Sara Campbell
It’s a well-known story and global obsession--the startup founded in a Harvard University dorm room that quickly grew to become the world’s largest social networking site. The popularity, growth and momentum of Facebook’s business are unparalleled and so are the IT practices that enable more than 850 million active users to harness the power and unprecedented collaboration of Facebook.
Having worked with Facebook since early 2010, Appirio has had the pleasure of partnering with Facebook to reimagine what is possible with technology. Recently, we had the opportunity to sit down with key members of the Facebook team to understand what a “cloud first” mentality means for the IT team delivering business transformation at Facebook.
Facebook CIO Tim Campos shares his vision about the next generation of IT enabled by the cloud.
The Facebook team explains why they needed a partner to move as quickly as their business.
From a global ad sales application to a custom recruiting and HR application to a consigned materials app that manages data center inventory to make sure Facebook is “always up”, Facebook shares first hand how they partnered with Appirio to change the way they do business.
Friday, March 23, 2012
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Customer Spotlight - A Q&A with Karen Bintz, BMC Software
By Sara Campbell
In 2011, BMC Software ranked among the top 20 largest software companies in the world. The company is credited with pioneering the business service management (BSM) concept as a way to help better align IT operations with business needs. Today, the company specializes in both mainframe and distributed technologies that serve multiple functions.
During more than three decades of growth and success, BMC has remained an innovator, always pushing the envelope on technology. The company’s forward-thinking translates into everything BMC does, including its world-renowned Executive Briefing Center (EBC). I recently sat down with Karen Bintz, director of customer experience at BMC to talk about the opportunities a recently developed mobile app has brought to the EBC.
Q: Set the stage. Tell me a little about BMC’s Executive Briefing Center?
A: We are very proud to have a world-class Executive Briefing Center and program that we use as a key strategy in the sales cycle to educate customers and prospects on BMC’s products and services. We hold about 300 briefings per year that range from custom briefings for individual companies, to our standard briefings targeted at multi-company audiences.
The EBC has proven itself to be an important revenue driver. In fact, approximately 85 percent of customers and prospects that visit the EBC purchase BMC solutions and the program itself touches about one of every five dollars of sales pipeline opportunity. Additionally, while the EBC is heralded internally as one of the best selling tools we have, we have also been recognized by the broader industry. In 2011, BMC’s EBC received the prestigious Briefing Program of the Year Award from the Association of Briefing Program Managers.
Q: It sounds like the EBC runs like a well-oiled machine, why make changes?
A: Last spring when we returned from the award ceremony, we were on cloud nine, but we knew we didn’t want to rest on our laurels. We needed to step up our game and take it to the next level. Debuting a mobile app was the obvious choice.
Q: How did you build the mobile app?
A: Once it was decided that we wanted to develop a mobile survey application for the EBC, we knew we had to partner with someone who had expertise in the area. The prior year, we successfully worked with Appirio to roll-out our Salesforce Sales Cloud implementation, and had built an excellent working relationship with their team. It turned out that they also had the mobile expertise we were looking for, making for an easy decision.
Appirio helped develop the survey app with their framework. The app front-ends our Salesforce.com CRM system and has seamless integration to Leads and Contacts. Additionally, real-time survey feedback is managed directly in Salesforce.com.
Q: How has the app changed the way BMC does business through the EBC?
It’s been amazing! Now when our customers and prospects walk into our high-tech facility they see iPads at each station rather than a piece of paper and a pen. This sets the proper image of BMC as a technology innovator, right from the start. And while the wow factor is impressive, the functionality is even better.
Additionally, up until recently, I had a college intern who would spend 10+ hours each week entering the responses from the EBC surveys. It was time consuming, tedious and extremely inefficient. It required us to shuffle work schedules to make sure the survey data was input and compiled within our 24 hour service level agreement.
With the paper survey, most attendees would wait until the very end to complete it. Now, at the start of each briefing, our facilitator asks the attendees to sign-in and rate their confidence in BMC. Since we receive the data in real-time, we have critical information about the audience’s pre-confidence in BMC right from the start. Our presenters go in knowing who the advocates in the room are and who might need a little more attention. We are able to alter our focus on the spot to address the individuals in the room and directly influence their confidence in BMC. And then at the end of the briefing, when the attendees complete the remainder of the survey, and answer the final question about their current confidence in BMC, we have an accurate representation of how the six hours they spent with us affected their perception of BMC.
Q: What kinds of feedback have you received thus far?
A: Needless to say, it’s been extremely positive. We get compliments from customers all the time about the experience our EBC offers, and our sales reps are constantly vying to get their prospects and customers involved in the EBC. Approximately 81 percent of our sales representatives who make their annual quota send customers and prospects through the EBC, so it’s definitely a measure of success.
Q: What’s next for the EBC?
A: In this mobility phase, we are pulling information from our attendees. In the next phase, we hope to push information to our attendees. This would allow them to choose presentations, white papers and other collateral and materials from a pick list and then email it directly to themselves or their colleagues.
Q: What advice would you give to others who have Salesforce.com and are considering mobility?
A: I would first say, don’t reinvent the wheel. Partner with a vendor like Appirio who has strong expertise in both Salesforce and mobility. Also make sure, as we did, to have a strong internal project manager who has both the technical aptitude and awareness of the business impact. In fact, it’s a whole lot like BMC’ s Business Service Management strategy, you need to link IT projects to the needs and goals of the business in order to truly achieve success.
During more than three decades of growth and success, BMC has remained an innovator, always pushing the envelope on technology. The company’s forward-thinking translates into everything BMC does, including its world-renowned Executive Briefing Center (EBC). I recently sat down with Karen Bintz, director of customer experience at BMC to talk about the opportunities a recently developed mobile app has brought to the EBC.
Q: Set the stage. Tell me a little about BMC’s Executive Briefing Center?
A: We are very proud to have a world-class Executive Briefing Center and program that we use as a key strategy in the sales cycle to educate customers and prospects on BMC’s products and services. We hold about 300 briefings per year that range from custom briefings for individual companies, to our standard briefings targeted at multi-company audiences.
The EBC has proven itself to be an important revenue driver. In fact, approximately 85 percent of customers and prospects that visit the EBC purchase BMC solutions and the program itself touches about one of every five dollars of sales pipeline opportunity. Additionally, while the EBC is heralded internally as one of the best selling tools we have, we have also been recognized by the broader industry. In 2011, BMC’s EBC received the prestigious Briefing Program of the Year Award from the Association of Briefing Program Managers.
Q: It sounds like the EBC runs like a well-oiled machine, why make changes?
A: Last spring when we returned from the award ceremony, we were on cloud nine, but we knew we didn’t want to rest on our laurels. We needed to step up our game and take it to the next level. Debuting a mobile app was the obvious choice.
Q: How did you build the mobile app?
A: Once it was decided that we wanted to develop a mobile survey application for the EBC, we knew we had to partner with someone who had expertise in the area. The prior year, we successfully worked with Appirio to roll-out our Salesforce Sales Cloud implementation, and had built an excellent working relationship with their team. It turned out that they also had the mobile expertise we were looking for, making for an easy decision.
Appirio helped develop the survey app with their framework. The app front-ends our Salesforce.com CRM system and has seamless integration to Leads and Contacts. Additionally, real-time survey feedback is managed directly in Salesforce.com.
 |
| Briefing accommodations survey screen |
It’s been amazing! Now when our customers and prospects walk into our high-tech facility they see iPads at each station rather than a piece of paper and a pen. This sets the proper image of BMC as a technology innovator, right from the start. And while the wow factor is impressive, the functionality is even better.
Additionally, up until recently, I had a college intern who would spend 10+ hours each week entering the responses from the EBC surveys. It was time consuming, tedious and extremely inefficient. It required us to shuffle work schedules to make sure the survey data was input and compiled within our 24 hour service level agreement.
With the paper survey, most attendees would wait until the very end to complete it. Now, at the start of each briefing, our facilitator asks the attendees to sign-in and rate their confidence in BMC. Since we receive the data in real-time, we have critical information about the audience’s pre-confidence in BMC right from the start. Our presenters go in knowing who the advocates in the room are and who might need a little more attention. We are able to alter our focus on the spot to address the individuals in the room and directly influence their confidence in BMC. And then at the end of the briefing, when the attendees complete the remainder of the survey, and answer the final question about their current confidence in BMC, we have an accurate representation of how the six hours they spent with us affected their perception of BMC.
Q: What kinds of feedback have you received thus far?
A: Needless to say, it’s been extremely positive. We get compliments from customers all the time about the experience our EBC offers, and our sales reps are constantly vying to get their prospects and customers involved in the EBC. Approximately 81 percent of our sales representatives who make their annual quota send customers and prospects through the EBC, so it’s definitely a measure of success.
Q: What’s next for the EBC?
A: In this mobility phase, we are pulling information from our attendees. In the next phase, we hope to push information to our attendees. This would allow them to choose presentations, white papers and other collateral and materials from a pick list and then email it directly to themselves or their colleagues.
Q: What advice would you give to others who have Salesforce.com and are considering mobility?
A: I would first say, don’t reinvent the wheel. Partner with a vendor like Appirio who has strong expertise in both Salesforce and mobility. Also make sure, as we did, to have a strong internal project manager who has both the technical aptitude and awareness of the business impact. In fact, it’s a whole lot like BMC’ s Business Service Management strategy, you need to link IT projects to the needs and goals of the business in order to truly achieve success.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
One Small Step For the Cloud Industry, One Giant Leap for Appirio
by Chris Barbin
This morning, Appirio announced that it has raised $60 million from global growth investor General Atlantic - more than 3x what we have previously raised as a company to date. Given our strong growth, ability to run a profitable services business and general market momentum, the natural question is why raise the capital? We couldn’t be more excited at all the things this will enable us to do right now, but, to answer fully, we must first take a step back.
We founded Appirio in 2006 because we thought our industry was broken. We had worked with and for systems integrators (SIs) and experienced first hand how they had engineered their entire business models around the complexity and shortfalls of on-premise technology. The combination of on-premise technology and traditional system integration was just not working. CIO survey after CIO survey highlighted the central issue of traditional IT - 80% of time and budget keeping the lights on and no time to align with the business. I saw this firsthand at Borland where when I became CIO, we had a company with 1,000 people and 1,000 servers.
As the cloud emerged, we saw a radically different future for technology in the enterprise. Enterprises now had the potential to move faster and capitalize on, and maybe even create disruptions in their industries. Yet, the services ecosystems hadn’t innovated in a decade and were wed to the practices and skills needed to make slow moving on-premise technology work.
We knew we needed to bring Silicon Valley thinking and innovation to the stagnant services model. In early 2007, we talked about “Services 2.0”, a new services model that could disrupt traditional consulting as radically as we believed the cloud would disrupt on-premise software..
Since then, we’ve been hard at work showing that Appirio can do it better. As we worked with over 300 enterprises and moved over 1.5 million users to the public cloud, we learned how to use technology and crowdsourcing to power our consulting services in ways that were never possible with on-premise software. We’ve been privileged to work with innovative companies of all sizes and mindsets, from large and established companies reinventing themselves for a new age like Japan Post to companies that are changing the world like Twitter. The constant across all these customers is a desire to change how they do business using technology.
Our agile delivery approach delivers results quickly, our technology portfolio helps us bring Appirio’s collective experience to every customer and the CloudSpokes community lets us bring the talents of tens of thousands of developers to every project. And of course the foundation of our success is the set of close partnerships with like-minded cloud leaders like salesforce.com, Workday, Google and Amazon.
Now, five and a half years later, what began as proof of concept is a vibrant and fast-growing global business with nearly 500 full time staff and operations in 3 continents. Both our customers and their ambitions have grown with us. We believe more than ever that we will disrupt the entire global systems integrator model - and General Atlantic does too. With their support, and with the public cloud growing in importance each day, Appirio will disrupt more and more of the worldwide IT industry. We’ll live up to the expectations of leading enterprises like Facebook that are showing us the future by re-imagining what’s possible with technology and demanding an alternative to global systems integrators.
With the investment we are also honored to welcome Gary Reiner to our board of directors. As the former CIO of GE for 14 years, Gary has shaped many IT leaders across today’s industry. GE and the network of executives it has graduated have the reputation of being pragmatic, cost conscious, ‘show me’ first executives who insist on clear and demonstrable value. Winning GA and Gary over gave us a no-nonsense filter to distill how we are and will continue to disrupt the IT value chain. His voice in helping ensure we continue to focus on the pragmatic, future needs of large enterprises will be a welcome addition.
Several months ago we were named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer because of our potential to help change the world through technology. Today, we are stepping up our commitment to deliver the same type of disruption that salesforce.com and Workday have delivered to SAP and Oracle to the traditional systems integrators. As Andy Warhol once said “They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” We are dedicated to driving that change and taking the success we have had with leading enterprises to more customers across the world and every aspect of the transition to cloud computing.
We founded Appirio in 2006 because we thought our industry was broken. We had worked with and for systems integrators (SIs) and experienced first hand how they had engineered their entire business models around the complexity and shortfalls of on-premise technology. The combination of on-premise technology and traditional system integration was just not working. CIO survey after CIO survey highlighted the central issue of traditional IT - 80% of time and budget keeping the lights on and no time to align with the business. I saw this firsthand at Borland where when I became CIO, we had a company with 1,000 people and 1,000 servers.
As the cloud emerged, we saw a radically different future for technology in the enterprise. Enterprises now had the potential to move faster and capitalize on, and maybe even create disruptions in their industries. Yet, the services ecosystems hadn’t innovated in a decade and were wed to the practices and skills needed to make slow moving on-premise technology work.
We knew we needed to bring Silicon Valley thinking and innovation to the stagnant services model. In early 2007, we talked about “Services 2.0”, a new services model that could disrupt traditional consulting as radically as we believed the cloud would disrupt on-premise software..
Since then, we’ve been hard at work showing that Appirio can do it better. As we worked with over 300 enterprises and moved over 1.5 million users to the public cloud, we learned how to use technology and crowdsourcing to power our consulting services in ways that were never possible with on-premise software. We’ve been privileged to work with innovative companies of all sizes and mindsets, from large and established companies reinventing themselves for a new age like Japan Post to companies that are changing the world like Twitter. The constant across all these customers is a desire to change how they do business using technology.
Our agile delivery approach delivers results quickly, our technology portfolio helps us bring Appirio’s collective experience to every customer and the CloudSpokes community lets us bring the talents of tens of thousands of developers to every project. And of course the foundation of our success is the set of close partnerships with like-minded cloud leaders like salesforce.com, Workday, Google and Amazon.
Now, five and a half years later, what began as proof of concept is a vibrant and fast-growing global business with nearly 500 full time staff and operations in 3 continents. Both our customers and their ambitions have grown with us. We believe more than ever that we will disrupt the entire global systems integrator model - and General Atlantic does too. With their support, and with the public cloud growing in importance each day, Appirio will disrupt more and more of the worldwide IT industry. We’ll live up to the expectations of leading enterprises like Facebook that are showing us the future by re-imagining what’s possible with technology and demanding an alternative to global systems integrators.
With the investment we are also honored to welcome Gary Reiner to our board of directors. As the former CIO of GE for 14 years, Gary has shaped many IT leaders across today’s industry. GE and the network of executives it has graduated have the reputation of being pragmatic, cost conscious, ‘show me’ first executives who insist on clear and demonstrable value. Winning GA and Gary over gave us a no-nonsense filter to distill how we are and will continue to disrupt the IT value chain. His voice in helping ensure we continue to focus on the pragmatic, future needs of large enterprises will be a welcome addition.
Several months ago we were named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer because of our potential to help change the world through technology. Today, we are stepping up our commitment to deliver the same type of disruption that salesforce.com and Workday have delivered to SAP and Oracle to the traditional systems integrators. As Andy Warhol once said “They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” We are dedicated to driving that change and taking the success we have had with leading enterprises to more customers across the world and every aspect of the transition to cloud computing.
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Software eats the World: Are the Globals SIs Next?
By Narinder Singh
@singhns
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”
– Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs’ commencement address at Stanford remains one of an entrepreneur's classic sources for inspiration - particularly the notion that time is limited and change is inevitable. What Jobs personalizes in death as the change agent for individual life, Joseph Schumpeter professed for companies and industries as “creative destruction” - the inevitability that innovation will disrupt the economic order of the day.
In Clayton Christen’s work on The Innovators Dilemma, Marc Benioff’s proclamations of how on-premise technology is dead, and Marc Andreesen’s piece in the Wall Street Journal on how software is disrupting every industry - we have leaders who demonstrate clearly how this has happened in the past. Yet in the moment, despite the lessons of history, the agents of change are too often dismissed because it’s just easier to believe the Goliaths of an industry will persist. It’s easier to believe in DEC, Kodak, Blockbuster, Barnes & Noble and Microsoft than it is to believe in upstarts we’ve never even heard of. Even when we acknowledge the initial disruption, as with cloud computing. The ultimate impact is far wider than most of us ever thought possible.
Cloud Computing: Catalyst for Structural Disruption
Less than ten years ago, many signs pointed to an enterprise software industry that looks like the auto industry, where a few major players control a stagnant set of competing ecosystems. SAP, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft appeared to only have serious competition from one another. Yet salesforce.com emerged from that stagnant market and shepherded in a new generation of innovative enteprise technology providers including Workday, Amazon and Google. These companies and others like them are capturing the hearts, minds and future wallets of the industry.
Cloud providers have shown two structural disruptions over their legacy predecessors. The first is a new level of speed to value. The cost advantages of the cloud were the initial spark, but the ability to get to value in weeks and months rather than years has created a firestorm of enthusiasm in the enterprise around potential impact. If technology-related programs can be executed this quickly, businesses can for the first time ever rely on technology to change current market dynamics. In the past, it was certain that by the time you were able to implement a significant on-premise technology, market conditions would be different, calling into question whether the problems you were solving were even the right ones.
The second structural disruption is more nuanced. It’s a change in the certainty of success and role of failure. In the past, technology projects were complicated initiatives that required everything to be just right. You could be 90% into an SAP rollout and still be uncertain whether or not it was on track and likely to succeed in achieving its goals. To mitigate against this, you structured everything around making sure every possible risk in a multi-year program had been considered and mitigated. Rolling out a new ERP was your equivalent of launching the space shuttle - you got one chance and it had to be right. Everything felt like it was, and actually was, wound too tight.
Cloud technology, for many of the reasons we’ve written about before, has created unparalleled flexibility for enterprises. By being able to show real users, business owners, and technologists progress as you go, you can evaluate, fail and fix almost daily. Users can see what they’re getting all along the way. Being agile has become more than a development trend, it actually represents how the business operates. This is the ultimate manifestation of the relative cost of finding an issue in development vs. testing vs. rollout. For even highly complicated projects, risk is now parceled into smaller pieces because you can spot and test failures at every point along the way. In addition, functional and technical managers no longer have to try to guess and prepare for all the different permutations of what might happen when they start a project. By the time you arrive at the first “go-live”, you already know what’s going to happen because it’s what you’ve been seeing for weeks or months. The ability to be agile and iterate frequently is one of the reason why cloud deployments have seen far higher success rates and far fewer high profile IT failures.
The CIO’s Guide to Making the Cloud Disruption Work For You
Marc Andreesen’s article that we referenced earlier - “Why Software is Eating the World” - describes how software has disrupted industry after industry. This view of software as a catalyst of disruption stands in stark contrast to an age of on-premise technology where leading academics and business leaders argued “Does IT Matter?”. Cloud technologies have changed where enterprise technology lies within these two extremes by radically altering speed to value and certainty of success. This has raised the stakes for more CIOs than ever before - will you lead your company to use technology in a way that directly impacts your competitiveness in the market, or will someone else disrupt your future?
Today, for companies to succeed with the cloud at scale, they need to take advantage of the cloud’s speed to value and agility to iteratively shape their processes and maximize business impact. CIOs who treat the cloud like an ERP initiative are certain to fall far short of translating cloud potential into true business impact. IT organizations must:
Cloud Eats the On-premise Ecosystem: A Broken Model and a Natural Extension
Cloud technologies have shown a potential that is well beyond previous paradigms of technology. Yet, for enterprises there are many steps between potential and actually driving transformative business impact. And it is in this transition, that lies the second order disruption of the cloud. You see, an entire systems integration industry has been built around how to help businesses consume and get value from technology. But the global systems integration model has been built around generations of limitations in technology that the cloud has removed in just the past few years. The very tools and techniques that enabled this model to deal with the challenges of SAP and Oracle ERP rollouts have created structural weaknesses in dealing with the cloud.
After the first World War, the French constructed the Maginot Line - a set of fortifications, tanks obstacles and other fixed positions to defend the country. It was “extolled as a work of genius” up until the point of World War II, when it became clear that armies were structurally more mobile and agile than ever before. The Maginot Line was essentially driven around and France was successfully invaded in just a few days. The global systems integrator model is the Maginot Line of the cloud world.
Most of us who have been in IT for long enough knew the on-premise application model was broken even before the cloud emerged. We felt the frustration of the business, protested a bit too vehemently at Nick Carr’s accusations that IT didn’t matter, and knew a big project had as much chance of being canceled as completed. Enthusiastic was seldom a word used to describe customers after a project.
Essentially, the same paragraph can be written to describe the state of the global systems integrator (GSI). Individuals and teams can be great, but most of us know that as firms they are mostly identical versions of one another. The scores of us who spent years inside them know that even on the best days they feel like great people trapped by a system created to minimize risk rather than environments that encourage dramatic innovation. And while Twitter is full of enthusiastic paens from customers to Salesforce, Google and Workday, I’ve yet to see close to the same enthusiasm from customers for their GSI partners.
So it’s no wonder that after disrupting on-premise technology directly, the cloud is now disrupting the ecosystems built around on-premise technology. After all, Accenture and Deloitte have as many or more Oracle and SAP developers than Oracle and SAP themselves. In addition, just like on-premise incumbents reacted slowly to the cloud, we see GSIs ‘embracing’ the change in small parts of their organizations while the antibodies within cling with every fiber to the older, more profitable model. Even further, just like in the early days of cloud when legacy providers were suggesting hybrid deployment models for SaaS applications (long since discredited), GSIs are not facing how significantly the industry has changed and are actually touting their long legacies in on-premise as an advantage !
One fundamental difference between the way the cloud disrupted on-premise technology and the current disruption to the GSI model is the level of dialog on the topic. As SaaS and the cloud took off, we saw fireworks between innovative leaders like Marc Benioff and those trying to hold onto the past. So far, we haven't seen close to the same level of dialog around the disruption of the GSI model. Partially this is a result of GSIs trying to attach themselves - no matter how awkwardly - to cloud leaders like salesforce.com, Google and Workday. Faced with already trying to change the very essence of the role of technology in business, cloud leaders have tried to use this embrace for validation “see even they get how big a change cloud is and are on board.”
But ultimately, cloud providers care most about how effectively their technology can be translated from potential to performance for their customers. While enterprises have relied historically on the GSI model to help with technology rollouts, it has only been in the context of IT as the lowest common denominator (Nick Carr’s IT Doesn’t Matter), never in the context of IT as a business disruptor (Andreesen’s model of using software to “eat the world”). The current GSI model is better suited to minimizing technology risk and getting to the lowest common denominator of results than for using technology to drive disruption. As the GSI model proves detrimental to driving disruption, the chasm between GSIs and cloud providers will widen. Finally, over time the economic conflict between GSIs and cloud providers will also become more pronounced. In a world without servers and software, GSIs will lose a substantive portion of the revenue they have taken for granted because it’s just part of the cloud service.
The cloud has shown the fundamental weaknesses in the on-premise centric model currently embraced by the GSIs. Now dozens of pure-play cloud providers are approaching cloud success with tools and techniques yet undiscovered by the GSIs. In fact, the vast majority of high profile public cloud successes across salesforce.com, Google and Workday haven’t even involved the GSIs. Perhaps most tellingly, Salesforce.com purchased a pure cloud provider last year, Model Metrics, to “lead the shift to the social enterprise” despite repeated statements from Accenture and Deloitte on how invested they are in driving social enterprise transformations.
Where to Go From Here
At Appirio, we are attempting to disrupt the global systems integrator because we witness first-hand the contrast between what can be accomplished with an “all cloud” mentality vs a legacy mindset. We believe the cloud-centric model is fundamentally better for customers. While it’s clear that Appirio the company is still a ways from instilling substantive fear into global systems integrators like Accenture and Deloitte, the cloud model we have helped drive is exploding.
Service providers who can drive enterprise success at scale with the cloud must deliver speed and agility, mitigate the right risks and enable customers to create disruptions. At Appirio, we use an agile-inspired approach along with technology built up over 1000s of enterprise cloud projects to deliver value faster and more predictably. By showing business users progress at every stage of our iterative development process, we can fail fast, make adjustments and reduce the real risks - low adoption, usage and impact. Finally, we help our customers think disruptively because that's who we are. Our business runs 100% in the cloud and has scaled and succeeded because of the very things we help customers do. We created a crowdsourced development community, CloudSpokes, because we constantly seek to disrupt our own business in order to deliver more value, more efficiently to our customers.
Ultimately GSIs are trapped by the Innovator’s Dilemma. Or stated through the lesson of the Maginot Line - “generals always fight the last war, especially if they have won it.” Now, CIOs and business leaders must prepare for tomorrow by choosing how they realign their own organizations, how they incorporate partners into their overall strategy, and who the right partners are. For the first time in a long time, cloud technology has made IT cool, relevant and strategic. Now, the only question is how your choices can lead your business to the right side of disruption.
@singhns
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”
– Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs’ commencement address at Stanford remains one of an entrepreneur's classic sources for inspiration - particularly the notion that time is limited and change is inevitable. What Jobs personalizes in death as the change agent for individual life, Joseph Schumpeter professed for companies and industries as “creative destruction” - the inevitability that innovation will disrupt the economic order of the day.
Cloud Computing: Catalyst for Structural Disruption
Less than ten years ago, many signs pointed to an enterprise software industry that looks like the auto industry, where a few major players control a stagnant set of competing ecosystems. SAP, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft appeared to only have serious competition from one another. Yet salesforce.com emerged from that stagnant market and shepherded in a new generation of innovative enteprise technology providers including Workday, Amazon and Google. These companies and others like them are capturing the hearts, minds and future wallets of the industry.
Cloud providers have shown two structural disruptions over their legacy predecessors. The first is a new level of speed to value. The cost advantages of the cloud were the initial spark, but the ability to get to value in weeks and months rather than years has created a firestorm of enthusiasm in the enterprise around potential impact. If technology-related programs can be executed this quickly, businesses can for the first time ever rely on technology to change current market dynamics. In the past, it was certain that by the time you were able to implement a significant on-premise technology, market conditions would be different, calling into question whether the problems you were solving were even the right ones.
The second structural disruption is more nuanced. It’s a change in the certainty of success and role of failure. In the past, technology projects were complicated initiatives that required everything to be just right. You could be 90% into an SAP rollout and still be uncertain whether or not it was on track and likely to succeed in achieving its goals. To mitigate against this, you structured everything around making sure every possible risk in a multi-year program had been considered and mitigated. Rolling out a new ERP was your equivalent of launching the space shuttle - you got one chance and it had to be right. Everything felt like it was, and actually was, wound too tight.
Cloud technology, for many of the reasons we’ve written about before, has created unparalleled flexibility for enterprises. By being able to show real users, business owners, and technologists progress as you go, you can evaluate, fail and fix almost daily. Users can see what they’re getting all along the way. Being agile has become more than a development trend, it actually represents how the business operates. This is the ultimate manifestation of the relative cost of finding an issue in development vs. testing vs. rollout. For even highly complicated projects, risk is now parceled into smaller pieces because you can spot and test failures at every point along the way. In addition, functional and technical managers no longer have to try to guess and prepare for all the different permutations of what might happen when they start a project. By the time you arrive at the first “go-live”, you already know what’s going to happen because it’s what you’ve been seeing for weeks or months. The ability to be agile and iterate frequently is one of the reason why cloud deployments have seen far higher success rates and far fewer high profile IT failures.
The CIO’s Guide to Making the Cloud Disruption Work For You
Marc Andreesen’s article that we referenced earlier - “Why Software is Eating the World” - describes how software has disrupted industry after industry. This view of software as a catalyst of disruption stands in stark contrast to an age of on-premise technology where leading academics and business leaders argued “Does IT Matter?”. Cloud technologies have changed where enterprise technology lies within these two extremes by radically altering speed to value and certainty of success. This has raised the stakes for more CIOs than ever before - will you lead your company to use technology in a way that directly impacts your competitiveness in the market, or will someone else disrupt your future?
Today, for companies to succeed with the cloud at scale, they need to take advantage of the cloud’s speed to value and agility to iteratively shape their processes and maximize business impact. CIOs who treat the cloud like an ERP initiative are certain to fall far short of translating cloud potential into true business impact. IT organizations must:
- Demand Speed and Agility - Organize their own teams and trusted partners around a model that expects every initiative to start to create value in months.
- Mitigate the Right Risks - Recognize that even for large-scale cloud initiatives, hierarchical, highly structured governance (PMOs upon PMOs) hamper rapid iteration and actually increase risk. What used to be fundamental to a successful voyage may today be anchoring you to the shore. Use cloud technologies to enable iteration and micro failures that will lead to macro level success.
- Think Disruption - Move beyond the template for last year’s best practice. Yesterday's best practices are technology-centric and inward looking. Today's technologies enable you to focus your business outward - on your customers and your customers' customers. Start creating “new practices” that use today's technologies (mobile, social, cloud) to change the way you engage with your customers, partners, employees, investors and other stakeholders. Think innovation and disruption rather than regressing to the mean with the last generation’s best practices!
Cloud technologies have shown a potential that is well beyond previous paradigms of technology. Yet, for enterprises there are many steps between potential and actually driving transformative business impact. And it is in this transition, that lies the second order disruption of the cloud. You see, an entire systems integration industry has been built around how to help businesses consume and get value from technology. But the global systems integration model has been built around generations of limitations in technology that the cloud has removed in just the past few years. The very tools and techniques that enabled this model to deal with the challenges of SAP and Oracle ERP rollouts have created structural weaknesses in dealing with the cloud.
After the first World War, the French constructed the Maginot Line - a set of fortifications, tanks obstacles and other fixed positions to defend the country. It was “extolled as a work of genius” up until the point of World War II, when it became clear that armies were structurally more mobile and agile than ever before. The Maginot Line was essentially driven around and France was successfully invaded in just a few days. The global systems integrator model is the Maginot Line of the cloud world.
Most of us who have been in IT for long enough knew the on-premise application model was broken even before the cloud emerged. We felt the frustration of the business, protested a bit too vehemently at Nick Carr’s accusations that IT didn’t matter, and knew a big project had as much chance of being canceled as completed. Enthusiastic was seldom a word used to describe customers after a project.
Essentially, the same paragraph can be written to describe the state of the global systems integrator (GSI). Individuals and teams can be great, but most of us know that as firms they are mostly identical versions of one another. The scores of us who spent years inside them know that even on the best days they feel like great people trapped by a system created to minimize risk rather than environments that encourage dramatic innovation. And while Twitter is full of enthusiastic paens from customers to Salesforce, Google and Workday, I’ve yet to see close to the same enthusiasm from customers for their GSI partners.
So it’s no wonder that after disrupting on-premise technology directly, the cloud is now disrupting the ecosystems built around on-premise technology. After all, Accenture and Deloitte have as many or more Oracle and SAP developers than Oracle and SAP themselves. In addition, just like on-premise incumbents reacted slowly to the cloud, we see GSIs ‘embracing’ the change in small parts of their organizations while the antibodies within cling with every fiber to the older, more profitable model. Even further, just like in the early days of cloud when legacy providers were suggesting hybrid deployment models for SaaS applications (long since discredited), GSIs are not facing how significantly the industry has changed and are actually touting their long legacies in on-premise as an advantage !
One fundamental difference between the way the cloud disrupted on-premise technology and the current disruption to the GSI model is the level of dialog on the topic. As SaaS and the cloud took off, we saw fireworks between innovative leaders like Marc Benioff and those trying to hold onto the past. So far, we haven't seen close to the same level of dialog around the disruption of the GSI model. Partially this is a result of GSIs trying to attach themselves - no matter how awkwardly - to cloud leaders like salesforce.com, Google and Workday. Faced with already trying to change the very essence of the role of technology in business, cloud leaders have tried to use this embrace for validation “see even they get how big a change cloud is and are on board.”
But ultimately, cloud providers care most about how effectively their technology can be translated from potential to performance for their customers. While enterprises have relied historically on the GSI model to help with technology rollouts, it has only been in the context of IT as the lowest common denominator (Nick Carr’s IT Doesn’t Matter), never in the context of IT as a business disruptor (Andreesen’s model of using software to “eat the world”). The current GSI model is better suited to minimizing technology risk and getting to the lowest common denominator of results than for using technology to drive disruption. As the GSI model proves detrimental to driving disruption, the chasm between GSIs and cloud providers will widen. Finally, over time the economic conflict between GSIs and cloud providers will also become more pronounced. In a world without servers and software, GSIs will lose a substantive portion of the revenue they have taken for granted because it’s just part of the cloud service.
The cloud has shown the fundamental weaknesses in the on-premise centric model currently embraced by the GSIs. Now dozens of pure-play cloud providers are approaching cloud success with tools and techniques yet undiscovered by the GSIs. In fact, the vast majority of high profile public cloud successes across salesforce.com, Google and Workday haven’t even involved the GSIs. Perhaps most tellingly, Salesforce.com purchased a pure cloud provider last year, Model Metrics, to “lead the shift to the social enterprise” despite repeated statements from Accenture and Deloitte on how invested they are in driving social enterprise transformations.
At Appirio, we are attempting to disrupt the global systems integrator because we witness first-hand the contrast between what can be accomplished with an “all cloud” mentality vs a legacy mindset. We believe the cloud-centric model is fundamentally better for customers. While it’s clear that Appirio the company is still a ways from instilling substantive fear into global systems integrators like Accenture and Deloitte, the cloud model we have helped drive is exploding.
Service providers who can drive enterprise success at scale with the cloud must deliver speed and agility, mitigate the right risks and enable customers to create disruptions. At Appirio, we use an agile-inspired approach along with technology built up over 1000s of enterprise cloud projects to deliver value faster and more predictably. By showing business users progress at every stage of our iterative development process, we can fail fast, make adjustments and reduce the real risks - low adoption, usage and impact. Finally, we help our customers think disruptively because that's who we are. Our business runs 100% in the cloud and has scaled and succeeded because of the very things we help customers do. We created a crowdsourced development community, CloudSpokes, because we constantly seek to disrupt our own business in order to deliver more value, more efficiently to our customers.
Ultimately GSIs are trapped by the Innovator’s Dilemma. Or stated through the lesson of the Maginot Line - “generals always fight the last war, especially if they have won it.” Now, CIOs and business leaders must prepare for tomorrow by choosing how they realign their own organizations, how they incorporate partners into their overall strategy, and who the right partners are. For the first time in a long time, cloud technology has made IT cool, relevant and strategic. Now, the only question is how your choices can lead your business to the right side of disruption.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Customer Spotlight - Q&A with Gary Spears, Medtronic
By Sara Campbell
We were proud to name Gary Spears, IT Director at Medtronic one of Appirio’s Cloud Pioneers in 2011. As a member of the Medtronic team since 2006, Gary has been the leading force behind Medtronic’s sales IT architecture overhaul.
Medtronic, the world’s largest medical technology company ranked among the Fortune 500, began working with Appirio to create a ‘hub and spokes’ like architecture with a single Salesforce master CRM system feeding multiple Salesforce instances at the individual business level. This created data consistency across the company and providing unparalleled opportunities for collaboration and dialogue between various business units and geographies.
I sat down with Gary to get his take on the business transformation taking place at Medtronic and what it means be named a Cloud Pioneer.
Medtronic, the world’s largest medical technology company ranked among the Fortune 500, began working with Appirio to create a ‘hub and spokes’ like architecture with a single Salesforce master CRM system feeding multiple Salesforce instances at the individual business level. This created data consistency across the company and providing unparalleled opportunities for collaboration and dialogue between various business units and geographies.
I sat down with Gary to get his take on the business transformation taking place at Medtronic and what it means be named a Cloud Pioneer.
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