I am moderating a panel tomorrow night on “mobile and enterprises” featuring key people from Google, HP, and DoubleDutch (white label FourSquare). This is shaping up to be a really interesting discussion and what I like about this venue is that the event itself is intimate which encourages good discussion.

The way I’m approaching this is as follows, there are 3 fundamental dimensions to the mobile enterprise:

1. Unified communications: The integration of voice telephony and a range of messaging technology, as well as the unchaining of these technologies from the desk, are changing how people conduct business
2. App ecosystems: We have evolved along a fairly predictable path with regard to mobile apps, first we started out replicating desktop applications as small screen formatted and when the limits of this approach were reached developers started building mobile apps as if they had no desktop counterpart. In other words, the development of mobile applications is in a renaissance period exhibited by user experience creativity and the integration of mobile specific hardware capabilities, like location based services.
3. Mobile internet devices: The enthusiastic reception that devices like the Kindle, Nook, and iPad have received underscored the point that mobile devices do not have to be mobile phones. We are fully unwinding the notion that mobile data and mobile telephony are one in the same and this will have profound implications for companies that have a vested interest in the mobile enterprise, as well as the carriers who are providing the infrastructure services for large enterprises.

I hope you will be able to attend this event, I’m looking forward to a spirited discussion that touches on all three of the points I raised above.

At the SAP academic research conference yesterday Hasso Plattner spent a lot of time talking about database design and why it’s still important. More significantly, he drilled into why re-architecting applications to take advantage of a fundamentally differently database than what we are used to with relational databases is critical if we are to simplify code bases and develop new generations of applications that take off where the current state of the art ends.

This area has a pretty steep learning curve so to get started here’s a good explanation of the distinction between columnar vs. row database architecture.

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• IBM-SAP combo not in the cards – exec (money.cnn.com)
• Hasso Plattner calls for in-memory OLTP column stores (dbms2.com)

I spoke with Sam Lawrence at Jive about their new Social Business Software (SBS) product and came away impressed on two fronts, the first being that the product is wicked cool and perhaps more significantly they are skating to the proverbial puck rather than following in the footsteps of other companies.

Longtime Jive followers will notice something immediately, Clearspace and Clearspace Community have been retired as naming conventions. For SBS, the technologies represented in both of these products are now referenced as “Jive Foundation” which forms the underpinnings for the new products and initiatives.

Jive is looking at the market opportunity from the standpoint of what people do with the software, and that represents the work centers which map to a neatly presented perspective on what happens in all companies. Within each of these centers is a business process in which a social component is integral. Based on my own experience in very large companies, I think this is a realistic perspective and it’s worth noting that the overlap between centers is probably proportional not by design but based on what actually happens.

In addition to process centers there are cross application modules that allow for top down functions across the entire suite of services. Analytics represent an obvious cross application module but it was the Bridging Module that really captured my attention.

What the Bridging Module enables is a federation of related communities for an integrated view. As an example, Kaiser is a Jive customer and with the Bridging Module any Kaiser user could add components that represent content and functionality in the American Heart Association community.

To be clear, this federation capability works exclusively with other communities that are built on Jive technology, but with 2,500 customers this is a significant list and represents the greatest strategic opportunity for Jive, to become a vertical industry standard where they have strong representation. This is class Law of Accelerating Returns stuff, a vendor will win more new business as a consequence of being perceived as the accepted standard by a group of competitors within a specific vertical industry.

In the “old days” we would have called these things portals but it’s really an understatement to reference any of these products that way now. Portals relied on a single vendor or approved partners to supply functionality that was unavoidably focused around a single vendor’s products and was also typically transactional data focused. With the emergence of unstructured content and social interactions being the bigger drivers of user focus, portals were poorly equipped to deal with this and it opened the door for a menu of competitive products to emerge, Jive being one of the more successful offerings.

A further data point that underscores the point above is that the technical specifications for what constitutes a portal component are less of an issue today, and as Jive and Socialtext both demonstrate, an OpenSocial widget is just as accepted as a native component. The evolution of widgets demands that they move beyond content and creative to social awareness, in other words, how the widget or component interacts with other components is of equal importance to what the widget or component itself does.

This is a pretty competitive sector and there are firm lines that are developing. Microsoft and IBM offer the biggest footprint enterprise social software stacks and as can be expected they are expensive and timely to implement but on the other hand they offer a lot of functionality and demonstrable ability to scale to very large user numbers while also offering strong integration options to other important enterprise products. Other vendors have emerged that challenge Microsoft and IBM, such as Jive, while another class is extending the big enterprise offerings (most significantly what NewsGator is doing on Microsoft Sharepoint). With a flight to quality as a consequence of current economic conditions, the large vendors will continue to dominate while challengers like Jive with extensive customer lists and mature product offerings will close the window for new startups to establish a foothold.

Today the focus in on what users are doing rather than what companies want them to do and Jive’s SBS is well positioned to take advantage of that with a compelling user experience, strong social functionality, a “marketplace” for third party components and federated community sites, and lastly, advanced functionality (e.g. analytics) that grow in importance as usage grows.

Ubikwiti is, despite a really unfortunate name, a very cool service. In a sentence, this is what I’ve always wanted to do with business mashups, combine off the shelf componentry at the business user level to achieve highly personalized business process models that still accommodated the need for master data and workflow integrity.

This is a huge challenge for any company because this is not how business users are accustomed to interacting with business applications. It’s also not clear that an significant number of business users want to do this but IT definitely wants more control over business apps in a manner that is abstracted from writing code, so maybe IT is really the front door in to business users.

The company is correct to assert that big enterprise apps don’t scale down well and large vendors have economic issues that obstruct a shift to pay-as-you-go pricing. The a la carte selection of business processes is something traditional enterprise companies will never do on their own but considering the waste that is in modern ERP systems from seats and functionality bought but not implemented, this is a good move aligned with the best interests of customers. Having said that, it’s also clear that there is a big functional gap between the top and bottom of the market so comparison to traditional enterprise software isn’t appropriate all the time.

Ubikwiti pricing is not pure a la carte though, it’s all you can eat for $4.95 a month per user. This is roughly half of the price point for Quickbooks Online but I am not in a position to evaluate the functional footprint relative to QB Online so I’ll reserve any judgement on their pricing model, but suffice to say, it does make it easy to get on to the system.

This is an intriguing service, I will be watching to see how they progress.

This is a good list, the three that I very much like are Untangle, SnapLogic (fyi, I met SnapLogic last year, wrote about it here) and Kickfire.

It’s easy to focus on SaaS companies in the enterprise space, relegating on premise to a wheezing and gasping dinosaur in it’s final days, but the fact remains that on premise software remains the overwhelming majority of spend for enterprise IT and that’s not likely to change for a few more generations.

Open source has been a bigger disrupter to enterprise IT than on demand SaaS but because it tends to focus on IT needs rather than business user needs, it gets much less attention. While open source for enterprise business applications has moved up the food chain more slowly than I predicted, it is happening and in the coming years we will see traditional proprietary code vendors come under assault once again by the prospect of open source, this time resulting in more significant progress than in years past.

Other open source companies I like:

Zenoss: Network and system monitoring software.

Enomalism: Build your own private elastic compute cloud.

rPath: Virtual appliances.

Qumranet: Red Hat just acquired this company, more virtualization technology (hypervisor).

OpenAir: Project management software for professional service organizations.

Lot’s of commentary today about VMware missing their number and CEO Greene out of the top job. For the record, when I was at SAP Ventures we looked at this deal but passed because of the husband/wife team (generally a big red flag for venture deals). It worked out for Diane and Mendel, and it would be stating the obvious to say that I regretted we passed on that deal but not just for the financial implications, Diane is the kind of entrepreneur you want to deal with, sincere and genuine but also really really smart.

Having said that, I think comments like this are misplaced and reactive:

Er, VMware may have tweaked its revenue forecast for 2008 to be “modestly below” previous guidance of 50 per cent growth. Few executives of multi-billion dollar companies usually get fired for 49 per cent growth, especially with an imploding worldwide economy in the background.

[From EMC CEO's ego has cost investors billions | The Register]

VMW has been at the center of a lot of confusion about their revenue forecasts and actual performance. Following the catastrophic Jan 28th conference call with analysts there was a lively discussion on the Enterprise Irregulars message board about their call and the details. In Q4’07 the company put up $412m against a $417m forecast… which being off $5m doesn’t seem disastrous but the fact that they came up $5m short while sitting on $550m in deferred revenues made no sense.

On that Jan 28th call they forecast that revenue would grow from $1.3b to $1.9b in 2008, 50% growth which again does not look bad. What that meant is that the company would need to add about $650m in 2008 revenue to meet their growth target of 50%, but when you consider that $550m in deferred revenue on the books it means they were really treading water for 2008. Basically they weren’t growing 50% at all but rather just covering their bases… and this from a company that had reliably put up 80% revenue growth.

At the time there was a line of thought that the company was resetting Wall St. expectations but today we can comfortably suggest that the company has some serious competitive and market challenges facing them. Blame Wall St. for being overly reactive but what investors were challenging is that apparent deceleration in VMW’s business and no substantive answers for what was going on.

The CIO’s role within global 2000 companies has changed in recent years from leading big systems projects, like ERP deployments, to business transformation. The objective for a lot of big companies is to use technology innovations to drive business innovations, not just achieve cost and productivity efficiencies.

“Ten years ago, CIOs spent a lot of time getting transactional systems—the giant stuff—in place. But that’s not so much the job anymore,” says Robert Urwiler, CIO of Vail Resorts. “CIOs have more freedom to explore innovative ways to provide business transformation and more freedom to look around at emerging technologies. I feel like I have an obligation to do that.” If Rogers were to revisit the idea of early adoption in IT in 2008, that classical distribution curve might not look so bell-shaped anymore.

[From Early Adopters' Secrets For Success With New Tech]

This article in CIO Magazine, link courtesy of Vinnie Michandani, caught my attention because it features the CIO of Virgin America, the airline that I have been flying a lot lately. Virgin’s in seat entertainment system, they call it “Red”, is an example of technology edge pushing in action and it’s great if for no other reason than it gives you a lot of control in what is an otherwise captive environment.

First and foremost, the entire system is built on Linux, which in itself is pretty cool but is also representative of a larger commitment to open source technologies by CIO Maguire. The focus on Linux is also representative of how technology is being used to drive business innovation at Virgin.

The entertainment system also has a food ordering system, which can be used to order everything from free drinks to box meals at $9 each. My personal experience suggests that the ability to select from a menu of food options instead of one or maybe two box options results in me spending more money per flight on food, probably on average $12 for a long flight.

The streaming video options are extensive and priced below the psychological threshold where you feel like you are getting ripped off. Throw in a movie and you are up another $6 or $8. There is a tab for online shopping that has yet to be activated, and I can imagine that being a popular service that results in additional affiliate revenue.

Essentially what Virgin America is doing is using technology to not only deliver a better in flight experience but also drive additional revenue per seat that is independent of arbitrary fees being tacked on by the airline. There are 140 seats, assuming a relatively constant load factor of 80% you end up with 112 butts in seats and if they can generate on average $8 per seat the revenue uplift is $900, roughly equivalent to 2 SFO-NYC round trip tickets.

There are 100 flights a day, assuming the short flights are less likely to produce additional seat revenue, let’s average that down to $300 per flight. Making some rough guesses about the flight schedule, let’s say that it’s 60/40 short to long haul which results in a combined additional revenue of $54k per day across their entire schedule. That’s an additional $20 million of revenue (no idea what the margins would be) per year that was enabled by a better piece of technology stuffed in the back of an airplane seat. Not bad.

Sam Lawrence put up this post on the Anatomy of the Enterprise Octopus and as usual he takes advantage of good graphics to make his point in such a way as to be hard to take issue with. He nails it with the following quote:

Think of this is way more effective baton passing. Formal workflows don’t work. People need to know where things are and when it’s right for them to engage. They even need to know how other people like to be engaged. Making sure the trains run on time is big business and things like social workflows and much easier coordination of work can make big gains for companies.

There’s something paradigm shifting going on with enterprise 2.0 but it’s not about collaborate this or user generated that, I suspect it has more to do with the rethinking of business process applications and their limits. We’ve gone through two massive generations of enterprise software that have been predominately master data and transaction oriented with efficiencies being the primary ROI generator.

The rather obvious truth that many of us see is that while efficiencies have translated into better economics for many companies, they have not resulted in better companies that optimize for new opportunities. Also, at an individual employee level, most enterprise software simply sucks and that’s the genesis of the business consumer who takes charge of his/her application environment much to the dismay of formal IT.

The consequences of this ruling are indeed significant, imagine a world where all those unused enterprise software licenses actually have residual value in a secondary market.

Let’s say you didn’t use 30,000 Oracle database seats or 15,000 SAP CRM seats and now you can go out and sell them to another company at a discount. That would certainly put a wrinkle in the business models of major enterprise software companies, as well as create an entirely new class of brokers who comprise this new market.

If Jones’s ruling is upheld on appeal, it will have important consequences for the software industry, where the legal fiction that software is merely licensed is widely employed. In addition to discouraging the market for used software, software firms have also attempted to use the “licensed, not sold” theory to enforce restrictions on reverse engineering that would otherwise be fair use under copyright law. If software is sold, rather than licensed, then no license is required to install and use the software, and the terms of shrink-wrap licenses may not be legally binding.

[From Court smacks Autodesk, affirms right to sell used software]

Dennis nicely captured the 3 people that I’ve read on the HP/EDS deal: Tom Foremski, Larry Dignan, and Vinnie Mirchandani:

My take is skewed by experiences I’ve seen in Europe where EDS has been removed or had its contractual relationships significantly cut back as projects have either failed, been ‘botched’ or it’s been forced to bid under onerous conditions. While everyone points to flat growth, contract cutbacks and changes in the infrastructure world, the long term problems in some of these massive contracts have made EDS a relatively target.

[From HP to take out EDS: does it make sense? | Irregular Enterprise | ZDNet.com]

This deal actually makes a lot of sense because EDS has been under a lot of pressure to improve performance while at the same time being constrained by their existing business, the industry, and culture. Acquisitions have the potential to disrupt all three factors.

Secondly, for HP this is a good move because of EDS’ outsourcing business providing a growth opportunity not just for services but also hardware, HP’s core business. These businesses require extreme scale in order for the economics to work and as a consequence the server hardware market is contracting and expanding at the same time. With companies increasingly moving to hosted data centers and on-demand applications, not to mention hosted cloud initiatives, there are fewer but bigger hardware purchasers.

Lastly, HP definitely needs to get in the game with a cloud initiative and while EDS doesn’t explicitly have that asset today it is not a stretch to give them the benefit of the doubt for their ability to get in this game given the right prioritization.