Web 2.0

I watched Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri kick off this year’s Workday Rising conference yesterday morning, and their stuff was spectacular.  While unfortunately I can’t give you all the cool details (I’ll let them break the hot news, and trust me, there’s some good stuff coming), I’ll take a few moments and share some high-level notes.

Dave Duffield

• Stressed keeping Workday’s commitments despite economic slowdown.  Workday continues to invest and hire.
• Drew parallel between the emergence of SaaS/on-demand and the client/server revolution that pushed big iron away from computing’s leading edge.
• Spoke about how the SaaS business model is particularly relevant in today economy.  This comes from the obvious cost savings, but also the not-so-obvious shifting of datacenter and IT operations to specialized companies.
• From a study with current customers, showed data illustrating that Workday is 50% less expensive versus legacy on-premise applications.
• 67 customers and rising steadily.
• All four updates this year have been delivered on-time to customer population.
• Reasons Dave is optimistic (but realistic) about 2009: (1) shift to SaaS gaining momentum; (2) Workday is financially stable; (3) dedicated focus on customers’ continued success; (4) experienced management team; and finally (5) customers, who are the best salespeople Workday has (seems Workday truly understands the power of word-of-mouth).

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Jeff Kaplan:

Despite the economy, election and lingering questions about whether Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is enterprise-ready, this week’s Salesforce.com Dreamforce conference drew nearly ten thousand energnetic attendees and exhibitors to celebrate the power of the ‘cloud’.
The event not only dispelled any questions about whether the SaaS movement can withstand today’s economy, it also helped to resolve the needless debate over whether there is a difference between SaaS and cloud computing.

Salesforce.com succeeded in dissolving any line of demarcation which may have existed between the SaaS and cloud computing worlds by:

• Using the terms interchangeably throughout its keynote and breakout sessions
• Unveiling a new round of cloud-based applications and platform capabilities
• Expanding its strategic alliances to include two more pivotal ‘cloud’ players

Salesforce.com’s two most significant announcements were its move into website hosting services, and new alliances with Amazon and Facebook.

10,000 attendees?  Amazing.  I think we’ve reached the tipping point, folks.  Hang on to your hats.

Related: Vinnie Mirchandani’s The Unsung Innovations at Dreamforce

If you remember the smash video from A Ha’s Take On Me from the 80s, here’s the literal version where the lyrics refer to what’s actually happening in the video.

I see this as a huge internet meme starting in 3…2…1.

Along similar lines: Here’s the Family Guy version of the same video.

Say what you want about him, but Larry’s never been one to mince words:

"The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing 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 cloud computing announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing. But I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud."

Of course, Oracle has its cloud-based offerings and will only continue to grow that base and development budget.  Cloud computing, from and end-user perspective, really doesn’t mean too much: cloud or no cloud, what does it matter to the application being served to the user?  You still need some sort of network voodoo, some type of middleware logic to handle data interfaces and messaging, and of course the end-user application and platform OS or browser.  No matter if the infrastructure is on-premise or not, the user still has to interface with the app to accomplish his business goals – whether the app server resides in-house or in the cloud somewhere. 

It’s really a matter of technical semantics more than anything else.  Of course, on the the cost-benefit front, a cloud-based approach is favored by many due to lower support costs and increased portability and access.

I think what Ellison is getting at is the fad-like obsession the tech world has with trends and the hype marketing that surrounds them.  “Cloud computing” is a hair away from being found on cereal boxes, and I think it’s this hype cycle that Larry finds somewhat insane.

(Counterpoint: it’s this very hype that will drive tons of interest in Oracle’s cloud offerings and make Ellison’s numbers continue to glow, but that’s an aside.)

Of course, I find almost all enterprise software marketing almost totally insane, but that’s just me.  It’s all crazy, it’s all 60% gibberish, it’s all buzzword soup.  Why get ruffled now?  Software marketing reform should have happened years ago.  Anyone remember BullFighter?

Detroit folks: MiPro is co-hosting a breakfast seminar with Workday about the increasing attention to the on-demand model of business application delivery.  If you’re in the area and would like to attend on the morning of Tuesday, October 8th, we still have space.  Workday will be there to explain its version of on-demand means, and Christine Ferguson, VP of HR Strategy at Workday, will give a demo of Workday’s HR and Payroll solutions.

The location is the Townsend Hotel in Birmingham, MI, and if you haven’t been there before, it’s the hotel.  It’s impressive.

Again: we have space and would love for you to come.  If you’re at all interested in what Workday is and what Dave Duffield has been up to, click below to learn more and register for the event.

For anyone still wondering if Oracle has let Fusion go into a black hole and innovation has stalled in the mothership, Joshua Greenbaum emphatically says no:

Perhaps the most impressive, due only in part to the huge hype riding behind it, is Fusion Applications. Oracle gave industry analysts a two-hour mind-melting core dump earlier in September on Fusion Apps and is planning on showcasing some of the new functionality during Open World on Day Three. And here’s what I can say without blowing the terms of an NDA agreement I signed two weeks ago: Oracle has made good on its promise to deliver Fusion Apps, and has greatly exceeded my expectations in doing so. A very impressive debut.

Greenbaum’s post is filled with great detail, so check it out if you’re wondering about the application and innovation details Oracle brain-dumped at this year’s OpenWorld.

From a more macro level, just yesterday our PeopleSoft Practice Lead and one of our Senior Client Execs gave a report from the field regarding their observations at OpenWorld, and the takeaway is this: there’s lots of good things happening with Oracle.  Lots of good energy.  While Fusion has taken its sweet time and shapeshifted, sometimes strangely, over the past 24 months or so, it’s come out looking better than anyone was expecting.  People notice that, and what we have here is grassroots buzz from a company that is making products that take a message to the marketplace.

The next year will be a very exciting time in the Oracle/PeopleSoft spaces.  Watch.

So I’m wrapping up at Oracle OpenWorld with Jim Borne, one of our Client Executives, where I’ve been asked to be the subject matter expert for PeopleSoft Maintenance Management.  I’ve been at the Utilities Industry kiosk, and while the name might not get you fired up, there’s been a ton of attention around the Maintenance Management offering.

(Gratuitous horn-honking: MiPro has been the only consultant involved with every Maintenance Management deployment in North America.  It’s been a fun journey and I’ve learned a lot, and I’m pretty thrilled that we’re in the position that we are.)

Anyway, in no particular order because I’m exhausted and getting ready to hop a red-eye, here are some recap thoughts of the conference:

• The Oracle Fusion applications are really coming along.  If you’re planning on being an early adopter of this stuff in 2009, you’ve gotta check this out.
• Lots of buzz about Oracle Beehive, a brand new, built-from-scratch collaboration tool.  It gives users a very slick way to communicate and work together, and does an excellent job of tying together email client, IM programs, calendars, VM and conferencing.  It does all this behind the scenes so users can easily share (and collaboratively edit) documents, emails, etc.  Pretty cool stuff.
• The show is downright huge, which, no matter how often I come to it, always sort of startles me.  All the products seem mixed-up, the grounds are confusing, and in general it’s hard to find what you’re looking for.
• The general mood is very positive: there are lots of comments and good juju about the continual improvement of the Oracle products and the future of Oracle apps.  Pretty exciting stuff.  Nice break from the dour headlines.
• PeopleSoft customers:  you’ve got to be on the lookout for PeopleTools 8.5.  There are some major usability improvements in the app itself and the web 2.0 applications.
• Mobility is one of the huge themes here, and many companies are grabbing hold of this sucker and seeing where it takes them.  Most notable supporters in this area are companies like RIM (BlackBerry), Bluedot Solutions, HighJump, DSI and tons more.  It’s going to be huge.

That’s all for now.  Off to the airport.  Will post more from BlackBerry if I get a chance.

What is the cost of a fumbled upgrade?  For J. Crew it was $3MM in unanticipated costs which, according to J. Crew, contributed to their recently announced earnings miss of 4 cents a share.   How did Wall Street respond?  Typical overcorrection seems to be the response with shares trading 15% down in after hour activity.

Ben Worthen highlighted J. Crew’s stumble in his business technology blog in the Wall Street Journal, mentioning that J. Crew isn’t the first company to blame poor earnings results on technology.

There was a wave of businesses blaming poor results on tech-projects-gone-bad in the early part of the decade. We haven’t seen it much lately, though.

One difference: Nike, Hershey and others that had problems in the past went out of their way to blame the tech vendor. J. Crew never once tried to pass the buck. The company didn’t respond to our requests for comment, which also means we don’t know which company sold the offending technology. You can search the Web for “J. Crew” and “systems” and find the names of several companies J. Crew buys software from, but there’s not enough evidence for us to point a finger.

What strikes a chord in me in the report is that Worthen assumes that the poor upgrade is the result of “offending technology.”  Our experience however, leads me to be much more suspicious of the implementation/upgrade approach, executive sponsorship, project budget and timeline constraints, and ultimately the implementation team itself.  All too often we see companies approach an upgrade as a routine activity that can be performed easily by their staff (all while their staff stays on top of their regular day-to-day responsibilities).   Supplemental staff is reluctantly brought in via simple commodity broker staffing firms that can only provide bodies and not real experience from both a people and process standpoint.

Obviously, this doesn’t fly too often.

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Internally, we’ve talked about doing videos of things ranging from the instructional to the campy.  Check out what our partner Workday did with their American Idol spoof, below.  The editing is actually very good.

Dave Duffield is a master of culture-building, among many other things.  Good to see the PeopleSoft-in-its-glory energy resurfacing here.

If you take this blog’s RSS feed and drop it into Wordle, you get a neat word cloud composed of oft-used words found in the feed’s RSS data.  The cloud for Unfiltered looks like this (click to enlarge):

Nice idea for a web app, and good design aspects too. 

All you need for Wordle to work is a bunch of straight text or a RSS or ATOM feed from a website or blog.  That’s it.  More fun than you might imagine.