Onward to enterprise collaboration

Too much noise on enterprise collaboration (EC) suite Beehive from Oracle Open World (OOW) in San Francisco.

The expression EC is indeed an oxymoron according to specialist Oliver Marks. Do people collaborate in any enterprise, really? Don’t they bitch one another? Have marketing ever been in love with production? Have the CFO ever appreciated salesman’s travails or ever bothered how sales bring up the topline numbers quarter over quarter? Nothing can be farther from reality.

But yet that’s what Beehive seeks to do – to extract the synergies of having people work more closely together saving money and be more efficient. Often large enterprises have no open editorial environment beyond just news being gathered from all around. At a price of $120 per user seat this is not a system for most small or medium sized businesses but rather a secure solution that can be integrated with existing enterprise infrastructure. Should work well with office workflow systems since the design fits clients that ask for ‘collaboration that works within the structure of our existing business’. The new openness allows integration with SAP or other competitors, and a set of web services that will run on different server platforms - Solaris, Linux, Microsoft.

Oracle take great pains to point out that they are addressing existing customer needs in providing a system that reinforces regulatory needs. Mark Brown, Senior Director of Beehive Business Strategy, cited the recent leak of politician Sara Palin’s private email and increasing regulatory compliance of the financial industry as examples of the need for tighter infrastructure oversight.

Great. But as a true blue consultant, I worry about sales hurdle. How will the CIO get its budget past the CFO? C-level people are either too secretive or even paranoid to freely use collaboration suites that leave a trail. (They can’t say “this was not what I meant” or say “I told you so” later if the stuff sucks). They are more comfortable with over-the-phone-requests that come with in-built “that-wasn’t-me” flexibility. Will they let in a feature that they will never use at such an expense? ;-)

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Upgrade upgrade

So Oracle Database 11g is here. How do users view upgrades? I ask.

Most of Oracle database users haven’t yet started using all features in their existing versions. It’s like the new car full of new knobs that you may seldom turn. Given an option, I would say *no* to those premium features if that means lower priced pack. But I get no option if it comes as part of the basic version, ex-works. In the enterprise software world, users get no choice on their first buy even as they could make do with far less features. Visualize the downtime for installation of the new version, you would swear by SaaS models. The new database environments of 11g may be chic, more automated and may even free up a lot of DBA resources, but the pricing rankles. DBAs in charge of the earlier versions come comparably a lot cheaper.

Customers see frequent across-the-board upgrades (except where new applications warrant them) as candid confessions by vendors that their older releases suck. Over the years, vendors have carved a lifeline along that business model. It just means they gave crappy database environments earlier, right?

How about some refunds, Mr.Ellison…? Your friend Steve Jobs did that with his iPhone recently.

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BBD or not; Larry Ellison is in no hurry

Larry Ellison never shoots from the hip. He is quite level headed and makes sure that he’s never caught with his pants down. I am referring to his casual dismissal of SAP’s SaaS offering – Business By Design (BBD) – by saying that it’s not going to make a lot of money.

But the fact is that he owns NetSuite, a SaaS ERP provider that is prepping an IPO. If Ellison really thought there would be no money in SaaS ERP he wouldn’t own NetSuite. But Ellison’s comments, which were delivered (transcript) after the company’s solid earnings report, do reveal Oracle’s strategy. Oracle isn’t going to try and replicate what SAP has done. Here’s Ellison’s strategy: Let SAP figure SaaS out and crow if the rival fails. If SAP is successful–it probably will be over time–Ellison buys NetSuite from himself.

Here you got what Ellison had to say about the growth strategies of Oracle and SAP and the SaaS market.

Simply put, Oracle will just buy NetSuite when the time is right. Sure, there are corporate governance hackles to be raised since Ellison is basically buying his own venture, but that’ll be worked out with some independent committee and a healthy premium. So when folks figure out this SaaS thing, Ellison will answer with another acquisition.

If BBD fails, he can start a grapevine and say Henning Kagermann, CEO of SAP was a daffy professor who bullshitted his way into a project that never made any sense in the first place, and predictably failed. But I have this question for you Mr.Ellison - costing a tenth of your economics, why would you think BBD will fail...? Wouldn't you agree it'll make up in volumes what it loses in the width of its margins...?

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