with application vendors at SIIA's "All About Mobile" conference - Blogging for ComputerWorld

Ryan Nichols

I had the privilege of being asked to join a fantastic panel at SIIA's "All About Mobile" conference yesterday with some leading application developers making the switch to mobile. I was joined by David Fulton of Right Now, Jason Prater of Plex Systems, and Dan Miller of INgage Networks to discuss "Transitioning Existing Solutions to Mobile Devices."

We were moderated by Anshu Agrawal, VP Marketing at Keynote Systems, who asked us a set of questions that are top of mind for any application developer thinking about mobile apps:

• Why mobile is important to your business?
• What is the cornerstone of your mobile strategy?
• What do you feel were the pain points in implementing your strategy?
• What were the biggest surprises for you in moving your customers to mobile?
• What would you recommend to SIIA members looking to transition to mobile?

Read more...

Where the rubber hits the road for Sales 2.0 - Blogging for ComputerWorld

Ryan Nichols

SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, and the other legacy CRM gorillas shared their vision for Sales 2.0 with the world yesterday, at the Sales & Marketing 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.  My beef?  We're talking about all the right ideas, built on exactly the wrong technology.

SAP is a great example.  Chris Ball (who runs SAP's western sales region) and Jonathan Becher (who runs SAP's product marketing) absolutely "get" Sales 2.0-- they were up on stage at the conference talking about how their customers are more concerned about transforming their business in these turbulent times than they are about the ERP expertise that has gotten SAP to where it is today.  They know that they need to help their clients become customer-centric rather than product-centric (and move in that direction themselves as a company).

Yet during the Q&A, one SAP customer in the audience summed up the experience of many: "It's been a disaster," she said of their SAP implementation.

The root cause is a classic catch 22 with on-premise technology.  This customer was encouraged to use SAP out of the box-- which is generally good advice, as anyone who has tried to upgrade a modified SAP system will tell you.  But that required them to make needless changes to their business processes to fit the vanilla software... and then perform an upgrade less than a year later in order to get missing required features.

Here's the core issue: technology optimized for change is fundamentally different than technology optimized for the seldom-changing core.

This is borne out in the market: "I have customers who are going to Workday for HR, to Salesforce.com for SFA," said SAP's Chris Ball.  "They're still an SAP customer, and will be for a long time, but they're eroding me at the edges."

Read more here....

Dell Acquires Boomi - A "Ground-to-Cloud" Data Play

Balakrishna Narasimhan

The cloud M&A chess game continues to heat up with Dell announcing this week that it was acquiring data integration vendor Boomi. Being a relatively small acquisition for Dell, there wasn’t a ton of industry commentary, but there were some pretty divergent opinions. GigaOm was mostly positive and saw this as a move to enable seamless data exchange between private and public clouds, all powered by Dell servers. Phil Wainewright on the other hand was pretty scathing saying that "it doesn’t make sense."

Here's our take: Dell has been trying to fortify its hardware business with adjacent software businesses for a while. Their strategy has been to acquire software that lives close to infrastructure, e.g., infrastructure management, scaling, etc. With this move, they're broadening the vision to include the data that lives on their servers. For most enterprises, Dell servers will be used to host their on-premise applications, but as the world becomes more cloud-centric, these on-premise applications will need to talk to cloud applications. Therefore it makes logical sense that Dell would expand into that space.

So, like IBM's acquisition of Cast Iron, this acquisition shows an industry giant acquiring a cloud foothold in an area that's very closely tied to their core business. Both Dell and IBM's acquisitions are great for cloud to on-premise integration - it will be interesting to see which combination will be more successful in the large enterprise, but given IBM's strong customer base and software experience, it's hard to bet against them.

But what most of the coverage misses is that cloud to on-premise integration is today's problem, not tomorrow's. Consider these data points from a recent Appirio survey of 150+ mid to large-sized firms that have already adopted cloud applications:

• While integration from cloud apps to on-premise was up there as a challenge, we saw almost 75% of adopters highlight cloud to cloud integration as an important priority.
• Current cloud adopters plan to have 55% of their applications and platforms in the public cloud within three years, which implies that the need for cloud-to-cloud integration will only intensify.
• ~40% of cloud adopters highlighted current technology as the reason they are unable to achieve better integration among their cloud applications.
• There's also a desire for deeper integration among cloud applications. To date, only 4% of cloud adopters have fully integrated their cloud applications at the UI, process and data layers. Within 12 months, over 50% of cloud adopters want to have their cloud applications fully integrated with each other.

Cloud-to-cloud integration is very different than cloud to on-premise integration. The principle problem of integrating to on-premise applications is building technology that enables data exchange with hundreds or even thousands of on-premise applications. This is nearly impossible problem to solve given the number of permutations of on-premise applications out there, and only shallow integrations are even possible. At its core, this is exactly the same "plumbing" that's caused so many headaches between on-premise applications. Isn't getting out of the plumbing business why companies are moving to the cloud in the first place?

With cloud-to-cloud integration, there are fewer and more stable end points since SaaS applications have stable APIs and are all the "same version". This means that it's possible to build broker technologies and cross-cloud solutions that provide a much deeper level of integration, all the way from data integration to identity management and even into the business process.

It's smart of Dell and IBM to stay focused on the "ground to cloud" data integrations that are close to their core businesses and capabilities... its a different question altogether who will venture into the brave new world of cloud-to-cloud business process integration!