I attended NetSuite’s global conference this year (disclosure – NetSuite contributed to my T&E to attend) and it has been interesting to reflect on a company that is unabashedly growing up. Having been at all of the previous global NetSuite events, it was impressive to see attendance grow to some 5000 people, to hear the conversations ramp up a notch and to see the increasing professionalism with which the event was run. Having had a few days to digest the announcements, here follows an assessment of what we saw through this pundits lens.

Launch of NetSuite for Manufacturing

Some three years ago NetSuite launched a manufacturing solution off the back of a partnership with Rootstock – for whatever reason, be it technical or business-related, that deal never really bore fruit. Instead NetSuite went back to the drawing board and decided to build its own solution. This is actually a better approach for a manufacturing solution since building off one common architecture and data type increases both the flexibility and the ease of use than by kludging together different solutions to create some kind of Frankensteinien combination. CEO Zach Nelson was very quick to point out that in the same time as SAP saw core licensing business reduce, the past four quarters saw NetSuite manufacturing sector bookings grow 60% – of course given the relative sizes of their business this is less impressive than it sounds, but for a company focusing heavily on growth, it’s something to crow about.

After announcing the solutions, Nelson told the audience about the partnership between NetSuite and Autodesk to integrate Autodesk’s 3d design and product lifecycle management (PLM) tools alongside the NetSuite ERP. The demo showcased a fictitious BBQ manufacturer and retailer, and showed how design, product feedback, customer input and financial aspects of a combined manufacturing/sales organization can be run on the products. While the demo was relatively slick, there didn’t seem to me to be a huge amount of true integration. NetSuite describes the partnership as:

a bi-directional integration of cloud-based ERP with cloud-based PLM, giving manufacturers a single, closed-loop solution to accelerate product design and development, reduce risk of errors and delays, streamline supply network collaboration, and gain critical real-time visibility into pricing, scheduling, capacity and profitability

There’s certainly some truth in that – but I suspect the number of customers who actually consider the design part of manufacturing as needing to be deeply integrated into their ERP solution is limited. There is also obviously some tension with regards existing product breadth from the two partners – as an example the functionality around requests for quotes, and important area for outsourced manufacturing businesses, exists in both Autodesk and NetSuite. Alongside the partnership with Autodesk, NetSuite rolled out some extended functionality that will appeal to manufacturing customers including availability to promise (ATP), standard cost, work-in-process (WIP), and routings.

Manufacturing is a massive area of opportunity and the complexities involved in a manufacturing business lend themselves well to the sort of broad, flexible and robust solution that NetSuite has created – the increasing velocity of the creation of new nimble manufacturing businesses (for example GoPro, the Pebble Watch and Jawbone) who aren’t constrained by existing thoughts around what a MRP system should look like plays very well into this new strategy for NetSuite

Omni-Channel Wins

One of the other areas Nelson focused on in his keynote was retail. Unsurprising since it was at this event last year that the company rolled out SuiteCommerce, a solution set designed to manage the complexities of omni-channel retail. NetSuite rolled out the CIO of Williams-Sonoma who has only just finished rolling out NetSuite to run four individual brands retail an e-commerce operations. The move to NetSuite was prompted by Williams-Sonoma’s first foray outside of the US, in this case building out an Australian business. The company wanted a solution that would scale geographically across markets and would let them roll out the stores as quickly as possible. The roll out took only three months, something Nelson is justifiably proud of given the massive timescale more generally seen with these sorts of projects.

The breadth of use of NetSuite by Williams-Sonoma was somewhat glossed over at the event – currently it’s in place for the Australian operations only. Having said that, in follow up sessions with the NetSuite executives in charge of retail, I did get the distinct impression that this is a relationship that is likely to grow stronger – Williams-Sonoma was very impressed by the speed at which the implementation of NetSuite occurred, perhaps especially so given their experience with existing large ERP solutions.

In a deep-dive analyst session around retail I stated my impression that, while the retail solution looks really powerful, it doesn’t really leverage the cutting edge approaches that we’re seeing in the marketplace – I mentioned such things as location based shopping and special offers as two areas where there is a massive amount of innovation. NetSuite doesn’t seem to be weaving this narrative into its approach towards retails. My impression is that there is a couple of reasons for this. Firstly the company has only just started down the retail route and is running fast to try and innovate quickly. Secondly however and more importantly, NetSuite is delivering a solution that its customers, generally larger retail operations, are asking for. These companies seem not to be aware of the impending tide of disruption that the social/local/mobile trend will have upon their business. NetSuite needs to start telling this more aspirational story or else it risks losing relevance in the future.

Look for part two of this review next week.

As part of their onboarding and proof of concept, EdgeSpring has developed CrunchEdge, a public playground where people can explore EdgeSpring applied to the Crunchbase data. I’ve had a bit of a play and it certainly does what it says it does – allows people to drill down into the part of the data set that is relevant to them – in the case of CrunchEdge that could be getting some data on deal size, on vertical industry, or on any other part of the data that is of relevance. The EdgeSpring platform allows users to:

• Acquire data from any source and bring it in to the platform – currently from SQL, Hive, salesforce.com, and some other sources.
• Manipulate data to meet specific requirements
• Query the platform – either manually or programmatically
• Derive visualizations off the back of the queries

In terms of its go to market products, EdgeSpring offers to distinct products, SalesEdge and MarketingEdge – as the names imply, these two products offer sales and marketing people the ability to gain insights into their area of specialty and to be in a position to assess where to best prioritize their time. SalesEdge offers pipeline management as well as salesperson-centric opportunity visualization and management-centric salesperson reporting. MarketinEdge on the other hand attempts to connect the marketing initiative data to customer acquisition/retention data to more accurately assess the efficacy of marketing initiatives. EdgeSpring already has some interesting customers including Equinix, Netflix and Intacct.

I really like the area that EdgeSpring is going in to. As with other BIO solutions the key barrier to uptake is the ease of adoption/deployment. If they’re able to make it far easier for organizations to get started leveraging business intelligence, they look set to achieve some real success.

…providing virtual environments in the cloud. CloudShare’s self-service SaaS platform and suite of solutions enable business users to build, freeze and share complex computing environments

The company boasts of over 175,000 users worldwide and more than half of the Fortune 100 as customers. Anyway – today CloudShare is extending their platform to deliver upon the needs of development and testing groups. CloudShare Labs is a self-service solution that delivers cloud infrastructure but in a way that is optimized for the particular use case of the department needing it. Particular capabilities of the platform include:

• Simplified Bug Fixing: The solution enables the capture of a multi-VM disk and memory state, literally freezing a bug in its environment so it can be shared with developers and corrected without having to reproduce the bug in a different environment
• Environment Cloning and Template Libraries: The ability to clone a master environment eliminates mistakes caused by misconfiguration and enables collaboration among cross-functional and dispersed teams through a web browser, console or SSH session. Groups can also create and store libraries of templates for later reuse
• Integration: The new solution integrates with the leading application lifecycle management (ALM) and software development lifecycle (SDLC) processes and tools, such as Team Foundation Server and Jenkins
• Remote Access: CloudShare Labs extends an organization’s existing on-premise development and testing environment to the cloud. Using an organization’s virtual private network (VPN), teams can connect to CloudShare to burst for more resources or collaborate with anyone, anywhere in the world.

It’s actually a compelling argument – individual development team are using so many specific functional tools that the idea of creating a one-size-fits-all development recipe that will cover all the different needs of a development organization is untenable. Rather what is needed is the ability to create libraries of stack templates, and to clone these environments as and when required. The environment cloning and template library aspects of CloudShare Labs make sense. The ability to “freeze” an environment mid-error and in doing so to more readily track and fix bugs is also a logical and compelling proposition.

The CloudShare approach is an interesting one and will suit large enterprises with a wide and diverse spread of development approaches and methodologies – it will be interesting to see the uptake that the product gains in the marketplace.

And at the end of it I was left with a slightly nervous feeling that in advocating the rise of DevOps, we run the risk of removing one archaic and broken system, only to replace it with more of the same.

The worrying thing was the hallway comments from people who were attending the event in order to formulate a plan to “implement a DevOps team” within their organization. That entire aim missed the point of DevOps as an organizational trend. I spent 45 minutes or so talking about how broken current approaches are – siloed teams, each with differing motivations and areas of focus doesn’t deliver consistency. Neither does the fact that these teams are generally talking in different languages, at cross purposes and with wildly different priorities.

To simply rip this out and replace it with a siloed DevOps team doesn’t help that at all. DevOps isn’t about particular toolsets and neither is it about implementing a black ops team to go around operational turf protection. Rather DevOps is a humanistic movement, one which should be almost completely focused on communication, on bridge building and on the identification of common interest. My frustration was lessened somewhat after reading a post by Jez Humble on the subject. Somewhat confrontationally entitled “There’s No Such Thing as a “DevOps Team”, the core thesis of the post was that

the Devops movement addresses the dysfunction that results from organizations composed of functional silos. Thus, creating another functional silo that sits between dev and ops is clearly a poor (and ironic) way to try and solve these problems. Devops proposes instead strategies to create better collaboration between functional silos, or doing away with the functional silos altogether and creating cross-functional teams (or some combination of these approaches).

In this modern world, where the delivery of agile solutions on an ongoing basis is a non-negotiable requirement for success, organizations need to set themselves an objective to cross functionalize as much within their organizations as possible. This is part of the reason that every step up the stack delivers incremental benefits. Automating infrastructure deployment does much to build bridges between application operations and systems operations teams, and creates common goals where formerly they were hard to identify. Similarly the move from infrastructure up the stack to PaaS all of a sudden means that development and operational tasks are developed and achieved with commonality.

Individual functional silos increase the occurrence of problems. Why? To revert to the previously mentioned post:

…functional silos often get created in reaction to a problem (which they inevitably exacerbate). At the beginning of an interview with Elisabeth Hendrickson I posted recently, she discusses working at a product company which was suffering a series of quality problems. As a result, they hired a VP of QA who set up a QA division. The net result of this, counterintuitively, was to increase the number of bugs. One of the major causes of this was that developers felt that they were no longer responsible for quality, and instead focussed on getting their features into “test” as quickly as they could. Thus they paid less attention to making sure the system was of high quality in the first place, which in turn put more stress on the testers. This created a death spiral of increasingly poor quality, which led to increasing stress on the testers, and so on

Functional silos (and a standalone DevOps team is a great example of one) decouple actions from responsibility. Functional silos allow people to ignore, or at least feel disconnected from, the consequences of their actions. DevOps is a cultural change that encourages, rewards and exposes people taking responsibility for what they do, and what is expected from them. As Werner Vogels from Amazon Web Services says, “you build it, you run it”.

So a “DevOps team” is a risky and ultimately doomed strategy. Sure there are some technical roles, specifically related to the enablement of DevOps as an approach and these roles and tools need to be filled and built. Self service platforms, collaboration and communication systems, tool chains for testing, deployment and operations are all necessary. Sure someone needs to deliver on that stuff. But those are specific technical deliverables and not DevOps. DevOps is about people, communication and collaboration. Organizations ignore that at their peril.

I was joined on the panel by two early PaaS thinkers – Sinclair Schuller of Apprenda and Bart Copeland from ActiveState – it was a really fun panel to moderate – take the time to watch I tbelow.

…a merry-go-round of conflicting views from the HP execs attendant, finally closed off on the most unfortunate note by one executive who told us that HP cloud will succeed simply because it is built on HP hardware? SHOOT ME NOW! If only all the execs in the room had come out with a simple and concise message, we would have all bought into it.

Perhaps HP has begun to listen as it is today releasing versions of its operation and automation tools that are designed to provide a comprehensive, and most importantly integrated, portfolio to automate the complete life cycle of IT services. According to the release, the new tools will:

• Drive business growth by quickly deploying innovative IT services on a massive scale with HP Operations Orchestration (OO) 10, which automates the execution of up to 15,000 simultaneous operations
• Lower IT costs by efficiently delivering computing capacity with HP Server Automation (SA) 10, which automates server life cycle management to increase utilization, while reducing manual administration
• Increase employee efficiency with HP Database and Middleware Automation (DMA) 10, which automates manual database management tasks
• Accelerate time to value of IT services with HP Cloud Service Automation 3.2, which provides service life cycle automation, utilization and financial management capabilities to accurately and efficiently manage and scale cloud services

There’s a veritable cacophony of marketing buzzwords and lingo in there so let’s see what it means. The Operations Orchestration tool takes the notion many in the cloud world will be familiar with from Chef and Puppet and creates “runbooks” (otherwise known as recipes). These runbooks automate the provisioning of infrastructure so deployment can be both faster and more automated than previously. OO10 now supports Amazon S3 Storage, HP ArcSight, HP Fortify, OpenStack and SAP applications meaning that automation can be applied to core business processes.

SA10 is a server life cycle management platform that creates a “single pane of glass” across heterogeneous infrastructure to make it easier to manage servers – both virtual and physical. The product also comes as a virtual appliance.

DMA10 automates the administrative tasks around database management – it handles provisioning, patching, upgrading and code release functions and coversDB2,Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase and WebSphere databases.

Finally CSA is HP’s cloud management platform that aims to ease the building, brokering and management of cloud services.

MyPOV

Anyone else seeing a problem here? HP is touting this portfolio as creating an integrated, holistic management platform. And yet we have multiple products with multiple names and questionable deep integration. It feels very much (and I suspect this is because it is) several distinct applications that have had a bit of a lick of paint in terms of some superficial integrations and are being launched together in order to tick a box for an enterprise that wants truly integrated IT operations.

It seems like this launch is an example of the troubling situation at HP whereby different divisions are busily beavering away on their own solutions – without a staunch leader who can break down those silos. When HP appointed Saar Gillai as general manager of the pan-HP cloud division, many of us hoped that this indicated that there was a mandate to break down these silos. Gillai has been in the job now for eight months and quite possibly the tone of this combined release is a result of pressure from him. However I’d expect significantly more and hope that, if not by HP Discover in June, then at least by their December event, that HP will have a far stronger story to tell that once and for all breaks down the walls that would appear to exist between the various units.

So what does MyIT have to do with location anyway? And why is that of even mild interest to people thinking about how their organization will function into the future?

Well if you look at the video of MyIT in action that an analyst from Ovum created (embedded at the bottom) you’ll see that much of the value in the product lies in the fact that the application is inherently location aware. It’s no use going to a service portal looking for, say, the nearest printer, if the application has no awareness of where the user is. Similarly it’s a drain on productivity having to manually inform the application of your location. Dancy explained to me that there’s a few core pieces of IP that BMC holds around the smarts within MyIT:

• Protection around a location aware service catalog – covering not only location but network and device details etc
• Visualizations of IT assets including their state (say for example a map showing that a printer around the corner is down)
• The ability to check in assets via QR codes or NFC tags

Now I’m not going to make a comment on the use of patents when it comes to software – that’s a discussion for another day. Indeed, and somewhat coincidentally, the country I live in, New Zealand, recently decided that software would be specifically excluded from patentable items. But what is interesting here is whether or not location is going to be a critical part of service desk management – looking at the video below it would seem to be the case. That being so it will be interesting to see how other companies in the service desk space respond and innovate what they do.

The bottom line here is employee enablement – few people would disagree that IT service is too slow and reactive – the addition of location based services on top of established IT service platform is a valuable development. And hey, if it means my printer can become the mayor of my home office, in the same way that I can be mayor of a café on foursquare, well that’s OK too.

While the OCP has made great inroads at opening up many parts of the data center operation, one area they’ve seen little impact is the world of networking. This is largely due to the fact that networking disruption lags behind other parts of the datacenter. While commodity hardware and open source software for compute is a well accepted and recognized approach, the same for networking is unheard of in the public arena. This despite the fact that many webscale operators design their own networking gear – in particular Google is rumored to do so.

Networking kit accessible to the general populace on the other hand tends to be highly proprietary hardware/software combinations that give customers very little flexibility. Traditional vendors like the fact that new technologies require updating both hardware and embedded software – awesome for their profit margins, but wasteful and expensive for customers. Which is where the Open Compute Project’s announcement comes in. The aim is to product an operating system agnostic, open source switch that, in the words of Frankovsky “can be treated just like a bare-metal server when it comes on the network”. The reference for the switch would create a piece of hardware onto which customers can load their own operating systems – in much the same way as customers load OpenStack onto standard servers. In doing so the initiative opens up the opportunity for organizations to take advantage of commodity hardware directly from OEM providers – and neatly sidestep the network giants in the process.

If this initiative gains traction, it raises some real concerns for the traditional networking companies – Big Switch Networks and VMware have put their names to the initiative but so to has Cumulus Networks, a stealth company that was founded by JR Rivers, a long time Cisco veteran and a former Google networking engineer. Google doesn’t talk about it’s forays into a new type of networking device but if the rumors are true, then Rivers was likely involved in taking commodity hardware and rolling it out within Google – taking that experience and applying it at a startup raises some interesting prospects. The fact that Cumulus has joined the OCP initiative raises them even more. Anyway – the initiative looks to get going immediately There is an OCP meeting at MIT next week and word is a number of companies with an interest in disrupting the networking status quo will be there.

Of course we already have OpenFlow, a protocol that allows users to manage their hardware. But this initiative is going further and covering any operating system that may be uses. In terms of how it will work, the projects aims to create a switch that has within it a “boot loader” that will let software be installed onto the device, across the network. And therein lies the opportunity for another open source software play – currently networking OSes are proprietary to specific vendors – Cisco, Juniper and Arista – imagine a networking OS built on top of Linux for example – it’s a prospect that has these other vendors quivering in their boots.

Change is something that has been lacking in the networking world – it looks like very soon it will be the new normal

And today, once again, my country has stood up when it mattered and, despite massive pressure from some gigantic multinationals and the governments who would seem to be at their behest, has decided that software should be left out of the pending legislation around patents.

One only needs to look to the US and the truly bizarre situation of Nathan Myrhvold’s Intellectual Ventures, one of the best known, and least liked of the patent trolls, to see that software patents reduce innovation, prop up those who shouldn’t be and are detrimental to small companies. By making software non-patentable, my Government is making the industry do what it should – that is focus on moving fast, innovating well and giving customers the best solutions possible.

Ka pai New Zealand.

SuiteWorld

I’m now a veteran SuiteWorld attendee having previously enjoyed a number of times the amazing job that NetSuite SVP Mei Li does of looking after the analysts that attend the event. NetSuite is an amazing company that has done a fantastic job of morphing from its roots as a SMB vendor and rapidly moving up the food chain to be a credible ERP offering. It has to be said however that NetSuite is a little constrained on a couple of fronts:

• Firstly by its own habit of pouring scorn on its larger competitors (SAP and Microsoft Dynamics) while completely ignoring the elephant in the room in the way of Oracle. Of course the NetSuite share register shows why this is the case, Oracle boss Larry Ellison is also the largest NetSuite shareholder but, still, NetSuite’s criticisms of its competitors would ring truer if this situation was resolved
• When compared to its cloud competitors, most notable Salesforce but others as well, NetSuite is a little slow to jump on the social bandwagon. Of course some of this is because NetSuite sells to the CFO, someone generally less inclined to “get” the social message. It’s easy for Salesforce selling primarily as they do to the sales and marketing parts of the business but still, a more compelling proposition about how NetSuite enables its customers to compete in the new more connected and collaborative world would be welcome

That said, even without lots of cool social enterprise cred, NetSuite is executing well. They’ve built strong vertical solutions in both retail and professional services – some smart acquisitions have helped with this an in my conversations with NetSuite customers – this value proposition of tying together the back office and the front office is one which resonates and really drives efficiencies for customers.

Last year at SuiteWorld CEO Zach Nelson announced SuiteCommerce, an elegant and compelling offering that strongly tied the back office EP functionality to an end-to-end retail offering that covered e-commerce including the customer facing aspects. The company has been a little quiet about the rollout and success of that initiative so I’d be hoping to hear much more on that front.

NetSuite also recently announced a vertical offering for the wine industry – I’ve long said that strong verticals are where NetSuite’s future lies and I’m looking for some more progress with this – NetSuite has some strong vertical success but I’d like to see it productize those vertical offerings a little more to give some clarity around where it is aiming.

Finally the perennial question remains as to when Larry Ellison will swoop in and buy the part of NetSuite he doesn’t already own. Much of the timing of this rests on NetSuite’s strategy to push two tier ERP as a strong solution for larger enterprises – the idea that individual business units will use NetSuite but roll up the various units into a bigger system for consolidation is one which makes sense – last year we saw a few of these stories being told and it seems to me that once the company starts seeing some real momentum around this strategy – that will be the moment that Ellison swoops in.

SuiteWorld is always a fun few days – this year will see it out grow the usual San Francisco hotel venues and head down to the Valley – I’m looking forward to speaking to customers and having a conversation with the always thoughtful and well informed Zach Nelson.

GoogleIO

Ah Google. I’ve attended IO once before but unfortunately missed it last year and had to watch the spectacle on the livestream. And what a spectacle it was seeing skydivers jump out of a blimp above the Moscone center and record their journey through Google Glass. Actually I was a little disappointed that Google had succumbed to the temptation to create a high impact, but generally meaningless stunt. Google is better than that and I’d have much rather seen a more measured, thoughtful and forward looking first outing for Glass.

Of course given the marketing wet dream that Google had when Robert Scoble recently declared glass to be the biggest thing since the transistor, it would seem that Glass is front and center in terms of what part of the Google empire will get the most airplay at IO. This is a little disappointing and, frankly, a little bit shortsighted for the company.

As Google begins to push it’s Amazon Web Services competitor, Google Compute Engine, as a credible public cloud alternative, it starts to beg a number of questions about just how ready for, and committed to the enterprise Google actually is. The recent decision to scuttle Google reader, an admittedly less than overwhelming success of a product, along with the seeming lack of focus on Google Apps that the company has does little to reduce the concerns about their eventual intentions.

It seems to me that Google is a company torn between exciting, attention grabbing and generally consumer faced business units and the less exciting, but very important enterprise products. What I’d like to see at IO is significant attention given to Google Apps, Google App Engine and the Google Compute Engine. What I expect to see is lots of hand waving about Android, Glass and self-driving cars.