Enterprise hits and misses - Plex and Microsoft gets cloudy edition
- Summary:
- Jon's cheeky weekly review of which enterprise software articles hit (or didnít) on diginomica & beyond - for the week ending March 22, 2015.
diginomica hit: Den and Brian crash Plex analyst day by Den Howlett and Brian Sommer
quotage: "The next chapter for Plex will be about execution. It is abundantly clear that the company has been quietly building for the future these last 24 months or so. Its products can stand on their own in multiple kinds of ERP deployment models. The products can be sold into a larger number of industries, geographies and sizes of businesses." - Brian
myPOV: OK, so I was joking about the "crashed" part - Den and Brian were both invitees to the Plex analyst day event last week. Den has more analysis coming but for now, we have his first impressions (and analyst reactions) in Plex – the modern face of manufacturing software.
Brian's piece, North Star found – now Plex must execute, walks us through the key elements of Plex in 2015: Capital structure, leadership, changing customer base, technology innovation, and - what lies ahead. I'm particularly interested in Plex's changing customer base as it pushes into new "sub-verticals" beyond automotive. Manufacturing-based cloud ERP is no longer a question mark. As Brian says, it's all about execution now.
diginomica four: my completely subjective "top four" stories on diginomica this week- In Will all businesses shift to product platforms, enabled by IoT?, brand-spanking-new diginomica contributor Charlie Bess applies his field experience to the problem/opportunity of turning products into IoT-enabled service platforms. He cautions against being late to this particular party. Sidenote: I met with one of his examples (Philips Hue) in Barcelona and wrote about that experience in How Philips Lighting mastered smart lights – and turned a $60 light bulb into a winner.
- We got a use case double shot from Jessica this week: start with Welcome on board – Mercy Ships finds faster way for HR to onboard volunteers (custom mobile app for the win - built at sea to boot!), then cruise on over to Newcomer Wines says ‘cheers’ to mobile card payments (neat mobile payments use case which gives independent shops an alternative to costly credit card processing).
- So how do you create a sense of community and cultural cohension across 300,000 employees from 100 nationalities spanning 40 locations? Janine Milne tells how TCS pulled it off with an internal social network in There’s no place like Knome for TCS employee engagement.
Vendor analysis, diginomica style - Fresh back from Atlanta, Phil filed At Microsoft Convergence, Dynamics comes in from the cold, wherein he posits that the de-emphasizing of Dynamics on the keynote stage is actually a promising move, heralding an integrated approach to business users. In Detente is over as Oracle lays into Salesforce and Workday, Stuart gives the blow-by-blow of the latest Oracle smackdowns, this time with Workday and Salesforce as the pinatas du jour (in case SAP is feeling left out, Stuart explained on Twitter there was the requisite HANA barbs as well).
Stuart posted an Adobe earnings digibyte (Adobe’s subscription-only bet pays off), while Phil updated on Adobe's e-document overhaul in Adobe Document Cloud champions paperless office. Following the appointment of new Birst CEO Jay Larson, Derek posted on Birst's enterprise play in Birst secures $65m in funding and positions itself as the ‘two-tier’ BI solution. Finally, Martin posted a revealing two-parter with the Chairman and CEO of Pentaho, Pentaho CEO sets out to the IoT and beyond and The 360 degree view of the Internet of Things.
Jon's grab bag - Stuart has been tracking Starbucks' digital maneuvers closely - the latest mobile experiments may not be the 'height of civilisation,' as Stuart quips, but if Starbucks thinks they have the "most robust mobile ecosystem of any retailed in the world," we should prolly have a look-see (Can digital thinking answer Starbucks’ “age-old question?”). On the dark side of the customer experience, Derek's absurd ride with Virgin Media shows why all the helpful reps in the world don't add up to "CRM." (and check out Derek's crackling Is the ‘sharing economy’, in its current form, just a capitalist con?)
Finally, if IBM's Watson had been able to assess hires based on handwriting, I might be unemployed today. I still enjoyed Den's foray into predictive hiring, Would you hire these people? IBM Watson speaks to personality.
Best of the rest
Making sense of the "dynamic" Microsoft cloud - by Doug Henschen and Frank Scavoquotage: "Unlike previous years, Microsoft is no longer positioning Convergence as a conference for customers of Dynamics, Microsoft’s business applications group. In fact, on the Convergence website shown in the screen grab to the right, the word “Dynamics” scarcely appears. Convergence is now Microsoft’s “premier event for business,” as CEO Satya Nadella explained in his keynote." - Frank Scavo
myPOV: A couple of good takes on Microsoft Convergence, perhaps the most-watched Microsoft event for the enterprise crowd. As Scavo notes in Beyond Business Systems to Business Transformation, Convergence is now less about Dyanamics, and more about the entire portfolio of Microsoft technologies, as they pertain to enterprise teams.
Doug Henschen took a different tack in Microsoft Cloud-First Push Shines In CRM, Lags In ERP, assessing why Microsoft has not yet offered production-ready Dynamics ERP in the public cloud. Meanwhile, Dynamics CRM Online is chugging along, doubling in revenue in recent quarters. Henschen points out that Microsoft is no longer hedging on customer demand for the cloud, so it's basically a matter of who gets there first - cloud ERP upstarts or on-prem incumbents.
Other standouts
Cloudera goes vertical, and Oracle may triumph in Oregon - Two more vendor analysis standouts, Cloudera by way of Holger Mueller, who went to Cloudera's analyst event and filed Progress Report - Cloudera's is all in with Hadoop - off to verticals. Sum: Mueller likes the Cloudera play, but asks if a leading position on the big data database side will be enough - or will a PaaS and/or analytical SaaS move be needed?
Meantime, UpperEdge assessed Oracle's chances in Oregon (as an outsider perspective). While some of the piece is speculative and should be read with that in mind, it doesn't look good for Oregon. There are plenty of lessons here for wary customers eager to have autonomy over their projects, but in an informed way. Points to consider include independent risk assessments, and then heeding the results of said assessments.
Three takes on Apple - past, present, and TV - Looking back (via The Evolution of Steve Jobs), we're faced with "life as a fluid history," not a set of Jobs-approved management bromides. Forward: Tim Cook on Apple's Future: Everything Can Change Except Values. Then, the best take on the TV business I've read in a long time (via Ben Thompson of Stratechery), which eventually gets around to Apple TV's chances (turns out Apple can't be as "disruptive" as some think, because they don't create the must-watch content or own the pipe).
Honorable mention
How Argyle Data Uses Facebook’s PrestoDB and Apache Accumulo to Detect Fraud - "Rules don't discover new fraud" - enter machine learning. Interesting.
'Growth Hacking' Makes Me Twitch - 5 Lessons For Enterprises - Has any term been more thoroughly rehabilitated than "hacking?" I'm not sure about "predictable viral lift" though...
Some Perspective on Twitter vs. Meerkat - Twitter can do whatever the heck it wants. But will Meerkat have a social video streaming breakthrough where Vine, Ustream and others have not?
Wishing Godspeed To Marilyn and Mark, The Godmother And Godfather of SAP Community - a tribute to two brilliant enterprise community pioneers.
Meet the man whose utopian vision for the Internet conquered, and then warped, Silicon Valley - a dark/Orwellian take on Silicon Valley, especially appropriate given the messy Kleiner Perkins gender discrimination case.
Whiffs
So I don't doubt Stuart's view of Starbucks as a digital retail leader, but jeez, the ill-fated "let's talk about racial issues" campaign was as nails-on-chalkboard as you're gonna get. How did this idea get from CEO Howard Schulz's brain onto a coffee cup? Given that 86 percent of the Starbucks corporate board is white (not the most flattering picture given the nature of the campaign, eh?), maybe the boardroom is a better place to start? Awkward...
Speaking of awkward, I finally watched an episode of SAP's TV show The Spin. Kind of reminded me of Nelly's Honey Nut Cheerios commercial. Moving away from ideas-that-somehow-survived-the-white board, I haven't had a chance to get pissy about spending the next couple weekends doing "forced march" upgrades of Quicken and QuickBooks (Intuit cleverly stops supporting the essential online banking features, thus forcing hand).
It's not the money and time I'm about to squander on said upgrade. It's not the tone deaf responses I got from Intuit on social media. It's the fact that in the last ten years of upgrading each product, neither has gotten better. Bloated? Sure. But not better. QuickBooks online banking worked better in 1998 than it does now. I get that companies like Intuit have a stick, but what the hell happened to the carrot? Grrr....
Officially off-topic
Of the cheesy ideas this week, none is cheesier than naming an algorithm to your corporate board. But at least some cheese can make you smile, like these junktacularKindle cover disasters: the world's worst e-book artwork.
On the helpful side, while I didn't agree with all of it, Daedtech's Getting Started as a Blogger: A Contract with Your Readers is a handy primer for those still in the aspiring category. Data science self-education gets a boost with this In-depth introduction to machine learning in 15 hours of expert videos.
Music: via Frank Scavo, we have this YouTube treat of three plucky teenage girls (The Warning) doing their kickass take on Metallica's Enter Sandman. In the "women taking over rock and roll" file, I'll add Going to Hell by The Pretty Reckless, and a memory lane trip to 1997 for Veruca Salt's Volcano Girls.
Which #ensw pieces of merit did I miss? Let us know in the comments.
Most Enterprise hits and misses articles are selected from my curated @jonerpnewsfeed. ìmyPOVî is borrowed with reluctant permission from the ubiquitous Ray Wang.
Image credits: Cheerful Chubby Man © RA Studio, Happy Children © Anna Omelchenko, Waiter Suggesting Bottle © Minerva Studiom, Overworked Businessman © Bloomua, King Checkmate © mystock88photo - all from Fotolia.com
Disclosure: SAP, Plex, Oracle, Workday and Salesforce are diginomica premier partners as of this writing.