Multi-Tenancy Debate Won’t Go Away
Under more normal conditions I react to blogs on a low key basis. If I like something I might not even mention it and the same is true if I dislike or disagree with one. The blogosphere is a big place and it is unproductive to be running around all day saying “Yes, I like this” or “No, not so much.” But I am grateful that so many of you read and even comment on what I post.
However, when a vendor weighs in on an official site and clearly makes a statement that I think is wrong and or self-serving, I feel a need to provide a counterbalance. Earlier this month Meg Bear, Vice President, Oracle Cloud Social Platform posted, “Multi-Tenancy and Other Useless Discussions” and from the headline I think you know where this is going.
The whole multi-tenancy debate of the last decade has been run by the same logic that a five-year-old uses at dinner — don’t let the peas touch the mashers or the chicken! Ironically, the chocolate syrup does indeed touch the vanilla ice cream and that is socially acceptable, but I digress.
According to Bear, the debate is no longer relevant not because we have all grown up and understand that, just as a bank co-mingles everyone’s money keeping yours separate from mine by use of metadata (account number, balance, statement, things like this), our data can be co-mingled without worry about cooties. No! Bear’s rationale is that Oracle has a superior “modern application architecture.”
Can we please be serious? I beg to differ for the following reasons.
IT is over. Note I didn’t say finished or in any way imply irrelevant. IT is over as a disruptive innovation and driver of the economy. Some macroeconomists who study the long economic wave a.k.a the Kondratiev Cycle have begun noting that the IT wave is over — just look at the economy today and you know this. IT is the economy in much the same way that cars and petrochemicals, once big drivers in their own right, are the economy. They don’t grow a zillion percent any more and now neither does IT. Over, finito, gonzo. Bring on the next Kondratiev Cycle, please, and hurry up!
But quickly back to Ms. Bear. IT is rapidly commoditizing — that’s the real message of cloud computing. The cloud frees up budget once spent on hardware for more productive pursuits. Under those conditions, dedicating spindles that remain half empty for everybody’s peas, mashed potatoes and chicken and dedicating separate database instances is both wasteful and unprofitable for the vendor. It also doesn’t seem very modern to me.
Fortunately, Ms. Bear assures us equally that the Oracle Fusion HCM applications are multi-tenant and that it doesn’t matter. If it doesn’t matter then, “the lady doth protest too much, methinks,” thanks to Mr. S.
So what is the point? Apparently it’s business value as in the value the applications enable the business to realize through their use. But according to Bear, multi-tenancy is not an enabler by, say, enabling greater throughput, faster processing and quicker searches over fewer spindles; things like that, because multi-tenancy doesn’t matter.
And that’s because…?
MSFT loss, Changing the Rules of Engagement
What’s the world coming to? Microsoft lost money in the software business last quarter, the first loss in a decades long string of positive earnings from the world’s biggest software company. Sheesh! Yes, there were extenuating circumstances that you can read about here, but the loss signals the breadth and depth of the impact that the tablet is having on the hardware market. The iPad tablet to be precise and its economy size, iOS sharing little brother, the iPhone. For a quick slide show on iPad’s penetration and adoption check out this presentation from Business Insider.
Last time I asked if hardware was becoming sexy again and why. The answers seem to be “Yes” and “Because tablets have reached a new price point that opens up more emerging global markets to computing.” Tablets and their near kin, smartphones, are defining a global computing platformfor the next decade and beyond promising first world information access to many people formerly left in the dust.
The writing was already on the wall when analyst firms IDC and Gartner recently documented a stall in the PC/laptop forward momentum. Lower PC sales means fewer operating system sales and all that goes with it. To be sure, tens of millions of units are still being sold this year along with operating systems and productivity software often bundled in. But growth has stalled as new customers in emerging markets are voting to type on Gorilla Glass over keyboards.
Every paradigm goes through a predictable lifecycle and the computer operating system dependent on hardware sales is another example, not an exception. Microsoft, Intel and others invested heavily in thin, ultra-light laptop machines as the next thing that would protect the franchise and compete with tablets, but they were still too expensive and ultimately not cool enough. If Microsoft expects to get its OS mojo back it will need to cajole its hardware partners into really being competitive with tablets.
Right now, everything is going the way of the tablet and Apple can almost do no wrong. Even when a European judge made a finding in favor of Samsung in a patent dispute with Apple recently, he declared the Samsung gear “not as cool” as Apple’s and therefore not infringing on Apple patents. That’s just amazing.
Windows 8 comes out later this year and Microsoft has introduced a tablet of its own, the Surface. The game is far form over but the latest brush with reality suggests Microsoft might have been prescient in going “all in” as Steve Ballmer said of the company’s approach to cloud computing some time ago. Microsoft is at some intermediate point in its journey from vendor of licensed software to ringmaster of a giant subscription economy. Like many companies in similar transitions, the going isn’t always smooth but if anyone can pull this off it ought to be the guys in Redmond.
When I’ve spent time with the Redmond gang over the last couple of years I’ve been impressed with how much they get it, not just at a high level but throughout the organization. All in, Azure, and retail stores suggest a company thinking its way through the changes. And analytics and social networks suggest they really get it. Maybe all in should be replaced by we get it or better, we get you, but not quite yet.
But on a cautionary note getting to the cloud or to tablets won’t be enough; this is a business model change that every company has to deal with and Microsoft has done more than many already. Now, Microsoft’s partners have to pick up the gauntlet and evangelize more than ever.
This week (on July 25) Zuora will release a Fireside Chat video discussion that I am participating in. It will be all about the cloud and subscriptions and I expect an important theme will be the attention that subscription companies need to pay not to selling but to service and ensuring customer happiness. And, oh, heck, while I am talking about myself I might as well mention that my new book is coming out around the same time — “The Subscription Economy — How Subscriptions Improve Business.”
While the changes in the industry might be painful for some, they also represent innovation and creative destruction which is the hallmark of a vibrant economy. The issue for us is not how to slow down change but how to embrace and leverage it. Once the election clears out I think Q4 could be an important turning point as winners and losers get back to the work of inventing the future and making money.
Steve Ballmer
There is a very good article in the current issue of Vanity Fair (with Alec Baldwin on the cover) about Microsoft. In “How Microsoft Lost Its Mojo” Kurt Eichenwald recounts the failures and bad decisions of the company’s “lost decade” a time overseen by current CEO Steve Ballmer.
If you are in this business you can probably recall at least some of the major inflection points related to missed opportunities and in-fighting that cost the company its market leading position. I thought it was just me, but Eichenwald even compared Microsoft to Detroit auto makers and their past glory. For good measure he ends with a long quote from Steve Jobs’ biography about the difference between having a sales or ops guy running the show and having a product guy in charge. Sad. Worth reading.
According to the article, Microsoft’s stock has barely budged over the last ten years while other tech companies flew by — Google, Facebook and of course Apple. In one recent quarter iPhone alone made more money than all of Microsoft.
The article quotes Ballmer saying he wants to remain at Microsoft till 2018 but I don’t think the company can wait that long. The article also implies that Ballmer might be a smart pick to break the company up and to take the legacy products into the sunset while more product oriented people try to salvage the core of innovation, if it still exists.
Fun fact: According to Wikipedia, “Ballmer was the second person after Roberto Goizueta to become a billionaire in U.S. dollars based on stock options received as an employee of a corporation in which he was neither a founder nor a relative of a founder.”
Ten years of stagnation can’t be sitting well with Wall Street. What will it take to orchestrate a palace coup?
I Don’t Get It
The NCAA just fined Penn State $60 million and kicked it out of the post season for four years as punishment for the Sandusky child abuse scandal. There will also be diminished recruiting and scholarships that will cripple the football program for many years. Maybe I am just think but I don’t see what the NCAA’s role is in all this.
As horrific as the incident is, this looks like the NCAA inserting itself into a purely legal matter to grab a headline. Penn State administrators and former administrators have a lot to answer for in criminal court, not in the NCAA. Of course, NCAA can’t have criminal activity in its ranks, but the body’s purview should be criminal activity related to athletics such as drugging athletes, betting, game fixing or other activities directly related to its sphere of interest. If Joe Paterno had been an alcoholic, would the NCAA show the same interest? If one of the coaches had robbed a bank or run a Ponzi scheme? I think the courts should throw the book at the perpetrators and the enablers but the NCAA, rather than showing strength here, shows how out of touch it is.
Stuffed to the Gills
A few years ago, Harvard Business School professor, John Quelch penned a post in which he invented the term, “middle aged simplifier” which is a person of middle age in the process of breaking down the household that raised and launched children. This simplifier was, according to Quelch, mostly female and mostly interested in acquiring services and experiences of all types, rather than buying more products.
Quelch’s metaphor is of selling the house in the ‘burbs and migrating to a city for its cultural attractions, restaurants and quality of life that does not include mowing the lawn or renovating the kitchen. Now a new study from sociologists at UCLA documents the pathology behind the catharsis of simplifying.
Researchers from UCLA’s Center for/on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) studied 32 families and their possessions and wrote “Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century: 32 Families Open Their Doors,” complete with pictures of over stuffed rooms and the obligatory garage that no longer accommodates a car. The research team included archaeologists, anthropologists and other social scientists.
Among their findings which I am quoting from UCLA Newsroom:
- Managing the volume of possessions was such a crushing problem in many homes that it actually elevated levels of stress hormones for mothers.
- Only 25 percent of garages could be used to store cars because they were so packed with stuff.
- The rise of big-box stores such as Costco and Sam’s Club has increased the tendency to stockpile food and cleaning supplies, making clutter that much harder to contain.
- The addition of costly “master suites” for parents proved the most common renovation in the homes that were studied, yet the spaces were hardly used.
- Consistent and troublesome bottlenecks emerged in the homes, yet families rarely devoted renovation dollars to remedying these obvious problems.
- Even in a region with clement year-round weather, the families hardly used their yards, and this was the case even among those who had invested in outdoor improvements and furnishings.
- Most of the families relied heavily on convenience foods like frozen meals and par-baked bread, yet they saved an average of only 10 to 12 minutes per meal in doing so.
- Fragmented dinners — those in which family members eat sequentially or in different rooms — threaten to undermine a sacrosanct American tradition: the family dinner.
So what’s the CRM angle on all this? In the interest of brevity, I thought I would bullet some ideas.
- Clearly, with or without CRM, consumer society has reached a zenith and the limit to acquisition of even more stuff may just be the lack of space to store it. The joke about expanding to fill the available space is coming home to roost (if it can find a toehold).
- As an economic reality, if current households are literally full AND new household formation is below what would normally be forecasted AND wages are stagnant AND the consumer makes up two-thirds of consumption in America, it is hard to see how growth resumes.
- I think you need to tease apart the ideas of hanging onto children’s toys and clothes for the “grand kids” from getting a deal on paper towels at Sam’s or Costco. At least the towels get used up; the toys are waiting for toy Godot.
- Our eating habits drive the obesity epidemic.
No wonder the simplifiers were documented by Quelch; they were the leading edge of the wave. But they were coming out just as the recession hit and now with house prices depressed the whole process might be in semi-permanent arrest. People with big suburban homes have found it hard to get their price, which backs up the process of deleveraging the garage, which might add to the stress.
What to do?
Regardless of one’s ability to move house, with fewer spaces to park additional acquisitions, it would make sense that more vendors will focus on services and experiences. Hence the software, especially the social software that helps us discover attitude and sentiment.
Perhaps there is a silver lining and some future entrepreneurs will make money by returning usable square footage to the homestead (clutter busters?). People armed with a dumpster and trained in the hard science of evaluating and tossing the unwanted and the exhausted or broken might become the new go-to professionals. I can just hear Steely Dan singing “Kid Charlemagne” — “…just get it all outta here…”
Jeff Foxworthy made many jokes and dollars defining rednecks as people with aging and non-running cars in the front yard. Turns out they were not unusual among humankind; they simply had bigger yards. There is a suburban equivalent and they need a name. Please help!
