Mobile and Enterprise Applications: Answers Questioned

I've been talking a lot about mobility with customers over the last several weeks. It's top of mind with the release of the Mobile SDK 1.2, which makes it simple to create mobile applications for just about anything. Some common themes from customers:

• Mobile use cases are different. Many (if not most) need to be quick logging of activities. It's not working through a complex business problem on your iPhone.
• An analogy from consumer software is Foursquare versus Facebook. Foursquare is fast, designed to get a user in and out of the application in seconds. Facebook is designed to hold your attention for minutes (heck, hours if you're stuck in the airport).
• Like Foursquare, there should be no barrier to the end user for mobile data entry: logging a sales activity, a shipment, an idea. And geo-location tags make that even easier. 
• Like Facebook, users will need to connect with others in the company. And almost all users need some kind of document library available. That generally dovetails into social media business requirements.
• BYOD just makes sense, it's ultimately much easier for most businesses to support, and is one less thing to manage. So HTML5 will be a natural design choice for a lot of this...even more so as the specification and support evolves.

Ultimately, progressive companies want to use mobile trends as a competitive advantage. Obviously, mobile personnel become more productive. But capturing more data, and more accurate data, will eventually lead to more agile, productive businesses. And that's where it gets interesting...

Random thought of the day.

As an avid news consumer with daily commute time to keep me captive, I spent time over the summer experimenting with the best ways to catch up on daily events on my iPhone. Sure, I love my iPad, but when I'm standing on a crowded train, my iPhone is easier to hold and control. Besides, I'm almost never without my iPhone at home or on the road - I have more moments to steal some productivity with my iPhone than any other device.

Last summer, Scribd announced Float, which on the surface looked perfect: a single user interface for any content I want. No more Twitter hyperlinks to poorly designed websites, or trying to manage everything with Google Reader. One app, one place to go, finally.

One problem: the app didn't work.

I downloaded Float on my iPhone 4 the day it launched, and quickly setup a few key content feeds from the list. While not everything on the web was accessible, it was a good enough selection to get get started. On the first day, it seemed to crash and close every second article or so. Many articles failed to load. But, hey, it just came out, so I gave them some slack.

Over the next week or two, it seemed that Float had an update to push every day. Every time, stability seemed to get worse. The user interface had a confusing preview feature you could kind of use by sliding over the article, and that itself would crash the application on occasion. After about 2 weeks, I grew tired of the constant updates, user interface, and instability. So I stopped using it.

In December, Flipboard launched their iPhone app, about 5 months after my Float experience. Flipboard for the iPad may be the most elegant piece of software I've ever used, and the iPhone app promised the same 1-stop interface Float had promoted. So I tried it.

The iPhone interface is every bit as spectacular as the iPad experience. The smaller form factor requires some design changes, of course, but the user features and the content presentation are outstanding. The presentation of my Twitter and Facebook content may never replace the iOS clients for those applications, but the ability to present the content linked in my social feeds is unparalleled.

So I use Flipboard, and I'll never go back to Float. Flipboard wasn't the first to market, not even close. But they did it right, which ultimately was more important than being first.

Lesson learned.

SAP HANA - system of engagement?

Used Evernote for today's SAP thoughts. They still don't get it.

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s5/sh/0a3dce0a-0d86-45dd-8c74-aa3321006bb6/26e71076b80d00d5e4d7eb76744ece83

Big Software Perils

This Gartner analysis of the "big" software companies is fantastic. I've talked to 100+ customers over the past 5 months, and most of them are in 2 ERP camps:

• Support mode: Hey, we all need a ledger. But let's face it, you shouldn't be investing 25% in SAP or Oracle systems that not only will never innovate, don't need to. My friends at Rimini Street are building a robust business, with good reason.
• Upgrade mode: let's face it,if you are running SAP or Oracle ERP, you're always upgrading. When upgrade projects take years, by the time you've rolled it out across all instances, users, and geographies, it's time to start doing it all over again. But the "value" of the upgrades? Mostly for hardware compliance, software compliance, internationalization.

Is there an innovation mode? Not with the major ERP players. Many customers are looking for an innovation platform that allows them to build fast, with minimal IT impact. An army from IBM or Microsoft won't work for the average American business, either.

The more I read about the state of software today, the happier I am to be at Salesforce.com.

Lock-In? Please...

In the last 4 months, I've talked to over 70 companies about Platform as a Service --> PaaS. Big companies. Small companies. Companies that make stuff. Companies that service other companies. Companies that represent business in America.

As with any emerging technology, the conversations are almost always educational (both ways) and spirited. And it's a lot of fun to figure out new ways we can improve their businesses.

Of course, they have concerns. Being new to the job, one concern I expected to hear was "vendor lock-in". After all, some analysts have pointed it out as a big deal. So I listened, listened some more, and took copious notes. 70 customers later, the percentage that list "lock-in" as a problem speaks volumes:

Zero.

Instead, I'm hearing a lot of quotes like this:

• "We need to move fast and innovate"
• "Let's choose the best tool for the job"
• "I want to leverage our existing skills"
• "Everything is going mobile"
• "We need flexible business models and a vendor that thinks like a partner"

Lock-in? Just another invention of ivory-tower analysts. I'll focus on real business problems at real companies instead.

To my customers: the Force is with you. Heroku, too.

JMF

Move fast, securely

For those who haven't heard, I've recently joined Salesforce.com working on the Platform business. It's great to be in a new place, on a growing team, working on a growth market (According to Gartner, anyway).

In my few few weeks, I've talked to about a dozen customers who all spin a similar story:

• Our business systems can't keep up with our user demand (consumerization of IT trends are rampant)
• Moving fast is important, but it can't pose undue security risk. With a nod to Citibank as an example...

With an array of new technologies available to IT professionals, productivity gains are only going to increase in the coming years. Ruby was a catalyst, new languages continue to pop up, and even Java is keeping pace with new frameworks to accelerate deployment in the Enterprise. Programmers are turning into polygot programmers, which is an accurate (if not amusing) term I've learned.

Putting this new power on a secure platform gives the CIO the ability to grow the business with increased productivity, while maintaining a central governance point to enforce enterprise security.

Sounds like the best of both worlds to me...

SaaS Benchmarking

I enjoyed reading this post by Dave Kellogg on SaaS, which summarizes a really nice BVP piece. I took particular note of axiom #8:

"Leverage and monetize the data asset. You can do this by leveraging your expertise to identify the metrics and dashboards of most analytic value and further by then selling industry benchmark data on them. This, to me, is one of the more obvious SaaS opportunities, yet nevertheless to-date, in my experience, one of the most unexploited. I expect to see much more progress in this area in the coming few years."

Having spent a good amount of time over the past year working on this, I know it's a great opportunity, but it's not a simple problem to solve. If you're going to tackle it, take note:

• Build your application vision first. Make no mistake, treating this as an application (as opposed to a data feed) frees your mind from worrying about the technical challenge, which will come later. Get on a whiteboard, sketch on a napkin, gather around the campfire in order to...
• Define some good metrics. It's an analytical application at its core, which revolves around measurements, dimensions, and comparisons thereof.
• Broaden your technical horizons. To pull it off, you'll likely need several components or tools, including Database, ETL, Statistical Programming, Business Intelligence, and UI and Data Discovery Frameworks. Each adds value at each step in the data lifecycle, but also must be carefully orchestrated. Software advancements in most of these domains are scorching right now. That's great news for developers, but also requires diligent oversight to make sure everything works together. I've listed some of the important ones below, linking to IBM pages with more detail.

In most ways, these concepts aren't new. Data providers have been turning aggregated metrics into commercial assets for decades. But the explosion of SaaS combined with new technical advancements are creating new opportunities for insight into processes and metrics that, until now, were confined to the walls of individual companies.

IBM Links

Predictive Analytics

Big Data Analysis - Hadoop

Scalable, Low-Maintenance Analytic Data Warehouse Databases

In-memory Analytics

Text Analytics

Business Intelligence and End User Data Exploration