conversation :: community :: nerdery

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.

Dave Duffield is the guest on tomorrow’s Bill Kutik Radio Show (hosted by our friends at Knowledge Infusion).  Listening to Bill is entertainment enough, adding Dave to the show makes this a can’t-miss event.

A few years ago, while at the HR Tech Conference, I had the opportunity to attend an interview session with Dave that was moderated by Bill.  This was during the very first days of Workday.  It will be very interesting to hear Dave’s view of software, HR applications, and the SaaS space now that Workday has a few years under its belt.

A bit about the show….

Workday CEO and Chief Customer Advocate Dave Duffield will be featured on The Bill Kutik Radio Show, airing Wednesday, September 17 at 12 p.m. EDT. Dave is a recognized pioneer in enterprise software and human resources (HR) technology and the founder of five companies including PeopleSoft and Workday.

To tune in live, click here: The Bill Kutik Radio Show. The Bill Kutik Radio show is also available as an iTunes podcast.

About The Bill Kutik Radio Show
The Bill Kutik Radio Show is a bi-weekly talk show featuring Bill Kutik, one of the leading independent analysts in the HR technology marketplace. Bill’s show features unedited and unrehearsed conversations with industry leaders, including practitioners as well as executives for some of the world’s leading technology providers

Hope you tune in!

The Story

As we approach the year-end preparation season, we’re getting asked a lot about how to close the gap in 1099 reporting compliance.  From what we can understand, there are several factors at play that you need to know about and that might re-prioritize 1099 reporting from whatever system you’re using.

More specifically, the landscape looks a little like this: the IRS is putting stronger enforcement efforts in place to close the compliance delta between self-employed/independent contractors (who, the IRS suggests, only report ~80% of their income) and W2-earning employees.  This will be done by increasing enforcement of 1099 information reporting rules.

The IRS has been hiring aggressively after a relatively tight lockdown on new personnel, and we understand that some of these people will be 1099 auditors.  While additional auditors really doesn’t mean much in the larger IRS scheme, it does serve as a call to action to 1099 workers and their associated employers.

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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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BusinessWeek’s Steve Hamm’s insightful piece about Workday absolutely nails what we are hearing ourselves from our customers and prospects:

Ever since veteran software entrepreneur Dave Duffield launched his new startup, Workday, a year and a half ago, people have wondered if it could become the next Salesforce.com (CRM). Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com’s chief executive, had shaken up the customer-relationship management software world and created a company with a market cap of $8 billion with an online service that replaces expensive and complex traditional software packages. Could Duffield and Workday do the same? Just now, there’s growing evidence they can.

Workday has landed three large companies as customers—important votes of confidence that it can be trusted to handle some of a corporation’s most crucial computing tasks. Flextronics (FLEX), the biggest of the three, plans on rolling out the Workday human resources management system worldwide for more than 200,000 employees in the next two years. “Workday could definitely be the next Salesforce.com,” says David Smoley, Flextronics’ chief information officer. “Their model is in line with companies like us. We want to keep things as simple as possible and keep costs as low as possible.”

The other major customers are Chiquita (CQB), with 25,000 employees, and Life Time Fitness (LTM), which plans to adopt all three of Workday’s services, adding accounting and payroll to human resources management.

If Workday does a good job of serving these clients it will gain credibility with large corporations that are looking for alternatives to traditional software packages. “They’re in the phase where they’re getting big customers. If they do well with the rollouts they’ll get the attention of a lot of mainstream corporations,” says analyst Jim Holincheck of market researcher Gartner (IT). David Dobrin of B2B Analysts is even more effusive: “Workday is like the iPod for enterprise HR software. It’s a better and simpler way of doing things, and people can see it.”

Right now, ERP and SaaS have a (relatively) symbiotic relationship, even within the same enterprise.  But SaaS is clearly the emergent, progressive concept (intelligently discussed here in what is must-read reading for anyone interested in the space) and will likely attract an increasing number of devotees — eventually at the expense of in-house software.  ERP certainly has its strengths, but the SaaS model is becoming more validated every day, which accelerates the maturity/acceptance curve.

(thx Jeff)

Businessweek recently published a surprisingly negative article about SaaS, saying that its hype can be largely undeserved for a number of reasons.  Now, I like BS-calling as much as the next guy (maybe a bit more, actually), but I found Gene Marks’s reasoning to be too generalized and all-encompassing.

Marks says:

Myth 1: SaaS is cheaper. No, it’s not. In fact, it can be a lot more expensive. Most service providers charge each user by the month. If you’ve got 10 people using a product, and they’re costing you 50 bucks a person each a month, that’s $6,000 a year. Most in-house systems have one-time licensing fees and optional support agreements. Spreading out the payments is nothing new, either; tons of software leasing companies will finance your purchase and spread out monthly payments over time. When you look at SaaS over the long term, it’s usually not a cheaper option.

Considering that on-premise enterprise software for a large firm can easily run into the millions just for new license acquisition, this argument pales quickly.  And support (maintenance) agreements for such systems are not “optional” — they’re mandatory.  Seeing how I’ve seen annual maintenance bills upwards of $400K/year, we’re not talking spare change, either.

And really — let’s not get into the costs associated with new hardware investments or modifications to existing infrastructure.  Let’s not get into new servers, new application security policies, network provisioning, desktop client modifications, and permissions.  Let’s not get into end-user performance issues and the time and expense needed to troubleshoot and remedy them.  And let’s also not get into aggregate IT staff allocations on a man-hour basis, because the numbers get crazy quickly.  Suffice to say that all of these get figured into the equation when trying to calculate the TCO of on-premise enterprise software.

SaaS may not be cheap, but it certainly might be cheaper.  And there is value in having fewer on-premise headaches with trashed servers, corrupt databases, and angry end users that the internal helpdesk must deal with.  It becomes an intangible quality-of-life discussion for the enterprise.

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In our recent newsletter, two of our senior principal consultants wrote a quick bit about the differences in PeopleSoft invoice matching functionality from 8.9 to 9.0.  We get asked about this a lot, and for most users, the differences can be somewhat arcane.  Because of this, I’d like to share the article.

Differences in PeopleSoft Invoice Matching from 8.9 to 9.0: A High-level View

by April Black and Jack Kochie, Sr. Principal Consultants

From PeopleSoft 8.9 to 9.0, some of the invoice matching and processing rules changed significantly, and we find many of our clients don’t know about the changes in any sort of detail.  At a high-level, here are the biggest-hitting changes:

• 9.0 includes all features of prior releases
• Expanded document association included (e.g. receipt selection)
• Expanded rules engine (contexts: summary, tolerance, global), which provide:
  • More flexibility
  • Flow control (allows matching – i.e. check all or check first)
  • Summary rules
  • Rule tolerances
• Auto-matching with debit memos
• Configurable matching workbench
• Expanded workflow

As for what we get asked about steadily, it’s the intricacies of the rules engine.

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