US in the worst part of recession now.  You decide if you believe the economists surveyed for this WSJ piece.  Maybe no place to go but up? 

Doom and gloom is pervasive in both press and company outlooks and the venture community as been abuzz about the end of the 'good times.'

Having worked consistently for early stage companies working to penetrate the enterprise for the past decade or so, I'm not sure there have been any recent 'good times.'

I have not found enterprise IT budgets to be lavish nor have I found sales cycles to be short or decision criteria to be lax.  I have experienced quite the opposite.

Building an enterprise focused business is hard and the good times have not been seen since the euphoria of the '98-'01 time frame if you define good times as the suspension of basic business principles and a welcoming market for broad innovation.

Actually, I would argue that there is still a hangover due to all the new, new things enterprises consumed during that period creating significant skepticism and caution in the following years.  The bar has already been high and will only get higher going forward.

As you might expect, the latest rounds of survey responses are not bullish on IT spending.  No surprise there and it's not like there has been wild spending going on anyway over the past few years.

CIO magazine published their most recent survey results here.  A couple things that caught my eye:

• 40% of CIOs plan to decrease their budget which is roughly double the response from earlier in the year.
• Over 70% have postponed or are planning on postponing discretionary IT projects.
• About half have renegotiated IT contracts and frozen hiring in the last 6 months.

Here's some additional perspective on the survey from InfoWorld.

I have been a fan of Charles Schwab & Co. for many years and use many of their financial products and services.  I thought this was a worthwhile bit of content to share and it is available on the public portion of their site. 

Their point of view – doomsday fears are overblown.

Have you stopped to think a moment about all the writers, analysts, pundits, journalists, etc. who so liberally use the word "depression" these days with such apparent expertise are the same ones who said nothing leading up to the current gyrations?  They don't know any more than you or I (and in some cases less) and are chasing ratings/subscribers/viewers.  The more dire the diagnosis, the more you tune in.  Take it with a grain of salt.

Read the whole thing from Schwab as it does a nice job comparing and contrasting where we were then vs. where we are now and calls out the following points as reasons to believe:

1.  'Jobless recovery' (from previous decline period means fewer reductions this time around)
2.  Fiscal policy (government focused on stimulus)
3.  Globalization (no protectionist mindset)
4.  The FDIC (it exists this time around)
5.  Money supply (Fed adding liquidity this time around)
6.  Housing near bottom (not there yet but falling less)
7.  Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (US Treasury steps in as a buyer)

No doubt, this is going to continue to be ugly for a while and the new sport of calling the bottom of the market decline needs to be replaced by nausea and vomiting before we really get there.  My view is positive in the long-term based on belief in the US and US economy.  I can't think any other way. 

I like to poke a bit of fun at the Google gang here as it comes with the territory when you become the dominant player in so many things.  That said, I use lots of Google services from email to RSS to finance and would even (don't tell them) consider paying for it at some point should that buy me out of their ad driven world.  A topic for another day…

The point of this post is as follows: 

Google stock is experiencing what most stocks are experiencing these days – a steep decline.  Combine that with the fact that they are an "aging" technology company now at the grand old age of ten and the stage is set. 

Seeing this ridiculous feature now available for Gmail convinced me that they had indeed jumped the shark.  It's not April so it can't be a joke unless they paid to have the date moved.  Do some math before you send a late night email you might regret.  For real?

To me it looks like too many people working on too many things that just don't matter which led to this example of software development run amok.  My guess is that cuts are coming to more than just the free food budget and I hope that all that work to build out Googleplex North up the street from me here in Kirkland works out.  Otherwise there is some mighty nice new office space going to be available in short order.

I got to thinking about this today after reading a few articles about Google celebrating its 10th anniversary and now, apparently, getting into the crosshairs of both the anti-trust and privacy hawks.  Microsoft and IBM have long been considered the big tech companies that everybody loved to hate even though their products continue to find a market and their revenues continue to climb.

So what happens when the antithesis to Microsoft comes of age and becomes one of these big companies?

Google has done some growing up, is experiencing a decline/pause in its massive stock appreciation, and is desperately trying to be more than an advertising company.  I can't find the source (apologies) but remember reading a quote about Google that goes something like this:  "it is a company of mad scientists supported by an advertising business."  Great for now, but what happens when an earnings miss occurs, a downturn in ad spending happens, or margins begin to erode?

The other "cool" player on the landscape is Apple and has held the title of "not IBM/Microsoft" for some time driven home by its really clever Mac vs PC commercials.  Their resurgence as a company has been very exciting to watch which makes me wonder what's next to sustain this growth?  Look around next time you are in a coffee shop or board meeting and count the number of Macs you see.  It is no longer the unique/alternative choice it once was.

It will be interesting to watch as the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" approach begins to wane and these two cool companies collide as tech industry giants.

I use products and services from all these companies and like the fact that they continue to raise the bar with each other.  I believe this drives innovation, creates opportunities for start ups, and creates a near-term exit path for venture-backed companies while the IPO market continues to be flat. 

Evolving from scrappy start up set on dethroning the big guy to large global multi-billion dollar player is what happens when you become successful beyond imagination.  It is part of the natural evolution and motivates a whole new generation of young companies to come after you.

This is interesting.  Jigsaw is making its "corporate data" available for free via its Open Data Initiative to CRM systems from Entellium, Landslide, Maximizer, NetSuite, Oracle, Sage and SugarCRM.  Looks like a finger in the eye for Hoovers.  I did a post a while back on contact information as currency which is Jigsaw's user generated model.

Got an article placed over on CIO.com on this topic entitled "The Long Tail of B2B Emerges."  It builds upon the concepts laid out in Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail but applies them to the B2B space laying out how the integration challenges that exist in the tail can only be served by self-service integration tools that scale down (both in terms of cost and effort) to meet the problem.  The opportunity in the tail far outstreches those in the head…you just have to use the right delivery model to access them.

Two data points came to my attention on this topic in the past couple days.  One is from Marc Averitt on the chaos awaiting him after being out of the office for a week even after trying to manage voice mail and email via BBerry. 

The other is from a recent LexisNexis survey (via Info Governance) that states that in the 8.89 hour average workday (gotta wonder where that number came from) employees spend 2.3 hours doing on-line research.  In digging into the study a bit, the results are heavily skewed towards legal and education sector employees which leads to the large amount of time spent researching.

Coincidence that LexisNexis provides research products/services?  I think not.

Regardless, we have no shortage of inbound communication demanding our attention and no shortage of on-line content available to occupy our time.  The question remains for us all -what is a priority and how do I get to the information I need quickly?

The folks over at Forrester Research recently released a new report entitled "The State Of Enterprise Software Adoption: 2007 To 2008."  Here’s an article on it (thanks Michael) and a couple of interesting quotes related to the priority around application integration as well as moving to a business process focus:

"The No. 1 software priority for 2008 is improving integration between applications, cited by 33% of IT senior executives surveyed by Forrester."

"If we take all our survey data, we see people looking at integrating applications, people looking at upgrading packaged applications, people moving from a function to a business process perspective,"