Why understanding what didn’t happen is more important than knowing what did

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

DashboardDashboards, business intelligence, and KPIs are some of the ways that companies achieve the goal of process visibility…or at least that is the way it is suppose to be. 

There is no shortage of tools that allow you to see what happened historically from built in reports to custom business intelligence applications.  The fundamental problem is this:  just knowing how many purchase orders, invoices, or order inquiries you sent does not mean you have visibility to the whole business process. 

The real questions are – Did they get there?  Are they being processed?  Are they in the right format?  Did I get back what I was suppose to? and many, many more.

At Hubspan our business is not business intelligence but we are in a unique position to show companies what didn’t happen.  We can do this because we can see both sides of the transaction – both sender and receiver.  We can not only see both sides but can make sure that what is sent is also received the way both sides want it to be. 

If you don’t have this view to both ends of a message then you don’t have true process visibility. 

SaaS provisioning and user credentials

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

Interesting question came up the other day when discussing many of the enterprise obstacles to broad-based adoption of on-demand applications.  In addition to integration being identified as the #1 barrier to SaaS adoption, there remains the question of how you centrally provision and remove users from a fragmented infrastructure that blends existing enterprise systems with one or more on-demand applications. 

I want my $2…

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

And that is all I am going to get from Bear Stearns as JP Morgan acquires them.  Now, I certainly didn’t lose anywhere near as much as Joseph Lewis although I am sure the size of his portfolio allocated to speculation is a tad larger than mine. 

Let’s hope the financial levers that can be thrown by the powers that be will be and in the right direction or this is going to get really ugly (uglier than it already is). 

Larry’s rules

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

We all get to decide how much like Larry Ellison we want to be but you cannot deny the success and related success of companies and people he has/had a hand in from Oracle to Netsuite to Saleforce to Tom Siebel.

A post on FoundRead sums up two of Larry’s rules the first relating to start-ups and the second related to work focus:

1.  Eat what you kill.  Or at least act like you killed it.

This is the other people’s money (OPM) trap and this hits at the core of treating the money you raise from others like it’s yours and that it may be all you get.

2.  Are you building it or selling it?

I like this one.  You do one of two things in a company – help build it or help sell it.  If you do something else, you won’t do it for long.

“Marketers are sales people. If they think of themselves as anything else, they’re not doing their job.”

If you can’t say something nice about your competitors…

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

Interesting post picked via Venture Chronicles from Human Capitalist on a bit of a kerfuffle between Successfactors and competitor Softscape which has escalated to a lawsuit.  This may be an extreme example of what happens when you take a direct shot at a competitor, but it is definintely indicative of the consequences that can arise.  If you sell something….anything, you will always be asked about alternatives or competitors so best to be prepared. 

Beyond having the standard matrix that lists all the things you do better or more completely than your competitors, it is important to have confidence.  Confidence that the other team has a good product or service but that yours is superior in a number of ways. 

Direct shots at a competitor make you look like a chump but solid differentation in key areas can make the difference.  Invite direct comparison or competing pilots.  In many cases that is the only way a smaller or  early stage company can win business with big customers that have never heard of you.  If you don’t have the confidence you can win in this way, time to step back and re-evaluate.

Integration is the #1 barrier to SaaS adoption

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

According to Forrester Research analyst Ray Wang via Sandhill.com, integration ranks as the number one obstacle to SaaS adoption based on a recent survey.  This is consistent with what we are seeing in the market and is a quesition that every application company that chooses software as a service as their delivery model will have to answer over and over.  Time to production and realized value is not only important, it is the premise on which these companies operate and differentiate.  If you don’t have a good answer to this question, get one fast. 

Topconcerns

Introducing the B2B Long Tail

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

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.