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.

What About the Social Angle?

In an analyst session with Zach Nelson, I raised my perennial question around the lack of a compelling vision from the company that provides some answers to the customer engagement question. I put it to him that Salesforce is really taking all of the mindshare when it comes to assessing the sentiment of the marketplace – harnessing conversations and bringing those into the core operations of the business. Salesforce has spent significant money on acquiring companies in this space and really articulates this value proposition strongly.

Nelson’s reaction was that as far as he was concerned, Salesforce isn’t really a customer relationship management solution but rather a prospect relationship management one. I suspect that what he justifiably meant by this was that solutions that only harness the front end of the relationship, but don’t have a deep visibility into the transactional activities of the customer are less than optimal In his view NetSuite, with it’s visibility into the total transactional relationship with the customer has this benefit. As I said that’s a justified position, but one which is, in my view, a little shortsighted. Any customer-facing organization that rests on its laurels by being happy to simply own the transaction relationship is missing out on the opportunity for new sales by harnessing the potential customers before they’ve even made a decision to purchase – this is where social media marketing and sentiment analysis tools come in.

I’m expecting to see NetSuite bridge this gap going forwards. With Their retail solution more baked now, I’d expect a very strong message about harnessing the customer BEFORE they’re event a customer to emerge between now and the next SuiteWorld in 2014.

A Vibrant Ecosystem

One thing that was very positive to see at SuiteWorld was the increasing maturity and breadth of the partner ecosystem. This ecosystem is vibrant not just at the ISV end, but also from the all important system integrator end. At SuiteWorld a partnership with CapGemini was announced – ticking off the last of the massive global consulting firms to have signed on as NetSuite partners.

In the ISV area however there was some real movement and some strong stories. On day two of the event a significant part of Evan Goldberg‘s keynote was given over to a demo by eWinery. I was very bullish about this vertically-specific solution for the wine industry when I first saw it a few months ago. I’ve long said that I believe the opportunity for NetSuite is to roll out more certical-specific solutions. I dug into this issue with Nelson and he explained his approach towards this. NetSuite is keen to provide broad solutions for general verticals (retail, manufacturing, professional services) but to leave what they call the “last mile” to partners. They’ll do broad categories, but not distinct industries seemed to be the approach. The eWinery partnership is a good example of this – NetSuite provided the broad retail and back office functionality, while eWinery came to the party with industry specific knowledge and process – it’s a logical approach and should allow NetSuite to hit a wider addressable market than otherwise.

Critiquing the Competitors

As is often the case, NetSuite put in a few jabs (actually more than a few) at its competitors. In previous years both SAP and Microsoft have come in for a lashing but this year criticism for Microsoft was lacking. This is interesting and is likely tied to the fact that Microsoft is rapidly becoming irrelevant in this space. There was one uncomfortable moment when Norm Fjeldheim, the CIO of Qualcomm, was on stage with Nelson during the keynote. Qualcomm are using NetSuite for some of their small business units and Fjeldheim made the comment that if he were Oracle or SAP he’d be worried. There was a moment of silence before Nelson agreed with him, at least when it comes to SAP. This off-the-cuff exchange shows the illogical nature of nelson’s harsh criticisms for SAP while leaving Oracle untouched. We all know that Larry Ellison is the biggest shareholder in NetSuite (in face I was part of a very small group of customers and influencers who enjoyed a cocktail event at Ellison’s amazing Woodside home), but clearly NetSuite is edging into the markets of both of these players are it’s frankly illogical to not admit that.

Nelson didn’t make a valid point about SAP’s much lauded in-memory technology HANA. He commented that while SAP talks all about technology, NetSuite is focused on delivering solutions to their customers. His point being that NetSuite uses in-memory techniques, but would rather talk about the solutions they’re delivering to the customers rather than the technologies themselves. It’s a valid criticism and one which SAP needs to ruminate upon.

Overall Thoughts

NetSuite is a company that is rapidly maturing. Their product has a depth and a breadth that we haven’t seen before and the customer wins they showcased at SuiteWorld really indicate that is now able to deliver a far greater selection of what large customers need. This maturing greatly increases the likelihood of what I have been predicting for years, namely an acquisition by Oracle. Outside of this M&A crystal ball gazing however, NetSuite seems to be doing everything right. They’ve got a long way to go to catch up with the mindshare and aspirational appeal of Salesforce, but my sense is that internally there is a realization about this and that the next twelve months will see the company really step on the gas and increase the activity on a number of levels – I’d expect to see some smart acquisitions, a strong marketing message about the future of the different verticals they deliver to, and a narrative that helps their customers (who, frankly, are often the more conservative parts of a business) see how their future looks different, and the moves they need to make to secure that future.

Overall SuiteWorld was an impressive event, as NetSuite events always are – I’m already looking forward to the next event and seeing what the company can deliver in 2014.

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.

So what is Infer all about? Essentially Infer’s solutions mine the historical customer won/lost records that sit in a sales organization’s sales and marketing databases. In addition to that inside data they pull in hundreds of signals from external web sources, and then build statistical models that identify the customers with the highest propensity to buy. So in one amalgam, Infer models customer data, along with company financials, social media presence, job listings, legal filings and other external information. As a result, they are able to deliver actionable revenue-driving insights that will (hopefully) lead to attention being given to the most likely prospects in an organization’s database and, hence, greater revenue opportunities.

The Infer team is something of a team of stars, CEO Vik Singh helped create the Yahoo! BOSS open search platform while co-founder Yang Zhang, is an ex-Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and MIT researcher, and Chung Wu was formerly the front-end tech lead of Google’s Public Data project. Their series A is also something of a who’s who – it was led by Redpoint Ventures but included participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Social+Capital Partnership, Sutter Hill Ventures along with a bevvy of high profile angels.

But the real test of a product like Infer is the use it gets from real world organizations – and if the experience that the sales team at Box has had is anything to go by, Infer is onto something here. According to Jim Herbold, EVP of Sales at Box, using Infer more than doubled the conversion rate from their highest volume lead sources. In an enterprise business where every conversion is potentially worth serious money, a doubling of conversion is a massive win. Alongside Box, Infer has signed multi-year agreements with “several Fortune 1000 companies” alongside tech stalwarts such as Jive, Tableau, Yammer and Zendesk. Staish Dharmaraj, a partner at Redpoint is understandably bullish about what Infer is doing but he raises a valid point when he says that:

While the sales and marketing automation markets have been strong over the last several years, automation is not enough. The much larger opportunity is to bring enterprises deep data science wrapped up in simple application services that anyone can use

Bringing together cold internal data and enriching it with external sources is a smart move in anyone’s book. The quality of the Infer team, the excellent early wins they’ve enjoyed and the excitement their initial customers show at the product indicates that this is one company to watch.

IBD: During the company’s Q4 earnings call you took some shots at SAP and Microsoft about their progress in building a cloud-based business. Why spare Oracle (ORCL), which is also building a cloud-based business?

Nelson: Oracle has made much more progress in the cloud. They have a strategy. We compete with Oracle in various industries.

But Microsoft literally has no strategy and no intention to get one in the ERP space, as far as I can tell. They are never going to bring their ERP products to the cloud.

SAP has done some cloud acquisitions, but these acquisitions are not in areas that SAP is known or valued for.

So I guess in some ways I’m picking on the weaker guys, namely Microsoft and SAP, because they really haven’t executed on a cloud strategy.

IBD: But Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and his family own about 55% of NetSuite’s stock. Is that why you spare Oracle?

Nelson: If and when we compete with Oracle, we play to win. So if customers are looking at us and looking at Oracle and our functionality is better, we are going to win. Oracle’s strategy is targeting very large companies. The sweet spot for NetSuite is the midmarket. I don’t see them coming down or attempting to come down to the midmarket. SAP has attempted and failed. Microsoft hasn’t really made any progress in cloud-based ERP.

Another person who watches this space, Frank Scavo, wasn’t shy in also questioning the motivaation for Nelson playing soft on oracle:

@zachnelson Of course, Mr. Ellison being a NetSuite major shareholder doesn’t have anything to do with your going soft on Oracle right?

— Frank Scavo (@fscavo) March 16, 2013

MyPOV

Larry Ellison is the smartest of business people. His historical smack talking about cloud, while all the while investing heavily in the pace, is the thing of legends. While he backed Salesforce early on but exited from the company when competitive tensions became too great, that is not the case with NetSuite – Ellison provided the initial capital for the company and to this day remains the majority shareholder.

While Nelson is keen to push the story that NetSuite competes as strongly with Oracle as it does with other vendors, the fact is that most people accept an Oracle outright acquisition is simply a matter of time.

I’ve opined upon the fact previously that as soon as NetSuite truly provides Oracle with a compelling story (and with the continuing strength of their “two-tier ERP” story, that day is getting closer all the time) for its customers, the deal will finally be consummated. While we may not like it, NetSuite is, other than the paperwork, an Oracle company-in-waiting. Give it 18 months or so and we’ll see closure on that prediction.

The other day I was talking to a friend who told me that his retired father has suddenly discovered Xero on the bourse, and is considering investing. This is a reflection on the level of maturity of the New Zealand market and the investing public. It’s also, to be frank, a reflection on the fact that institutional investors and advisers have suddenly decided Xero is a sure bet, no doubt encouraged by the stellar share price growth. They’re buying the stock and advising their clients to do similarly. The day Xero entered the ranks as one of the top 50 market cap companies on the NZX they also suddenly gained visibility within the advisory community – the combination of a stock that isn’t heavily traded with this increased demand leads to an artificially high impact from low volume trades – this is great on the upside but painful on the downside. It’s actually very positive for the maturity of the company that they recently cross listed on the Australian exchange – it brings them a greater level of savvy investors that actually understand the dynamics of a potentially high-growth/high-risk investment. Drury has also signaled a possible future listing on the US exchange – this too would give both some stability and some liquidity to the share price – both positive things.

However this greater scrutiny will challenge the company to find analogues for its business. Drury has regularly pointed out the fact that Microsoft acquired enterprise social networking company Yammer for $1.2B as justification for the sort of valuation Xero is hitting. That might work for new Zealand investors who don’t quite understand the nuances, but Yammer was a very different deal for a couple of reasons:

• It had an exceptionally effective viral user growth pattern that Microsoft needed to learn about as they try and morph their business into the internet age
• It was an answer to the growing attention that social networking within enterprise was garnering – Salesforce’s Chatter product and Tibco’s Tibbr were increasingly making Microsoft look late to the party

For these reasons, and given the massive war chest of cash that Microsoft holds, the Yammer deal made sense. it may end up being a failure as a business division of Microsoft, but as a learning, marketing and corporate culture tool it makes sense.

Others rightly suggest that Intuit, the US’s biggest vendor of SMB financial products, is a potential suitor for Xero (some even going on to suggest that it is Intuit behind the buying that is sending the share price upwards – a theory I discounted). People point to the fact that Intuit acquired the personal financial management product Mint a few years ago and has an appetite for acquisitions that shoehorn itself into this new world. The Mint acquisition was, in my view, a very different deal, in a couple of important ways:

• Mint had delivered an interesting mix of behind the scenes business intelligence. It was mining aggregate data to deliver insights to customers and hence had some very useful technology that could be back doored into other Intuit products
• Mint, like Yammer, had worked out the viral uptake model and, at the time of acquisition, boasted over a million users

While Xero is doing very well from a user numbers perspective, for Intuit to acquire the company, it would have to be showing stellar growth in the only market that really matters – the US. Xero has really ramped up its US presence, the company has shifted into its own space and has ramped up the team significantly, but it’s coming from a relatively small customer base. While I recently reflected on the 100000 customer milestone and suggested that this indicated that Xero had reached escape velocity,  this statement becomes far more nuanced when we look at the joint factors of massive market capitalization and global market share dynamics. I believe that Xero, at its current market capitalization, is yet to become a compelling proposition for a US acquisition. Rather, what a company like Intuit is likely to do is one of two scenarios:

• Wait until someone enjoys meaningful customer success in the US and acquire them for a lofty sum, secure in the knowledge that they’ve gained a path to continuing market domination
• Acquire a company for a far more modest sum that has potential to become the breakout product in the space

The cloud accounting space isn’t a zero sum game however and this creates another difficulty for Xero, it is unlikely that we’ll see a repeat of the emergence of a small number of companies that dominate in the three big geographies (Intuit in the US, Sage in the UK and MYOB in Australasia). Xero is helped by the fact that in the US there is no vendor that has really captured market share – Outright (recently acquired by GoDaddy) and Wave (an interesting company with a free model) are the two best known domestic providers, but potentially more compelling is FreeAgent, a UK based vendor that has recently entered the US market and is a savvy operator.

Xero is executing well and their potential is massive. However potential only explains part of a business’ valuation, does Xero’s potential justify a $1.5B valuation? Not in my analysis – surely it may go higher as market frothiness and low liquidity combine to drive the economics, but eventually an equilibrium needs to be found, one that is based on customer numbers, market growth and eventual profit – we’re yet to see Xero deliver on that.

When asked how they would characterize their organization’s strategy towards using and supporting Microsoft Office products, there is an increasingly large number of organizations actively looking to minimize their investment in Microsoft Office. When one considers that Microsoft Office has been the dominant office productivity suite since it was released in 1990 – that is of real worry to Redmond.

60% of Google Apps customers are minimizing further investment in MS Office, further it seems that the longer customers have been with Google Apps, the less likely they are to continue investing in MS Office licenses – 64% of respondents who have been on Google Apps for 2+ years said that they are minimizing further investment in MS Office.

In his analysis of the results, BetterCloud CEO David Politis said that he felt there are several factors contributing to the declining investment in and lack of reliance on MS Office:

• Adoption – broader adoption of the Google Apps suite is eliminating the need for similar software outside of Google
• Compatibility – Google continues to improve compatibility between MS Office products (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) and Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, meaning users can do business with an organization still operating on MS Office without having to use Office themselves
• There is a generational shift occurring – as educational institutions continue to adopt Google Apps, the proportion of young people familiar with MS Office continues to decline. According to Politis a new generation is “growing up Google” and will want to use software they’re familiar with when they enter the workforce.

MyPOV

Of course in his analysis, Politis omits to make any mention of Office 365, the launch of the more subscription friendly and web-savvy Office 2013 and the benefits that Microsoft’s acquisition and eventual integration of enterprise social software Yammer might have on enterprises’ willingness to continue using Microsoft products. It’s undeniable that Microsoft has matured significantly in the past few years since it disputed the validity of cloud completely and continues to push its “software plus services” approach. Those days have gone and a very different Microsoft exists today. I suspect this trend of moving away from Office will slow as the company further advances its cloud thinking – tools like CloudOn that give users of Office the ability to use the product on iOS devices will further reinforce the Office franchise.

The bottom line is that, until recently, organizations that wanted to empower their employees with a mobile ready office productivity suite were poorly served by Office – they had little option but to look to other vendors. Those days have gone and Office is gradually becoming a compelling web product – if you’re a Microsoft shop already, you’ll think twice about migrating off Office if it meets your needs – both on-premise and mobile.

What people didn’t understand however was that my comment didn’t relate to the outage in particular, but rather the root cause of it. Cloud systems are highly complex and made up of a myriad of component parts – sometimes failures in those parts, or in the connections between them, occur. The key thing here is to adopt an approach that moves a provider towards anti-fragility, the concept where IT organizations increasingly learn from their issues to improve the ultimate reliability of the services they provide. So outages aren’t the problem per se, but when a company has multiple outages that stem from the same root cause, alarm bells should start ringing.

Microsoft finally finished an analysis of the outage and has published a post detailing what occurred, why it occurred and steps they’re taking to ensure the same thing won’t happen again. Some key points from the post are quoted below:

Windows Azure uses an internal service called the Secret Store to securely manage certificates needed to run the service. This internal management service automates the storage, distribution and updating of platform and customer certificates in the system. This internal management service automates the handling of certificates in the system so that personnel do not have direct access to the secrets for compliance and security purposes.

The certificates in question originate from this secret store and are stored locally on each of the Azure storage nodes. The certificates in question all expired within three minutes of each other – when this time was reached, the certificates became invalid and all connections using HTPS with storage were rejected (HTTP was still operational obviously). The interesting thing here, of real concern to Azure customers, is the root cause behind these certificates not being updated. Further, the fact that these certificates were the same across all regions is another concern.

For context, as a part of the normal operation of the Secret Store, scanning occurs on a weekly basis for the certificates being managed. Alerts of pending expirations are sent to the teams managing the service starting 180 days in advance. From that point on, the Secret Store sends notifications to the team that owns the certificate. The team then refreshes a certificate when notified, includes the updated certificate in a new build of the service that is scheduled for deployment, and updates the certificate in the Secret Store’s database. This process regularly happens hundreds of times per month across the many services on Windows Azure.

In this case, the Secret Store service notified the Windows Azure Storage service team that the SSL certificates mentioned above would expire on the given dates. On January 7^th, 2013 the storage team updated the three certificates in the Secret Store and included them in a future release of the service. However, the team failed to flag the storage service release as a release that included certificate updates. Subsequently, the release of the storage service containing the time critical certificate updates was delayed behind updates flagged as higher priority, and was not deployed in time to meet the certificate expiration deadline. Additionally, because the certificate had already been updated in the Secret Store, no additional alerts were presented to the team, which was a gap in our alerting system.

And so the certificates expires, and the Azure storage services went down. Microsoft went into disaster recovery mode and worked through some scenarios to have service returned – to their credit they took the time to test and validate fixes to ensure that no downstream problems were caused. In situations like this it’s always tempting to take knee jerk actions in an attempt to restore service and, in doing so, caused unintended secondary outages.

Anyway – the team found a fix and deployed it – services came back up and customers could breathe easy. But very quickly the questions came – I’ve had more engagement from readers in that blog post than on almost any other post I’ve written over my career. People wanted to know how the outage happened and, more importantly, what step Microsoft was taking to ensure something like this wouldn’t happen again. The key things people want some clarity on are the prevention, of outages, and the detection and recovery in the case of outages. From the blog post:

Detection

We will be expanding our monitoring of certificates expiration to include not only the Secret Store, but the production endpoints as well, in order to ensure that certificates do not expire in production.

Recovery

Our processes for recovery worked correctly, but we continue to work to improve the performance and reliability of deployment mechanisms.

We will put in place specific mechanisms to do critical certificate updates and exercise these mechanisms regularly to provide a quicker response should an incident like this happen again.

Prevention

We will improve the detection of future expiring certificates deployed in production. Any production certificate that has less than 3 months until the expiration date will create an operational incident and will be treated and tracked as if it were a Service Impacting Event.

We will also automate any associated manual processes so that builds of services that contain certificate updates are tracked and prioritized correctly.  In the interim, all manual processes involving certificates have been reviewed with the teams.

We will examine our certificates and look for opportunities to partition the certificates across a service, across regions and across time so an uncaught expiration does not create a widespread, simultaneous event. And, we will continue to review the system and address any single points of failure.

This is a fairly robust Mea Culpa – while one can look back and say that the outage was inexcusable (which it is) the most important thing going forwards is that things are put into place to continually improve the reliability of the service. In the case of SSL certificates, the steps that Microsoft has undertaken would appear to reduce any chance for an outage like this to occur. The bigger issue is the culture of continuous improvement. It’s fair to say that Azure has had a couple of very serious wake up calls and the depth of their investigation into this incident gives me a degree of faith that they’ll apply the learnings more broadly to not only improve their SSL certificate handling procedures, but also their approach to how they run their services overall.

At the time of writing Microsoft was suffering yet another outage, this time affecting Outlook.com and Hotmail – I’ll reserve judgement on that particular slipup for now….

Storage is currently experiencing a worldwide outage impacting HTTPS operations (SSL traffic) due to an expired certificate. HTTP traffic is not impacted. We are validating the recovery options before implementing them. Further updates will be published to keep you apprised of the situation. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers. Status of affected services will be updated in  the table below.

Have no doubt – this is completely and utterly unacceptable performance from a startup, let alone someone calling themselves an enterprise cloud vendor. Heads should, and absolutely must, roll because of this.

Completely unacceptable Microsoft, I’m disappointed.

I’ve long said that I believe cloud is revolutionary – primarily because it melds technical innovations (virtualization, the web, APIs, etc.) with new ways of doing business (a utility model, subscription basis, ease of use). Put these two things together and you have a revolution.

To help get this message across I filmed some video recently and had it animated to punch the message home – enjoy 2:36 of a justification for why cloud is indeed a revolution.

While we’re integrating consumer technology into our business, we also deliver many purpose-built systems to provide a competitive business edge. We depend on reliable, focused vendor support. We need to understand future product direction. We need partners that don’t chase shiny new things for a living and understand the discipline of delivering shareholder value through risk-managed innovation and execution… I don’t think Google gets this point at all…I could be part of the in crowd and say that I get it. But I’m not sure I do. It can take me six months to socialize (my favorite new buzzword) an innovation, and another six to implement it. Google, is that product going to be around after six months, or replaced?

The cynics will tell me I need to be a more nimble innovator and implement mass organizational change in a month or two. Fortunately for my employer, I realize the nonsense in this notion. Business change is risky. I will take what I can get from Google, but I see a gap between what I need and what it promises. This is why my company recently switched from Google to Microsoft as the map provider for our customer portal. Microsoft was simply more enterprise-friendly.

Google, I know you don’t care. As a midsize enterprise, we aren’t even a pixel on your radar screen. I hope some larger enterprises are able to help you pave this road for the rest of us.

Google, you have some great products. You have market share, cash, and the ability to innovate. You also have the opportunity to change the world in many other ways, but it will take some adjustment in thinking and approach to conquer the enterprise. An attitude adjustment wouldn’t be a bad start.

Our industry is anything but black and white. Dissenting perspectives from real world practitioners extend the thinking of all of us – this article, and the sentiments it espouses, are a good example of this.