OpenWorld Grand Opening
Oh, what to write about Sunday night?
Sunday must be the hardest night to do a keynote, especially at Oracle OpenWorld. People have been flying all day or the day before and have traveled great distances — 19 percent came from EMEA while 70 percent came from North America — so they’re tired and running on a different time zone’s clock. So I get it.
Nevertheless, Oracle continued a tradition of mediocrity with two keynotes the first by Intel President, Renee J. James and the climax by founder and CTO, and newly appointed Executive Chairman, Larry Ellison. Each presentation had its merits but they could have been better. For some reason each speaker felt a need to recapitulate the history of technology since the invention of the wheel, which got a little tedious.
On the plus side, the companies are doing some very cool R&D that is translating into products that help manage both the big data tsunami and help lock down data so that those nasty people in Eastern Europe and the People’s Liberation Army in China, and yes, the NSA, will be thwarted as they try to figure out how I like my latte.
Best ideas from my vantage point — embedding database functions in silicon to make them extra fast and using silicon photonics to make the connections at the chip level even faster. So far these advances seem aimed at bulk commercial data processing but I can see huge upside as these vendors apply all of this to a single problem like molecular modeling or code breaking.
Ellison gave a survey of accomplishments from the last year touting all of the apps his company has built and that list is impressive. However, the proof of the pudding at this conference for me will involve how these points get lined up into end-to-end business process support. I hope that’s where this is going because so far it seems instead like the company has reinvented its legacy products for the cloud rather than re-imagining the business processes. Hope I am wrong.
However, it must be said that both speakers seemed to tire as their talks went on. James got giddy as she made what seemed like a few small unforced errors and Ellison decided on an alternative order for his slides even while his remote clicker went on the fritz yet again, “Backup two slides, please.”
James didn’t seem to know the conference’s title is Oracle OpenWorld and not Oracle World. I know this sounds picky but it leads one to question how much practice the speakers put in and how well rehearsed the whole event is. Maybe I am spoiled by Salesforce’s crispness and manic attention to presentation details. But that’s the way it ought to be when you are addressing your global customer base in your annual address.
We’ll see how it goes today. Over and out.
Subscription Time at The Financial Times
Zuora, the subscription billing and payments company and the Financial Times of London announced a deal today in which the Times will use Zuora to help manage its subscription business. Two interesting paragraphs from an article in Computerworld UK stand out:
“The organisation has invested heavily in its digital strategy in recent years amidst a declining print market, helping increase total circulation 13 percent year on year to 677,000 during 2014, two thirds of which are online subscribers. It has also seen growth in mobile, accounting for 50 percent of overall traffic.
According to FT chief technology officer, John O’Donovan, the software as a service (Saas) system has helped provide flexibility in terms of pricing and bundling of subscription products, enabling the company to concentrate on where its 126-year old business can add value – the creation of content.
I am impressed by everything about this deal — the preponderance of digital subscribers; the use of Zuora not simply for billing but also for managing the business in a more fundamental way; and the company itself. The Times is a 126 year-old company coming into the digital and subscription age. Good on them, I say, and good on Zuora for making this happen. It’s got to be worth at least one touchdown in the race for supremacy in the subscription billing race.
This helps to validate (though Zuora is a long way from needing validation) the subscription management idea, which started with billing and payments but is more complex than this today. The data given off by digital customers through their subscriptions is significant and can tell a vendor quite a bit about tastes, needs, preferences, and much more — all of the things that a vendor needs to make a better mousetrap — or as the CTO in the article says to make content that customers want.
So when I see an article like this, I am happy for both parties because it means the vendor is also adopting the ways of digital marketing that make it possible to understand customers even if its people aren’t in direct communication daily. Does this mean that the billing and payments system should be part of CRM these days? Perhaps, but more fundamentally it can also mean that the traditional CRM silos of Sales, Marketing, and Service are crumbling and being replaced by data, analytics, and specific process-oriented apps that address customer moments of truth. There is nothing more fundamental to the relationship than getting the billing right and offering the right product mix. Doing those two things enable subscription companies to win the battle today and earn the right to do it all over again tomorrow.
Last week I attended Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud customer event put on by ExactTarget. The theme of the conference was “The journey is its own reward” and I think that offers proof for what I am arguing because the journey involves collecting and analyzing customer data so that the vendor can stay relevant to the customer. So, not to get too far afield, this is an important announcement and I am glad I found it.
Going Old School
I participated in an involuntary natural experiment this week. I went to Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud Connections 2014 conference in Indianapolis but left my phone home. So I had to make the best of it by relying on my MacBook Air the whole time for everything from computing to Internet surfing, texting, and even telephoning.
It’s almost cringe-worthy to even title this piece as old school because it’s not — at least in my life. For me old school means no phone and no laptop either. It wasn’t that long ago, well within the span of my career, when even that rudimentary bit of technology was unavailable to road warriors. My basic business kit back then consisted of a very nice leather briefcase with an assortment of pens, maybe a calculator, note pad, and whatever paper files I thought might be useful on a trip. That was it!
I made phone calls by finding a public phone, calling the office (yup no voice mail yet either) and getting messages from the secretary of my department. Luckily there were phone credit cards and you could make all the calls you needed simply by entering a ten-digit code. Yes, I memorized it and most of my customers’ phone numbers too — heck I knew the whole parts list including individual part numbers by heart for that matter. At a phone booth I could take notes on the phone but only the basics — someone, a customer, called etc. — I already knew the number.
Back then the customer complaint was that sales reps didn’t always call back when they were supposed to. Boy, has selling changed.
It has often seemed to me that the IT revolution did several things but one of the most important was to reduce the hassle of being a road-warrior and not a moment too soon. Today airlines take up the slack. And, oh yes, since I didn’t have a laptop, I didn’t have PowerPoint and if I wanted to make a presentation it was either a chalk talk or, later, a slide show with real slides for which I carried a Kodak projector because you couldn’t depend on the customer to have one.
So having a multifunctional MacBook wasn’t exactly going old school but I am taking you, dear reader, into consideration here. You are more likely to have taken a laptop to college or had a PC in your dorm room. My college had a computer.
So, that was the experiment, reduced to the Spartan confines of a mere 1.6 GHz computer. How did I do? Well not bad though I have to admit there are far fewer things around to assist you these days. For example, I never saw a public phone which was fine because I haven’t had a charge card in forever and didn’t want to contemplate feeding the beast. Also, there was no one back at the ranch who could give me my messages anyhow.
I managed by making Skype calls through my computer on a few occasions and the result was satisfactory. Also, thank goodness I was bathed almost continuously in Wi-Fi while in Indianapolis so checking email, SMS, and Tweets was pretty easy and Tweeting is another form of communication all to itself. Very definitely new school.
I found not having a phone de-neuroticising to coin a phrase. For instance, when I landed I didn’t have the luxury of obsessing about whether the driver would be on time to pick me up. I couldn’t call the service after all. The most I could do was look out for my name in the small sea of signs greeting travelers. I was there, or my name was, just as it was supposed to be. Imagine that?
Also, in those moments when I was alone with strangers say, riding an elevator, there was nothing I could do to deal with the awkward silence but be more cognizant of my surroundings, which turned out to not be a bad thing. I could walk down a street without having to look up every few feet to ensure I was not about to step off a curb with my usual grace while not attending. At a sports bar I could watch the game or talk to my neighbor when that person was not avoiding me by being on the phone. I also discovered or re-discovered what it was like to look someone in the eye. I forgot how much gets communicated through body language, unconsciously, and without saying a word.
But what was most interesting was having no access to the Web and Wikipedia and having to rely on things like my brain to evaluate a statement about reality. Sometimes all I could do was evaluate the speaker and decide the person was credible or not so much.
To net it out though, I missed my phone and the up-to-the-moment connectivity it affords me. The time that I refer to as old school has vanished and only a few dinosaurs like me can relate to it and the experience was sort of like one of those wilderness experiences where they give you a match, a knife, and a canteen and let you go for a couple days. Not everyone’s cup of tea.
Wait a minute! This could be the basis of a new extreme sport or even a reality series. It would be safer than a muddy obstacle course and less expensive to produce than one of those island things. Maybe that’s a concept worth exploring. Somebody call re-write, but use a rotary phone.
Larry Ellison
NOTE: This has been edited to correct the spelling for Safra Catz’ name and to remove a ‘not’ that completely misled my meaning.
I was going to write a post about Larry Ellison leaving Oracle after he announced his retirement on Thursday but it is probably pre-mature. Ellison will become the executive chairman while Safra Catz and Mark Hurd run the shop as co-CEO’s and I have a lot of doubts.
It’s not that Safra and Mark are competent executives because each has held down significant positions for a long time. Recall Hurd was CEO of HP a while ago and Catz has had significant responsibilities at Oracle. But two things strike me. First Larry isn’t going anywhere. If he said he was going sailing or going to live on the island he bought in the Hawaiian Islands that would be a good indication for retirement. But as executive chairman, Ellison will still be heavily involved in the day-to-day operations so I am not sure what if any difference this will mean.
Second, I am leery of two riders on the same horse, which is what you have with co-CEOs. It’s not a good idea — heck sometimes one CEO is too many. By keeping Catz and Hurd in the same relative positions they were in when Larry was CEO we run the risk of losing steam, credibility, innovation, and creativity.
I see this situation as an analog to Microsoft. When Bill Gates retired, Steve Ballmer was waiting in the wings. He was one of the original team and he was a continuation of Gates possibly without Gates’ smarts. In the event, Ballmer stayed the course, rewriting Windows every few years and living off the cash cows and that was exactly what Microsoft didn’t need.
The list of markets that Microsoft plays in but does not lead as a result of a drowsy decade of following Ballmer’s script include cloud computing, phones and tablets, and CRM. We’ll see about the Internet of Things (IoT). I fear that something similar could happen to Oracle. The company has bought a lot of other companies recently and knitting them together is a big job that has to be done but I am not sure that constitutes a vision of where business computing should go and I am not sure the new team has that vision.
Perhaps the vision exists in some of the people who came into the company from the acquisitions, an iffy proposition to be sure. Very often when a company gets bought, the founders and lead talent make enough money to leave. They work through a transition period and then depart for some beach to contemplate their next moves. Some stay. Anthony Lye was a great case in point. He came with the Siebel acquisition and turned Oracle’s CRM group into a real money maker. But he’s gone along with many others.
So the question is what’s next. How long will the transition of Larry all the way out of the organization take? The answer will manifest itself when Larry really does retire and more visibly when we see some new blood in the corner office driving a new vision of Oracle.
Wearables Revolution
Groucho-glasses, the first intelligent device.
The wearables market heated up last week with Apple’s introduction of its Watch and payment processing service and the implications for CRM are interesting. First off the announcement shows how very young the wearables marketplace is and how far it has to go. Second, even though wearables are by nature devices intimately connected to us and our motivations, they are still devices, which should concern us. Why? Because they have the potential of buying things for us that we might not realize. First thing first.
Young market
Samsung and other Asian manufacturers are not wasting any time waiting for California to invent wearables that it will later copy and manufacture. They have a handful of wearable devices, Google one, Apple one, and Salesforce has a developer’s kit for all of them. Moreover, a host of new companies are trying to make a mark with their devices as well. But we’re already hearing a lot about killer apps or their absence. Last week the New York Times published an article that seemed to make lemonade out of lemons when it reported that while Apple was releasing a software developer kit (SDK) it was assuming the market would innovate toward the next killer app.
That’s certainly true but we didn’t have to wait for a use case or killer app for the iPhone or iPad; those devices arrived with their reasons for being well documented. So introducing a watch is somewhat risky and somewhat ho-hum for Apple. It’s risky because they didn’t introduce anything else in a family of devices, like glasses, and because the market is awash in digital watches and it’s ho-hum for the same reason. It will be hard to differentiate from there. You really want to believe that the company is working on another wearable device that will come with a more eureka moment.
This brings up more questions like how many of these gizmos will we really need? The iPhone consolidated a lot of things like phone, camera, music device, email/Internet access device all into a single manageable handful. Are we about to go in the opposite direction needing one device for recording video, another to get us into the building, another to track our health, and still another to tell the world we’re in the building? What would Elvis do?
So it seems to me that the wearables wars, and there will be more than one, will first be about form factor and functionality and then maybe about apps ecosystems — and we haven’t even gotten to killer applications yet. So watch this space, it’s going to be interesting around here for a while.
Devices as part of the IoT
The prospect of devices doing our bidding has one major concern which is what happens if the device gets a little carried away and the cost of its help turns out to be large? As a nation we’ve been digging ourselves out of a debt hole ever since the housing crisis in 2008. As many people get their heads above water again, will devices suddenly submerge us all over?
Like it or not we’re entering an era when customers own consumers and consumers have credit card numbers and a certain amount of autonomy to make purchases on behalf of the customer. Teaming up the consumer with Apple Pay or any other payment service will drain more than one bank account before we get it right. And what about hacking?
The last time I saw so much technology and potential was when SaaS got its act together. Definitions were everywhere and there were few standards to guide us. The world of wearables and the IoT present the same challenges. Eventually it all gets sorted out but in the interim, there’s plenty of opportunity for innovators and charlatans.
I am usually a best of breed guy provided there are adequate bridges between technologies, but the wearables revolution is going to need to come with bridging to be credible. Fortunately most vendors have reached that conclusion and there are some good products on the market already. Nonetheless, I am at the moment coming down on the side of the platform that can seamlessly generate apps for the new devices complete with well-behaved integration.
I hate to repeat myself, but we haven’t even identified the/a killer app yet. This thing is in the very early stages and it will consume a big chunk of one’s career.
