Susan Scrupski – Page 42

Sapient Erupts

Taking a short break from Enterprise 2.0 coverage, I had to acknowledge the news on Sapient today. I received a flash alert from Sapient’s investor team that, “SAPIENT NAMES ALAN HERRICK PRESIDENT AND CEO.” The bulletin went on to explain that co-founder Jerry Greenberg had resigned. Stuart Moore, the other co-founder is still a board member, but gave up his position as co-chairman in order to allow for an independent chairman (now, Jeffrey M. Cunningham). The company also named Joseph S. Tibbetts Jr. as the new CFO, replacing Susan Cooke who was interim CFO and who also resigned today.

Reading the press release, it appears Sapient is in hot water over options-dating, I suppose. Is this the 2.0 crime du jour? Why, everybody’s doing it! Not just Silicon Valley hotshots, but now a company like Sapient, that heretofore, I believed was basically infallible.

Sheesh. I’m not sure I’m more disappointed this happened or if I didn’t know anything about it because I’ve taken my eye off the IT Services ball. Some ITSinsider! Well, the good news is Dan Farber agreed to give me a ZDNet blog on IT Services, so I hope I will be catching up fast.

I put out a number of calls on this Sapient news, and haven’t heard back from anyone yet. I talked to Sapient, but the PR woman really couldn’t tell me anything more than was in the release. The news troubles me. I once wrote a column about what makes an IT Services firm successful, and Sapient gets high marks for all my criteria. I’m sure the company will weather the storm, but when founder CEOs leave, it generally doesn’t go well. My guess is we’ll see a merger/acquisition on the horizon.

Incidentally, Jerry Greenberg is a Jersey boy. He grew up in a small town here in South Jersey not too far (or too dissimilar) from the town I live in today. He made it to Harvard out of there majoring in Economics, he then worked at Cambridge Technology Partners, and started Sapient with Stuart Moore in 1991. Moore was a Computer Science grad out of UC Berkeley. In the day, Moore led one of the first client/server implementations on Wall Street and managed one of the largest installations of Sybase.

I admired Sapient for many things… including the choice of naming Susan Cooke as interim CFO. Imagine that? A woman who can talk numbers and face the investment community.

So, we’ll see what happens. For me, it’s the end of an era.

Office 2.0: War Room, Revolution Central

A woman I admire, Olga Grkavac, at the Information Association of America (ITAA) recently got back to me on an email inquiry. I had asked Olga what, if anything, the ITAA member companies were thinking about Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 for their businesses. In an email response, she basically said, “Not much, but I’m still checking.” (I’m paraphrasing). I remember being at an ITAA conference with Olga in 1998 or ’99. We were standing on a beautiful outside deck at a cocktail party at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs. The Colorado Rockies loomed hazily in the distance. I gestured toward them and said to her, “Olga, the Internet is like those mountains. It’s a giant phenomenon that’s going to hit the IT industry by surprise. Some people can’t see it, but it’s coming.” She looked at me quizzically, but I was going for a Hollywood impression, and I think I got it. I reminded her of that discussion this week in my return email. I told her, “I’m writing you from a conference on Office 2.0. The conference is sold out with standing room only in the popular sessions. There are over 45 companies exhibiting here. A lot of these firms (most actually) are startups. My point is the federal and commercial groups not only should but must start looking at this phenomenon. The Internet has finally grown up and is going to work!”

Office 2.0 was one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended in my 20+ years experience in the high tech industry. Why? Because there was a special magic in the air that we were all on the ground floor of something BIG. Even the skeptics who made for some interesting panel discord, couldn’t deny there was something going on here that was worth sticking around for. For the record, I am an unabashed believer. I asked Rafe Needleman who sat next to me, “Rafe, are we in another bubble?” Thoughts of losing my income, my house, my car, and my stock portfolio like in the last bubble were haunting me like the ghost of Christmas past. Rafe said, “Yes,” but reassured me that the market was more mature. Rafe Needleman is an insightful guy who reviews new technology. I felt good he wasn’t fearful of the road ahead. We agreed we’d live another day to write about it, if we were headed for another implosion.

At the same time we were in San Francisco, I got an email from a friend who said there were over 6,000 people at the Gartner IT Expo that was on this week in Orlando. I was surprised to hear that even Gartner analysts were talking about Enterprise 2.0. and that it was a hot topic at the show. This encouraged me. Most of the dissension and disagreement was related to whether or not IT is the enemy or not. More on that for another post. In short, I’m starting to weigh in on the side of the neo-Enterprise 2.0ers who believe we can find some common ground. IT will embrace Enterprise 2.0 the same way they have accepted Salesforce.com; it’s just a matter of time.

With 56 vendors exhibiting, and my obligation to my client, Itensil, I didn’t have enough time to see every product. This was probably my biggest disappointment, but I’m the one to blame. The most impressive, hands-down, company I spoke to was Atlassian. The reason was not for the imaginative nature of the product, but because of the company’s fast-track success. I will post separately on Atlassian, as I spent a lot of time getting a demo and brief from co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes. Other products that impressed me included Approver, FreshBooks, Koral, SiteKreator, Vyew, Wufoo, and ZoHo.

Major Props to Ismael Ghalimi for conceiving and delivering a first-class conference!

Office 2.0: Don’t miss the podcast

I’m here at Office 2.0. It’s a terrific conference. I’d say the enthusiasm is outweighing the skepticism so far, but the day is not over.

In the meantime, Anne Zelenka has taken up the initiative to create a podcast for the conference. Be sure to tune in:

“The Office 2.0 Podcast Jam launched Monday with podcasts on the Office 2.0 revolution, technology usage in Afghanistan, and 2.0-style enterprise content management. This experimental project provides a virtual alternative to the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Check in today for a discussion of Office and Web 2.0 in higher education, a proposal for an IT 2.0 toolkit, and coverage of the unified communications landscape underlying next-generation web technology.”

Visit the website at www.office20podcasts.com

Web 2.0 and the Youth Culture

Thanks to the creative talents of Rod Boothby, the Enterprise Irregulars have a new logo image. The Irregulars are an incredibly smart and experienced collaborative team who group together on the web to try and solve the mysteries of the future of Enterprise Software in the Next Net world.

I’m going to post here a point I made to the Irregulars a few weeks ago. I received excellent comments on it, and would like to solicit more feedback, if possible.

Talking ’bout Y-Generation
Web 2.0 is not all about us, sorry. I have no hard statistics on this,
but I’m thinking that many of the developers that are building it are a
generation behind us. Adoption is coming in the enterprise because the
next-generation office-worker is psychographically predisposed to it.
It’s what Jerry Bowles refers to as the “MeMedia” generation, not sure
if that’s original from him. We need to keep this in mind when we’re
thinking about defining the sector.

In other words, it’s the ‘tude, man. My kids would be rolling their
eyes if they saw me trying to type cool. Yet I feel compelled to put
this on the table. We can argue the enterprise software
deletion/inclusion debate like the EU trying to establish its European
Constitution for months, maybe years… but there is an entire
generation of nextgen hotshots building applications that will find
their way into the enterprise. Will we be ready?

Take a look at this presentation from Molecular*, a consulting firm part
of the Isobar network of Interactive Agencies. Isobar with its massive
reach, has G2000 customers. They are raising awareness and generating
excitement on a global scale.

*Sorry, the presentation is not widely available. You can contact Molecular directly to get a copy of this 100-slide deck.

Revolutionary holdout… Maybe Bowie not Lennon. Definitely not Lenin.

What time is it when a consultant blogs? Time to turn and face the strain.

I heard Andrew McAfee say recently that he doesn’t think we’re involved in a revolution; that it’s more of a transformation. Sigh. I need to go on the record saying I respectfully disagree. He said revolutions are generally short and violent. (I’m paraphrasing.) To try and make my argument, I did what I normally do in these situations, I researched “revolution” on Wikipedia. I won’t argue the violent observation, but the short I will. Take the American Revolution, for instance. It lasted 9 years from 1774-1783. More importantly, it was a war for independence and overthrowing existing societal and governmental order. Am I the only one seeing the similarities here? Am I wrong, perhaps?

From Wikipedia:
1774–1783: the American Revolution establishes independence of the thirteen North American colonies from Great Britain, creating the republic of the United States of America. A war of independence in that it created one nation from another, it was also a revolution in that it overthrew an existing societal and governmental order: the Colonial government in the Colonies.

In fairness, I caught the revolutionary bug from Joe Kraus whom I interviewed for an article on the disintermediation of high-priced consultants due to SaaS applications in the enterprise.

JotSpot CEO, Joe Kraus admits, “JotSpot is trying to enable a Do-It-Yourself revolution. When you give people the ability to do something that previously only experts could do, I think very interesting things happen.” Kraus doesn’t think the impact will be overnight, however. He believes the adoption of the new technologies will take about five years. “I think we generally tend to over-estimate the impact of technologies in the short term and radically under-estimate them in the long-term. There’s a lot of racket and fear that this is going to displace traditional consulting, and my answer would be, in the short term, I don’t think so, but in the long term, I think there’s more risk.”

Yes, we’re transforming the enterprise with new alternatives, but there is an undercurrent of shall-I-say… Raging against the Machine… that is driving the move to self-help applications. I’ve been harping on the socio-cultural underpinnings on the “movement” and the freedom of choice that web 2.0 applications provide to users for months now. For whatever their reason (I hate Outlook, Excel, SAP, Oracle, fillintheblank for xxx reason), users are turned off by the establishment’s choices and are psychologically primed to look at alternatives. That smacks of revolution– not transformation.

Along these lines, before the rumors broke about Google and YouTube, I had wanted to publish some commentary from my old friend, Richard Holway. I’ve never known an analyst to be as prescient as Richard. Here’s what Richard (who publishes for the UK market) had to say about the ch-ch-changes taking place in today’s enterprise and for today’s enterprise suppliers.

McAfee is an incredibly bright guy. I’m ashamed to admit I disagree with him, but for ITSinsiders who’ve known me over the years, I have a hard time not stating my opinion. And, also for the record: Lord knows, I’ve been wrong before. But if I’m right, I feel we’re missing something more deeply philosophical in our discussions of Enterprise 2.0. It frames how truly remarkable this wave of “next net” is. I heard a lot of this talk during web 1.0 from digital evangelists who were inspired to subvert the prevailing paradigm. Today, we have the tools and the passion. The sad truth is, we won’t see the results until widespread user adoption takes root. This is something I’m sure McAfee and I can agree on.

Humpty Dumpty Lives to Blog Another Day…

Readers, fans, and friends– My car decided to get into an argument with another car while I was en route in Virginia for Dion’s TNNI conference. As it turns out, I was walking around the conference somewhat delirious as I had a concussion and didn’t even know! I was released from the hospital this week. I’m trying to get caught up and will try to post something soon, including a great analysis from Richard Holway/Ovum.

Please stay tuned. And thanks so much for the kind words, cards, and flowers from those who had the heads up that I was recuperating.

Still planning on attending Office 2.0 in San Francisco. Thank goodness I don’t have to drive. 🙂