Software Archives - Page 57 of 71

Screw the Trademark, Move on to Web 4.0

Posted on May 25, 2006 ·

“IT@Cork is a not-for-profit networking organisation for IT professionals. IT@Cork organises regular information and networking events which are free for its members.

One of these events – the upcoming Web 2.0 half-day conference is the target of a cease and desist letter (below) from the legal team of O’Reilly publishers. Basically O’Reilly are claiming to have applied for a trademark for the term “Web 2.0″ and therefore IT@Cork can’t use the term for its conference. Apparantly use of the term “Web 2.0″ is a “flagrant violation” of their trademark rights!

Ironically I invited Tim O’Reilly to speak at this conference last February and his response (which I received on 15th of February) was:

“I would love to be able to do it, but my schedule is just too full for an additional international trip.”

So Tim was aware of the event in February but decided to wait until 2 weeks before the conference to set the lawyers on us.

As I mentioned, IT@Cork is a not-for-profit organisation and doesn’t have the resources available to O’Reilly – what do people suggest we do?”

This is absolutely ridicoulous, but I know what to do.

First of all, stop talking about Web 2.0, let him stick it up … (hm, pardon my French).
Second, skip Web 3.0, too, since that’s the theme of the next O’Reilly conference, (Defining Web 3.0: What’s Next), so he probably trademarked that, too.
Third, while at it, boycott O’Reilly’s expensive conference and attend / organize unconferences instead.
Fourth, move on to Web 4.0, which I have “prior art” on, so he can’t trademark it. I promise to never make any claims on it and it really doesn’t matter what we call it.

Update (5/29): Isn’t it fun to watch mainstream media pick up on a subject days after bloggers have already forgotten it? Her’s the New York Times, and late or not, they’ve made it to Techmeme.

Tags: web2.0, web3.0, oreilly, o’reilly, trademark, web4.0, unconference, zoliblog

Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Collaboration, Software ·

Wiki Could Have Saved School $250K

Posted on May 24, 2006 ·

This must be my wiki-morning, the second story in a row. I have a backlog of posts to finish and I find myself reacting to news instead. I should follow Stefan’s example, and stay focused .. yet the opportunity is too good to miss.

“At Cobb County school system in Georgia,a spam filter is causing a political dust-up.

Officials say a bid to provide telephone services to the system was gobbled up by the filter, and the bidder was subsequently disqualified, according to a report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The term “long distance” was apparently what triggered the block.

The school system had requested an e-mail as a follow-up to the formal bid, which had previously been submitted on paper. When they didn’t see the reply, officials dismissed the bidder and awarded the contract to another–more expensive–contractor. Now the bidder and the school system are arguing over whose fault it was.” (source: Blogma)

Here’s a wonderful showcase that calls for a wiki. Set up separate pages for each participating vendor where they directly upload all relevant documentation. If they make changes, the wiki keeps track of versions and shows what the changes are. School district officials who have a role in the decision-making process have access to all vendor pages, so they can compare the bids, plus they can set up their own internal workpages where the create notes, discussions, tables .. i.e. collaborate easily.

At the end of the process they have one compact site, the wiki that includes the official bids as well as all supporting documentation instead of hundreds of emails, cc’s, untrackable attachments.

(I have posted parts of this article on The SME Blog where I am a guest blogger)

Tags: wiki, collaboration, bidding, bidprocess, versioncontrol, zoliblog

Filed Under: Collaboration, Software ·

JotSpot Marries Salesforce

Posted on May 24, 2006 ·

In late 2004 I implemented JotSpot and NetSuite about the same time. The wiki project was a few weeks ahead, and within days of starting with NetSuite it became clear that there are potential areas of overlap between the two. For example we had already started to maintain competitor-, trade association info on the Jot wiki, also managed our marketing and sales collateral there (version control is a lifesaver), and all of a sudden we realized there is a more structured home for this information within NetSuite.

So early on we had to make decisions on what information should live in the wiki or the CRM system, and we took care of the “integration” by cross-linking such pages. As rudimentary this approach was, it worked well, and both being hosted applications we could surf back-and-forth seamlessly .

The experience was an eye-opener to me: all businesses have a need for both structured and unstructured (OK, semi-structured) data management, collaboration, and this means a potentially huge channel for the wiki guys: their product should be a natural extension of all Enterprise Applications (ERP, CRM, Accounting …etc).
These are seemingly two different worlds: traditional enterprise software is process-driven, while the wiki guys consider process dead, it’s all about freewheeling, creative collaboration of independent minds. Well, businesses need both.

Back then we were Jot’s first corporate customers, so I had direct channels to Joe, and recommended him to team up with the likes of NetSuite, Salesforce ..etc. The idea was not a winner, they were busy building their word-of-mouth, bottom-up, quick-signup pipeline, and Enterprise Software appeared to be a strangely different world.
I’m glad to see they have come around, as expressed in Joe’s excellent writeup, as well as their partnering with Salesforce.com. Congratulations!

And to the rest of the Enterprise Software world (my old world): you guys ALL need a wiki.

Tags: collaboration, wiki, enterprisesoftware, crm, erp, jotspot, socialtext, joekraus, rossmayfield, unstructureddata, process, workflow, netsuite, salesforce.com, zoliblog

Filed Under: Collaboration, ERP / CRM, SaaS ·

AntiSpam Software Maker the Worst Spammer

Posted on May 23, 2006 ·

(Updated)
Panda Software offers “protection against viruses, spyware, hackers, spam and other Internet threats“.

I find it ironic to receive on average two spam emails per day from the spam-protection company (it’s just the average, on 5/17 I received 5!). Or is it some twisted logic that says eventually I surrender and buy their product, then, and only then I can stop their spam? C’mon guys, I am used to receiving spam from others, but not at this rate… Let’s suppose I am in the market for antivirus software, and let’s suppose yours the best, I would still not buy it after the way you treated me!.

What kind of idiot does it take to think that making customers hate them will drive them to buy their products?

Update (5/23): Apparently I am not the only one. There is a whole thread on Panda Spam at the PC Pitstop:

“I responded to their Unsubscribe address, but it didn’t help at all. I

went to Panda’s site and wrote to a few of their support and sales

email addresses, explaining the situation and asking to be removed from

all of their marketing lists. No response, and the emails keep on

coming.
I set up my spam filters to stop them, but they still

keep coming almost daily! (Using K-9 with Pocomail) How do they do

that? I guess that they are, after all, experts in the spam department

and would know how to circumvent such filters. But why would they?”

Update (5/23): After all the bad experience a pleasant surprise: Carolina, PR Manager at Panda emailed me in perhaps less than an hour, apologized and promised to fix it. Kudos for paying attention and being so prompt. Of course, ideally, it would not take PR’s intervention to fix this … and again, what happens to all the other people complaining on the PC Pitstop? Carolina, again, thanks for helping me, but the real nice solution would be to revise your spam and opt-out policy. If you do, I’ll write about it.

Update (5/25): Well, whatever Carolina did, had no effect, I am still receiving Panda Spam. To her credit, she responded to my email in less than a minute: “I’ll contact the marketing again. I will walk over there

myself.” Thanks, Carolina. Just so you know, I took out a little insurance: set up a filter that forwards all Panda-mail to you, deleting the original copy. Don’t worry, you won’t get a lot of spam – if you can stop it, that is.

Update (6/2): Panda is unstoppable. It no longer bothers me, since I have it auto-forwarded to Carolina. She is clearly motivated to stop it, but apparenly can’t – I can still see the forwarded copies in my trash folder. Perhaps she gave up, too, and created an auto-delete filter.

SPAM from Panda Soft

Tags: Panda, Pandasoftware, spam, antispam, antivirus, zoliblog

Filed Under: Marketing / PR, Software ·

How SAP Ended up Promoting NetSuite

Posted on May 22, 2006 ·

NetSuite, the provider of perhaps the best hosted integrated software solution for the SMB market tried to rain on SAP’s parade during SAPPHIRE 06 in Orlando. They planned to host a cocktail party in a hotel suite right across the Convention Center. The party’s theme was “SAP for the rest of us” and the email invitation posed a question/answer: “Who will become the SAP for the midmarket? (It Ain’t SAP),” Cute.

Of course SAP got p***ed and enforced it’s contractual right to cancel competitive events in any of the SAPPHIRE venues. SAP’s Spokesman Bill Wohl called NetSuite’s move “guerilla marketing“.

Now, what’s wrong with Guerilla Marketing? It’s fun … if you have humor to appreciate it. Last week SAP didn’t. The result? NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson laughed off the “loss” and will hold a web-conference instead. This being a juicy story of course it got picked up in the media and quite a few blogs – the media blitz lasted a few days, then will start again around the web-conference … so basically SAP’s decision to kill the party provided NetSuite with a fair amount of publicity – exactly what it needs as it ramps up for its IPO planned later this year. Zach should send a thank-you note to SAP.

Here’s what I think SAP should have done: let it happen, and set up their own counter-party. Had it been allowed to proceed it would have been a noon-event. Not that NetSuite is a negligible company, in fact they have an excellent product. Some say Salesforce.com is just a glorified contact manager relative to NetSuite, and I tend to agree. (I put my money where my mouth is: in my last corporate job I became a NetSuite customer, after careful comparison to Salesforce). That said, NetSuite is targeting strictly the SMB market, in fact more the “S” than the “M”, while SAP despite all their SMB initiatives is still largely the Enterprise Company – SMB is just not their sweet spot. SAP had their own SMB people in Orlando (I interviewed Gadi Shamia, SVP for SMB Solutions, and intend to write about it soon) – they should have set up their own party right next to NetSuite, and present SAP’s vision for that market segment. In fact they could have embraced the NetSuite event (steal their show) and make up SAP logo’d signs pointing to both events.

The impact of the NetSuite party, especially in an environment where most participants are already biased towards SAP would have been minimal. In fact NetSuite had more to gain from the cancellation and the resulting media blitz then actually proceeding with the party … so much so, that I wonder if NetSuite intentionally leaked the news to SAP – a brilliant PR coup, if you ask me.

Intacct raises $7 million; promises guerrilla campaign against SAP/Oracle

Filed Under: Business, Enterprise Software, ERP / CRM, Marketing / PR, SaaS, SMB / SME · Tagged: emergencecapital, guerillamarketing, hummerwinblad, intacct, marketing, midmarket, netsuite, pr, salesforce.com, sap, SAPPHIRE06, smallbusiness, smb, sme, zachnelson, zoliblog

SAP Without SAP – Duet

Posted on May 21, 2006 ·

(Updated)
More than a decade ago as Project Manager implementing SAP solutions I could not understand why the Client’s PM showed absolutely no interest in getting SAP-trained, or even attempting to log on to the SAP system. The only software product he ever touched was email. Years passed, and as I climbed the ladder, I found myself in a similar situation: locked in to Office products most of the time – just like millions of corporate employees whose daily life does not involve actively conducting transactions in their Enterprise system (SAP). They need to occasionally review/approve an item or react to an exception alert though. They are the (often management-level) employees who will not directly use SAP, even though timely access to SAP data is critical to their decision-making process – or to somebody else’s daily job.

Thanks to Duet they can now have the SAP data at their fingerprints without touching SAP itself. The long-awaited (and often promised ) SAP-Microsoft Office integration has finally arrived.

What was announced at last years’s SAPPHIRE in Europe as the Mendocino Project became a product, the second preview of which was released a week before SAPPHIRE 06 under the name Duet. Considering Microsoft’s role, just having a friendly name is a major achievement itself – it could have been something as friendly as Microsoft Office Extension to mySAP ERP 2004, Enterprise Version, Release 1.0. (read Microsoft Uber-Blogger Robert Scoble on product naming…)

I’ve seen a presentation of some of the current features as well as the roadmap for the next year, and also had a chance to sit down with Dennis Moore, GM of Emerging Solutions, who provided the blogger group with additonal insight.

Currently Duet (which is a boxed product) supports MS Office 2003 and mySAP ERP 2004, and there are 4 business scenarios available:

Leave Management
Time Management
Organization Management
Budget Monitoring

The final release is due in June 06 and will soon be followed by two value packs.

Value Pack 1 is due in Q3 06, new scenarios will include recruitment and travel management, enhanced analytics and support for mySAP ERP 2005, the current platform which, per Shai Aggassi will stay for years to come.

Value Pack 2 is expected in Q4 06 with some line of business functionality becoming available, e.g. Sales contacts, activity, Purchasing. MS Office 2007 will be supported.

It’s important to clarify that Office will not become the primary user interface of the “transactional worker”, i.e. you will not be creating product masters, running a shop-floor, etc. What Duet is, is a natural fit for a workflow (think of roles, limits ..etc) -based processing of messages and underlying data triggered by events, rules and exceptions.

Duet’s importance by far exceeds what the limited number of currently available scenarios might imply: for SAP it means potentially tripling / quadrapling their user base, even if indirectly, and for Microsoft it’s another way to lock users into their Office suite.
Duet is a step in SAP’s declared strategy of opening up access to their data and processes via a number of user interfaces, including Office, Portal, Mobile devices ..etc. It also fits in the “Sap Simplified” philosophy of owning the Business Processes and letting go of the user experience.

I tend to disagree with AMR’s concern on the large number of prerequisites: mySAP ERP 2004 or 2005, MS Office, Exchange server, and specific applications for some scenarios, e.g. E-Recruiting 6.0 for Recruitment Management, mySAP SRM 5.0 for purchasing management and CRM 4.0 for sales activity management. Yes, these are prerequisites, but the point is that even though Duet is a boxed shrink-wrapped (thanks for the comment!) product (I’ve seen a white box at SAPPHIRE, whether real or mock-up), it is not expected to sell as a standalone product on it’s own merits. It will expand access to additional users within corporate customers already using both SAP and Microsoft products, i.e. likely to already have the prerequisites.

Talk about prerequisites, pricing for Duet, and specifically the underlying SAP access will be an interesting challenge, since SAP’s model is typically charging $$$$ a smaller user base, while MS relies on $ from a large number of users – there has to be a model in between.

Not everyone in Microsoft welcomes Duet: the folks at MS Dynamics are clearly unhappy. They even produced a so-called White Paper comparing Duet to their own solution, Snap. “So-called”, because it does not even attempt to be unbiased. It praises Dynamics and Snap, while listing the dry facts about Duet, completely forgetting the fact that as Enterprise systems Dynamics and SAP are really apples and oranges… or I should say Ford vs. Rolls Royce.

IBM isn’t sleeping either: IBM to sing in Harmony with SAP to match Duet. IBM’s Harmony, which I haven’t had a chance to see, claims to play a similar role with Lotus Notes. It clearly is a competitive product, as far as Duet (which is jointly owned by MS and SAP) is concerned – but from SAP’s point of view, it’s just one more user interface, exposing more knowledge workers to SAP. The more the merrier.

SAP’s Vision on the Changing Role of CIO’s

Posted on May 21, 2006 ·

(Updated)
SAP is not a technology company, it’s the world’s leading business process company – says Shai Agassi, President of SAP’s Product and Technology Group.

Niel Robertson, one of the SAPPHIRE bloggers (or the Brotherhood as we’re often referred to) thinks through the consequences in an excellent article, The New Corporate World Order. It’s a very deep, thoughtful post, simply too good to summarize, please just read it. I was trying to find where I heard Shai express similar thoughts, and I realized it wasn’t at SAPPHIRE 2006, but at Software 2006, just a few weeks earlier. Here’s the relevant slide:

The entire presentation, titled Business Process Co-Innovation; “Enterprise 3.0” is available in PDF format here.

Update (5/23): Niel’s original posts created quite a debate, so he reposted the comments here. Wow, comments take over.. this is the real conversation!

Filed Under: Business, Enterprise Software, ERP / CRM · Tagged: bpel, bpm, businessprocess, chiefprocessofficer, cio, cpio, cpo, sap, SAPPHIRE06, shaiagassi, software2006, workflow, zoliblog

Open Source Hotel Rooms

Posted on May 19, 2006 ·

I’ve just checked out of my hotel at SAPPHIRE 06 and am shocked looking at the bill:

You can click to view the original Zoho Sheet.

Since I am still in a “software state of mind” (and btw, will return to SAPPHIRE posts soon), I can’t help but draw the analogy to the software industry: Support and Maintenance charges in the Enterprise Software business are in the 20-25% range. There is an ongoing debate about the viability of Open Source as a business model but several companies are experimenting with giving away the product and focus on additional revenue sources, i.e. support, maintenance, training ..etc.

Since the hotel industry is up to 18% in surcharges, why not make a dramatic move, “opensource” the rooms and make their numbers on all these other (bogus) fees? (OK, before I get ripped apart, yes, I do realize running hotel rooms has actual material costs vs. downloading software, and that the Open Source model is a bit more complex … in other word, my analogy is far from perfect, but hey, it’s Friday afternoon, I am waiting for my plane and can have a little fun, can’t I?)

I see a lot more potential surcharges (on top of the free rooms), like: clean hotel fee, airconditioning surcharge, towel fees at the pool, hot water fee in the bathroom, warm water fee at the pool, low-noise airconditioning surcharge, no-cigarette-smell fee in the nonsmoking rooms, Broadband fee (yes, I know they already have it, but this would be extra for connection that actually works vs. trickles), private room fee (that is when you don’t get the keys to a room already occupied like it happened to me), fast or medium service surcharges at the restaurant..etc. Of course when you can’t sleep at night because the damn airconditioning is so noisy, or when your nonsmoking room smells.. .etc, you don’t have to pay. This could become the feedback / QA mechanism for the hotel industry, a’la the Open Source community support / QA in software.

The opportunities are tremendous, and we should not stop at the hotel industry. Open Source the World!

Filed Under: Business, Humor, Open Source · Tagged: business model, Enterprise Software, hotels, Humor, Open Source, resort, Software industry, surcharges, zoho sheet

S-type at SAPPHIRE 2006

Posted on May 17, 2006 ·

No, this is not my car…but there is a reason why it’s here .. hold on tight … for the news ..

Update: Since the news is out, the Jaguar S-type was obviously a reference to SAP’s announcement of CRM 2006s-release – of which I’ll write more soon.

Tags: sapphire2006, sapphire06,s-type, s-release, SAP, zoliblog

Filed Under: Enterprise Software, ERP / CRM ·