Pattern Finder

If This Is Friday, It Must Be Manchester

Late Thursday evening I flew into Manchester, England from London. Adventures I had after landing included:

• Being on a bus in the middle of nowhere with the rental car nowhere to be seen. (A scene very similar to the rental car scene in the movie, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. An absolute classic starring Steve Martin and John Candy. If you haven't seen it, you should, especially at this time of year, as it takes place the day before Thanksgiving.)
• Once I'd found the car rental office and the car, driving around the rental car carpark about three times before figuring out how to get out of it. (They'd hidden the Exit signs really well.)
• Overshooting the hotel by about five miles due to initially entering the wrong address in the GPS.(I don't function too well when I'm tired, and by then I'd been up for 20 hours.)

Today, after two meetings in the Manchester area, the Burton Group sales rep and I drove down the M1 to London, where I'll stay over the weekend before flying out on Monday.

By the way, in my Wednesday post I mentioned that Swissair had prevented me from bringing one of my two bags onto an Airbus 320 as carry on because it was too heavy--necessary due to "security reasons." Yet on Thursday, I boarded an Airbus 320 run by British Airways with both bags as carry on and didn't hear a peep about it.

If This Is Thursday, It Must Be Basel

I was in Basel, Switzerland today, and saw the beautiful Town Hall and the square in front of it. An especially nice surprise was that workers had just finished putting up a large Christmas tree within the Town Hall courtyard, and it was very pretty.

Earlier this week, when someone found out that I was traveling in Europe, sent me an e-mail along the lines of, "That must be very exciting." Here's some of the excitement I had:

• I ran to make the train from Basel to Zurich Flughafen (Zurich Airport), and when I got within 6 feet of the door it pulled away (I made the next train).
• However, that cut things a little close. I made my flight to London Heathrow with 10 minutes to spare, and I was the last passenger able to cram my luggage into the overhead bins.
• I inadvertently left my backpack at the security inspection point, and by the time I realized what I'd done and went back to get it, you could tell the security staff were starting to think there was a bomb in it (even though they'd just scanned it and passed it).
• My flight from Heathrow to Manchester was delayed for an hour; when it did arrive, BMI instantly announced that it was "In the final boarding process." The group of bedraggled passengers went to go to Gate 8, but the door to the gate wing was locked, since it was past the official closing time of Terminal 1. Happily a cleaner came along, opened the door, and we propped it open so we could get to the plane. An access alarm went off shortly after I walked away.
• I got to my hotel room at 1 AM.

There's some excitement I could do without.

If This Is Wednesday, It Must Be Zurich

I flew from Amsterdam to Zurich this morning. It was an interesting trip in several ways.

First, SwissAir told me I couldn't bring on one of my two carry-on bags because it was too heavy--9.2 kilos instead of the limit of 8.0 kilos per bag ("Due to security," said the gate agent. I'm like, "Huh?"). So I checked it--in other words, the total weight of my luggage on the plane didn't go down. Yet I'd carried that same bag as carry-on on the flight from Boston to Amsterdam. I suppose it could be related to the airplane, since they probably don't want to overload the overhead bins--this one was an Airbus 320, and the flight from Boston was a larger airplane--but it may just have been an airline peculiarity. It will be interesting to see if British Airways and British Midlands say the same thing in the next several days.

Second, the noise on the plane was incredible--to the point where it was hard to hear the safety announcements--because a bunch of passengers at the back of the plane didn't stop talking the entire flight. They were all businessmen--with a few businesswomen sprinkled in--who got on the plane in groups of two or three, and spent the entire time socializing. It was very similar to what you see on commuter rail trains, where groups of people sit together every day and talk about a variety of topics for the entire trip. And once the plane landed, they continued to stand and talk, even after everyone in front of them had left the plane. Certainly not the behavior I'm used to seeing in the States, where businesspeople, even if they're together, stop talking to each other after awhile, whip out their laptops, and read e-mails or work on a document. They also sit at the front so they can get off quickly.

If This Is Tuesday, It Must Be the SaaS Conference in Rotterdam

Today I was in Rotterdam, where I discussed the roadmap and vision of SaaS at the first European SaaS Conference. I must admit that as I was putting the presentation together several months ago I was a bit stumped on how to talk about the SaaS roadmap--it sort of wanders all over the place, with different applications arriving at different times. For example, SaaS-based web conferencing and SaaS-based web analytics came out in 1995 and 1996, and so have now been around for over a decade, while SaaS-based document sharing solutions arrived only several years ago. All of a sudden, it came to me--while the destinations were all over the place, the roads weren't. I needed to describe the roads themselves: the map of roads. Once I thought of the problem that way, it became very clear. There are three stages of roads:

• Gravel Road: 1993-1999--During this time, hardy pioneers were blazing new trails--startups were looking for a way to break into a market and SaaS (called ASP at the time) was an attention-grabbing hook. Meanwhile, on the customer side, enterprise departments were looking for a software alternative. However, there were no real customization/configuration capabilities.
• Highway: 2000-2006--At this point, SaaS started to go mainstream. Departments (e.g., HR, Sales, Marketing) began using SaaS because sometimes it was a better solution than software and they could buy it faster than software. At the same time, the vendor attitude of "You can have any color you want as long as it's black" attitude started to soften, with suppliers starting to allow some customization via configuration settings.
• Superhighway: 2007+--Today, SaaS is accepted as a delivery model and being exploited. Large vendors are buying up SaaS providers and enterprises are starting to look at migrating significant portions of their business to SaaS (e.g., e-mail). Also, SaaS is now being viewed as a platform.

The conference had some big players in attendance--IBM, Iron Mountain, KPMG, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com were there; Google was supposed to present, but backed out at the last minute.

Tracking Down the Elusive BlackBerry Storm

My Verizon cellphone is now over two years old, and I must admit I have my eye on getting a BlackBerry Storm to replace it. Bill Pray, a colleague of mine, said he got to try one out last week in Utah and liked it. Based on Bill's comment, I figured that at least demo versions had been sent to all dealers, but when I went into my local Verizon Wireless store in Andover, MA on Saturday, the owner said he didn't have any--and didn't appear to believe me when I said there had been a sighting in Utah. He did say he planned to order as many as he could, since he already had 15 orders for it. At that point I decided I'd keep my eyes open and see where it first turns up. I spotted my first one today at a Vodaphone store in downtown Amsterdam. (See the picture to the left; it's the middle one.) I'll be in Zurich tomorrow, so I'll try to make a sighting there; next is Manchester, UK on Friday; and then London over the weekend. I figure I'll have multiple sightings in London if I stroll down Oxford Street. I'll keep you posted.

Peter de Haas: Microsoft Exchange Isn't That Expensive

Peter de Haas, Online Strategy Manager for Microsoft Netherlands, has taken issue with the eWeek article claiming that Serena Software is going to save $750,000 per year by moving to Google Apps. He points out that Microsoft Exchange isn't that expensive. He quotes the Radicati Group, which says, "Mid-size organizations (i.e. 1,000 email users) had a 3 year average TCO of $562 per user/year." So instead of $1 million a year, Microsoft Exchange costs only $449,600 a year (800 employees x $562 per user/year). Um, OK. That's still more than ten times more expensive than the Google Apps price of $40,000 (800 employees x $50 per user/year).

Peter then points to Exchange Online, a hosted version of Exchange run by Microsoft, as a lower cost way to get Exchange. That's certainly cheaper--$92,352 a year, instead of $449,600 a year. However, Peter rightfully points out that that price doesn't include Microsoft Outlook--which if you figure in buying Microsoft Office at $300 for each of the 800 employees, adds $240,000 to the bill (800 employees x $300). If you spread that cost out over three years ($240,000 / 3 = $80,000), then the annual cost for using Exchange Online and the e-mail client is $172,352 per year--still more than four times the Google Apps cost of $40,000 per year. So while Serena Software may not be saving $750,000 a year, it's still saving a chunk of change.

While Peter is right for taking eWeek to task for overstating the cost of Exchange, I think eWeek also overestimates the cost of Google Apps. The article says Serena will pay $250,000 per year for Google Apps, rather than the $40,000 I come up with (800 employees x $50 per user/year).

No matter how you slice it, the ultimate takeaway is that Exchange is still on the high side for licensing fees. Microsoft has only itself to blame for this state of affairs. If Microsoft were to drop the effective price of Exchange to $50 per user per year, Microsoft would stop Google Apps dead in its tracks. Google Apps hasn't done well in large enterprises, but if Microsoft were to meet Google's low price, that would drive the nail into the coffin. I think two things will prevent that change in Microsoft behavior. First, Microsoft likes the margins of the Office suite, and second, Microsoft may be worried that regulators would see such a pricing strategy as monopolistic.

Serena Software: Moving from Exchange to Google Apps

This summer the Collaboration and Content Strategies practice within Burton Group published a report on SaaS-based e-mail, saying that enterprises would increasingly use such an option, whether it came from Cisco, Google, Microsoft, or another provider. There's an eWeek article this morning reporting that Serena Software is moving from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps, thereby saving $750,000 in annual license and support fees.

It's always nice when the market behaves the way you predict it will.

Pictures of Prague

Burton Group held its European Catalyst Conference in Prague in late October. It's a beautiful city, so I thought I'd share some pictures I took while I was there. The top two are of a hotel (Grand Europa) in Wenceslas Square. The bottom two rows are of buildings in the Old Town. I've put additional pictures of Prague up on Flickr.

Google Search Appliance Now Available as a VM

You can now download a free virtual machine version of the Google Search Appliance (GSA) from the Google Code site. The download notes point out:

The Google Search Appliance virtual edition is targeted for development and trial use, and not for production use. To that end:

• This is a software download
• The number of documents crawled and indexed is limited to 50,000
• Developers can test against the features of the Google Search Appliance

The FAQs point out, "You can download Google Search Appliance virtual edition software onto any server that is supported by VMWare virtualization." Interesting that it doesn't support the Microsoft virtual machine environments.

While developers will find the VM version useful, companies thinking about/curious about a GSA should also try it out. It's a way to kick the tires of the product without going into full trial mode with a sales rep.

Social Software in Politics: "Blogged Down in the Past"

An article in the Columbia Journalism Review compares the online strategies of the McCain and Obama campaigns. It notes,

Barack Obama’s campaign reaches out to activist bloggers in order to communicate with and mobilize campaign volunteers and feed them into its online social networking site, MyBarackObama.com. In contrast, John McCain’s campaign takes a top-down approach, using blogs—many of which it helped incubate—as an echo chamber for channeling mostly anti-Obama attacks into the mainstream media, in order to create an impression of grassroots online support.

This "bottom up" characteristic of Web 2.0--embraced by Obama's camp and never really understood by McCain's camp--is puzzling some enterprises as well. The classic command-and-control enterprises, looking at things like blogs and wikis because they feel they have to in order to stay technologically current, are struggling with the fact that they may have to let the community police itself. Otherwise, employees worried about getting fired for saying the wrong thing will stay away in droves, and the community never progresses beyond the rah-rah rollout stage. In short, many companies are finding that in order to use social software effectively, they need to change their culture first. Buying the software is easy; interweaving it into the way employees work and think can be hard.

Google Continues to Be Both Stupid and Smart

Google is an odd mix of being both stupid and smart. The most recent example of stupid was shown in a recent article in PCWorld entitled, "Salesforce.com and Google Execs Blast Oracle, SAP, MS":

Girouard [Dave Girouard, Google Enterprise VP] also had choice words for traditional enterprise software vendors, saying that they haven't learned from the successes of Web-based software for consumers, and are thus failing to meet the expectations of those same consumers when they go to work.

"There's an amazing disconnect between the innovation and user experiences delivered in the consumer world and the stagnant, unenlightened world of enterprise computing that puts the user experience far in the background and focuses on business process," he said.

Uh, let me get this straight. Girouard is saying that competing vendors are stupid for supporting business processes such as role-based administration and records management for documents? (Both of which Google Apps doesn't offer, I might add). The enterprise clients I talk to certainly don't share Google's view. Yes, they appreciate good usability, but that includes not having to save each Google Apps document to their C drive if they want to control it via a records management system.

You see a remark like Dave's and it makes you wonder if Google will ever be successful at selling anything more than search appliances to enterprises--and then you see them do something smart like adding Google Analytics to Google Apps. This new feature allows Google Apps administrators to see how users are interacting with the online documents--which ones are most popular, and which ones aren't. This can be an important thing to know if everyone is supposed to be reading a major company announcement--and they aren't. This understanding of crowd behavior is something that software suites can't offer, and does make Google Apps more useful than software-based legacy applications. Rather than doing negative campaigning, Google should be marketing what it does well--and Google Analytics within Google Apps is one of those things.