Category: SOA

Disruptive Technology makes smooth market for SaaS Integrator

Had an excellent chat this week with Narinder Singh, founder of Appirio based in San Francisco. Singh and his colleagues started up Appirio to take advantage of the next wave in enterprise adoption of SaaS applications such as Salesforce.com and SuccessFactors. With backgrounds from SAP, Webmethods, Borland, and Accenture, Singh and his colleagues know the enterprise market cold.

His predictions for the disruption of the enterprise app ecosystem were particularly interesting to me. Singh feels today’s enterprise vendors are falling into the classic trap of the innovator’s dilemma— how do you serve two masters– move to embrace disruptive technology while preserving your existing base? Further, he feels traditional, large SIs are also hooked on the enterprise drug with revenues pushing toward $10B for Accenture and IBM alone in enterprise app implementation and support services. On-demand also affects ISVs in that changes Oracle or SAP make in their core products won’t affect an ISV until maybe a year or so because of the complexity of the cycle in upgrades, etc. “In the on-demand model, if Salesforce innovates in an area where you [the ISV] have previously created some value add, over night their entire customer base has access to that innovation,” says Singh. The model of on-demand forces everyone to stay on their toes, and Singh believes this is good for customers.

He also sees his firm and firms like his as playing a unique role in helping enterprises with the SaaS (r)evolution. He sees a wide open opportunity to “bring the customer back to the center of innovation.” For instance, he’s working with a client to mesh their HR data (SuccessFactors) with their sales data (Salesforce) to deliver a strategic view on how to manage sales performance by increasing quality and reducing ramp-up time. The opportunity to observe, assemble and rapidly deliver new solutions is unique to this era of systems integration. The role of the SaaS-savvy services provider is more of an emissary than vendor, too. The business units are rapidly adopting SaaS under the radar of the CIO. Singh feels his firm is a natural to rationalize the SaaS silos within an enterprise and to help the CIO embrace the new technology, rather than resist it. By the same token, he feels the more successful and comfortable CIOs become with leveraging SaaS and web 2.0 solutions in the enterprise, the greater the disruption will become for the enterprise eco-system.

The following is a chart from a paper from Appirio entitled Services 2.0. It’s a good read for IT Services fans and enterprise app stalwarts alike.

before and after IT Serviceds

Another interesting paper in the IT Services sector was recently published by the Outsourcing Institute. If you want to know more about Outsourcing 2.0, you can download the paper here.

Watch this Space: Hinchcliffe is Hot

Dion Hincliffe

Dion Hinchcliffe, as many of you know, is one of the leading pioneers in the Enterprise 2.0 movement. His regular blog posts on ZDNet and at the SOA Web Services Journal have explained concisely and eloquently how to apply web 2.0 in the enterprise. Yesterday, Hinchcliffe & Co. announced its Web 2.0 University. The university will be providing high-end Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 education solutions and premier consulting services in partnership with O’Reilly Media who delivered the concept and the term “web 2.0” to the industry.

The early registration list of A-list customers for the University is impressive. Classes and seminars for Web 2.0 University will be offered around the world in a variety of locations starting this year. The core curriculum consists of five courses, beginning with “bootcamps.” The next scheduled is the Enterprise 2.0 Academy ™ which aims to provide real-world, hands-on information on how to transform the enterprise. The first bootcamps will be held December 12th and 13th at the Carlyle Center in historic Alexandria, VA.

The University will train top executives, IT experts, programmers and developers and other business leaders on how to transform their business by focusing on “the power of the user.”

Hinchcliffe’s partnership, also announced yesterday with with Tim O’Reilly’s O’Reilly Media to deliver a suite of educational and consulting offerings to enterprise customers is a further testament to Hinchcliffe’s rising status as a thought-leader in the web 2.0 market. Tim O’Reilly certainly could have chosen literally anyone in the industry to partner with, but he chose Hinchcliffe. The combination of O’Reilly’s reach into global corporations and Hinchcliffe’s passion and depth of understanding for the technology that is fueling Enterprise 2.0 advances is an unparalleled match for consulting and education services.

Andrew McAfee recently wrote about “Evangelizing in the Empty Quarter.” With this O’Reilly and Hinchcliffe partnership, that quarter will be populated in no time. Remember, the “Rub’ al Khali” is one of the most oil-rich places in the world.

Sweet Virginia

TNNI_badge3

Thank you for your wine, California
Thank you for your sweet and bitter fruits

Mick and Keith might not be there, but you will be among friends. The kickoff conference for Web 2.0 for Business is definitely Dion Hinchcliffe’s New New Internet conference here on the East Coast in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia. He has assembled an A-list set of speakers in web 2.0 including Michael Arrington (TechCrunch). If you (customer or vendor) are on the East Coast. DO NOT miss this conference. A first-mover event; will make it into the history books.

Office 2.0 in SF: It’s the “IT” (the hip word, not Information Technology) conference for the Fall

Office 2.0 conference

Office 2.0 conference,
originally uploaded by srm_nj.

I’m experimenting with flickr. Here is the button for the Office 2.0 conference. What’s neat about this conference is the grassroots effort that is behind its organizing, collaborating, and showcasing.

Let’s see what happens when I hit “post entry…”

The Rebirth of the SI Market: Anyone in the Mood for a Fat Margin?

I had a great briefing this week with IBM’s Dan Gisolfi of its Emerging Technology Group. I was able to clear up a few things. For starters, it’s not THAT easy to create a “long tail” micro situational app. Gisolfi says, “Today, it’s extremely hard unless you’re a programmer… and unless you know Ajax, Java script, and programming languages, you’re not going to create a mash-up.” But that’s where this IBM group is headed. With their web 2.0 class of tools– mash-up makers– ultimately, the high IQ guys and gals in IBM’s key installed base accounts will be able to create their own dashboards ad hoc and provision data across departments and groups without troubling anyone from IT at all.

Gisolfi and I waxed philosophically about the cultural trends that are driving Enterprise 2.0 and we agreed about the socio-cultural underpinnings. Now here is a guy who can fit squarely in both camps– traditional IT, wearing the IBM logo, yet can hold a respectable conversation on the latest in open source, or any web 2.0 technology. We agreed the new Enterprise 2.0 wave is not about technology. The technology is evolutionary and Gisolfi recounted many examples of initiatives IBM has been involved in for years that are now hyped as web 2.0. What’s different now, however, are the attitudes that eclipse the technology. He said, “Web 2.0 is a convergence of enablers… coming together at the right time, at the same time.”

We then talked about a possible rebirth of the systems integration industry– something I found intriguing. Gisolfi said, “For the IT guys, we’re not taking away work, we’re creating a new type of work. Instead of doing integration of monolithic applications, today, you’re going to create granular software components.” He used Sarbanes-Oxley as the perfect example of the need for a customized, daily mashboard. He described using a business analyst or consultant to define the data indicators and then pass it to a software guru to render it and provision it as a mashboard.

It’s at this point, I started thinking about the sweet-margin business of the late 80s: systems integration. I checked in with Graham Kemp, who tracked the SI market in those days. Graham said, “In the late 80s, SI margins were good… in the high teens… and FM (facilities management [outsourcing]) margins were fair (low teens). As the 90s came in, both dropped.”

On EDS’ Next Big Thing blog a few days ago, I read with some interest a post resurrecting the “I” word:

For a long time, the Fellows have been talking about the movement away from the Chief Information Officer to the Chief Integration Officer. The integration of process and information flow between and across the enterprise to enable greater flexibility is where all organizations need to be headed.

And as I just wrote recently to the head of analyst relations at CSC, before all outsourcers were called outsourcers, they were systems integrators. It might be time to ditch the losing battle in the ITO market, and start putting up recruiting booths on MySpace. There may be high margin opportunity introducing the Global 2000 to Enterprise 2.0.