Deal for Ribbit and BT
Ribbit announced that it had been purchased by British Telecom (BT) on Tuesday for $105 million in cash. As deals go that might not seem like a lot but given the fact that it’s all cash and given the relatively slow market for “”liquidity events” these days, it’s worth pondering.
Peeling the onion and trying to get beyond the cash, this is an important milestone. For background, you should know that Ribbit is a software and services company that provides on-demand phone service through VoIP and a developers tool kit for integrating voice as a data type into all manner of applications.
The company has been around since 2005 but it began making news in late 2007 when it announced an integration with, who else, salesforce.com. Ribbit added voice as a data type to SFA and enabled sales people to dictate their notes rather than typing.
Now you might say that this idea has been around for a while and so what but older ideas that I am familiar with used real people to transcribe the dictation. Ribbit can operate in that mode too, but it’s the idea of leaving the voice notes as voice that intrigues me.
As sales people become ever more mobile the idea of opening up a laptop has gone away. Mobile reps either leave voice mail or scribble on whatever is handy and the reality is that they live on their cell phones though none that I ever spoke with enjoyed learning to type with their thumbs.
Ribbit gets people away from all that and now that it has BT’s backing I really expect that voice as a data type will become more prevalent. The really interesting thing to me might be what this means for device makers who have been constrained by the small form factor and the need to share it with screens and keypads.
One of Ribbit’s capabilities is to enable voice to kick off workflow and I see all of this leading to smaller devices with larger screens and a more natural fit for the hand held device in the business process. Face it, adding a keypad to a hand held device might seem really cool at first but it gets old fast, I wonder what we’ll think of keypads in five years.
For CRM I see lots of potential upside. First, all of the things already mentioned will make being a mobile sales rep easier and I am all for that. It will also make it possible for all manner of people to become more mobile in their jobs. From the factory floor, to service and support to administrative and executive jobs, all manner of people will be able to not only receive calls but generate electronic work bundles.
Maybe that sounds a little outlandish or maybe it sounds like something from further along in the century, but I think it couldn’t have come along at a better time. The implications for the communication technology and the presence of the SDK tell me that after voice the next logical thing to do is video.
With jet fuel and gasoline prices stuck on the up escalator vendors everywhere need to find ways to take as much transportation cost out of their sales processes as possible and that should mean applications with video conferencing built in. I think video will be increasingly important in the years ahead and if I was BT I would be looking at Ribbit as much for what they have now as for what they can do next and that means video.
Ribbit’s ability to deliver the voice SDK to application developers who want to enhance their CRM and other offerings is a logical precursor to video enabling these same applications. BT’s deep pockets and farsightedness make a good home for this not quite four year old but very precocious company.
Front office project management
One of the hallmarks of CRM is that its footprint keeps expanding. I think part of the reason is that we have taken to lumping everything that is not a back office application area into CRM. In fact, some people are even using front office interchangeably with CRM these days, myself included.
I am of the opinion that CRM should cast a big shadow because there are so many things that we do in the front office that have not been automated and because CRM vendors like salesforce.com have taken a lead in application development. It was natural for the two to come together. The front office is the last bastion of spreadsheet based applications and CRM vendors are providing the tools to do something about it.
Moreover, as the epicenter of the on-demand revolution, the applications that modern CRM vendors enable tend to be on-demand as well. As a result, applications that are too expensive to develop for a small or diffuse market can become profitable.
Of course, as time passes, the spreadsheet applications that get turned into real applications begin to get a little distance between themselves and CRM proper. One great example is compensation management, which I think is one of the most important application areas out there with quite a few vendors in the space including Callidus, Centive and Xactly.
Compensation management for sales people is one of those things that is very near to CRM — and SFA — but distinct from it. In the years ahead though I think compensation will both expand and distance itself even further from CRM. In doing so it will become even more important to the corporation. How will that happen?
Consider this:
There are several trends driving us in this direction. First, more and more people are reaching a point in their lives when they can choose to work in a different paradigm. The early rise followed by the commute from hell spiced with the knowledge that your engine is idling away a $4+ commodity gets old fast. Car pooling will not be fun and the bus or train might not go through your neighborhood. For those reasons and because the corporate world continues to shed people to save on costs and boost competitiveness, I think we’ll see more people opting to become consultants.
That’s great, but have you ever pondered how companies manage the projects they hire consultants to do? Many of them get tracked in statements of work (documents) and good old spreadsheets. These spreadsheets encompass all of the challenges that be-deviled earlier generations of spreadsheet applications — small capacity, no ability to audit the process, minimal reporting and much more.
Managing a project this way is not for the faint-hearted. Interestingly, existing compensation management applications have many, but not all, of the attributes needed to manage consultants. They already track processes, milestones and delivery dates and their infrastructures are way better than what you get with a spreadsheet. They also offer distinct interfaces for sales people (the worker/consultant) and the sales manager (project manager). What’s left are some important capabilities like entering milestones and payment objectives and similar things that are different for consultants than they are for sales people.
My reading of the tea leaves says that this is a big market waiting to happen and unlike selling, where the largest benefit accrues to the company, a compensation system for consulting projects might be more of a boon for the consultants themselves. A good consultant might have multiple projects in various stages of completion and a system that can track all of them and put them into a single screen might be very attractive.
Nevertheless, there’s no market per se yet and someone will need to start banging a drum to call attention to it. I guess that’s what I am for. Seriously, it makes a lot of sense and producing an on-demand application that both corporate and consulting users can access to manage their projects makes a lot of sense.
Managing people who do projects — but who don’t technically work for you — is just one area where I think new applications will find fertile ground. As demographics and energy issues continue to converge I expect that the software industry will find itself called on to help do what it has always done — innovate new products that support new business processes. In the last few decades our industry has had a green field and little pressure. We’ve been inventing things that have never existed for the most part. The trick going forward will be to invent on-demand or for a specific and highly desired need.
Me and My iMac 3
I have deleted this post because it contained some errors. As I have learned more about the Mac my interpretation of some features has changed. It really is a cool device!
Me and My iMac 5 — Corrections
I take it back, it’s even better than I thought. The right mouse button lives on the Mac, forget all that stuff about dinosaurs with feathers. Tien Tzou gets my thanks for this.
The right mouse button also leads you to a place that counts words — just what I needed!
I was wrong! I love it!
Me and My iMac 4 — the operating system
Ok, let’s get this out of the way up front: I am not an operating system guy. I don’t program in assembler (I don’t really program at all) and I don’t wax rhapsodic about registers, memory allocation, the fine points of the GUI, storage or networks. I am a USER. I take what they give me, hope the screen doesn’t turn cyanotic too often and hope I can find a decent array of applications for the OS to help me do my job. I would be boring at a geek cocktail party.
When I compare Windows and Leopard, it is as a user and my standard of comparison is how well these things help me do my job. If you have been reading this series you know that my judgement on Windows/Vista was that it would not help me do my job and so I began looking elsewhere. If Vista had managed to capture just a little less bad press than it did I might be fighting with it right now rather than writing this on a new iMac. But there it is — Vista is what it is and I made a decision. By and large I am happy with the decision even though it involves some relearning on my part which includes adjusting to a new operating system paradigm.
Here’s the way it appears to shake out for me. Windows is/was good for business applications for a long time and maybe it still is. It was certainly not the best in a range of categories but whenever it seems to be in danger of falling too far behind, Microsoft dumps some money into it and voila, it gets better.
In the GUI itself, Apple has the lead but every time Apple makes a breakthrough Microsoft plays catch up. They did it with the GUI itself, with the browser, with better resolution graphics, with managing sound and pictures and I would reasonably expect that Microsoft will do something astounding with video in the not too distant future.
That’s Microsoft’s method. Let somebody else define a standard then pour money on it until you gain the lead. Look at spreadsheets and word processors and browsers and you get the idea. Microsoft even tries to find ways to extend the functionality as in their superiority with integrating the mouse. That tactic doesn’t always work though — look at what they’re trying to do in CRM. In a vain effort to catch up and protect another franchise in the process, Microsoft is building Outlook into CRM or vice versa. Their contention is that people already spend the majority of their days in Outlook so it must be a perfect place for CRM users.
(Most people I know spend their days at work because they have to, not because they love it.)
I don’t think that will fly — too many free office products on the Internet. If you ask me hitching Office to CRM isn’t as bad as throwing an anchor to a drowning man but it isn’t as good as throwing a life line either.
But back to the operating system. It’s not that Windows and Leopard are different, though they are, it’s that they are aimed at different audiences, a big one and a smaller one. Windows is aimed squarely at the millions of desktops in the corporate world. Apple tries to capture the high end of that market, the sophisticates in marketing and other creative outposts as well as education. I didn’t know it but when I swapped my PC for a Mac, I was crossing a divide, acknowledging the reality that as someone who works for himself and writes and develops other kinds of content, I have a lot more in common with the creative types than with people who live in spreadsheets all day.
The Mac OS is built for people who need a lot of computing power to manage creative processes and who don’t want to be troubled with managing their machines. That means that the OS makes decisions that simplify your life by masking some things. There are great and powerful things built into Leopard that help you find things if you can only remember their names or fragments or when you last opened them but diving into a file structure which is easy in Windows, appears to be less so on the Mac. I think I can live with that as long as I can find things when I need them.
The other thing about the Mac is the orientation toward the creative person or the solo worker. Whether you develop content, pod casts, video, stills, Web sites or music, there are good programs that enable you to develop and edit within your art form even if your primary data type doesn’t look like your grandfather’s rows and columns.
My issue with the Mac OS is that I am still new to it and a good deal of the learning curve that I have alluded to on the Mac will be dedicated to learning the OS. Some things are very nice like the preferences you can establish for every application. Some applications don’t go deep enough into preferences but most give you more rope than you need to hang yourself.
Other things will take a while to get used to like the Application folder that you need to access if an application doesn’t happen to already exist in icon form in the doc at the bottom or side of the screen.
In my analysis Vista has opened up some important flood gates at a dangerous time for Microsoft and all of its ecosystem. As more applications are built to run in the cloud the type of computer and operating system you use will continue to lose importance. Safari and Internet Explorer along with Firefox and other browsers constitute the majority of the competition in the foreseeable future.
That Vista is poor enough to make people like me switch is, or should be, troubling for Microsoft. Someday some analyst will calculate how much Vista ended up costing companies like Dell and HP and it could be quite a bit. Intel made a sweet deal with Apple to provide CPU chips for the Mac, HP printers plug into either brand, so these large corporations have covered their exposure (HP still makes PC’s though, I think) but companies that only make Windows PCs will be hurting from Vista for years to come.
The situation is compounded by the continuing exodus of smart, creative people from corporations to set up little businesses on their own terms. These people constitute a big part of the workforce — tens of millions of people according to Daniel Pink author of “Free Agent Nation”. Most of these people will stay small but some will grow and in either case these people now have a legitimate choice of which platform they use. That selection is much less of a slam dunk for a generation that hears music through an iPod, talks and swaps text on an iPhone (and doesn’t even have a land line and probably never will) and thinks in shapes and colors and is serious about production values.
That’s the end of this series. I hope it’s been a little bit useful to anyone who is thinking about a new computer. Good luck.
