Business & Technology Nexus

So, America can remove the World Cup season pass from their Tivo and not worry about recording another soccer match for 4 years. But, the last month has been truly fantastic and a welcome break. I won’t reiterate my plea for changes to the game, as this post will focus on some of my favorites from the Cup.

Best Goal of the Tournament: For sheer team brilliance and a textbook example of how soccer is a game of triangles, no goal compares to Argentina’s 2nd goal against Serbia-Montenegro.

Best Shot of the Tournament: There were a ton of great outside shots, some helped by the new ball. Rosicky’s blast, Frings shot, Maxi Rodriguez volley and more. But I still can’t believe the power of Robin van Persie’s free kick from just outside the box. In slo-mo, it is fast.
Best Young Player: Soccer has a plethora of young stars, more than I can remember coming out of the last few Cups. Certainly Tevez and Messi are a force to be reckoned with from Argentina. Valencia from Ecuador is another. I thoroughly enjoyed German’s young talent, Podalski. Playing up front with Klose, he had the grit, determination and skill that made the German squad a pleasure to watch. My best young player vote goes to Cristiano Ronaldo. On a semi-final team, he seemed to be the one that was creating havoc game in and game out for the defense. As my brother pointed out, he’ll need to work on his final touch, but his relentless attacking, footwork and presence make him a superstar.

Biggest Disappointment: I think the entire US team (and manager) deserve strong consideration for this category, but I’m going to go with Ronaldihno and the Brazil team. A few moments of brilliance was all this team could muster. Ronaldihno, probably the most gifted player in the game, was taken out of his game for the majority of the matches.

Best Player: While Zidane was a master in a few games, Fabio Cannavaro was my player of the tournament. The Azzurri captain started stepping it up with game 3 in the first-round and never looked back. Their lone goals allowed were an own-goal against the US and a dubious penalty kick against France. The French had the better of the play, but could hardly get quality chances because of Cannavaro and the Italian defense.

Best Goalie: There were only 2 real candidates, Ricardo from Portugal and Buffon from Italy. Ricardo let in a softie against Germany, so the vote goes to Buffon.

Most Entertaining Team: I couldn’t understand the voting from that gave this award to Portugal. Too much diving and too little offensive imagination after the second round. It’s a no-brainer for me. The most entertaining team for me goes to Germany, which I never thought I would ever say. While not the most artistic team, they constantly move forward, great in the air, play hard, don’t complain, don’t dive, etc. It’s everything the US team could be if they had the skill.

Best Single Game: Zidane’s play against Brazil was simply beautiful. He controlled everything that was happening on the field. They speed of the game is so fast, but not for Zidane. He sees things that others don’t, has the ball control of the best in the world and the competitive spirit that makes opponents fear him.

Best Headbutt: :-)

(ps. don’t tell Dave, but it probably won’t be my last on the World Cup)

Say you’re a senior strategic buyer, in charge of software. You’ve worked with the business to nail the requirements & now you’re ready to issue an RFP. You’ve found 3 vendors who seem like great candidates – but 2 are traditional firms and 1 is, gasp, an open source outfit.

You issue a 50-page document with 275 questions to the 3 parties – but only the traditional firms respond. Sound familiar? Or how about this? You call up the 3 vendors and try to set up dates for them to come visit. The traditional, closed source firms with their large direct sales force say “no problem,” while the open source firm says “no thank you.” You are left in a fog about how to proceed.

The plain truth is Open Source is proving to be just as disruptive to the enterprise buying process as it is to enterprise software markets. And understanding how to adapt procurement processes to fully evaluate open source options has become a “hot topic.”

The simple reason behind the disruption is that open source firms make up for their low-to-no license fees by dramatically reducing sales & marketing expenditures. See p21 of this Larry Augustin presentation for a wild guess of an income statement comparison between closed an open source firms.

So, let me offer some practical advice… Here are a few suggestions for how to include open source in your next evaluation:

1) Try, try, try before you buy

Open source firms typically expect you will have used their online service or downloaded and installed the application & kicked the tires before you contact them. They expect buyers to qualify themselves. Naturally, when the open source vendor is receiving nothing in upfront license, sales costs need to be zero too! And don’t just try the open source software early, try all of them. If some prove too costly to even install, well, that’s a good early indicator that TCO will be a problem. And SaaS vendors will love the bake-off, their whole premise of existence is how easy they are to use.

2) Replace fly-in’s with Webex

Don’t expect open source vendors to fly to your main government office or corporate headquarters to meet you & do a sales pitch. It’s so rare it might as well never happen. Instead, ask for virtual meetings and get together remotely. Viva la webex! (or Glance, etc)

3) Evaluate solutions on TCO, not upfront costs

Just because open source might offer you a “free pass” on license does not guarantee it offers the lowest TCO for your business. Evaluate projected TCO at the 1-year and 3-year mark. Is the open source vendor on an expensive technology stack? Is the software so complex to install and manage that a closed source SaaS vendor is a better value? Choose the solution that fits best and keeps costs down.

There’s a lot more ground to cover here, but hopefully these 3 suggestions will get you pointed in the right direction. And good luck!

Had a great lunch with Scott Kveton yesterday. As I have mentioned, Scott is the new CEO of JanRain, a controlling force around the nascent OpenID technology movement. Previously Scott was Director of OSU’s Open Source Labs (OSL). Jason McKerr, who has worked a long time with Scott at the OSL, has moved to JanRain as well.

I had a lot of questions to ask Scott, but I won’t bore you with them. They generally centered around making sure Coupa does open source in a way that’s both sustainable as a business and friendly to open source advocates and evangelists.

The more interesting part of the discussion was learning more about OpenID. In short, it is a distributed model for identity. As Scott talked through all the consumer examples – blogs, wikis, e-commerce sites – I kept thinking about the awful state of technology for B2B, both server-to-server communications and employee-to-server communications. Together, we talked through a few different scenarios including traditional supplier punchout.

Could there be a way to adapt distributed authentication to B2B problems and lower costs? I think so. I’m looking forward to exploring a few ideas with the Coupa community and seeing if people are ready to toss old and increasingly arcane standards like cXML overboard. It’s by no means a slam dunk – the ROI associated with replacing methods that are still operational is muddy. Why replace your stove until it breaks, even if it’s from the 1950′s?

In other open source news, Scott confirmed something I had heard down in the Bay Area a few weeks ago – that Compiere is moving from Portland to Silicon Valley. Of course when you are a 2-person company there’s not too much to box up! They are a really interesting firm – it just goes to show you what releasing unrestricted intellectual property can do for your install base. Now that they are awash with cash from NEA it will be neat to see if they can turn their brand awareness and install base into a bigger business.

Check it out via this e-sourcing forum post. I’ll post a more thoughtful commentary on the analyst report later. But you can bet the report is going to see a fair amount of action in sales cycles, especially with the number of best-of-breed Procurement vendors selling SaaS solutions these days. It will be interesting to see if Oracle or SAP choose to respond.

Who are your MVP employees? Many managers would say that the most important person on the team is the one that holds the most information or knowledge. As a product manager, I knew that Person A could be counted on to know everything about Product X..so whenever I got a tough question, I knew I could go to Person A if necessary. Person A was indispensible.

But nowadays, walking encyclopedias seem a lot less desirable. In fact, I now realize that Person A was holding back progress and operational efficiency of the team. Our new employee MVP’s are people that share, not hold, the most information. And we need systems, processes and rewards that recognize this shift – ones that encourage, support and value sharing.

I’ve been at companies, big and small. Accomplishing work always involved finding your way to the key information, or better said, finding your way to the key people. It’s never been easy. For example, I was talking to my friend who works at a major consumer electronics firm. His team sets the price for one of their key product lines. When he joined, he was frustrated with the friction to share within his own group. It’s not that his colleagues weren’t willing to share when approached, but he had to do all the leg work, hunting, etc. Naturally, his ramp-up time was slower than it should be.

But beyond his immediate group he was even more frustrated by the lack of infrastructure to support sharing among the different pricing teams at the firm. If he had to build a model to reflect competitive price factors, his manager told him to try to get a meeting with Person X over in this other group. Maybe you got the meeting, maybe not. Person X seemed to be the competitive pricing guru, but her methods were her own. Next maybe it was a promotional pricing model…and he had to find out who to talk to for that. You get the idea.

The company was in the midst of rolling out a new software application for price modeling. But even this failed to address the information sharing problem. If anything, it further fragmented knowledge in the company.

Why was it so hard to proactively share information? To start with, we don’t give bonuses or other rewards to “sharers”. We also fail to make it easy enough to share. Putting together an internal website for your team is useful, but enough of a headache to maintain that they more often than not turn stale. And of course a website is for information broadcasting more than information sharing and improvement. Now, technologies like Wikis are definitely helping but there are limitations.
One of the biggest problems is that the ability to share, search and retrieve knowledge is absent from the core applications that we work on. Sharing systems, when glued on to the real systems in which you do work, can only go so far.

Enterprise systems must evolve to handle information sharing much better in the coming years. In Procurement in particular, there are golden opportunities to improve the level of sharing with the procurement group, with related teams (ie., finance, legal) and most importantly with the end-users that they are serving. So get ready to use the lessons you learned way, way back when you were a kid. Because sharing what you know is more valuable to your company than being a know-it-all.

I’ve been to a lot of 4th of July celebrations, but last night in Seaside topped them all. Picture tens of thousands of people on a large beach next to the Pacific Ocean, with fires roaring, everyone trying to outdo their friends with massive amateur rockets and fireworks in addition to the traditional smaller stuff. Then the main show, set to music blaring from louspeakers strategically placed around the beach, and you’ve got the idea. Cool stuff!

David Bush, my good friend who helped found the e-Sourcing outfit Iasta, invited me to write a guest post on e-Sourcing Forum. The topic was procurement & innovation, and I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to talk about until I started typing. Right away, my mind struck upon how open source is emerging as a crucible for innovation in software. I also perceived invention and innovation seem to be concentrating into smaller businesses as their larger counterparts scale back research to boost margins. The smartest companies will figure out how to ride on the back of small-company or co-operative innovation and adapt their supply chains to match this new world. Hope you enjoy the post on e-Sourcing Forum, and thanks again to David Bush for the invitation to join the discussion.

Hope all of my US readers are off to a fun day of BBQ’s, watching fireworks, and having fun.

It’s exciting to be within a few weeks of publishing our initial release of Coupa eProcurement. Despite our hectic schedules as we wrap things up, we’re happy to continue offering prospects, analysts, and others a special overview and demo if interested. Simply register and let us know your interest via a comment.

And I’m happy to report our first “preview” review of Coupa eProcurement, available at Michael Lamoureux’s new blog Sourcing Innovation, is in. Thanks Michael!

This July 4th I’m traveling to Portland, Oregon. Portland, for those that don’t know, is arguably the US capital of open source. I was surprised to find it a hotbed of open source thought leadership and activity, and I’m told it’s been that way for some time. It’s wonderful to sit in a Starbucks and hear conversations about networked innovation and the darwinism behind the success of Linux. It’s great stuff.

Here in Silicon Valley, most of the coffee conversations sound more like the guy in this short and funny video by StoryStream courtesy of YouTube. No offense Palo Alto!

I’m hoping to catch up with a new friend of mine, Scott Kveton, while I’m up there. Scott was Director of OSU’s Open Source Labs, and I first got to know him in that capacity. He’s a firehose to talk to – lots of experience and insightful commentary on the community.

He’s just now taking on the CEO role for JanRain, a firm that has some really cool technology for individual authentication for users applicable to both the business and consumer spaces. Identity management is a pain most of us wish we had to deal with a lot less, certainly in our everyday web experience but also within the enterprise. I’m hopeful Scott will hit a homerun with JanRain & wish him the best. Who knows, maybe Coupa’s products will be able to take advantage of OpenID someday.