1984 - 2014: 30 years later, same threat?

30 years have passed since Apple introduced the Macintosh with what was only a decade after recognized as a masterpiece in advertisement and surely one of the most controversial in the history of IT. In this famous advertisement, Steve Jobs wanted to represent the monopoly of IBM in the computer industry as a real threat for the freedom of everyone of us, and Macintosh as a means to save humanity from "conformity". IBM was represented as the Orwellian Big Brother, an over controlling entity to which we should have revolted by... Thinking different.

Think Different

Steve Jobs never really won his battle against the compatible PC industry, partly because the hardware vendors proliferated, partly because the software by Microsoft met a wider audience expectations, by means we could discuss about, but that are out of topic for this article.

20 years later Jobs realized his dream by introducing new devices that hit the personal PC at its heart, revolutionizing the entire industry. Even if it was a change in device paradigm (from PCs to more mobile devices), Apple has succeeded in destabilizing an industry, thanks also to the wrong approach by Microsoft that this time did not have a “Big Brother” IBM hardware partner in the competition. With the iPhone Apple was the first one to enter the market with a unique combination of device and software integration: the now so common swipe movement of the fingers, everyone of us is used to, was a perfect combination of software and hardware new concept, far more successful than the use of the Xerox GUI within a personal computer.

The real Big Brother

So, was the war against the Big Brother won? Well, the real question could also be: was IBM and the compatible PCs industry the real threat? At the end of the day, I cannot help but think about Apple as a very closed ecosystem; its approach of integrated hardware and software is also a very smart approach to create a monopoly. But, at the same time, it is true that the innovative Apple products have always distinguished themselves from the conformity of the moment.

As I wrote in my last article “Are cheap marketing strategies going to dumb down all future Software?”, I have a strong feeling of an increasing impoverishment in the business software industry. For sure, with the Cloud advent in the corporate industry, we are experiencing an uncritical conformism of corporations towards a new reshaped "renting" model as an answer to the economic crisis.

As a result, in recent years we passed from over complicated and over-engineered software solutions for business to over simplified Software with limited capabilities. In order to overcome the intrinsic limits of CRM Cloud software, for example, lot of effort has been and still has to be put on the integration side of things, above all to handle data transfers from on-premises data centers to the Cloud and closing the loop of specific functional processes. As I have already said, too often the reasons of companies moving to the Cloud are not the right ones and this brings us to the idea that maybe it is time again to think different, because there seems to be a huge conformism when it comes to going to the Cloud. Thinking different does not mean refusing evolution; on the contrary, it means engaging with new trends with an open mind, with enough critical thinking to avoid simple and too straight choices; choices that bring to consequences...

The 1984 campaign promoted a specific theme: "[T]here are monster computers lurking in big business and big government that know everything from what motels you've stayed at to how much money you have in the bank. But at Apple we're trying to balance the scales by giving individuals the kind of computer power once reserved for corporations."

The real threat?

30 years later, we are facing something that is even closer to that scary idea. The real Big Brother is someone that really controls the information, the data and what you can do with it. If you really think about it, the next Big Brother could, in fact, be the Cloud.

The decision of storing our data in someone else premises in locations where you are not sure about the applied legislation is something we should always think about when it comes to going to the Cloud. Companies move their data to the Cloud, trusting their data is not actually viewed by third parties. It’s a big act of faith towards a vendor; are we sure that also moving the corporate CRM processes to someone else on-premise infrastructure is a good thing? yes, because we should understand that what they sell us as Cloud is actually their On-Premise infrastructure, so we can hope that these vendors are also fond of their on-premise solution and not only the Cloud!

The reality of things is in front of us, if we keep our eyes open; how many times, in the last years, we have heard about privacy breaches, data leaked from Corporations or institutions? In last years I have seen many kind of situations, also cases where the on-premises CRM application technical repository like the Siebel one was not actually handled by the company itself, but by some external provider, and I have seen the consequences of such approach: a total lost of control over the software development life cycle. What many businesses do not realize is that their strategic processes, their approach to customer, is actually also partially implemented in their CRM solution. Why would you want to give away your strategy and your business aprroach?

The real Big Brother could now sit on the Cloud, reading and analyzing your data, watching your private pictures (Jennifer Lawrence knows something about it...), reading the exchanged messages of your sales force, being able to contact your customers, your prospects, anticipate your leads... As the US government itself has not proven to be so respectful of our privacy, we cannot even rely on governments to protect us from such breaches.

The Big Brother has taken also control of art: U2 recently released their 13th album for free, making a pact with Big Brother, because the device (in this case a CD or a vinyl) has no value any longer. What counts now (and probably should have always been) is exclusively the sensation and the emotions that the music (or the movie) create, so why not distributing it via some proprietary cloud? That would be a good idea if you did not put yourself in the hands of a multinational company that is trying to dominate an entire industry via its channels. And the risk of precipitating into conformity has impoverished also the artistic vein of once big artists, killing the essence of art as something that should be measured on quality adjectives, not quantity ones. Bono even had to apologize last week to users who objected to receiving an automatic download of the band's latest album, after thousands complained they did not want the album and that it took up precious storage space on Apple devices...

Are you sure you are not going to be the next one? Are you sure you are not going to compromise your Software artwork u 2?

But I am not and I have never been someone that criticizes for just the pleasure of doing so, even if I admit I have always refused conformity since my childhood; you need to have in any case the moral drive to offer a different perspective on things and, with it, a better alternative, if any.

An alternative

In this sense, wouldn’t be perfect to have the possibility to simply run all kind of software directly on your PC without the need of any installation and all the related burden? One limit of Cloud applications is that they behave like they run on your PC, but they are actually running on a remote server and also the data they handle is often just in the Cloud, organized in ways and schemes you are not aware of and you can't even control.

It would be perfect if we could decide: there should be no dilemma for the users, but only the best of both worlds.

There is for sure a better way to simplify your business without over dumbing your software and giving away all your privacy at the same time. As far as I am concerned, we @ e-Up will always go in the direction we envision to be the best not only for us, but for the entire business community. I know that in times when a trend is so strong and permeates everything it is difficult to look to other possibilities... But I strongly believe it is again time to think different, really.

So, as usual...

Stay tuned,

Manuel

(https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20141023111515-4189733-1984-2014-30-years-later-same-threat?trk=prof-post)

Are cheap marketing strategies going to dumb down all future Software?

noticing the automatic addition of an advertisement at the end of the post, just before publishing it.

I was actually introducing a survey we’ve been working on, to understand the current Siebel CRM projects scenario and the opinions of people working on it.

Can you guess what the automatically added advertisement was about? Well, as soon as you put CRM in the context, you can be sure you will get a Salesforce.com advertisement.

Nothing against the guys, but what the heck had this to do with our Siebel projects' survey? Fortunately enough LinkedIn has still the decency of allowing you to cancel these automatic advertisements, but what if a less focused author does not notice this?

I actually received an update once, where a guy was promoting some Siebel positions, while at the bottom there was the same Salesforce.com advertisement. I commented on his post, underlying how hilarious this was, but I am not sure he got it...

After a certain period of time, while some comments were published on one of the posts related to the survey, a totally out of context comment arrived. A company using a Salesforce image, trying to sell Salesforce.com training? Oh man.. “Extremely affordable Salesforce/SFDC CRM hands on based training for all roles”.. I immediately thought “what the heck has this to do with our Survey? Can’t you guys use proper space to make your own advertisement?.. Ok, let’s flag this as inappropriate, I am sure LinkedIn will delete this posts as out of the contextual discussion”. You wanna bet on the result? Well, you just have to click on the link and see for yourself: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/Are-you-taking-part-in-41388.S.5905974750093537283? (note how they delicately removed the Oracle Siebel keyword from the link).

Ok, so Salesforce.com is still spending a lot of money (LinkedIn thanks) to make the guerrilla marketing that characterized its first battles against the one time giant of CRM solutions (remember the fake protesters outside Siebel marketing events?) Mmm... Interesting.

But let’s now discuss about the real reasons behind this recent cloud, “light” solutions' proliferation in corporations. After having talked with an Oracle guy working on the “new” Sales Cloud application, I have a personal confirmation and a wider awareness of the reasons behind a potential impoverishment of the IT business solutions. This guy mentioned that he recently attended a training but I could not understand exactly about what, until he said he wanted to improve his selling skills, in order to be able to better promote the Cloud solutions. When I heard him playing the part of the seller: “because software is for you, sales people, you are the king, you should be the ones deciding what you get: do you want this crap, slow solution, or you want this fancy and easy to use interface?”.

Ah, now I see.. .So, “cloud” solutions are winning because the perception (easily sold) is that cloud applications are more user friendly and you can tweet and post on Facebook with them? You can bet on it.

But what has this to do with the Cloud paradigm? A company should abandon years of on-premise investment because ferocious assault of cheap marketing strategy of IT corporations? Show me the ROI man! Are you sure we cannot get a cool user interface and mobile application that synchronize with your on-premise servers? You might want to check better the latest solutions.

I see the added value of cloud based applications in the case some information is meant to be directly transferred from a sales rep and his/her manager, for example: in such a case, it absolutely makes sense to make use of the widespread cloud services, rather than burden the company server infrastructure. At the end of the day the goal of IT has always been that of simplifying our lives and tasks as workers. But... wait a minute, didn’t we say - in the glorious CRM propaganda days - that CRM is about business and not the technology? Do CRM applications (or CX, as now they like to call them) really need to be on the cloud to be easy to use? For sure I challenge that an application has to be in the cloud to be well engineered. But there’s food for thought.

One thing companies should be aware of, above all in the IT departments, is that with a cloud solution you will 100% lose control of the data layer of your application: every vendor in the market has locked up the data schemes and layer of their cloud solutions; you can add the fields, some out of the box relations, but don’t think to get deeper than that - optimization, partitioning, denormalization and database maintenance (just to name a few) will be history.

An added value for some companies for sure, it’s anyway a dangerous track to follow, in my opinion, even if Larry Ellison says you can now simply push a button to put your on-Prem solution in the Cloud.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing bad with the current trends, if the reasons companies are making strategic decisions are the correct ones. It’s actually a certain part of IT’s fault if business users were so frustrated by very poor and too heavy applications if now we are in this situation. As for marketing strategies, they have always been and they will always be where the money is flowing. But innovation is usually a disruptive element in the status quo and I have a huge sense of innovation lack in business software nowadays.

Am I the only one having this bitter sensation that all these cheap marketing strategies are going to dumb down the entire business software production, completely abandoning professional software engineering?

P.S. The images were taken from RugRag, but I like them as a metaphor for companies going to the cloud: it works, but it’s not for everyone.

Are you planning to leave Siebel for some other technology? .. Think twice...

As e-Up is attending the Oracle Open World 2014, today I attended the “Siebel CRM - the future of Siebel, Strategy and Roadmap for the World’s most complete CRM” session.

I have to say that after years of frustration, now Siebel customers could relax about the future of their multi-years investment, if Oracle keeps its promises.

As I have had the opportunity to underline in other occasions, the strategy towards what they now define as the most complete CRM solution in the World, has been ambiguous - to say the least.

During these days, I have met Siebel customers really expressing years of frustration towards a non clear statement of direction, making confusion even between going to Open UI or Oracle Cloud (by the way - someone still talks about Oracle Fusion applications and you would be surprised by who is doing so..).

What we have been experiencing in these years is a constant and continuous penetration of the cloud buzzword in the business applications scenario. Cloud is cool, On-Prem is obsolete... Or so they say.

So we have seen Siebel customers abandon their investment for other technologies, quite always towards cloud based ones as Salesforce.com or Sugar CRM (as in the famous IBM case). But are we really sure they did the best long-term decision?

Siebel customers are still very concerned about their commitment to their Siebel solutions and they are not sure if continuing investing in it is a winning strategy.

If until today I had my own idea about the right choice for big corporations, but I could not reassure them (at the end of the day, we do not own the future of Siebel as a technology) now I can honestly say those customers that they should be relaxed and not too much worried about the future of their CRM platform.

What really changes between Cloud and On-Prem solutions is the commitment you are giving to handling your own data and servers. If taking care of your servers and data is more a burden than an advantage, then you should probably think about a strategy to get rid of it and find someone to take care in your place or change the entire application paradigm and move everything to the cloud.

If you are not part of this group, then I don’t think you should be concerned about not being yet on the cloud. As technology is improving, as network speed and bandwidth are increasing, the difference among the different paradigms is really more and more a keyword, marketing one. But I will return on this in the future, discussing how we simply deliver to you new solutions like e-Tools for Siebel.

What I want to give you is really my impression about the market and my opinion about the most intelligent way to face the future.

My impression is that someone has tried to put on-prem solutions as Siebel apart, but customers were not ready or not willing to follow the flow.

The consequent lack of customers satisfaction and the evolution of technologies I mentioned before brought us where we stand today, with Oracle telling us they are going to commit to Siebel for the most foreseeable future with a bunch of new implementations I am going to list.

Again, if you are not in the group of customers that consider handling data and application servers a burden, you should not really worry about not being on the Cloud. Why? Because it will come, step by step, and I think you should let Oracle worry about that, not yourself.

A first example is the integration of the new Oracle Cloud solutions with Siebel, that will extend your on-prem CRM features with cloud based ones, without the need for you to completely disrupt years of implementation.

This is part of the Oracle CX strategy, that is offering you the possibility of choosing new cloud solutions such as Oracle Marketing, Oracle Sales, CPQ, Commerce, Service and Social to be integrated with the Siebel core.

Numbers show us today that 84% of Siebel customers are either on 8.1 or 8.2 version; that means that - from now on - things should be much simpler in terms of innovation and upgrades and the official roadmap now clearly shows 2022 in the time line. So commitment is there... As for the quality of the products, I cannot really say and I don’t want to make everything appear so easy as it has not been in the past years for many upgrades (really painful for many customers).

Open UI, firstly release 2 years ago, is now not just a reshaping of the user interface; it is really a change of technology, making sure that the Siebel application is not only more likable for the users, but ready to be run on all the latest devices. IP 2014 will make sure that there will be a complete responsive design UI, so that no development is needed to adapt the user interface to different devices. Using both tablets and smart phones? Then the UI will automatically shrink or expand to fit to your device screen.

The third part representing an update and new life to Siebel is represented by mobile solutions: there will be now the possibility to directly download the mobile application from the App Store and the synchronization famous pain points will be approached (and hopefully solved) with 3 different options (complete synchronization, upload or download). The disconnected application will therefore see new life with an enhanced solution, together with a new version of CRM desktop, completely integrated with Outlook 2013 and Lotus Notes 8.5.3.

Together with the standard mobile application, new ad-hoc vertical mobile solutions (phone or tablet) have been introduced: for the moment Communication, Life Sciences (particularly for e-detailing) and Financial Services will have completely dedicate mobile applications that will be integrated with Siebel (Open UI, of course).

The fourth pillar of a potential Siebel renaissance (as our friend Bruce Daley has referred to at the beginning of this year -http://www.brucedaley.com/siebelobserver/2014/01/2014-the-year-of-a-siebel-renaissance.html) - and from my point of view the real indication that the Siebel team in Oracle is taking this seriously - is the introduction of a complete SRF and web templates free deployment (also called Run-time configuration) and a web version of the Siebel Tools that should allow you to do some basic customization of Siebel directly on the web browser, something similar to what you can do nowadays with Cloud platforms such as Salesforce.com. This is not something that will be available in the coming IP-2014 anyway, but should come from 2015 on. Of course this is a big change and will be released step by step, also because I am not totally convinced that you can successfully deploy all the current powerful Siebel configuration possibilities into a web browser: one of the limits of customization possibilities for cloud packaged applications (if we can define them so) relies exactly on this, in fact.

Oracle future strategy aims at a so called Single Unified Tools on the web (weirdly very similar to our Unified Perspective approach) so that changes can be applied on an environment that is very similar to the end-user one.

This unification should also bring new Optimized Testing capabilities for Siebel applications (Packaged Siebel Test Automation Interfaces and Objects).

As you can see, lots of new developments should arrive to completely refresh the Siebel technology and this reinforces my point of view that on-prem or on the cloud, it is just a question of the technical evolution that an application is going through. Once your user interface is HTML5 compatible, your tools are web compatible, and you can rely on standard integration interfaces, the real difference between Cloud or On-Prem relies on the fact that data is on your own servers or on third-parties’. That’s really it!

As for the timing for the commitment to do such changes, well... That’s a completely different story, and we could write an entire new article and discuss for days... My personal opinion is that these changes are at least 6 years late and that I am quite sure that around half of the lost Siebel customers in these years would still be on Siebel, if such changes would have been applied in a coherent time frame.

I just want to finish this long post reinforcing the fact that this just represents my point of view on the current scenario and it is particularly referred to the long list of Siebel customers I talked with that are worried about the future of their CRM platform. As I mentioned, going to the Cloud could be the right decision for some, but for others I would say that right now they can look at their years of investment as an asset and not any longer as a liability. Above all, I always invite everyone to critically analyse what "cloud" really means, because at the end of the day the real important thing is that your piece of software is up to date with the recent technologies and the possibilities they offer, not where you store your data.

Personally, I can say that we at e-Up will still commit with strategic and technical consultancy and innovative new software for Siebel, together with other technologies... but that’s another story...

So, as usual, stay tuned...

Manuel