Why is IBM in the horizontal solutions business?

Every year I attend IBM software analyst meeting. It is an opportunity to gain a snap shot of what the leadership team is thinking and saying.  Since I have had the opportunity to attend many of these events over the year, it is always instructive to watch the evolution of IBM’s software business over the years.

So, what did I take away from this year’s conference? In many ways, it was not that much difference in what I experienced last year. And I think that is good. When you are a company of the size of IBM you can’t lurch from one strategy to the next and expect to survive.  One of the advantages that IBM has in the market is that has a well developed roadmap that it is in the process of executing on.  It is not easy to execute when you have as many software components as IBM does in its software portfolio.

While it isn’t possible to discuss all that I learned in my various discussions with IBM executives, I’d like to focus on IBM’s solutions strategy and its impact on the software portfolio.  From my perspective,  IBM has made impressive strides in enforcing a common set of services that underlie its software portfolio.  It has been a complicated process that has taken decades and is still a work in progress.  The result required that all of the business units within software are increasingly working together to provide underlying services to each other.  For example, Tivoli provides management services to Rational and Information Management provides data management services to Tivoli. WebSphere provides middleware and service orientation to all of the various business units.  Because of this approach, IBM is better able to move to a solutions focus.

It’s about the solutions.

In the late 1990s IBM got out of the applications business in order to focus on middleware, data management, and systems management. This proved to be a successful strategy for the next decade. IBM made a huge amount of money selling WebSphere, DB2, and Tivoli offerings for SAP and Oracle platforms. In addition, Global Services created a profitable business implementing these packaged applications for enterprises.  But the world has begun to change. SAP and Oracle have both encroached on IBM’s software business. Some have criticized IBM for not being in the packaged software business. While IBM is not going into the packaged software business, it is investing a vast amount of money, development effort, and marketing into the “solutions” business.

How is the solutions business different than a packaged application? In some ways they are actually quite similar. Both provide a mechanism for codifying best practices into software and both are intended to save customers time when they need to solve a business problem.  IBM took itself out of the packaged software business just as the market was taking off.  Companies like SAP, Oracle, Seibel, PeopleSoft and hundreds of others were flooding the market with tightly integrated packages.  In this period of the early 1990s, IBM decided that it would be more lucrative to partner with these companies that lacked independent middleware and enabling technologies.  IBM decided that it would be better off enabling these packaged software companies than competing in the packaged software market.

This turned out to be the right decision for IBM at the time.  The packaged software it had developed in the 80s was actually holding it back.  Therefore, without the burden of trying to fix broken software, it was able to focus all of its energy and financial strength on its core enabling software business.  But as companies like Oracle and SAP cornered the packaged software market and began to expand to enabling software, IBM began to evolve its strategy.  IBM’s strategy is a hybrid of the traditional packaged software business and a solutions business based on best practices industry frameworks.

So, there are two components in IBM’s solutions strategy – vertical packaged solutions that can be applied across industries and solution frameworks that are focused on specific vertical markets.

Horizontal Packages. The horizontal solutions that IBM is offerings have been primarily based on acquisitions it has made over the past few years.  While at first glance they look like any other packaged software, there is a method to what IBM has purchased.  Without exception, these acquisitions are focused on providing packaged capabilities that are not specific to any market but are intended to be used in any vertical market.  In essence, the packaged solutions that IBM has purchased resemble middleware more than end-to-end solutions. For example, Sterling Commerce, which IBM purchased in August 2010, is a cross channel commerce platform.  It purchased Coremetrics in June, provides web analytics and bought Unica for marketing automation of core business processes.  While each of these is indeed packaged, they reach represent a component of a solution that can be applied across industries.

Vertical Packages. IBM has been working on its vertical market packaging for more than a decade through its Business Services Group (BSG). IBM has taken its best practices from various industry practices and codified these patterns into software components. These components have been unified into solution frameworks for industries such as retail, banking, and insurance. While this has been an active approach with the Global Services for many years, there has been a major restructuring in IBM’s software organization this past year. In January, the software group split into two groups: one focused on middleware and another focused on software solutions.  All of the newly acquired horizontal packages provide the underpinning for the vertical framework-based software solutions.

Leading with the solution. IBM software has changed dramatically over the past several decades.  The solutions focus does not stop with the changes within the software business units itself; it extends to hardware as well.  Increasingly, customers want to be able to buy their solutions as a package without having to buy the piece parts.  IBM’s solution focus that encompasses solutions, middleware, appliances, and hardware is the strategy that IBM will take into the coming decade.

Predictions for 2011: getting ready to compete in real time

2010 was a transition year for the tech sector. It was the year when cloud suddenly began to look realistic to the large companies that had scorned it. It was the year when social media suddenly became serious business. And it was the year when hardware and software were being united as a platform – something like in the old mainframe days – but different because of high-level interfaces and modularity. There were also important trends starting to emerge like the important of managing information across both the enterprise and among partners and suppliers. Competition for ownership of the enterprise software ecosystem headed up as did the leadership of the emerging cloud computing ecosystem.

So, what do I predict for this coming year? While at the outset it might look like 2011 will be a continuation of what has been happening this year, I think there will be some important changes that will impact the world of enterprise software for the rest of the decade.

First, I think it is going to be a very big year for acquisitions. Now I have said that before and I will say it again. The software market is consolidating around major players that need to fill out their software infrastructure in order to compete. It will come as no surprise if HP begins to purchase software companies if it intends to compete with IBM and Oracle on the software front.  But IBM, Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft will not sit still either.  All these companies will purchase the incremental technology companies they need to compete and expand their share of wallet with their customers.

This will be a transitional year for the up and coming players like Google, Amazon, Netflix, Salesforce.com, and others that haven’t hit the radar yet.  These companies are plotting their own strategies to gain leadership. These companies will continue to push the boundaries in search of dominance.  As they push up market as they grab market share, they will face the familiar problem of being able to support customers who will expect them to act like adults.

Customer support, in fact, will bubble to the top of the issues for emerging as well as established companies in the enterprise space – especially as cloud computing becomes a well-established distribution and delivery platform for computing.  All these companies, whether well established or startups will have to balance the requirements to provide sophisticated customer support with the need to make profit.  This will impact everything from license and maintenance revenue to how companies will charge for consulting and support services.

But what are customers be looking for in 2011? Customers are always looking to reduce their IT expenses – that is a given. However, the major change in 2011 will be the need to innovative based on customer facing initiatives.  Of course, the idea of focusing on customer facing software itself isn’t new there are some subtle changes.  The new initiatives are based on leveraging social networking from a secure perspective to both drive business traffic, anticipate customer needs and issues before they become issues.  Companies will spend money innovating on customer relationships.

Cloud Computing is the other issue in 2011. While it was clearly a major differentiator in 2010, the cloud will take an important leap forward in 2011.  While companies were testing the water this year, next year, companies will be looking at best practices in cloud computing.  2011 will be there year where customers are going to focus on three key issues: data integration across public, private, and data centers, manageability both in terms of workload optimization, security, and overall performance.  The vendors that can demonstrate that they can provide the right level of service across cloud-based services will win significant business. These vendors will increasingly focus on expanding their partner ecosystem as a way to lock in customers to their cloud platform.

Most importantly, 2011 will be the year of analytics.  The technology industry continues to provide data at an accelerated pace never seen before. But what can we do with this data? What does it mean in organizations’ ability to make better business decisions and to prepare for an unpredictable future?  The traditional warehouse simply is too slow to be effective. 2011 will be the year where predictive analytics and information management overall will emerge as among the hottest and most important initiatives.

Now I know that we all like lists, so I will take what I’ve just said and put them into my top ten predictions:

1. Both today’s market leaders and upstarts are going to continue to acquire assets to become more competitive.  Many emerging startups will be scooped up before they see the light of day. At the same time, there will be almost as many startups emerge as we saw in the dot-com era.

2. Hardware will continue to evolve in a new way. The market will move away from hardware as a commodity. The hardware platform in 2010 will be differentiated based on software and packaging. 2010 will be the year of smart hardware packaged with enterprise software, often as appliances.

3. Cloud computing models will put extreme pressure on everything from software license and maintenance pricing to customer support. Integration between different cloud computing models will be front and center. The cloud model is moving out of risk adverse pilots to serious deployments. Best practices will emerge as a major issue for customers that see the cloud as a way to boost innovation and the rate of change.

4. Managing highly distributed services in a compliant and predictable manner will take center stage. Service management and service level agreements across cloud and on-premises environments will become a prerequisite for buyers.

5. Security software will be redefined based on challenges of customer facing initiatives and the need to more aggressively open the corporate environment to support a constantly morphing relationship with customers, partners, and suppliers.

6. The fear of lock in will reach a fever pitch in 2011. SaaS vendors will increasingly add functionality to tighten their grip on customers.  Traditional vendors will purchase more of the components to support the lifecycle needs of customers.  How can everything be integrated from a business process and data integration standpoint and still allow for portability? Today, the answers are not there.

7. The definition of an application is changing. The traditional view that the packaged application is hermetically sealed is going away. More of the new packaged applications will be based on service orientation based on best practices. These applications will be parameter-driven so that they can be changed in real time. And yes, Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) didn’t die after all.

8. Social networking grows up and will be become business social networks. These initiatives will be driven by line of business executives as a way to engage with customers and employees, gain insights into trends, to fix problems before they become widespread. Companies will leverage social networking to enhance agility and new business models.

9. Managing end points will be one of the key technology drivers in 2011. Smart phones, sensors, and tablet computers are refining what computing means. It will drive the requirement for a new approach to role and process based security.

10. Data management and predictive analytics will explode based on both the need to understand traditional information and the need to manage data coming from new sales and communications channels.

The bottom line is that 2011 will be the year where the seeds that have been planted over the last few years are now ready to become the drivers of a new generation of innovation and business change. Put together everything from the flexibility of service orientation, business process management innovation, the wide-spread impact of social and collaborative networks, the new delivery and deployment models of the cloud. Now apply tools to harness these environments like service management, new security platforms, and analytics. From my view, innovative companies are grabbing the threads of technology and focusing on outcomes. 2011 is going to be an important transition year. The corporations that get this right and transform themselves so that they are ready to change on a dime can win – even if they are smaller than their competitors.

Oracle + Sun: Five questions to ponder

I spent a couple of hours today listening to Oracle talk about the long-awaited integration with Sun Microsystems. A real end of an era and beginning of a new one. What does this mean for Oracle? Whatever you might think about Oracle, you have to give the company credit for successfully integrating the 60 companies it has purchased over the past few years. Having watched hundreds and perhaps thousands of acquisitions over the last few decades, it is clear that integration is hard. There are overlapping technologies, teams, cultures, and egos. Oracle has successfully managed to leverage the IP from its acquisitions to support its business goals. For example, it has kept packaged software customers happy by improving the software. Peoplesoft customers, for example, were able to continue to use the software they had become dependent on in primarily the same way as before the acquisition. In some cases, the quality of the software actually improved dramatically. The path has been more complicated with the various middleware and infrastructure platforms the company has acquired over the years because of overlapping functionality.

The acquisition of Sun Microsystems is the biggest game changer for Oracle since the acquisition of PeopleSoft. There is little doubt that Sun has significant software and hardware IP that will be very important in defining Oracle in the 21st century. But I don’t expect this to be a simple journey. Here are the five key issues that I think will be tricky for Oracle to navigate. Obviously, this is not a complete list but it is a start.

Issue One: Can Oracle recreate the mainframe world? The mainframe is dead — long live the mainframe. Oracle has a new fondness for the mainframe and what that model could represent. So, if you combine Sun’s hardware, networking layer, storage, security, packaged applications, middleware into a package do you get to own total share of a customer’s wallet? That is the idea. Oracle management has determined that IBM had the right ideas in the 1960s — everything was nicely integrated and the customer never had to worry about the pieces working together.
Issue Two: Can you package everything together and still be an open platform? To its credit, Oracle has build its software on standards such as Unix/Linux, XML, Java, etc. So, can you have it both ways? Can you claim openness when the platform itself is hermetically sealed? I think it may be a stretch. In order to accomplish this goal, Oracle would have to have well-defined and published APIs. It would have to be able to certify that with these APIs the integrated platform won’t be broken. Not an easy task.
Issue Three: Can you manage a complex computing environment? Computing environments get complicated because there are so many moving parts. There are configurations that change; software gets patched; new operating system versions are introduced; emerging technology enters and messes up the well established environment. Oracle would like to automate the process of managing this process for customers. It is an appealing idea since configuration problems, missing links, and poor testing are often responsible for many of the outages in computing environments today. Will customers be willing to have this type of integrated environment controlled and managed by a single vendor? Some customers will be happy to turn over these headaches. Others may have too much legacy or want to work with a variety of vendors. This is not a new dilemma for customers. Customers have long had to rationalize the benefits of a single source of technology against the risks of being locked in.
Issue Four: Can you teach an old dog new tricks? Can Oracle really be a hardware vendor? Clearly, Sun continues to be a leader in hardware despite its diminished fortunes. But as anyone who has ventured into the hardware world knows, hardware is a tough, brutal game. In fact, it is the inverse of software. Software takes many cycles to reach maturation. It needs to be tweaked and finessed. However, once it is in place it has a long, long life. The old saying goes, old software never dies. The same cannot be said for hardware. Hardware has a much straighter line to maturity. It is developed, designed, and delivered to the market. Sometimes it leapfrogs the competition enough that it has a long and very profitable life. Other times, it hits the market at the end of a cycle when a new more innovative player enters the market. The culmination of all the work and effort can be short as something new comes along at the right place at the right time. It is often a lot easier to get rid of hardware than software. The computer industry is littered with the corpses of failed hardware platforms that started with great fanfare and then faded away quickly. Will Oracle be successful with hardware? It will depend on how really good the company is in transforming its DNA.
Issue Five. Are customers ready to embrace Oracle’s brave new world? Oracle’s strategy is a good one — if you are Oracle. But what about for customers? And what about for partners? Customers need to understand the long-term implication and tradeoffs in buying into Oracle’s integrated approach to its platform. It will clearly mean fewer moving parts to worry about. It will mean one phone call and no finger pointing. However, customers have to understand the type of leverage that single company will have in terms of contract terms and conditions. And what about partners? How does an independent software vendor or a channel partner participate within the new Oracle? Is there room? What type of testing and preparation will be required to play?

Can IBM become a business leader and a software leader?

When I first started as an industry analyst in the 1980s IBM software was in dire straits. It was the era where IBM was making the transition from the mainframe to a new generation of distributed computing. It didn’t go really well. Even with thousands of smart developers working their hearts out the first three foresees into a new generation of software were an abysmal failure. IBM’s new architectural framework called SAA(Systems Application Architecture) didn’t work; neither did the first application built on top of that called OfficeVision. It’s first development framework called Application Development  Cycle (AD/Cycle) also ended up on the cutting room floor.  Now fast forward 20 years and a lot has changed for IBM and its software strategy.  While it is easy to sit back and laugh at these failures, it was also a signal to the market that things were changing faster than anyone could have expected. In the 1980s, the world looked very different — programming was procedural, architectures were rigid, and there were no standards except in basic networking.

My perspective on business is that embracing failure and learning from them is the only way to really have success for the future. Plenty of companies that I have worked with over my decades in the industry have made incredible mistakes in trying to lead the world. Most of them make those mistakes and keep making them until they crawl into a hole and die quietly.  The companies I admire of the ones that make the mistakes, learn from them and keep pushing. I’d put both IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle in that space.

But I promised that this piece would be about IBM. I won’t bore you with more IBM history. Let’s just say that over the next 20 years IBM did not give up on distributed computing. So, where is IBM Software today? Since it isn’t time to write the book yet, I will tease you with the five most important observations that I have on where IBM is in its software journey:

1. Common components. If you look under the covers of the technology that is embedded in everything from Tivoli to Information Management and software development you will see common software components. There is one database engine; there is a single development framework, and a single analytics backbone.  There are common interfaces between elements across a very big software portfolio. So, any management capabilities needed to manage an analytics engine will use Tivoli components, etc.

2. Analytics rules. No matter what you are doing, being able to analyze the information inside a management environment or a packaged application can make the difference between success and failure.  IBM has pushed information management to the top of stack across its software portfolio. Since we are seeing increasing levels of automation in everything from cars to factory floors to healthcare equipment, collecting and analyzing this data is becoming the norm. This is where Information Management and Service Management come together.

3. Solutions don’t have to be packaged software. More than 10 years ago IBM made the decision that it would not be in the packaged software business. Even as SAP and Oracle continued to build their empires, IBM took a different path. IBM (like HP) is building solution frameworks that over time incorporate more and more best practices and software patterns. These frameworks are intended to work in partnership with packaged software. What’s the difference? Treat the packages like ERP as the underlying commodity engine and focus on the business value add.

4. Going cloud. Over the past few years, IBM has been making a major investment in cloud computing and has begun to release some public cloud offerings for software testing and development as a starting point. IBM is investing a lot in security and overall cloud management.  It’s Cloud Burst appliance and packaged offerings are intended to be the opening salvo.   In addition, and probably even more important are the private clouds that IBM is building for its largest customers. Ironically, the growing importance of the cloud may actually be the salvation of the Lotus brand.

5. The appliance lives. Even as we look towards the cloud to wean us off of hardware, IBM is putting big bets on hardware appliances. It is actually a good strategy. Packaging all the piece parts onto an appliance that can be remotely upgraded and managed is a good sales strategy for companies cutting back on staff but still requiring capabilities.

There is a lot more that is important about this stage in IBM’s evolution as a company. If I had to sum up what I took away from this annual analyst software event is that IBM is focused at winning the hearts, minds, and dollars of the business leader looking for ways to innovate. That’s what Smarter Planet is about. Will IBM be able to juggle its place as a software leader with its push into business leadership? It is a complicated task that will take years to accomplish and even longer to assess its success.

What are the Unanticipated consequences of the cloud – part II

As I was pointing out yesterday, there are many unintended consequences from any emerging technology platform — the cloud will be no exception. So, here are my next three picks for unintended consequences from the evolution of cloud computing:

4. The cloud will disrupt traditional computing sales models. I think that Larry Ellison is right to rant about Cloud Computing. He is clearly aware that if cloud computing becomes the preferred way for customers to purchase software the traditional model of paying maintenance on applications will change dramatically.  Clearly,  vendors can simply roll in the maintenance stream into the per user per month pricing. However, as I pointed out in Part I, prices will inevitably go down as competition for customers expands. There there will come a time when the vast sums of money collected to maintain software versions will seem a bit old fashioned. In fact, that will be one of the most important unintended consequences and will have a very disruptive effect on the economic models of computing. It has the potential to change the power dynamics of the entire hardware and software industries.The winners will be the customers and smart vendors who figure out how to make money without direct maintenance revenue. Like every other unintended consequence there will be new models emerging that will emerge that will make some really cleaver vendors very successful. But don’t ask me what they are. It is just too early to know.

5. The market for managing cloud services will boom. While service management vendors do pretty well today managing data center based systems, the cloud environment will make these vendors king of the hill.  Think about it like this. You are a company that is moving to the cloud. You have seven different software as a service offerings from seven different vendors. You also have a small private cloud that you use to provision critical customer data. You also use a public cloud for some large scale testing. In addition, any new software development is done with a public cloud and then moved into the private cloud when it is completed. Existing workloads like ERP systems and legacy systems of record remain in the data center. All of these components put together are the enterprise computing environment. So, what is the service level of this composite environment? How do you ensure that you are compliant across these environment? Can you ensure security and performance standards? A new generation of products and maybe a new generation of vendors will rake in a lot of cash solving this one.

6. What will processes look like in the cloud. Like data, processes will have to be decoupled from the applications that they are an integral part of the applications of record. Now I don’t expect that we will rip processes out of every system of record. In fact, static systems such as ERP, HR, etc. will have tightly integrated processes. However, the dynamic processes that need to change as the business changes will have to be designed without these constraints. They will become trusted processes — sort of like business services that are codified but can be reconfigured when the business model changes.  This will probably happen anyway with the emergence of Service Oriented Architectures. However, with the flexibility of cloud environment, this trend will accelerate. The need to have independent process and process models may have the potential of creating a brand new market.

I am happy to add more unintended consequences to my top six. Send me your comments and we can start a part III reflecting your ideas.

Can we free process and data?

I am still at IBM’s Information on Demand conference here in Las Vegas (not my favorite place..but what can you do). In listening to a lot of discussions around strategy and products I started thinking about one of the key problems that customers are facing around business process and managing increasingly complex data. What companies really want to do is to have the flexibility and freedom to leverage their critical data across applications and situations. They also want to be able to change processes based on changing business models.

This is the core issue that companies will be facing in the coming decade and will be the difference between success and failure for many  businesses.  Here’s an example of what I mean. Let’s take the example of a retailer in a competitive market. Let’s say our retailer had five or six applications: Accounting, Human Resources, supply chain management, a customer support system, and a customer facing e-commerce system. Each of these systems has an underlying database; each one manages this data based on the business process that is the foundation of the best practices that is the value of these packages. Even if each of the packages are the best in their markets there is a core problem since each solution is a silo. Processes that move between these systems tend to fall through the cracks.  This is why we, as customers of such retailers, are often frustrated when we call about a product that wasn’t delivered, doesn’t work, or requires a change only to discover that one department has no ability to know what is happening in another area. For most companies the dream of single view of the customer is aspirational but not practical right now. In reality, it is hard for companies to mess with their existing applications. These solutions are customized for their business environment; they were expensive and complicated to implement — and change is hard. In fact, companies only change when it is more painful to stay with the status quo than it is to change. In a retail scenario, companies change their approach to process and data management when they must change their business model because the current processes will lead to failure. Retailers are currently faced with emerging approaches to selling and managing customer relationships that are challenging traditional selling models.  Look what a company like Amazon.com or Netflex have done to their slower moving competitors.

A number of customers I have spoken with understand this very well. They are looking at ways to separate their core data assets from the underlying applications. Many of these customers are at the forefront of implementing a service oriented architecture (SOA) approach to managing their software assets. They are increasingly understanding that the secret to their future success is the knowledge they have about their customers, their needs and future requirements within their own set of offerings and those from partners. These companies are setting a priority of making this data independent, secure, and accurate. These business leaders are preparing for inevitable change.  At the same time, I have seen these customers creating SOA business services that are, in essence, codified business processes. For example, a business service could be a process that checks the credit of a potential partner or links a new customer request for service to the set of applications that confirms the request, orders the part, and notifies a partner.

So, here is the problem. These customers are implementing this new model of abstracting data and process based on specific projects or business initiatives.  These projects have gotten the attention of the C-team because of the impact on revenue. But, in reality, the real breakthrough will happen when the separation of data and process are the rule, not the exception.

This is going to be the overriding challenge for the next decade because it is so hard. There is inertia to move away from the predictable packaged applications that companies have implemented for more than 30 years. But I suggest that it will be inevitable that companies will begin to understand that if they are going to remain agile and change processes when they anticipate a competitive threat. These same companies will understand that their data is too important to leave it locked inside an application linked tightly to a process.

I don’t have the answers about what the tipping point will be when this starts to become a wide spread strategy. I think that the cloud will became a forcing action that will accelerate this trend. I would love to start a dialog. Send me your thoughts and I promise to post them.

The end of maintenance?

I admit that I didn’t read the whole article but then I really didn’t have to. I knew what Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com was trying to start. I remember many years ago seeing Marc at an industry conference where he proudly announced the end of software.  A nice marketing approach that definitely got everyone’s attention. Of course, at that time Marc was working on a little software as a service enviornment that became Salesforce.com. The rest is history, as we like to say.  Now, Marc is on a new mission to attack maintenance fees. While it is clear that Marc is trying to tweak the traditional software market I think that he is bringing up an interesting subject.

Software maintenance is not a simple topic to cover and I am sure that I could spend hundreds of pages discussing the topic because there are so many angles. Maintenance fees began as a way of ensuring that software companies had the revenue to fund development of new functionality in their software products. It is, of course, possible to buy software, pay once, and never pay the vendor anything else. Those situations exist of course. Ironically, the better designed the software, the less likely it is that customers will need upgrades. But, clearly that circumstance is rare.

There are major changes taking place in the economics of software. Customers are increasingly unhappy with paying huge yearly maintenance fees to software providers. Some of these fees are clearly justified. Software is complex and vendors are often required to continue to upgrade, add new features, and the like. There are other situations where customers are perfectly happy with software as is and only want to fix critical problems and don’t want to pay what they see as exorbitant maintenance fees.

Now, getting back to Marc Benioff’s comments about the end of maintenance. Here is a link from Vinnie Mirchandani’s recent blog on the topic.Marc is making a very important observation. As the world slowly moves to cloud computing for economic reasons there will be a major impact on how companies pay for software. Salesforce.com has indeed proven that companies are willing to trust their sales and customer data to a Software as a Service vendor. These customers are also willing to pay per user or per company yearly fees to rent software. Does this mean that they are no longer paying maintance fees? My answer would be no. It is all about accounting and economics. Clearly, Salesforce.com spends a lot of money adding functionality to its application and someone pays for that. So, what part of that monthly or yearly per user fee is allocated to maintaining the application? Who knows? And I am sure that it is not one of those statistics that Salesforce.com or any other Software as a Service or any Platform as a Service vendor is going to publish. Why? Because these companies don’t think of themselves as traditional software companies. They don’t expect that anyone will ever own a copy of their code.

The bottom line is that software will never be good enough to never need maintenance. Software vendors — whether they sell perpetual licenses or Software as a Service– will continue to charge for maintance. The reality is that the concrete idea of the maintenance fee will evolve over time. Customers will pay it but they probably won’t see it on their bills.  Nevertheless, the impact on traditional software companies will be dramatic over time and a lot of these companies will have to rethink their strategies. Many software companies have become increasingly dependent on maintenance revenue to keep revenue growing.  I think that Marc Benioff has started a conversation that will spark a debate that could have wide ranging implications for the future of not only maintenance but of what we think of as software.

Oracle Plus Sun: What does it mean?

I guess this is one way to start a Monday morning. After IBM decided to pass on Sun, Oracle decided that it would be a great idea. While I have as many questions as answers, here are my top ten thoughts about what this combination will mean to the market:

1. Oracle’s acquisition of Sun definitely shakes up the technology market. Now, Oracle will become a hardware vendor, an operating system supplier, and will own Java.

2. Oracle gets a bigger share of the database market with MySQL. Had IBM purchased Sun, it would have been able to claim market leadership.

3. This move changes the competitive dynamics of the market. There are basically three technology giants: IBM, HP, and Oracle. This acquisition will put a lot of pressure on HP since it partners so closely with Oracle on the database and hardware fronts. It should also lead to more acquisitions by both IBM and HP.

4. The solutions market reigns! Oracle stated in its conference call this morning that the company will now be able to deliver top to bottom integrated solutions to its customers including hardware, packaged applications, operating systems, middleware, storage, database, etc. I feel a mainframe coming on…

5. Oracle could emerge as a cloud computing leader. Sun had accumulated some very good cloud computing/virtualization technologies over the last few years. Sun’s big cloud announcement got lost in the frenzy over the acquisition talks but there were some good ideas there.

6. Java gets  a new owner. It will be interesting to see how Oracle is able to monetize Java. Will Oracle turn Java over to a standards organization? Will it treat it as a business driver? That answer will tell the industry a lot about the future of both Oracle and Java.

7. What happens to all of Sun’s open source software? Back a few years ago, Sun decided that it would open source its entire software stack. What will Oracle do with that business model? What will happen to its biggest open source platform, MySQL? MySQL has a huge following in the open source world. I suspect that Oracle will not make dramatic changes, at least in the short run. Oracle does have open source offerings although they are not the central focus of the company by a long shot. I assume that Oracle will deemphasize MySQL.

8. Solaris is back. Lately, there has been more action around Solaris. IBM annouced support earlier in the year and HP recently announced support services. Now that Solaris has a strong owner it could shake up the dynamics of the operating system world. It could have an impact on the other gorilla not in the room — Microsoft.

9. What are the implications for Microsoft? Oracle and Microsoft have been bitter rivals for decades. This acquisition will only intensify the situation. Will Microsoft look at some big acquisitions in the enterprise market? Will new partnerships emerge? Competition does create strange bedfellows. What will this mean for Cisco, VMWare, and EMC? That is indeed something interesting to ponder.

10. Oracle could look for a services acquisition next. One of the key differences between Oracle and its two key rivals IBM and HP is in the services space. If Oracle is going to be focused on solutions, we might expect to see Oracle look to acquire a services company. Could Oracle be eyeing something like CSC?

I think I probably posed more questions than answers. But, indeed, these are early days. There is no doubt that this will shake up the technology market and will lead to increasing consolidation. In the long run, I think this will be good for customers. Customers do want to stop buying piece parts. Customers do want to buy a more integrated set of offerings. However, I don’t think that any customer wants to go back to the days where a solution approach meant lock-in. It will be important for customers to make sure that what these big players provide is the type of flexibility they have gotten used to in the last decade without so much pain.

My Top Eleven Predictions for 2009 (I bet you thought there would be only ten)

What a difference a year makes. The past year was filled with a lot of interesting innovations and market shifts. For example, Software as a Service went from being something for small companies or departments within large ones to a mainstream option.  Real customers are beginning to solve real business problems with service oriented architecture.  The latest hype is around Cloud Computing – afterall, the software industry seems to need hype to survive. As we look forward into 2009, it is going to be a very different and difficult year but one that will be full of some surprising twists and turns.  Here are my top predictions for the coming year.
One. Software as a Service (SaaS) goes mainstream. It isn’t just for small companies anymore. While this has been happening slowly and steadily, it is rapidly becoming mainstream because with the dramatic cuts in capital budgets companies are going to fulfill their needs with SaaS.  While companies like SalesForce.com have been the successful pioneers, the big guys (like IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and HP) are going to make a major push for dominance and strong partner ecosystems.
Two. Tough economic times favor the big and stable technology companies. Yes, these companies will trim expenses and cut back like everyone else. However, customers will be less willing to bet the farm on emerging startups with cool technology. The only way emerging companies will survive is to do what I call “follow the pain”. In other words, come up with compelling technology that solves really tough problems that others can’t do. They need to fill the white space that the big vendors have not filled yet. The best option for emerging companies is to use this time when people will be hiding under their beds to get aggressive and show value to customers and prospects. It is best to shout when everyone else is quiet. You will be heard!
Three.  The Service Oriented Architecture market enters the post hype phase. This is actually good news. We have had in-depth discussions with almost 30 companies for the second edition of SOA for Dummies (coming out December 19th). They are all finding business benefit from the transition. They are all view SOA as a journey – not a project.  So, there will be less noise in the market but more good work getting done.
Four. Service Management gets hot. This has long been an important area whether companies were looking at automating data centers or managing process tied to business metrics.  So, what is different? Companies are starting to seriously plan a service management strategy tied both to customer experience and satisfaction. They are tying this objective to their physical assets, their IT environment, and their business process across the company. There will be vendor consolidation and a lot of innovation in this area.
Five. The desktop takes a beating in a tough economy. When times get tough companies look for ways to cut back and I expect that the desktop will be an area where companies will delay replacement of existing PCs. They will make do with what they have or they will expand their virtualization implementation.
Six. The Cloud grows more serious. Cloud computing has actually been around since early time sharing days if we are to be honest with each other.  However, there is a difference is the emerging technologies like multi-tenancy that make this approach to shared resources different. Just as companies are moving to SaaS because of economic reasons, companies will move to Clouds with the same goal – decreasing capital expenditures.  Companies will start to have to gain an understanding of the impact of trusting a third party provider. Performance, scalability, predictability, and security are not guaranteed just because some company offers a cloud. Service management of the cloud will become a key success factors. And there will be plenty of problems to go around next year.
Seven. There will be tech companies that fail in 2009. Not all companies will make it through this financial crisis.  Even large companies with cash will be potentially on the failure list.  I predict that Sun Microsystems, for example, will fail to remain intact.  I expect that company will be broken apart.  It could be that the hardware assets could be sold to its partner Fujitsu while pieces of software could be sold off as well.  It is hard to see how a company without a well-crafted software strategy and execution model can remain financially viable. Similarly, companies without a focus on the consumer market will have a tough time in the coming year.
Eight. Open Source will soar in this tight market. Open Source companies are in a good position in this type of market—with a caveat.  There is a danger for customers to simply adopt an open source solution unless there is a strong commercial support structure behind it. Companies that offer commercial open source will emerge as strong players.
Nine.  Software goes vertical. I am not talking about packaged software. I anticipate that more and more companies will begin to package everything based on a solutions focus. Even middleware, data management, security, and process management will be packaged so that customers will spend less time building and more time configuring. This will have an impact in the next decade on the way systems integrators will make (or not make) money.
Ten. Appliances become a software platform of choice for customers. Hardware appliances have been around for a number of years and are growing in acceptance and capability.  This trend will accelerate in the coming year.  The most common solutions used with appliances include security, storage, and data warehousing. The appliance platform will expand dramatically this coming year.  More software solutions will be sold with prepackaged solutions to make the acceptance rate for complex enterprise software easier.

Eleven. Companies will spend money on anticipation management. Companies must be able to use their information resources to understand where things are going. Being able to anticipate trends and customer needs is critical.  Therefore, one of the bright spots this coming year will be the need to spend money getting a handle on data.  Companies will need to understand not just what happened last year but where they should invest for the future. They cannot do this without understanding their data.

The bottom line is that 2009 will be a complicated year for software.  There will be many companies without a compelling solution to customer pain will and should fail. The market favors safe companies. As in any down market, some companies will focus on avoiding any risk and waiting. The smart companies – both providers and users of software will take advantage of the rough market to plan for innovation and success when things improve – and they always do.

Will packaged applications sink under their own weight? Five recomendations for change.

I have been researching and thinking about the problem of the packaged application for many years now.  Over the years I have had conversations with many CIOs who are planning to implement large complex ERP systems as part of their initiative to streamline their operations.  There is an assumption that implementing one of these systems will simplify corporate IT. There is also the assumption that it is possible to implement an ERP system as is – in other words, without complex customization.  The sad reality is that this just doesn’t happen in the real world.

This brings me to a conversation I had about a month ago with a CIO.  He was in charge of the IT organization in a relatively large corporation (I am not at liberty to mention the company name).  The company had decided to replace its assortment of corporate business applications with a comprehensive ERP system. The idea was correct – the company needed a system that would implement business process and best practices to support the business in a uniform and efficient manner.  The problem, in my mind was two fold – first the cost.  To purchase and then implement this software cost the company $500 million dollars. Obviously, a considerable part of this expense was for professional services.  And maybe that is the point. The idea that a company can purchase a packaged ERP system that is really packaged software is a misnomer. In reality, packaged software is not really packaged.  It is a set of tools, a set of templates and processes that are linked together based on marketing and promise.  The CIO I was speaking with provided some insight into the complexity of this implementation. It required a lot more customization than anyone had anticipated. The promise of out of the box implementation was a myth.  Once the customization was applied to this package, the concept of a packaged environment was gone.  Therefore, it should not have come as a shock when the next time the base platform of processes and tools had to be upgraded; it cost the company an additional $50 million.

So, what am I saying here? Should we throw the bums out? Should we declare that the concept of packaged software is dead and flawed? Probably.  Now, let’s get real. Obviously, companies cannot and should not go back to paper based processes. However, I think that we need to get real about what it means to package software.

Here is what I propose. Let’s not pretend that packaged software is packaged.  The reality is that good software that is designed to meet a specific corporate goal should have the following five components:
1. Business best practices should be component based.  Packaged software should be a set of business services that implement well-tested business processes that are either industry or practice based. For example, accounting practices are fairly well understood and well codified.  Accounting best practices may be different between industries but it is straightforward to create modular components that are populated with processes.  It should not be constructed as a set of complex intertwined code. It should be independent modules that can be linked to each other and that can exchange data.
2.  Create standards based links. Well defined interfaces that enable the customer to link these components and other components without complex coding, including easily usable interfaces to all data files and databases.
3. Separate business rules from code. Business rules should be contained in a separate set of components or a rules engine so that they can updated easily. These rules should have a visual interface so that management can easily review them and map them to corporate governance
4. Implementations should be configurable. It should be straightforward for an organization to change the details of a process or a service without recoding.
5. Modularity is the key. Company specific rules, configurations, and services should be modular and separate from the connective tissue that links the components of these environments.  In this way, when a system foundation needs to be upgraded, it can be done without impacting the value that is the lifeblood of a company.

The bottom line: the packaged software market is at a transition point

The state of the packaged software market is complicated.  Companies across the globe have spent trillion of dollars trying to automate business practices.  Some implementations have been successful. But even those companies that have had the good fortune of implementing packaged software to streamline their business have done so at a steep financial and organizational price.  I predict that we are entering a new stage of evolution of software.  Many of the CIOs I have spoken with lately are beginning to rethink the conventional wisdom about packaged applications.  They are beginning to take the concept of business services that is the foundation of a service oriented architecture and applying that to the packaging of codified best practices.
One CIO I spoke with has started methodically to peel away key business services from packaged applications.  This might be an order to cash process that is rewritten hundreds of times across hundreds of applications.  Now, the company has created one business service called order-to-cash.  This order-to-cash service will be used anywhere in the company where this capability is needed.  This very patient CIO plans to replace duplicated services locked in inflexible packaged applications with well-constructed and very independent business services.  And some day, there will be no more complicated, inflexible, and repetitive packaged applications.  I think this might lead to a lot more innovation at a fraction of the cost.