The Future of Organizations, The Future of Technology
While attending HP’s Discover event (disclosure – HP covered some of my expenses for attending the event) in Frankfurt in December I was invited to take part in an interview alongside fellow Antipodean Paul Muller. The interview started off with Paul Muller explaining what he does in terms of looking at the macro trends impacting [...]
Who is to blame when a SAP Payroll Project Fails
There have been several high profile SAP Payroll failures over the past few years in the United States at places such as the State of California, National Grid, Kentucky Government, City of Portland, LA School District, City of San Diego, California Judicial Council, Marin County and an epic train wreck happening down under at Queensland [...]
The Truth About Lock In
Last week I was invited to speak at a Microsoft conference in Redmond about building cloud applications for portability across clouds and infrastructure. In my presentation, I approached the issue of application portability from the enterprise perspective. This means that developers generally are not choosing servers, clouds or other infrastructure components. Developers focus on building [...]
Empathize Not Sympathize
Many enterprise software vendors sympathize. “We know it’s a bad experience” or “We will fix the usability.” One of the reasons the software is not usable is because the makers never had any empathy for the end users who would use it. In many cases the makers didn’t even know who their end users were; [...]
Enterprise software wars: 5 points of advice for CIOs
Enterprise software, long a complex domain only of interest to specialists, has become the darling of venture capital investors and start-ups. This post presents context and concludes with advice for CIOs on navigating the changing enterprise software landscape. Enterprise software eats the world (photo credit: Michael Krigsman) To get a sense of growing interest in [...]
PaaS and Mobile Enterprise – Real Conversations with Customers
One of the benefits of working on cutting edge technology like PaaS is that I get to have conversations with enterprise customers about the transformations that PaaS will bring. Increasingly, I’m seeing lots of interest in the intersection of PaaS and mobile enterprise (yeah, it’s not just an attempt by me to put together two buzzwords!). [...]
Cloud research exposes gaps between CIOs and business leaders
We often hear that IT is not aligned with the business, which is a catchall concept loosely meaning that business leaders and IT folks do not understand each other’s goals. Although differences in perspective and goals between these groups do exist, the gaps are difficult to measure, quantify, or even describe precisely. Nonetheless, these differences [...]
SAP and HANA: 5 Points of advice for CIOs
Following a significant announcement from SAP, here is advice for Chief Information Officers.
HP’s Cloud: The Giant Ship Lost its Way
HP stands still, not taking the initiatives and real risks expected of a true industry leader. At the Discover conference, I learned why some companies don’t last and why this IT giant is at risk of losing in this new era IT battle.
2013 – The Year of the User – Again.
I’ve long since given up the perennial quest of predicting “what this year will bring”, skillfully leaving this particular exercise in bland rhetoric to those bold enough to want to suggest whether 2013, 2014, 2015 or 2021 will indeed finally prove be the year of VDI, Linux on the Desktop or herald the arrival of other such [...]
Moving PaaS Beyond the Sound Bites in 2013
Most of the discussion around PaaS these days tends to focus on the rapid application deployment capabilities. That’s the easiest thing to demo in a 3-minute video so it tends to get the headlines. I believe that in 2013 we will move on from this eye candy and dig into some of the higher value [...]
Cloud research: Cost matters most and confusion remains
Although cloud computing holds the promise of innovation and business transformation, buyers remain focused on cost and are confused over license models.
The Basho Riak News Keeps Coming – Get to Distributing All The Things!
I mentioned earlier this week on Twitter that there was a deluge of software releases, additions and other goodies that would be released in the coming days. Earlier this week Jeremiah @peschkaj & OJ @TheColonial released the CorrugatedIron .NET Client for Riak. Big news for my .NET cohorts out there! It makes life uber easy …
Which Vendors Own the Enterprise Social Software Market?
According to IDC the enterprise social software market was just shy of $800 million in 2011 which represented a growth of 40% when compare to the previous year and a growth of 100% when compared to 2009.
‘Autonomy Inside’ matters at Hewlett Packard
The Hewlett Packard marketing machine was busy last week, assuring the world that the company’s £7.1bn ($11.7bn) acquisition of Autonomy still made sense despite an eye-watering financial write down and unseemly public squabbling with the Cambridge company’s former management. HP CEO Meg Whitman used her keynote at HP Discover in Frankfurt to assert that the [...]
