Software Safari - Premium Blog on Application Software

AEC Software - A quick profile

Over the years I've reviewed a number of project and portfolio management as well as professional  service automation software applications. Many of these are offered as on-premise or, lately, on an on-demand basis. Regardless of business model, these solutions can often be a bit high-priced for those companies desiring a more straightforward and simplistic solutions.

Last week, I spoke with executives from AEC Software of Dulles, Virginia. AEC sells a $349 (retail)  project management product. They also offer solutions for 5, 10 or 25 concurrent users. Their most current version of the software is called FastTrack Schedule 10. This product is targeted for individuals who may need a project management solution for a short time or for a less complex endeavor. This could be the person who is an occasional project manager or is a project manager for a specific endeavor. Contrary to the company’s name (AEC - often refers to architecture, engineering and construction), the software product can be used in many different industries (e.g., advertising) and not just AEC.

This particular product comes pre-delivered with a number of project management templates and examples that are free to customers. The software also allows the collection and and utilization of outside data regarding project resources. As an example, information about specific project team personnel can be extracted from Microsoft Outlook. Photographs of workers can even be added to the resource management tool. The resource management tool permits project managers to consolidate resource requirements across multiple projects to identify potential resource conflicts.

Projects can be encoded via effort driven schedules. Project information can be imported and exported to and from Microsoft Project. The software already supports Microsoft Project 2010.

AEC believes they have the following product advantages:

-          their product utilizes workflow and other ease-of-use technologies

-          the software works on both Macintoshes and Windows-based PCs.

-          The software presents information in a easy to use, understand and enter perspective.

From what I saw of this package, I concluded the following:

-          Given the software's price point, the product is a straightforward, easy to use project planning tool that adds many helpful resource management capabilities.

-          The product is correctly positioned as a tool to be used by persons or firms with few or sporadic projects. It was not designed to replicate the types of complex program management capabilities found in higher-end project portfolio management solutions. However, complex program management solutions don't retail for $349 either.

-          Professional service firms may find the resource management capabilities to be less robust than what one finds in a professional services automation solution. Likewise, very large complex multiperson project teams will want a solution that comes with pre-supplied time entry module. There is no such module currently within this product line.

Processes still not 1st Quartile? Could be the documents, integration and other solvable problems at play

Jeff Williams, an old colleague of mine at Accenture, and I will be guests on a webinar on June 3, 2010. The webinar will be run by CFO magazine and sponsored by SpringCM. SpringCM is a cloud-based content management solution headquartered here in Chicago.

Jeff and I will get quizzed regarding our views on the content management space.  This area remains of great interest to Jeff and I as we both drove a lot of work in back office processes in our careers. We’re still seeing a lot of bad processes in businesses. Some of this is due to rushed mergers, over-reliance on spreadsheets, etc. to solve problems. But, sadly, we’re still seeing a lot of talented individuals in all manner of companies struggling with error correction activities, fighting fraud and other fire-fighting activities when they should be doing something far more strategic for their employers and their careers.

Last week, in preparation for this, Jeff and I did a conference call. We’ll likely discuss:

- how prevalent document and process problems still are in many businesses

- how expensive these problems can be

- what the range of solutions are in the marketplace

- the upside some companies reap with better content solutions

- how the cloud (i.e., software as a service) brings better economics to this space

- and whatever else the folks at CFO want us to discuss

If you’d like to listen, there’s no fee but you’ll need to register on CFO magazine’s site:
http://www.cfo.com/webcast.cfm?webcast=14499018&pcode=SPR060310_Vital_Analysis

I hope a few of you can make it

Brian

ERP and the On-Demand World - A Blithering Media Press Release

          

 Intergalactic ERP Says On-Demand is ‘too demanding’

 

Will Raise Maintenance Fees and Re-focus on Acquired Innovations

 

Old School, California - July 22, 2009 - Intergalactic ERP, the world's oldest ERP vendor, has announced that it has developed a new vision behind its software maintenance fees and its On-Demand (or Software as a Service) offerings. It calls this vision “Retrograde”. 

“Frankly, we found On-Demand applications to be too demanding”, says Lord Stuckinthemud, Managing Director of Intergalactic ERP. “Customers were demanding we spend our hard earned maintenance monies and SaaS fees on creating multi-tenant versions of our product. They also demanded things like SAS 70 certification. They actually expected us to dilute our record earnings and create a viable, relevant product. What are they thinking? Look SaaS is only ten years old already – our customers do not want us to rush into such an unproven technology!” 

 

 

After making over 200 acquisitions of on-premise solutions, Intergalactic is re-focusing its development efforts on perfecting other peoples’ innovations, especially those innovations that are over 20 years old. “We see lots of value in re-inventing the wheel” adds Lord Stuckinthemud. “In fact, we think there are at least three decades of other peoples’ innovation we can mine before we have to do any original thinking of our own.”

Intergalactic is also raising its maintenance fees. “We think that customers expect us to charge them ever higher maintenance fees so we’re setting maintenance now at 38% and making it retroactive to 1998. Next year, maintenance will jump to 50%. This sends a message to the market that we’re serious about maintenance”.  

 

 

Customer reaction has been wildly enthusiastic. “When we heard that Intergalactic is jacking up maintenance fees, abandoning its innovation into SaaS applications and pursuing innovation only through acquisitions, this caused a lot of discussion at our firm,” says Defies Belief the CIO of Illogica, Inc. “You can bet we’ll be talking to Intergalactic soon!” 

 

 

“We’re ready to have these exciting conversations” says Lord Stuckinthemud. “Customers need to buy more of our software and we think our old school products are more market relevant than ever!" 

 

 

According to ForrestYank Analysts, “Intergalactic’s 112 general ledgers, 260 payroll systems, 71 MRPs, 216 report writers and their Sri Lankan CRM solution will produce exciting integration challenges for customers. Now that Intergalactic has purchased a new middleware platform, Waste Makes Haste, customers get to re-install every old application all over again. Customers should count on making Waste Makes Haste upgrades until 2019.”   

 

 

The Retrograde vision is likely to be copied soon by other ERP vendors like DullSter, Pointless, Futile Software and WhatTheHell.com. SaaS vendors are not going to like Retrograde as it drives more IT budget funds to traditional vendors and away from SaaS firms.    

 

 

About Intergalactic ERP – Intergalatic ERP has steadily grown its way into becoming the world’s largest ERP vendor. It doesn’t make the latest or greatest products, but, it does sell the most! To find out more about their bewildering array of products, don’t go to their website because even their Marketing team cannot keep track of what they’re selling from day to day. No, you might want to call one of the 14+ million channel partners they use such as Client Hemorrhaging Partners  (www.clienthemorragingpartners.com)  the Cayman Islands

About Blithering Media – Blithering Media represents way too many tech firms and amazingly enough has no one on staff that understands the space. Blithering Media personnel are expert though at crafting press releases on just about anything (or nothing as in this case). For more info on Blithering Media contact us point.less@ blitheringmedia.com

(for serious tech marketing help: contact@techventive.net)

Spreading the Word

Spreading the Word - Through Another Channel

Several of the Enterprise Irregulars blog on ZDNet (e.g., Dennis Howlett and Michael Krigsman to name a few). Their experiences finally moved me to take the plunge, too. You can find my new blog, Software and Services Safari here. 

All of my other blogs will continue to get updated but please add : http://blogs.zdnet.com/sommer/ to your RSS feeds and blog roll.

Thanks

What if.....

What if VCs, SAP, Your Marketing Team, etc. Designed the Stop Sign

I took a call last week from a friend of a friend who is trying to fight off a patent troll who happens to have a really obvious patent on a process that never should have been granted patent status. As ridiculous as that patent is, it did cause me to wonder how some teams have ever gotten anything developed or patented with all of the management stupidity, lawyers, etc. getting in the way.

Today, I ran across this video that asks the question "What if Marketing Designed the Stop Sign?". You could substitute Marketing for your VCs, your favorite software vendor or any other team when you watch this but once you do, you'll see how the group dynamic can ruin a perfectly good idea. This makes you seriously question the wisdom of some crowds.

Enjoy

http://view.break.com/542649

http://view.break.com/542649 - Watch more free videos

After I saw this, I realized why scope creep sinks so many good software projects/products.

How to Save a Lot of Coin, Easily, When Buying Software

Software Licensing Handbook – A Million Dollars Worth of Value

                                                     Book Review

Jeffrey Gordon has published the Software Licensing Handbook that is sure to save software buyers lots of money and cost vendors a lot more. It could also impact my colleague Vinnie’s Deal Architect practice, too, if a lot of folks read this.

What Jeff has done is dismantle a standard software contract. He has dissected its component parts into easy to understand sections that explain what a vendor wants, what a customer should ask for and what each party should be willing to agree to if they want to reach a fair decision.

I would call this book: King Solomon’s Guide to Splitting the Software Contract Baby. Vendors are surely going to hate this publication and that should mean it is must-read material for software buyers. I’d strongly recommend that selection team members, not just the in-house counsel, read this as it lays the groundwork for negotiations.

I’d also echo a suggestion in the book where buyers are encouraged to negotiate the terms and conditions first before haggling over the contract price as vendors show much less flexibility after the price (and hence, the decision of which vendor to go with) has already been determined.

While Jeff’s book is not meant to replace legal counsel, the fact that he laid it out in the sequence and headings of standard software contracts makes it easier for buyers and sellers of software to involve counsel and buyers simultaneously in contract negotiations. This is actually quite useful as too many software buyers evaluate product capabilities separately from price negotiations which are negotiated separately from terms and conditions. When deals are negotiated in pieces, the right hand often agrees to a deal the left hand would have never accepted. This structure helps eliminate this outcome.

The book is approximately 200 pages in length. It’s well written, complete and current. As someone who has negotiated deals recently, I could only think of a few areas where I would have added more depth.

I highly recommend this publication. The price will not break the project team’s budget and the value payoff vs. book cost ratio is excellent.

Want to Compete With Oracle’s Marketing Machine?

               How Does Your Software Firm Compare to ORCL?

Start-ups through mid-sized software firms have a tough time competing with large firms for mindshare, editorial coverage, advertising placement, brand awareness and press coverage. These smaller firms have considerably fewer internal resources and may lack the reach, capital, market presence or buying power to help them win the hearts and minds of software buyers everywhere.

Let’s look at Oracle (ORCL) for a moment. Oracle is one of the largest software firms in the world. ORCL has recently reported revenues of approximately $22.43 billion (source: Yahoo Finance). Their marketing budget is reportedly 1.7% of total revenues (for an outstanding assessment of Oracle’s Marketing budget, see “Oracle CMO Opens the Books on Marketing Spending, ROI” in B to B magazine, www.btobonline.com, 7/14/2008). This equates to approximately $381 million available to Marketing. This sum alone dwarfs the total revenue figure for all but their largest competitors.

The B to B article also noted that Oracle:

-          produced 6,623 marketing events last year

-          347,000 attendees were at these events

-          56% of Oracle deal closures could be linked to one of these events

That article also indicated that Oracle spends approximately $4.6 million/year on public relations (PR). That figure works out to approximately $383,000/month on PR. With many press releases costing approximately $400/release to place on a newswire, Oracle is certainly getting a lot of press releases out and/or keeping a lot of PR agency types well paid. Many software firms couldn’t even afford an annual PR budget of $383,000 let alone a figure like Oracle’s.

This piece isn’t a criticism of Oracle as they have actually reduced Marketing spend as a percent of total revenue over the last decade. My colleague, Vinnie at Deal Architect, is always watching the SG&A costs of software firms and he would likely applaud Oracle’s cost reduction efforts here. Total marketing spend as a percent of revenue has declined from 5% to 1.7% today.

In fact, we should look at what Oracle is doing right:

-          reducing total Marketing spend as a percent of sales

-          scaling back print advertising and focusing more on online ads

-          measuring effectiveness of events and tying event activities to deal closures

-          moving away from traditional press releases and embracing more social media (e.g., blogs)

For smaller software firms, there are tough calls one must make when competing with an Oracle-sized firm. Does your firm:

-          Create compelling events, newsletters, copy, etc. or are they relatively similar to those of competitors?

-          Maximize its PR potential? Are the items generating buzz? Do they reinforce the brand you want to create in the market?

-          Speak to its prospects or does it serve up self-congratulatory messages/pieces? How narcissistic is your copy?

-          Get the value it should from its PR firm? Tele-sales group? Etc.

Want to know how to get more for less? Here are some tips:

-          Get really focused on your message and what your brand is supposed to be about. It if doesn’t fit handily on a bumper sticker, it needs work. When I engage with many tech firms, they confuse their brand with:

o       product line names

o       sector names

o       mission statements

o       their life story

       your brand should be a phrase or descriptor that anyone instantly recalls about your firm.

-          Tie every press release, event, webinar, collateral piece, white paper, etc. to this brand. Accenture never lets you forget that they help create “high performance companies”. What is your firm doing for (not to) customers?

-          Create unique collateral and events that also ties back to your brand. Don’t send out signed baseballs to prospects if your product has nothing to do with baseball. If you stumble across a ‘neat’ give-away for a promotion in a catalog full of these ideas, chances are your competitors have also. Find something else. Anyone can do the easy stuff and it isn’t memorable. Be the first and be unique – you’ll be memorable and you’ll get people to return calls.

-          Make your collateral, events and messaging highly relevant to your prospects. Generic Marketing materials rarely attract much interest. Get verticalized! Speak the language of subsets of your target market and watch how much more engaged they’ll become.

-          Speak to customer problems and concerns first. Quit trying to tell us about your firm, your products, your development team, your…. No one likes to listen to a egoist. Technologists love to talk about their creations and toys. Customers want to hear about your knowledge of their business. Make your Marketing customer focused – it’s hard to do but massively effective.

-          Segment, Segment, Segment. Your firm can’t be all things to all buyers so quit trying to be the universal answer to all of our prayers. Be content to get half the market or less for now. Next, figure out which segments, verticals, micro-markets, etc. are most inclined to want your solution, have the crushing business need and can afford it. Look for niches where buyer demographics and psychographics converge with your firm’s strengths. Look for spots competitors under serve.

If you need more tips or help getting more value from your Marketing group, drop me a line. I know a few great folks who can quickly push you to the next level. Maybe, we’ll be writing your effective Marketing spend here soon.

Your IP Address Could Get You Sued

                       Careful Before You Threaten Litigation

                                      Hell Hath No Fury Like....

Tanya Andersen is the feature player in a great article in the 5/5/2008 issue of BusinessWeek (see "Does She Look Like a Music Pirate?"). The gist of the story is that a number of recording industry players put a ton of pressure on a woman to settle for supposedly downloading recorded music illegally. Apparently, the industry had the wrong person and all because someone spoofed this woman's IP address.

The errant IP address triggered a cascade of arm-twisting, legal threats, attempts to collect a financial settlement and, eventually, a lawsuit from the recording industry. When Ms. Andersen got a good lawyer and some insight into who spoofed her IP address, things changed. The industry lawsuit was ruled in her favor and now she's suing back.

While I commiserate with the industry and its loss of revenues to illegal file sharing, I cannot abide strong-armed, inflexible techniques that lack appropriate discovery and due process protections. From what was written in this article, the industry used a blame first, collect second and thoroughly investigate third as its process. I think they got a few steps out of order.

There are currently a number of technology lawsuits pending these days that are relying on the identification of persons via IP addresses. Defense counsels will no doubt want to look at this case and see if similar mistakes were made in their situations.

The End of Blogging

The Loss of Relevance/Innocence

Blogging has had its ups and downs. There have been millions of bloggers who ran out of things to say after a few months. There were bloggers who couldn't keep on topic. They wrote about the most banal things and, thankfully, most of those have disappeared into irrelevance. And then, there were blogs dreamed up by corporate marketing types. Some of those blogs masked their real intent or ownership and some were such blatant touts that they, too, disappeared from relevance.

The blogs that prevailed were blogs of substance, volume and focus. That could be changing.

To date, most efforts by mainstream media firms, PR firms and businesses re: blogs have been slapdash, immature or poorly thought out. As these companies finally get their arms around blogs, they will no doubt change the nature of blogs and not necessarily for the better.

If you don't believe me, read this 06/23/2008 BusinessWeek piece: Inside The War Against China's Blogs. Three firms are featured that charge clients $500-25,000/month to:

• monitor blogs others write
• publish lots of positive posts about their client's firm/products/services
• attempt to quash or bury negative publicity for their client

Marketing organizations can really ruin a great technology. They'll ruin it through overuse and inappropriate usage. That may be about to happen to blogs. It's already impacted newsletters (that turned into news-less pitch pieces), emails (which begat SPAM), webinars (which went from informative knowledge transfer mediums to shameless infomercials), etc. When a great technology gets misused, it gets less valuable.

I really don't want that to happen to blogs but the article paints a disturbing story. Consider these data points: bloggers are being paid to send at least 50 posts per day for only $0.015 per post. I don't about you but my cost per blog is considerably higher.

If my posts are getting shoved aside by these puff-piece generators, then I'll need to rethink why I'm blogging. Many bloggers write as it gives them a way to have influence. If marketers find methods to negate or obliterate that influence, then blogging ceases to work. It would for me.

Before long, we'll need a mechanism to identify this type of paid, commercial blog content as readers will likely want a way to bypass it. We do this with television (think TIVO or DVR), we do this with radio (think SIRIUS or your iPod) and people will want this with blogs. But, like with newsletters, email and other media, some media cannot be easily managed to discard the superfluous, self-serving hype. If blog content gets so polluted with this self-aggrandizing tripe, then it could usher in a dark ages era for blogging.

Thoughts?

Silly HR Policy: Dress Codes for Avatars?

                                  Too Much Time on HR's Hands

Sometimes, people get a bit too zealous in the performance of their jobs. In a recent Computerworld article ("Avatar Dress codes and Other Rules", Computerworld, 6/23/2008), businesses are being advised to adopt dress code policies for the computer avatars their employees select as they negotiate virtual worlds.

Let's let this soak in for a moment.

Companies should mandate how you look and dress in both the real and virtual worlds? If your avatar wants to look like a minotaur with 200 body piercings, what's the big deal?

These are virtual worlds populated with graphical symbols. No one, and I mean no one, expects that anybody will look exactly like their real world self. These are rendered graphics that operate, look and behave worse than some bad 1960s offshore cartoon figures. Real people are fully 3-D. They can't change material aspects of their appearance. Bald men can suddenly sport a mohawk haircut. They can't fly or hover a virtual or real world. They exist and we must accept them.

Virtual characters can change genders, age, hair, appearance, clothes, etc. at a whim. They are make believe icons in a make believe world. The concept that an HR person must dictate a dress code for these images seems like a real reach or an abuse of power.

What makes this more amazing is the attention being paid to an alternate universe of business/personal interaction that still hasn't really taken off. Sure, a number of big firms have sunk sizable funds into these interactive, psuedo-worlds but they still haven't caught on in a big way yet. Maybe, just maybe, these HR policies are a bit premature.

Think I'm being tough on HR? Have you ever looked at a teenager's or college kid's avatars? They don't look anything like the person they really are. In fact, that's the point. Some people choose avatars that are:

• exact opposites of who they are
• ideal versions of who they'd like to be
• a joke - they are intended to get a laugh
• shocking - they want them to provoke a strong emotional reaction
• mysterious
• etc.

The fact that firms want to control an avatar's look seems like an infringement of free speech or self-expression. Personally, I find it to be much ado about nothing.