NBC’s Press: Here

Schwartz came to SAP through their acquisition of Business Objects, and unlike many acquisitions where the “assimilated” CEO gets slowly marginalized, this one seems to have worked well. In fact John Schwartz is becoming somewhat of a front man, especially as his analytics become the growth engine SAP badly needed, with their traditional transactional system being somewhat stale.

Another interesting aspect is that while SAP now has a an On-Demand Tzar in ex-Oracle John Wookey, his team is still largely strategizing – while Schwartz’s  Business Objects is a showcase of a formerly traditional software company turning to SaaS aggressively.

Btw, this is not the first time an “acquired” exec catapults fast in SAP: the previous guy arguably started lower and raised to stardom fast… but he is now at a Better Place (pun intended).

Anyway, enjoy the discussion.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Btw, these videos have been online for a week now, but on the first day the were practically unviewable: watch for 3-4 seconds, then wait for long buffering… again… again. 

One Customer at a Time is a great principle – in Customer Care, not on-demand video.

Related posts:

• Columnar Data Storage
• SAP Gets Transactional with In-Memory Database: Changing the Game for Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft
• SAP’s Position on On-Demand, Social Networking, and Cloud Computing

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)

He points out some inconsistencies comparing this year’s chart to the 2007 version. He should know, he is a Gartner Alumnus himself.  But I’ve been wondering if there was a way to further simplify it, i.e. make it digestible to average folks like yours truly .. and I’ve just found it.

Ladies and Gentlemen, here’s the simplified,  scobleized, oprahized, too-oh-ized version of the Gartner Hype Cycle:

Courtesy of Geek & Poke.

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)

It’s not so long ago that it felt embarrassing to say the words "SaaS" and " single-tenant" in the same sentence. For years, it’s been an industry mantra that it’s  simply impossible to have a scalable SaaS business without multi-tenancy.

Both Jive and Atlassian went single-tenant. That’s a red flag with many SaaS purists.  But there’s more then just tenancy. What if customer data stays behind the firewall, while the application is still provided over the web?  Is that still considered SaaS?    Do customers really care about such issues, or do they look for innovation in features and services?

And a bonus: the #1 SaaS icon supposedly delivers on-premise, if the deal is big enough…

Read more here…

Microsoft SharePoint has a very strong position in the Enterprise as the incumbents behind-the-firewall collaboration server, and for years smart Collaboration and Social Software vendors with better functionality, like Atlassian, Socialtext, Jive Software, Newsgator  have been "playing well", adopting their services to SharePoint.

Now Zoho joins, announcing Zoho Office for Microsoft SharePoint, which combines the benefits of a collaborative SaaS Suite with the (perceived or real?) security if keeping data behind the firewall.

Read more…

He spent the first 6 months crafting the new strategy, which he first announced at the SIIA OnDemand Europe conference in Amsterdam.

Continue reading…

This week we’re also seeing a for-profit company, Atlassian drive to raise $100,000K for the benefit of Room to Read, an organization that builds schools, libraries in rural communities in Nepal, Cambodia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Laos, Zambia …etc.  Doing good is in Atlassian’s DNA, likely coming from the co-Founder, who is a major Kiva Supporter.  His company had set up the Atlassian Foundation which donates basically 1% of everything:

• 1% of company and employee time to Foundation projects
• 1% of company equity to the Foundation
• 1% of our products to non-profit groups

But wait!  This isn’t a post about charity only.  There’s a Deal in it for you!

The Atlassian $timulus package is a 5-day drive, during which you can get either Confluence, the excellent Enterprise Wiki, or Jira, the issue tracker – Atlassian’s first product that’s still an IT favourite  for $5 for 5 users.

Now I hear you ask: is that $5 per person per month?  That would by typical (actually low) pricing for most SaaS offerings.   NO!  It is:

• A five-user licence (ie. $1 per person)
• For a full year
• For the full-featured entrerprise strenght products

My only regret is that it does not involve the hosted versions of these products.   But if it’s the downloadable, installable version, what’s this per year licence?  Most enterprise software is sold with a perpetual licence: you can use it forever.  But then the vendor pushes the (almost) mandatory maintenance fees to the tune of 20-25%, and major new releases every 4-5 years.

Atlassian does not play such games, their philosophy is transparency and simplicity. Software should be easy to learn, easy to use and easy to buy.  Hence the annual licence whish involves support. (Update: I misunderstood this part: the licence is a perpetual one, the additioal annual fees are for maintenance / support, and the are optional.)  And for comparison, the minimum annual licence for both Confluence and Jira is $1,200.

So Atlassian is essentially giving away $1,200 licences for free – but it’s actually a lot more.  This isn’t just your introductory price.  Customers who purchase during the $timulus week (only two days left) are locked in to their $1 per user price for the lifetime of the product, and those fees will be donated as well.   That goes way beyond giving up revenue – they can’t possibly provide support for $1 a year, so Atlassian is reaching into their pockets big time for years to come.

The initiative appears to be more wildly popular than they expected. The initial goal was to raise $25,000 for Room to Read, and they exceeded that target on the first day – hence the new objective of $100,000K.

Early this morning they were at 66% of the increased target:

Now, before someone thinks I am doing a paid commercial here: I am not receiving any form of compensation or incentive from Atlassian.  I simply like what they are doing.  A lot.

But I’m not naive.  This isn’t just charity.  It’s damned good marketing – in more ways then one.  First, as you may suspect is Brand recognition.

The second is perhaps less obvious: Atlassian’s initial product, Jira took several years to take off – the second, Confluence had much faster growth.  Part of their secret sauce has always been relying on a very loyal, very satisfied customer base, mostly IT-types who buy additional products from their trusted vendor.

So yes, Atlassian is seeding their market with thousands of free customers this week.  Which is fine, I’ve said before: you don’t have to be purely altruistic to do good.

Update: The Atlassian $timulus Package is now listed in Consumerist’s Morning Deals, along with Blu-Ray Discs and Casio Cameras

(Cross-posted from CloudAve. To stay abreast of news, analysis and just plain opinion on Cloud Computing, SaaS, Business grab the CloudAve Feed here.)

Granted, the SAP – Sybase partnership just being announced at these very moments (webcast) isn’t all about the iPhone: it’s about making the SAP Business Suite 7 available on iPhone, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry.  Still, it’s nice to see they chose the “right phone” for the video. (hat tip: Jeff Nolan)

(Cross-posted from CloudAve. To stay abreast of news, analysis and just plain opinion on Cloud Computing, SaaS, Business grab the CloudAve Feed here.)

The aptly named Business ByNetsuite program guarantees at least 50% savings to current SAP R/3 customers relative to  – watch this! – the annual maintenance fees they are now paying to SAP.  Yes, it’s not a price-to-price comparison.  With the perpetual licence model customers pay upfront, but are still forced to pay annual maintenance fees – with SaaS there is only a subscription fee, and now NetSuite proves it can be half of only the maintenance component of traditional software’s TCO.

Read on to find out how SAP’s own blunder around their excellent product, Business ByDesign opened the opportunity for Netsuite…

Image by wicho via Flickr

The Enterprise Irregulars took over CloudAve… well, sort of, forcing us to release an article early.  Eran Kampf had a post lined up for Monday morning about Larry Ellison’s Cloud Envy, when all of a sudden fellow Irregular  Anshu Sharma had a humor attack and came out with a hilarious post. All he did was replace Cloud Computing with Fusion in Larry’s famous rant, and voila!:

"The interesting thing about Fusion is that we’ve redefined Fusion to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t Fusion with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?"

"We’ll make Fusion announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing. But I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of Fusion other than change the wording of some of our ads. That’s my view."

Wow.  This variant of Ellison’s speech makes a lot of sense, referring to his own elusive Fusion applications.   Even Vinnie Agrees.

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We must be a crazy bunch on a suicide mission.  Why else would we launch a new blog focused on Cloud Computing and Business, when it’s just a fad that will collapse in two years?

Harry Debes, CEO of Lawson Software is a respected Enterprise Software industry veteran, but I’m afraid for all his achievements he’ll go down in history as the man who grabbed headlines with a fatally wrong call.  Of course not all wrong calls hurt one’s reputation: IBM’s Thomas Watson is still an industry legend despite the famous quote incorrectly attributed to him:

” I think there is a world market for maybe five computers“

The small difference is that what Thomas Watson could not fathom in 1943 ended up putting IBM on an amazing growth trajectory,  while Harry Debes’s view may just turn out to be fatal for Lawson – or to quote my Enterprise Irregular friend, Vinnie Mirchandani:

“That’s what American and Delta said about SW. And GM and Ford said about Japanese cars. And Sears and Wards said about WalMart.”

Another quote by Vinnie, closer to our industry:

“Dun & Bradstreet, which GEAC acquired for a song, was one of the most spectacular slides in the software market. In less than 5 years it went from dominant position to a distress sale as it missed the client/server wave in early 90s.”

I’ve seen that one close, fortunately for me from SAP’s side – the winner in that round.  We’re witnessing another tidal wave now, the shift to Cloud Computing.  It won’t happen overnight, but those who completely ignore it will vanish.  Some of my fellow Enterprise Irregulars elaborate more:

• Vinnie Mirchandani points out that SaaS is what more and more customers want, and those who stop listening to customers inevitably hit the wall sooner or later.  Need proof?  How about this 100% SaaS customer, showcased at the recent Office 2.0 conference?
• Jim Berkowitz  of CRM Mastery fame agrees,  adding that calling people, potential customers “stupid” never leads to any good.
• Bob Warfield makes the case that even if we ignore what customers want and only consider profitabilty, Debes is wrong, Salesforce.com is almost as profitable as Lawson, but grows much faster, while Conquer, another SaaS success story is actually more profitable than Lawson is.
• Jason Corsello adds that Lawson actually launched a SaaS offering last year, but experienced lackluster customer response largely to pricing and deployment issues … so now that they couldn’t pull it off, the declare the entire market doomed.
• Josh Greenbaum concludes: “SaaS isn’t collapsing, it’s only just getting started“.

I can live with that… it’s only starting… so we’re not a suicidal bunch, after all. But thank you, Harry Debes, for sparking a great discussion.

If you read just the few articles I’ve quoted above, you get a fairly good picture of the many benefits the Software as a Service model offers.  Let me add a few of my personal favorites:

• Extended reach – small businesses can now have business functionality previously only available and affordable for large enterprises.
• Commoditization of the software market – commoditization hurts most companies, except the few who drive it, but guess what – it’s great for customers.
• End of Bloatware  – for the first time SaaS vendors can run stats and observe what features are actually used by customers, so they can cut out the fat and enhance the in-demand features.
• New Business Models, like benchmarking – based on anonym aggregate data provide your customers with performance metrics.  Even newer business models we have not even imagined yet.
• Dramatically changed Sales and Marketing model: pull vs. push.  Instead of the traditional sales model it’s all about transparency, information, letting informed customers find you.  The Product sells itself and your Customers are your Marketing team.

We’ll be writing about these and more. I’m a “business application guy”, so I mostly talk about SaaS – but our name is Cloud Avenue, not SaaS Avenue, for good reason: fellow blogger Krish will talk about it soon.  By the way, Krish and I got to know each other through our blogs – just like my fellow Editor, Ben Kepes, and just about all other contributors. We also have our CloudLab – for product / service reviews.  Yes, we will report on products, but do not strive to be a mini-TechCrunch: we have no intention to report about everything new.  We’re not a news-blog.  We’d rather sit back, analyze a market, find key players, then produce a series of reviews / comparative analysis.  Quality before quantity or urgency.

We’re believers in Cloud Computing, but  not over-zealous cheerleaders.  Just as I’m finishing this post, another SaaS debate erupted, which prompted Anshu Sharma to note: “there must be a Sky is Falling Support Group“.  The really notable part of the Cloud-Filled Debate @Forbes is Nick Carr’s responses: not because of the Big Switch author’s unquestionable “cloud-bias”, but because of how realistic he is:

Forbes.com: Is cloud computing over-hyped?
Nicholas Carr: At the moment, yes, and that’s typical for technological advances.

What’s your imagined time line of the adoption of cloud computing? Will it take years? Decades?
If you’re talking about big companies, I would say it will be a slow, steady process lasting maybe 15 to 20 years.

On what Gartner Research analysts call “the cycle of hype and gloom,” where do you think cloud computing is currently positioned?
It’s definitely near the peak of its hype. The doom period, when the media and IT managers realize the challenges ahead, is likely coming soon. But regardless of hype or gloom, the technology will only keep progressing.

Overhyped, slow process, doom is coming… has Nick Carr switched sides?  No, he is just being realistic – and that’s what we need to do here  @CloudAve, too. We will talk about integration problems, security issues, privacy concerns, even legal ramifications – many of these I don’t claim to know much about, which is why it’s great to have a diverse team of authors with complementary areas of expertise. And our door is never closed: we welcome guest posts, and who knows, you may feel inclined to join us as as a regular writer…

Finally, we could not afford to bring you CloudAve without sponsorship.  My regular readers know I’ve been an advisor to Zoho for years now – I’ve found them to be a showcase for a lot of my ideals.  Zoho stepped up as exclusive sponsor of CloudAve.  This does not make us a Zoho PR outlet, in fact they can expect less coverage here than they got on my personal blog.  We enjoy complete editorial independence.

What we do not have, and will not have is any form of advertising.  None of those flashy banners, boxes, making the site close to unreadable. Just pure content.  And since we are not dependent on page views, we can afford to offer our content under a Creative Commons licence.  Yes, it’s all yours, take it – just don’t forget attribution.

So here we are – welcome to CloudAve. We hope you will follow us.   And once again, thank you, Harry, for all the attention to Cloud Computing.

P.S.  The CloudAve platform  is not exactly in nice order yet. It’s work-in-progress.

So for now, all I can do is apologize for the shabby appearance, like I did at a previous move – that one turned out quite well, didn’t it?

And talk about move – I am not abandoning this blog either, so I hope you continue to follow me both here and on CloudAve.