You are here: Home / Archives for Technology Product Advisory Services

On the Evolution of the Enterprise “App”

22 June 2011 By

I’m talking about APPliance, what kind of apps are you talking about?

I can’t help but think that appliances provide the same value proposition to companies that apps do for consumers.

Appliances…

  1. simplify functionality,
  2. enable innovation within a specific context, and
  3. give people (I hate the word “users”) the control they need over their specific environment in order to make sense of the ocean of capabilities available in the broader technology landscape.

Want to know what I’m talking about… head over to your local bookstore and read John Jantsch’s forward to Ken Yarmosh’s book AppSavvy . In it he writes about how he took freely available podcast content from his website, created a $2.99 app, and people bought it. They paid extra for free content because (he surmises) that it gave people the control they valued over the content.

Maybe (I don’t believe so, but let’s say) you could do everything without an appliance that you could do with… however, with an appliance you literally drop it in and go. You don’t get that convenience with pure software. You get “well, you could do that with the software if you set it up as follows…”.

By the way, the inspiration for this post was a long conversation I had with some folks at Solace Systems yesterday and today’s IBM Netezza press release which I believe is a sign of things to come in the broader market. Netezza is an IBM analytics appliance. Remember DataPower? They’re an IBM appliance for service/SOA/API compliance & security. Oracle acquired Sun and is trying to figure it out, and I bet HP could do it if they fixed their management problems, and Apple TV is nothing more than a consumer appliance – there’s nothing you can do with Apple TV you can’t do with a computer.

Filed Under: Technology Product Advisory Services Tagged With: , ,

The #1 Proof that Windows is More Expensive than Linux is…

13 June 2011 By

Just look at the pricing of hosting vendors.

This is the free market at work. Not every pricing model is cost-plus. Some pricing is supply-and-demand driven. However, we can reasonably assume that in a very competitive market where there’s a customer-grab happening, pricing would reflect costs because there’s not much supply-and-demand history.

In any case, I’m doing some research on cloud offerings and came across Rackspace’s cloud pricing when I had this thought. Check it out. Linux is 75% cheaper than Windows. I believe that’s probably a reasonable benchmark, regardless of it’s accuracy.

If you want to read more about the state of cloud hosting, check out Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, also posted on Rackspace’s site. It’s a good quick read.

By the way, another insight to the market.

Gartner most heavily weighs “execution” in their evaluation of cloud vendors… though admits that this market is noted for the current rapid evolution of services and offerings.

I wonder if “execution” is the most important factor in a rapidly evolving market. Perhaps completeness of vision is? You might execute best, but if you’re executing the wrong thing, it’s going to take you longer to get there. If you’re vision is right, you’ll maintain market leadership, and learn to execute along with your customers.

Remember, you don’t have to be 10x as smart as the person next to you to impress them. You just need to be a little smarter than they are, and they probably can’t tell how much smarter you actually are. These vendors don’t need to execute perfectly… just good enough to ensure that their customers succeed – and then provide maximum innovation and vision to give their customers the simplest growth path to the future at the most efficient price point (like Amazon AWS seems to be doing).

Filed Under: Technology Product Advisory Services Tagged With: , , ,

9 Apps = iCloud

7 June 2011 By

I find it fascinating to see the comparison between Apple and Google (and others), and try to understand how to bring these lessons into my own work.

When Apple launches something, it seems to go after the “end-to-end” experience. They seem less interested in building generic “platforms” than others, in particular Google and Amazon.

Though perhaps comparing different products (refraining from saying “apples to oranges”)… the other week, when Google announced their Wallet platform, it’s just that. At the time I wrote about the “end to end experience” others, in particular retail banks, might build on top of Google Wallet to deliver an end-to-end experience.

Apple and Google both seem to be going after consumer markets, and I really believe Google would be more successful over the short term if they helped others build the end-t0-end experience (minimizing the “technology” and maximizing the “consumer value”) as part of their platform roll-out.

Apple’s not waiting for people to use their cloud to innovate… I’ve no doubt that will come and there will be some great innovation. They’ve defined the cloud as 9 specific applications, and then delivered on the end-to-end experience. It’s not everything to everyone, but it’s everything to someone. It’s their beach-head, and I’ve not doubt we’ll see more Apple apps be added to those 9 over time.

With regards to the enterprise market though, say Amazon Web Services, I think Google’s strategy of building a platform is more appropriate and then partnering for the end-t0-end experience. Enterprise success is about getting anchor accounts, and building out solutions around that success. I think success in that case then drives partnerships, perhaps appliances or gateways, that make the cloud misty. Meaning, the customer may not even realize the cloud is there. For example, forget “buying Amazon’s cloud”, a customer might instead buy “enterprise backup to the cloud” which in turn validates the cloud, and creates a leveraged model for driving customer adoption indirectly.

These sorts of relationships are important, and over a relatively short period of time will help get traction on the underlying platform. However, I think that in the enterprise market the platform provider needs to engage directly with the customer around the platform, and bringing a platform to market is more valuable than a solution at first. As the platform matures, then engage with partners who can deliver an end-to-end solution experience to their “niche” markets.

 

Filed Under: Technology Product Advisory Services

APM is, By Definition, an Integration Problem

27 May 2011 By

I’ve been thinking (again) about Application Performance Management over the last two weeks as I begin some new customer work. For obvious reasons, I’ve got a lot to say on the subject and I’m just trying to get sorted and create a publishing schedule on the topic.

I would like to leave you with a thought though that popped into my head last night with respect to the space.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Technology Product Advisory Services Tagged With: ,

Page Numbers in E-Books? Simple, right?! Apparently Not.

25 May 2011 By

Disclosure: I’m an Apple fan. And, though I have frustrations across all their products, there is also something about the “Apple Experience” that I believe in. It’s a level of attention detail; details focused on the non-technical user that matter. They seem to have a way of creating a very natural experience with technology that most other companies can’t match.

By the way, Tivo’s another company that has this ability to hit the human experience. I remember when I first went to movies after getting my Tivo and reflexively trying to rewind the movie (in the theater) 30s so that I could catch what was said. In the years since then, I still notice how poor alternative products compare even now, to those early Tivo products.

To the point…

I was really excited when Amazon announced (and subsequently delivered) page numbers on ebooks. I’m a math guy, and I like to count things. I also had a hard time enjoying starting a new book when I had no idea how long of a read I was to expect.

Page numbers! Simple, right? Apparently not. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Technology Product Advisory Services Tagged With: , ,

Thought Piece on Open Source Software

7 April 2011 By

Image courtesy of the Open Source Initiative

I remember my first job in software. Teknekron Software Systems. You’d know them as TIBCO. It was 1995, I was a “networking expert” and I was hired to make sure the networks underneath high-speed middleware based trading systems were designed to maximize system performance.

 

I love the software industry. Software’s like magic. It can be anything at all. And, agree or not, I believe it’s a very young industry so there’s a lot of room for trail-blazing.

An area of software I don’t have much experience with is open source. I’m a commercial guy. I like to make money, and I understand “build a product, sell it”. It’s much harder to understand “build a product, give it away”.

That said, at Progress where we had FUSE message-oriented-middleware as a result of the IONA acquisition I was exposed to open source for the first time. It’s a very different beast, and in some ways it changed a lot of my thinking.

Let’s say you’ve been living in a closet for the last 15 years, and didn’t know anything about middleware and messaging. Though somehow, you were up to speed technically on all things software when you came out of the closet.

Let’s say you have a project that requires middleware. You want to create a tender (RFP/RFI), but you don’t really know enough about middleware. And, you can’t buy it until you create a tender.

How do you “play with it” and actually do something, gaining the experience to make “the best decision” on your purchase1? [Read more...]

  1. In my experience, companies have major failures here, and evaluate software very poorly when building an RFP by asking questions and playing vendors against each other in a proof-of-concept. A lot of time and money is wasted shamelessly. I wrote more about this elsewhere. [↩]
Filed Under: Technology Product Advisory Services Tagged With: ,

Twitter’s Biggest Competitor (One I Bet Makes Things Interesting)

28 March 2011 By

In an interesting twist on the API economy, UberMedia now controls over 20% of twitter traffic.

What if UbermMedia created a value-added “twitter” backbone enabling two users of UberMedia properties to interact in ways beyond what Twitter can offer… but was “backwards compatible” with Twitter’s API (and therefore other UI’s built on Twitter’s backbone)?

In fact, TweetDeck, the latest UberMedia property, already offers a feature that lets tweets be longer than 140 characters. It’s only a matter of time, until that feature interoperates between all of UberMedia’s properties. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Technology Product Advisory Services Tagged With: , , , ,

3 Pillars for an Online Product Launch

23 March 2011 By

You’ve got something everyone wants. Awesome. That’s step one. Now what?

Well, you need to get it out there. And, you need a plan. What do you do first? How do you make decisions when presented with conflicts, such as time, money, or knowledge constraints?

Obvious stuff, I know. But, often we get lost in the details or can’t come up with a good execution plan. Last week I reviewed an e-book creation e-book and very early on it said that “the idea is the bedrock” on which you build a foundation of execution. I liked that way of thinking about it, because it helps to express the value I add to my customers. Execution. Making things happen. Being tactical, while keeping the big picture in mind. It’s harder than it looks*.

So, I’ve come up with 3 pillars to help people express the strategy behind delivering their offering. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Technology Product Advisory Services Tagged With: , ,

Does That API Go With This Outfit?

18 March 2011 By

Have you ever purchased a product based on a product description, or industry review, or friend’s recommendation… only to realize you’ve got a different situation than those others, and that the product you’ve bought is not right for you?

Have you ever purchased a complex product (chosen a neighborhood to live in, or picked a type of car) and found, a few years into the decision, that based on what you’ve learned since then, you would have made a different decision? Maybe the house you bought was great, but the neighborhood… or the criteria you used to evaluate the schools were not the best criteria for what ended up being your situation?

Ever wonder why second children are raised so much differently than firstborn? (No hard feelings, really.)

It’s because we learn as we grow. We don’t know the right questions to ask until we have the experience, at which point we have to live with some of the decisions we’ve made.

It’s like this a lot with application architecture.

People who define architectures (or select products) try to anticipate what they don’t know… like how the business will change, or what the economy or industry trends will do. That’s important, but only part of the decision. These same decision makers discount the fact that they don’t know what they don’t know.

“Social technology” (that’s the phrase I’m using, you can use your own) enables us to share more with more people. It’s changing the dynamic of decision making, in part because we can leverage the wisdom of the crowd.

Let me give you an example.

I don’t care if the guy next to me in the coffee is smart enough to be the next president, but if I have a conversation with him and ask the right questions… I may trust his opinion. If I asked him why he chose this cafe, over the brand-new one across the street, I’m either going to relate to the answer or not. If I asked 10 people over 10 days, I’d have a really good insight into the cafe… maybe understanding the best time to arrive, or the best barista to befriend. I would even gain a new perspective or two because some of those people would evaluate the cafe differently than I ever thought to. It might take me much longer to figure it out otherwise. Or, I might learn much more quickly if I really should be going across the street to the new cafe (with seemingly harsh sound & lighting).

This is what brands are (re)learning about marketing and how they communicate. It’s not about the smooth talker with the sharp suit. It’s not about the buzzwords. It’s about authenticity and the shared experience.

With that in mind, let me post a few questions:

  1. How can we use social technology (and crowd-sourcing methodologies) to improve the API experience?
  2. What if I didn’t have to learn the same mistakes you did, six months after you?
  3. What if I had access to more contextual-information (as compared to product information)?
  4. What if I could share (and use) tips or fixes the community has already created to best use an API, so that I didn’t have to recreate those tools (and the thought process behind them) from scratch?

I’ll leave you with an example. My post from a few weeks ago, when Salesforce bought DimDim and the impact it had on DimDim API users. There were probably an awful lot of people/companies using DimDim’s API having the same “oh crap” moment the day that announcement came out.

Wouldn’t it be great if they could have come up with a solution together?

Yeah it sure would.

Originally posted on OpusGrid.

Filed Under: Brand Experience Through Technology, Technology Product Advisory Services Tagged With: , , ,

Cognitive Dissonance in Social Strategy

14 March 2011 By

What’s wrong with this picture?

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Technology Product Advisory Services Tagged With: , , ,
« Older Posts