Sep

29

Sprinkling some Web 2.0 pixie dust on boring stuff

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Cisco’s acquisition lineup tells a story.

  • Webex for $3.2 Bil
  • Postpath for $215 Mil
  • Jabber (undisclosed sum)

Hmm .. what do these three have in common? Looks like Cisco is after the $34 Bil collaboration market, by beefing up its portfolio with unified communications, telepresence, and all sorts of Web 2.0-for Enterprise technologies so that people can cut down on physical travel.

Makes sense, given the weak economy and soaring gas prices - it’s costly to travel. Much like how dinosaurs went extinct and the smaller animals went on to dominate the earth because they were smaller, nimbler and able to adapt to the changing environment, Cisco is evolving.

Companies that rely on easy credit and on business models that require moving physical goods will probably find a tough time surviving. Cisco can help in the latter by cutting down on employee travel (ok-still no substitute for actually delivering parcels of stuff like Amazon), but for multi-national companies even small savings make a significant dent when multiplied.

Web 2.0 innovation is increasingly bottoms-up; that is, it’s first tested “in the wild” by consumers, then buffed up for corporations. That’s right, Web 2.0 is growing up and is punching holes through the corporate firewall.

Why am I writing about this? Oh, because I think it’s cool to watch the behemoth Cisco turn its big ship. We’ll see if they succeed in evolving fast enough.

A similar trajectory this reminds me of is British Telecom (BT).

Cisco = big company that makes the low level nuts and bolts for networking = boring.

BT = big telco which without, your cell phone might as well be a brick = equally boring.

Cisco with Web 2.0 = ooOOooh!

BT with Web 2.0 = aaAAaah!

Ok, on a more serious note, just as Cisco has a real strategy-so does BT. Just as Cisco is thinking how it can provide more value on top of its TCP/IP stack, BT is working to deliver more value through its pipeline - by being a channel for SaaS providers to reach BT’s SMB clients.

What BT has done so far:

  • Acquired Ribbit - $105 Mil
  • Partnered with Genius.com, branded as BT Smart Marketing
  • Announced a deal to sell NetSuite and SugarCRM

At the very least, Cisco and BT’s strategies to deliver value added services on top of their commoditizing products in an increasingly saturated market (Africa aside) makes for an interesting juxtaposition and business case study.

Aug

27

Oracle’s 20% price hike (rock) + Slumping economy (hard place) = where do you go?

Filed Under business, cloud computing, problem-opportunity, regular reads, saas, technology, things to ponder about, trends, web 2.0 | Leave a Comment

A snip from an interview with Red Hat’s new chief exec:

Q: What’s your biggest surprise since starting at Red Hat?

A: I think I finally get the joke. I was a senior exec and, like every other senior exec, I had a huge IT budget. Mine was as large as Red Hat’s revenues last year. You sit there and say: “Why are my IT costs going up, but I’m getting less and less functionality?”

Every IT professional says the same thing: “My lights-on costs are going up. But — wait a minute — I bought a laptop, and it cost me half as much as it did three years ago, and my costs are going up?” I get the joke now.

If you look at the S&P 500, seven of the top 20 companies are tech and, other than Google, they’re not high-growth. But they’re just printing money because switching costs are so high. There’s this incredible amount of residual goodwill to Red Hat because we’re seen as an alternative to that. Oracle announced a 20-something percent price increase just as the economy starts heading south. How can you do that unless you’re pretty sure nobody can switch? High switching costs led to infrastructure cost creep. Once you get hooked, you can’t get off.

I chuckled as I read this. The switching cost problem sounds like the case between AT&T and Bell Atlantic in the 1980’s, which I coincidentally just recently blogged about recently.

Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.
— George Santayana, in his book The Life of Reason.

I think the comment about Oracle’s 20+% price increase is certainly good news for on-demand SaaS/cloud computing players - to disrupt the market. As companies start tightening their belts, the pay-per-drink model would inevitably look a lot more enticing.

Even when placed between a rock and a hard place (between the US economic slump and technology behemoths’ Oracle-style price increases), the numbers show that companies still can’t afford to cut back on technology spending. Technology is a business competitive advantage.

According to research firm Gartner, “It can be hard for a business to stay ahead if its technology is falling behind. That is one reason that despite an uncertain economy, worldwide information technology spending is on track to reach $3.4 trillion in 2008 — an 8 percent increase over 2007.”

PC sales (especially laptops) are surprisingly stronger than expected, according to S&P’s Equity Research. “The latest evidence came from the Aug. 19 earnings report from Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), which said unit shipments of PCs rose 20% from a year ago”

The bottom line is that businesses can’t afford to be without technology. And with such pricing pressures, online business apps are just much easier on the wallet. $50 per user/year for Google Apps, or $350 user/year MS Office.

Granted, Enterprise Web 2.0 still has a long way to go to fill the shoes of traditional on-premise apps, but I am confident that more innovation will come (I certainly plan on being a part of that innovation!), and SaaS/cloud computing/Enterprise Web 2.0’s benefits will be too good to ignore - and eventually, its benefits would exceed those from the traditional legacy on-premise apps.

From CNNMoney/Fortune: Merrill Lynch estimates that online business applications will grow to a $95 billion market within five years. The market for online office software is “wide open,” said Guy Creese, an IT analyst with the Burton Group.

“My lights-on costs are going up. But — wait a minute — I bought a laptop, and it cost me half as much as it did three years ago, and my costs are going up?”

Yeah. It doesn’t make sense.

Aug

13

Case study: Bell Atlantic and AT&T’s vendor lock-in battle

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One of the reasons I really hesitated in getting the eyePhone is because among other things, I truly dreaded the 2-year mandatory contract. I hated the idea of guaranteeing someone a consistent revenue stream and possibly be locked-in to their demands should they raise their prices.

Case study: Bell Atlantic and AT&T vendor lock-in battle.

In the 80’s, Bell Atlantic spent $3 Bil on AT&T 5ESS switches for Bell’s telephone network. AT&T’s switches were much more superior to Northern Telecom and Siemens at that time.

However, Bell didn’t properly size the vendor lock-in.

The 5ESS switches ran an operating system proprietary to AT&T, so whenever Bell wanted upgrades or new features, it was pretty much at the mercy of AT&T’s pricing weather.

Case in point: Bell Atlantic wanted its systems the ability to identify toll-free “1-800″ calls. AT&T didn’t provide (of course they didn’t!) any documentation or API for Bell to develop this feature themselves, and quoted Bell $8 Mil for a software upgrade just to do that. Bell had no choice and bent over. Voice dialing? $10 Mil! (really)

This extortion was a fat consistent revenue stream for AT&T, and made up 30-40% of AT&T’s switch revenues. AT&T’s position was further solidified by using its proprietary OS to prevent others from developing compatible equipment that may cannibalize sales from AT&T’s product line.

Bell Atlantic could not just throw AT&T out because (1) the switches had a lifespan of over a decade (2) removing and installing was expensive (3) the used switches had low re-sale value, because nobody not already locked-in would want to be locked-in ;)

In other words, the switching costs were astronomous, and Bell was hurting real bad in the wallet. It sued AT&T in 1995 for monopoly.

Shifting gears. To draw a parallel, in many ways, traditional on-premise software vendors use such tactics to .. well, play their hand.

With SaaS, this problem goes away. The customer can switch vendors on a dime; without the safety net of a perpetual licensing scheme, vendors have to constantly prove themselves by continuously delivering innovation and value to their customers — or risk losing them to the competition.

A flat world combined with fierce competition to innovate can only mean more and better options to the consumer :)

Unlike traditional on-premise vendors, SaaS vendors can’t rely on their own product development “baggage” to milk a drying revenue stream.

Aug

11

Reaggregating SaaS/PaaS results for a competitive advantage

Filed Under cloud computing, innovation, paas, problem-opportunity, regular reads, saas, technology, web 2.0 | Leave a Comment

In a previous post, I discussed how cloud computing and the Grameenphone microfinance endeavor fit into a McKinsey article about the benefits of unbundling production from distribution. This weekend I decided to revisit the article again just to see if I would see anything differently this time around.

The world is indeed getting flatter. The article’s section on “Tapping into a world of talent” talks about how technology today fosters interactive online collaboration which in turn enables companies to outsource increasingly specialized aspects of their work and still maintain organizational coherence.

[…] technology permits them to decentralize innovation through networks or customers, it also allows them to parcel out more work to specialists, free agents, and talent networks.

Top talent for a range of activities-from finance to marketing and IT to operations-can be found anywhere. The best person for a task may be a free agent in India or an employee of a small company in Italy rather than someone who works for a global business service provider. Software and Internet technologies are making it easier and less costly for companies to integrate and manage the work of an expanding number of outsiders […]

This trend should gather steam in sectors such as software, health care delivery, professional services, and real estate, where companies can easily segment work into discrete tasks for independent contractors and then reaggregate it. […] Competitive advantage will shift to companies that can master the art of breaking down and recomposing tasks.

Globalization is inevitable, and increased competition means keeping businesses on their toes, which in turn translates to increased benefits to the consumer. In short, it’s healthy for both consumers and producers (unless you’re just lazy).

In a way, this also parallels SaaS/PaaS. Look at the SaaSCon sponsors list for a glimpse of some of players out there. There’s no shortage of on-demand providers filling gaps in the cloud-computing/SaaS value chain and gaps left open for disruption by on-premise incumbents.

Each cloud computing/SaaS vendor mostly specialize in one verticle and strive to dominate that niche-delivering a continuous stream of value (innovate or die) for less (save customers money or be undercut by your competitor). Jeff Bezos has explicitly said it before that with Amazon AWS, he wants to innovate there by reducing operating expenses, increasing efficiencies infrastructure through economies of scale, so that (here’s the important part) “.. the cost savings can be then in turn be returned to the consumer.” Ok, so I paraphrased, but he said it in a video clip somewhere online and I can’t seem to find it right now.

The point here is that he’s trying to save the consumer money (and that’s a great brand promise!) The jury is still out on that one, given that AWS is still relatively young, but if anything else - it’s a makes a good sell (who doesn’t like to hear that their vendor is actively trying to save them more money?), but ok .. I’ve digressed too much on Bezos. I just can’t help liking people (and companies) who genuinely want to help others (the customers) be successful, so that they themselves can be successful too. Pay-for-performance? Pay-per-drink? Cloud computing? ;)

Just to name a few vendors:

  • Google Docs -> on-demand “MS Office”
  • Amazon AWS -> on-demand computing power, storage.
  • Salesforce -> on-demand CRM
  • CODA -> on-demand finance application (built on Force.com!)
  • NetSuite -> on-demand ERP
  • WorkDay -> on-demand HR, payroll, procurement, business intel, ERP

Odds are that your company is already using some kind of on-demand solution for one of its functions, even if you do not realize it.

The way I see it, if you think of each of these functions as discrete tasks with each farmed out to a particular SaaS vendor, then the need for the reaggregation for each of the function’s results is obvious. I agree with the article that companies that succeed in recomposing these tasks would hold a competitive advantage.

It would allow executives to conduct business at the speed of thought (asking questions like “how can I reduce operating expenses here today, can I realistically turn the ship around fast enough in anticipation of this tectonic shift/change in competitive landscape”) - as opposed to the speed of “how fast can I line up all the columns in this Excel spreadsheet from that tabular data in the PDF spreadsheet and .. hmm, it would be really nice if I could overlay on this the results from some SQL queries.. oh wait I have to get those from John in IT first ..”

The $200-300Bil business solutions market is open for disruption by Platform-as-a-Service.

Web 2.0 - all grown up and ready to change the way we do business.

Aug

5

Not withholding innovation by decoupling from low(er)-level constraints

Filed Under cloud computing, innovation, paas, regular reads, saas, technology, web 2.0 | Leave a Comment

Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce kicked off this month in cloud computing and SaaS news with a guest post on TechCrunch.

Some key highlights:

Web 1.0 was about the emergence of the “killer app” from companies like eBay, Amazon.com, and Google. Although we thought of them as Web sites at the time, they were really amazing applications with a level of functionality, ease of use, and scale that had rarely been seen before by the average consumer. Transactions, not just of goods but of knowledge, became ubiquitous and instant. The efficiency and transparency that was once the domain of global financial markets was now at the command of individual consumers and businesses.

It’s about empowering the everyday worker (especially the small business guys) with powerful tools previously only available to mega-corps with deep pockets. Web 2.0, cloud computing, SaaS leaves a taste of benevolence on my tongue, and I like it.

That’s “benevolence”, the way Paul Graham says it:

Surely Microsoft isn’t benevolent? But when I think back to the beginning, they were. Compared to IBM they were like Robin Hood. When IBM introduced the PC, they thought they were going to make money selling hardware at high prices. But by gaining control of the PC standard, Microsoft opened up the market to any manufacturer. Hardware prices plummeted, and lots of people got to have computers who couldn’t otherwise have afforded them. […] Microsoft isn’t so benevolent now.

I guess I like rooting for the underdog and taking on the incumbents ;) Any big problem is a big opportunity, right?

More from Marc’s post:

Web 3.0 changes all of this by completely disrupting the technology and economics of the traditional software industry. The new rallying cry of Web 3.0 is that anyone can innovate, anywhere. Code is written, collaborated on, debugged, tested, deployed, and run in the cloud. When innovation is untethered from the time and capital constraints of infrastructure, it can truly flourish.

Emphasis is mine on that last sentence, since I think it’s worth noting. It’s why I absolutely <3 SaaS/cloud computing and believe in it. Too many times, as a software engineer .. you cut back on truly innovative ideas because of the voice of fear that speaks softly to you from the back of your mind, “but dude, you’re opening a can of worms; you need to do this, that, and it’s mostly all prickly infrastructure stuff that you’re not an expert in and would take you days/weeks/months to get up to speed! gahh .. can’t we find another less innovative solution that is easier to implement?”

And sad to say, most would take the easy way out — innovate lesser, in smaller incremental chunks (to keep the pain points low). And that’s infrastructure holding back otherwise creative problem solving.

According to Daryl Plummer, managing VP of Gartner (IT), about $8 of every $10 spent on technology in corporations is for maintaining systems, as opposed to innovating. Talk about a serious baggage.
“It’s hard to turn a big ship very quickly […] You have technologies that are like cement in these businesses—they’re hard to change and get rid of.”

I believe that with cloud computing and SaaS, we’ll see more bottom-up (of the org chart) punching of holes in the “corporate policy” firewall, because business units needs stuff done, and IT departments can’t keep up. This is especially true in huge bureaucratic companies.
Read more

Jul

20

A laundry list of business problems (opportunity)

Filed Under entrepreneurship, problem-opportunity, product management, silicon valley, startup, things to ponder about, web 2.0 | Leave a Comment

“Every problem is an opportunity, and the bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity. No one will pay you to solve a non-problem.”
– Vinod Khosla, on big problems and big opportunities.

The one thing I’ve come to admire about Paul Graham (using “Paul Graham” as a synonym for Y Combinator itself), is that he’s turned into quite a force to be reckoned with - aligning, match-making problems with teams and solutions, cranking up accomplishment cycles. Seems to me that these days, he has access to all sorts of real-world business problems, and conveniently enough he also practically has an army of technology entrepreneurs ready to take a bite out of any gauntlet that he throws down.

I love that quote from Vinod Khosla above, and I’m always on the look for problems, because I see them as unmet needs, and I love disruption - David vs. Goliath style take-on-the-incumbent fights. PG has recently written up on ideas for startups that he’d like to fund, so reading this list was definitely a must for opportunity-seekers, and you know what .. even if it’s not a problem that you can see yourself solving, it’s good to be aware of the problems out there in your adjacent industry.

I find #6 interesting:

More variants of CRM. This is a form of enterprise software, but I’m mentioning it explicitly because it seems like this area has such potential. CRM (”Customer Relationship Management”) means all sorts of different things, but a lot of the current embodiments don’t seem much more than mailing list managers. It should be possible to make interactions with customers much higher-res.

When I think CRM, I think of Salesforce.com, simply because well, who doesn’t associate CRM with Salesforce? ;) What I really like about Salesforce.com is how they have opened up their platform for 3rd party developers via AppExchange. Why is this such an important strategic move?

They realize that now that they are a huge company serving a huge customer base, there’s bound to be a subset of their customers whose needs are either over-served or under-served, and thus these customers will be ripe to be poached by smaller and more agile startups. Thus, the bigger Salesforce gets, it’s only a matter of time before their core market gets nibbled from say, the low end, .. which would force Salesforce.com to then shift focus on the higher end of the spectrum (and keep going higher) until the nibblers now become this real threat of displacing the incumbent.

Thus, by opening up their platform to innovation, they can capture the “long-tail” of features needed by their customer base and actually meet them. Imagine you are running some obscure business in a very niche vertical. You need CRM, but you also need this 1 extra feature very specific to your business. You now have the option to installing the “addon” to meet your needs. Other (most) companies who don’t care about this addon don’t need to install it.

What Salesforce.com has also effectively done here is allowed their SaaS bread-and-butter be customized specifically to each customer! This is powerful, because most people think that SaaS is just a web app, and because it’s served from the same web server to all customers, customization is difficult.

Software customization/personalization is also way to segment your market and extract more value from the different segments. And all of this, for free to Salesforce.com because they don’t even need to hire developers to build stuff — the platform is open to any 3rd developer. In short, AppExchange is one of Salesforce.com’s competitive advantage that builds network effects over time (like eBay), further solidifying their dominance on the market.

The iPhone too, has a developer app market place. And this too, will be a powerful force to be reckoned with by iPhone competitors over time.

Back to what PG was saying, “It should be possible to make interactions with customers much higher-res.” I wonder what he means by that exactly, but then again he did say that this list was intentionally vague. I can at the very minimum at least conclude that he sees an opportunity for innovation in CRM, which I do too :)

Paul Graham’s list of problems: http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

May

11

iPhone apps for healthcare technology — plus some robots

Filed Under changing the world, healthcare technology, innovation, mobile, regular reads, technology | Leave a Comment

Cell phones, mobile phones, hand phones, whatever they are called, wherever they are in the world–can change the world! We already see it help drive economic development in microfinance, and now, we’re making strides with healthcare technology, another field I’m interested in because I love seeing technology change lives. The convergence of sophisticated UX-centric mobile devices, Internet/Web 2.0, Software as a Service, cloud computing — not to be missed!

From the article:

Despite all the advances in medical diagnostics, two-thirds of the world’s population has no access to imaging technologies. Worse, about half of the imaging equipment sent to developing countries goes unused because local technicians aren’t trained to operate it or lack spare parts, according to the World Health Organization. But thanks to the proliferation of cellular and other wireless networks, researchers are stepping up efforts to deliver crucial medical services from afar. “You go through India, anywhere, in the middle of the road, there’s someone with a cell phone. A friend calls me from the jungles of Costa Rica,” says Rubinsky. “I can see so many applications in which the cell phone becomes an integral part of a medical device. A cell phone can cut the cost of almost every [diagnostic] device.”

We have the $10Mil fbFund for Facebook apps, $100Mil iFund for iPhone apps, $10Mil for Google Android apps, and the to be announced $150Mil Blackberry apps fund — will we see a fund to drive healthcare technology apps?

With the iPhone spurring more handset makers to introduce similarly robust devices, the U.S. market for medical cell-phone software is expanding rapidly. Sales of phone applications for medical professionals are expected to rise from $111.8 million last year to $276 million in 2011, according to consultancy Ambient Insight.

On the “heavier” tech side, we’re definitely making huge strides in having robots that can now operate on people.

Consider this: Suppose there are only 10 surgeons in the world that specialize in this really complicated brain disease, affected by not that many people, but the number of victims dying from it is significant enough (say, 5,000 deaths a year worldwide). There’s only so many surgeons to go around, and with that many victims around the world, even if these surgeons worked themselves to death to save the world, they can’t possibly help everybody with just two hands and only 24 hours in a day. Seriously, it takes almost a day to just travel halfway across the world, and that’s just a one-way.

The solution: remote surgery. In terms of supply and demand, the supply is scarce (the Ph.Ds in this very narrow field) and the demand far exceeds the supply, and the number of victims is probably going to grow at a rate faster than the rate Ph.Ds in this field can be minted. Technology here serves to increase supply, that is, not by letting universities churn out more doctors (although that would work too), but rather by increasing the “utilization rate” of the existing doctors by allowing them to perform their work anywhere at anytime, by saving on travel time and expense. Even if we had an infinite amount of money to spend on the fastest jets, nobody can buy more than 24 hours in a day. 10 hours on a jet spent traveling is 10 hours that could be spent operating on a patient.

“If you are looking at the future, it’s hard to envision a hospital not offering robotics,” said Robert Glenning, chief financial officer at the Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey

Technology, changing lives and making the world a better place–I love it!