SAP is doing something significant in the acquisition of Datango, the question is whether the market will react accordingly. The move is significant in that Datango offers a new paradigm for enterprise software training, but that significance is tempered by the sorry state of training content and the unfortunately legitimate attitude of many a CIO that spending big on training is wasted.

The attitude is legit largely because of how poorly the market has approached the development and delivery of enterprise software training.  Basically, enterprise training is broken, and most companies ignore it entirely or pay lip service to training their end users. This is because most training content doesn’t match implementation reality, training only happens at the initial time of implementation, and training is usually dumped into user’s heads during mind-numbing day-long classes, which means that it is forgotten the moment the class is over. Not to mention the fact that few companies refresh their end-user training during the enterprise software lifecycle, nor do they bother to train new hires.

The problem with this picture is that good training could make a huge difference in many areas: process mastery and overall software ROI is only the start. End users who are well-training tend to like their jobs more, customers who interact with well-trained employees tend to like their vendors better, and companies in regulated industries that train their employees well tend to stay out of regulatory purgatory more. There’s no end to the potential ROI of good training.

Despite the theoretical value that good training provides, training in the enterprise software world has been a colossal failure. It should come as no surprise that training budgets – as well-evidenced in SAP Education’s declining revenues – have been falling over the years as the awfulness of most training content has met the real problem of cost-justifying this awfulness. (For a look at what happens to SAP customers who skimp on training, Michael Doane’s work on SAP end-user maturity is essential.)

Datango’s ability to do advanced simulation provides an excellent platform for providing this desperately needed transformation of training as a dumping ground for talent and aspirations into training as a strategically necessary arrow in any enterprise software user’s quiver. I spent some time looking at Datango several years ago as part of a major review of enterprise software engagement models, and it was clear that Datango could add a lot to the development and delivery of next generation training.

The main problem for  SAP and Datango will be in convincing CIOs and business process owners to make the investment in technology and people in order to elevate training’s strategy value. Oracle bought UPK in 2008 with the similar goal of driving advances in training into its customer base, and thereby building a solid training revenue base. Those goals have largely been dashed in the ensuing three years, not because UPK isn’t a good product — it most fundamentally is, and enjoys a significant penetration in the SAP customer base as well as the Oracle customer base. The problem is that the value of training has never been elevated to meet the technological advances that UPK and now Datango can offer. The result has been missed opportunities for both vendor and customer.

So, good for SAP that it now has Datango under its belt (and, by the way, when they get around to adding Right Hemisphere’s visualization technology to enterprise training, SAP will have an truly impressive-looking training platform). The trick will be to convince a weary and jaded enterprise training market that it’s time to take another look at this neglected corner of the budget and prioritize training and process mastery once again. My guess is the investment in changing the industry’s collective mind about the value of training will make whatever SAP paid for Datango look small in comparison.

I’ve been working in the interactive gaming and gamification industry for over four years now, first as the founder of a now-defunct start-up focused on developing interactive training games, and most recently as a hands-on catalyst for enterprise gamification. It’s been gratifying to see this idea crop up as a topic of considerable interest – and research – in 2012.

And while the majority of what has been done with enterprise gamification to date has really been about marketing and customer engagement, I believe that we’re poised for an enterprise gamification revolution inside the enterprise that will take the largely unrealized concepts of social collaboration and create the engagement metaphor that will, finally, help companies realize these lofty social/collaborative goals. And their lofty investments in what has been a less-than-stellar reality for many, users and vendors alike.

The bottom line concept for why enterprise gamification will enable real social engagement and collaboration is this: our existing enterprise business culture and its processes and technology have ill-equipped us for supporting the kind of ad hoc collaboration that we need in order to take business efficiency and effectiveness to the next level. Nor are we able to use new social media and collaboration tools to force fit this requirement into the enterprise. Why? Because, fundamentally, we don’t know how to collaborate in this wild world of unstructured, ad hoc, highly interactive, always-on and highly virtual people-to-people-to-enterprise connectivity.

We need not just new technology but new kinds of processes in order to meet these requirements: Enterprise gamification will show us the way.

In the old world of ERP-based transactions, business processes were largely proscribed – either by regulation, law, or practice. This made it relatively easy to design and build a process for, say, invoice reconciliation, that, while perhaps boring and inflexible, was proscriptive precisely because there was a process that had to be followed to reach a desired outcome. This ability to define processes led to the growth of the enterprise software market that we know today: proscriptive, repeatable processes codified in packaged software. That’s been the state of the market for over 20 years.

In the new, post-ERP, post-transaction world, we have discovered that trying to harness the potential for human interaction and collaboration can’t be based on neatly proscribed processes, because real human collaboration simply doesn’t work that way. Indeed, we often cannot begin to fathom what the process would actually be to, say, collaborate on building and maintaining an enterprise knowledge base, mostly because to command that it should happen, the way we command that invoices be processed according to GAAP rules, is neither possible nor desirable. You simply can’t order your way to a truly collaborative process.

Rather, when looking at the post-ERP requirements of the 21^st century social/collaborative enterprise, instead of proscribed processes, we have desired outcomes. This notion of outcome becomes the focal point of a collaborative process the way transactions were the focal point of classic business processes. Thus, an outcome might be something as basic as “better customer service” or “better cross-business unit collaboration”, but in either case outcomes start with two basic characteristics: that lack of proscriptive process I just mentioned, and a conviction that an outcome can benefit from collaboration between different stakeholders, if only there were a collaborative process in place to make that happen.

The notion of outcomes has two more essential characteristics that need to be understood: they have a genuine value to the enterprise, and that value can be turned into a KPI that hopefully can be measured in some fashion or another. Gamification, it turns out, is ideal for analyzing and reporting on these values.

Finally, there’s the final rock-solid foundational component for enterprise gamification, which I alluded to above: despite the desirability of the outcome, the stakeholders need to be shown how to collaborate in order to reach these goals. This is the dirty little secret of the social/collaborative world in which we are trying to live today. We’re not a very collaborative society – this is, after all, the nation of the rugged individualist, the Jeffersonian pioneer conquering the wilderness. Enlightened and capable, naturalement. But collaborative? Not us.

This is where enterprise gamification becomes a powerful tool for the 21^st century enterprise. The key benefits of enterprise gamification are seen in providing a system of incentives and disincentives that direct individuals and groups towards a specific set of behaviors that in turn positively influence a desired outcome. A well-designed enterprise gamification environment becomes an engagement mechanism for collaborative behavior that can overcome the natural inability of people and enterprises to collaborate effectively towards a common goal.

Thus, the classic gamification elements such as points, badges, contests, leaderboards, ratings – not to mention fun – are put to use incenting people to collaborate and cooperate towards the desired outcome. On the way people get tangible rewards, peer and supervisor recognition, a sense of purpose and collective action, and other psycho-social rewards that can help the individual and the enterprise reach the apex of Maslow’s hierarchy. And have some fun doing so.

But that’s not all. Because all the stakeholder interactions are taking place inside a gamified technology platform – even those interactions that require use of some enterprise or desktop software system – there is an unprecedented ability to measure how well individuals and groups are collaborating. This analytical capability isn’t just limited to people: the same environment can also show as how well the technology components – the gamified elements and the enterprise or desktop software systems – are working towards serving the desired outcome. This ability to measure how people and processes interact – and offer guidelines for improvements –  will provide an unprecedented window into the enterprise’s overall effectiveness.

Meanwhile, something subversive is happening inside the newly gamified enterprise: people are more engaged, more able to understand and support the outcomes that matter to the enterprise, and they are being recognized and rewarded for these actions. This ability to acknowledge the contribution of individuals in a collaborative endeavor isn’t unique to gamification. But only in a gamified environment can everyone – employees, their peers and their supervisors – see the value of those contributions to the individual, the work group, and to the company as a whole.

In conclusion, I have to confess to an essential problem that continues to bedevil enterprise gamification: a real ROI. The problem with the above is that it’s very theoretical, there simply is no data to prove that enterprise gamification works, yet. That’s the real goal for 2012: start taking the theory into the field and show how it works, and do it well. That’s one of my person goals as a gamification catalyst, and one that I will be writing about further as the year unfolds.

Luckily for all of us in enterprise gamification, there’s lots of solid data on how well traditional multi-user, online gaming works in terms of issues like user engagement and knowledge transfer: multi-user game researchers like Nick Yee and game-based training researchers like David Williamson Shaffer, to name two of hundreds of researchers in these fields,  have amassed considerable data that supports the notion that gamification could have a powerful impact on the enterprise. This body of research is vast, comprehensive, and provides, in my opinion, an effective starting point for cost justifying enterprise gamification. But more is needed, nonetheless.

So, hold tight, it’s going to be a fun year, and a year when fun enters the enterprise in the most subversive guise possible: as a means to make good on social collaboration and the potential for greater efficiency in the performance of ad hoc processes. It’s a worthy goal, and enterprise gamification is a worthy platform. Onward!

This is a story of a credit card fraud that happened to my wife and I just before the holidays. It’s an amazing one that apparently involves insiders working at Chase.com and UPS, but the fraud is only half the story. The other half is about incompetence, poor call center training, broken security processes, and how once again the weakest link in any business process is the person trying – or not trying – to do their job.

So if you’re counting on Chase to protect your identity or work proactively to solve a serious identity theft against you, read on. You may want to reconsider placing your precious identity in the hands of this clown car masquerading as the largest U.S. bank.

This is also a story about how, once the rogue human element is inserted into the picture, automated call centers and logistics systems make it too easy to steal – in this case by intercepting newly ordered Chase credit cards from a UPS distribution center, using a pilfered security code to activate the cards, and then going on a heckuva holiday spending spree. And it’s the story of  how hard it is for one of the biggest banks in the world to fathom that it’s just been stung by a not –very-sophistacted inside job. Chase would rather blame the victim than heal itself.

The story begins one morning three weeks ago with the receipt of an email from Chase, the issuer of my Southwest airlines credit card, that alerted me to the pending arrival of a “the new card that I ordered.” It also cautioned me to contact Chase if I hadn’t ordered it, and as I hadn’t ordered it I immediately called the call center.

And thus began a comedy of errors that has run now for three solid weeks. First I was told not to worry, that this must be some kind of routine re-order. I persisted, and was then told that indeed my wife had ordered the new cards the night before. I told them she hadn’t, and I was asked, I swear, if I was sure that she hadn’t. Yes, I was sure.  I was even asked if I had actually asked her if she had ordered the card. This conversation was going south quickly.

Having filled my idiot quotient already, I forced the call center agent to put her supervisor on, and he and I determined that some sort of fraud was happening, though with a curious twist: the new card was being sent to our home address. Nonetheless, we cancelled the card, retired the account number, and ordered new cards to be sent to us. And we put a new security password on the account so that all future activity would be required to “go through” the new password. For the record, the new password was written down on a piece of paper and my wife and I then entered it into our respective computer systems using a relatively elaborate code.

That afternoon, armed with the tracking number for the fraudulent card (but not the new ones, Chase didn’t give that tracking number to me) I began to track the package on the UPS site. At 3 pm a notation showed that the packaged was being diverted from home delivery to a pickup at a UPS facilty, on the request of the receiver – not me, but obviously the woman who had pretended to by my wife. This made some sense, as it wasn’t obvious how the thief planned to get ahold of the card once it had been delivered to my house. It would be soon, however: I  hadn’t counted on the UPS side of this scam.

At 6 pm a new notation showed up in the UPS record, indicating that the thief had changed her mind and was now requesting it to be delivered to the house. Which meant that we were going to get three cards the next morning (a Friday): the two new cards and the original fraudulently ordered card.

Friday morning comes and around 11 am I get a call from Chase, checking on some recent activity with my new card. New card? Yes, one of the cards I ordered the previous day – and secured with a new password known only to Chase and me  – was being used at the Apple store in San Mateo, CA (above 45 minutes south from here) to great effect, ,while the other one was shopping its little heart out at SunGlass Hut in Napa, this time 45 minutes to the north. Merry Xmas.

Having never seen these cards, or even having an inkling of the new account number, I was dumbfounded. I immediately asked to speak to a supervisor, and was told that the cards were signed for at my house that morning at 9:50 am. I told them that was impossible, as I was home all morning and saw no no sign of UPS.

Maybe, it was suggested, with the utmost seriousness, UPS had showed up and someone waiting outside my house signed for them. Also not possible – Amber the wonder dog goes into serious intruder alert mode at the site of a UPS truck, and would have been barking up a storm at the site of a truck and some stranger in front of my house receiving some packages. In other words, the package had not only not been delivered, it hadn’t even made it to a delivery truck but had been stolen from the UPS distribution center in San Pablo, CA sometime after its arrival scan. (I checked with a UPS driver on this: had the thief diverted it from a delivery truck, the package would have been located in the electronic manifest of the truck and the driver would have become suspect  #1 in about two seconds. UPS drivers, unlike the seasonal help UPS hires in the DC during the holidays, are pretty unlikely to risk their jobs and pensions for a relatively minor fraud like this one.)

Then, I asked the Chase supervisor the two questions that have bedeviled Chase since that day:  1) how can you activate a new card that is password protected without the password, and 2) how can someone intercept a package from UPS without a tracking number? Bear in mind, I had encrypted the new password on our computers and I had never received the tracking number.

Absent a reasonable explanation that has escaped me for these two weeks, I have to conclude that it was an inside job: Someone at Chase stole my wife’s identity, ordered the first card, and then, noticing that it had been cancelled, stole the new password and tracking info, passing the latter on to his or her partner at UPS and using the former to activate the card. The fact that this theory seems possible is reinforced by Chase’s inability to actively investigate this fraud: Their investigative incompetence has left a security hole a mile wide in their credit card operations, and anyone who knows what I know about how Chase deals with fraud would have easily been able to pull  this off with some reasonable assurance that Chase would be unable to figure it out.

Indeed, this is where  the farcical elements of the story begin to pile up. Chase has now spent the last three weeks attempting, and failing, to figure out how this fraud could have taken place without the involvement of someone inside Chase: it’s clear that their investigation is centered on a desperate attempt to show that no inside job took place.

Instead, some pretty silly alternative scenarios have been suggested. The best was the theory that someone in my house listened in on the phone call and obtained the new password. I have interrogated my wife, my two young children, and Amber, and none of them apparently stole the data. (Amber broke and confessed to sleeping in the bed while we were out of the house, but that was it on our end.) Chase has also continued to assert that no identity fraud has taken place from inside Chase, and that, rest assured, Chase is working to resolve the matter.  (I have learned that “rest assured” is Chase’s little call center mantra, it’s probably on a poster hanging up next to a picture of Chairman James Dimon. Trust me, it’s one of the great oxymorons of modern business.)

And, just to be clear, without revealing too much, if this fraud was accomplished by listening in on my phone calls, the scam could have been much more comprehensive. Nuff said on that.

There is one other scenario that has degree of possibility with respect to authorizing the pilfered credit cards: judging from weeks of dealing with Chase’s call centers, including people who claim to be two and three levels above the level one responders, it is possible that some gross incompetence in the Chase call center allowed the person who diverted the cards from UPS to activate them without the password (using my mother’s maiden name), though I was assured by Chase that a call center rep can’t even enter the activation screen without the password. This still doesn’t solve the question of how someone can pull a packaged out of a UPS distribution center without a tracking number, unless another poorly trained Chase call center rep gave out the UPS tracking number to a caller without correctly verifying their identification.

I leave open this possibility because it turns out that poor training and gross incompetence is Chase’s forte when it comes to call center operations. One of many examples: After the replacement cards were intercepted from UPS, we had them cancelled and two new cards ordered, with yet another new password set up for the account. The new password, I found out five days later, hadn’t actually been entered into the system, or it had been entered and erased by someone. It was a heady moment when I first called in and tried to access the account with the new password, only to find that I had to use a previous password to check on a fraud notification alert (see below on how they mucked this one up  too).

Chase, in a rare moment of humility, acknowledged this failure to record the new password was an error.  The fact that a call center managers (this was a manager) is unable to press ‘enter’ when placing a new password on an account, means almost anything is possible inside Chase, much more probable than my wife hiding the fact that she’s ordered new credit cards or that someone is lurking in the basement listening to my phone calls.

One more in the list of noteworthy failures inside Chase: when I got the new cards on Saturday, I notified the Chase fraud desk that I would be traveling to Boston that Mon. (which is why I was still even working with this company: I needed a credit card for my trip and my only other one was Amex.) The following Wed. I received a travel notification alert from Chase that indicated that someone had placed a notification of pending travel on the account. I called (and was rejected from the account because I was using a new password that had actually never been entered. Luckily I still remembered the old password), I found out that the travel alert was the one I had placed on the account five days earlier. Five days! The people who went on the shopping spree has spent thousands of dollars in the space of an hour, imagine what someone could do for the five days it takes for the fraud alert to show up. So much for a proactive fraud alerting system.

The story unfortunately has yet to be resolved. Chase has basically been trying to end its investigation of the fraud for the last three weeks, calling me periodically to say that their Center of Excellence has determined that no fraud occurred. I have asked three different supervisors to provide answers to my two questions  regarding the password and tracking number, and after a week there has been no answer. They did admit the other day that there had been a pattern of credit card diversions from UPS in Northern California, but that of course has nothing to do with Chase.

At this point the only reason I am hanging on to the cards is to see how this will all pan out and to see what Chase is going to do for me once they finally admit that the fraud occurred inside Chase.  I’m thinking a three-year subscription to a credit card alert service for starters. Just starters.

So, the moral of this long-winded story is simple: It’s possible to be the largest bank in the United States and be ill-equipped to deal with credit card fraud to a shocking degree. Despite however many millions Chase must spend on protecting its credit card holder, it’s clear that they don’t train their people well, they don’t have strong, bullet proof security processes, their investigation processes are pitiful, and they’re overall default mode is to blame the victim and ignore the obvious.

But most important is how vulnerable Chase is to relatively clever gang of credit card thieves working inside Chase and its logistics partner, UPS.  This is the Wikileaks effect in the consumer credit world: you can build the best security system in the world, and yet a single individual with inside access can circumvent it with little effort. The trick is to not only be able to prevent such an occurrence – some of which can be done by better hiring practices, particularly during seasonal hiring rushes – but also to be able to consider the impossible – an inside job – and investigate it thoroughly and passionately. Chase has been mailing this investigation in from the get-go. They need to clean it up before they kill off whatever reputation they think they still deserve.

I was finally able to listen to the Oracle Q2 call, and the picture looks pretty bad for Oracle, while looking much better for the rest of the enterprise software market, which is completely undeserving of the collateral damage that Wall Street visited on their share prices following the Oracle debacle.

The key takeaways were pretty damning. Applications license revenue fell, while technology revenue grew relatively anemically. Importantly, license revenues from vertical industry sales were clearly suffering, and the company clearly missed its own targets for selling Exadata and Exalogic by significant margin.

Most importantly, the damage from the Sun acquisition continued to be felt in the company’s overall margin performance: Safra Catz again made a vague promise about an eventual return to pre-Sun margins, but it was clear that a lot would have to improve over last quarter, as well as every quarter since the Sun acquisition, before those margins come back to lead the industry again. If they ever do.

Also important was the almost off-hand comment from Catz – “the quarter was not dependent on any large deals” – that indicated there was no single large wound that resulted in the bad quarter as much as a thousand  small cuts. Triaging the big wounds is easy, staunching the losses from many smaller ones is much much harder.

Other details of interest. CRM grew close to 20 percent, ERP “did very well”. But verticals “need better management.” Considering the two largest volume components of the Oracle enterprise portfolio – CRM and ERP, which I assume mostly consists of EBS – did well or very well, the laggards – verticals – must have done really poorly if the overall apps license revenue was negative. Sucked wind may be a polite way to look at it.

I attribute this in part to the complexity of deploying these products – all of which were acquired and all of which require serious hardwiring in order actually integrate them to the rest of the suite. This is the essential fallacy of the company’s “engineered for investors” strategy: buying all these pieces makes it hard on customers who actually have to pay the price of integrating them to their ERP systems of record – regardless of whether that ERP system is from Oracle or some other vendor. The increased approval times Catz cited as a reason for why many deals didn’t close in the quarter may have really been a sign of better due diligence on the part of prospective customers as to the real total cost of ownership of deploying Oracle’s un-integrated vertical applications.

Other noteworthy issues can be found in what wasn’t said. Not a word about Fusion Applications, which means that they were neither material to Q2 nor a strategically important component of how the company plans to dig itself out of this revenue hole. In fact, Larry didn’t mention any applications products as being part of the hoped-for recovery in the next quarter – every forward looking statement he made was about hardware, particularly Exadata and Exalogics.

This is Larry being consistent with his hardware obsession, but it really begs the issue of what will happen to what was once a market-leading enterprise software company that has now been diverted by its CEO’s hardware obsession.

It was perhaps telling that the miss for the quarter was most evident in applications but the company’s focus in the earnings call was mostly on how it would grow its way out of the problem with hardware sales. I can see no way for Oracle to fix its applications business by selling more hardware, and the more the company focuses on hardware the more it seems that applications are becoming an afterthought. This, in my mind, is what happened in Q2, and will continue to happen until Oracle figures out what business it really wants to be in. Clearly, based on the last few quarters, the hardware business isn’t working out quite as well as the company had hoped.

As an industry analyst, I’m used to be being slotted, even though my goal has always been to cover as broad a swath of the enterprise software market as possible, based on the assumption that customers and users need help understanding the full context behind their enterprise software decisions, and not just listen to a vendor pitch, write a check, and be done with it.

This goal is often anathema to how vendors organize their analyst relations functions, having historically followed the big analyst firms down the path of splitting the market into discrete analytical areas, mostly for the purpose of selling discrete analyst services. Thus, a general practitioner such as myself often must contend with multiple AR teams, often out of communication with one another, in the pursuit of full coverage for any vendor with a complex product portfolio.

Lately, this problem has grown in spades as vendors like Oracle have branched into hardware, vendors like Microsoft have started successfully blending its non-enterprise assets into enterprise product lines, and hardware stalwarts like HP have become erstwhile enterprise software vendors. With my holistic market view as the goal, as vendors evolve to provide a broader and broader portfolio of products for the customer, analysts who want to follow the customer’s perspective need to follow a broader swath of the vendors’ product portfolio as well.

Which, in most cases, turns out to be largely impossible, to the detriment of vendor and customer alike (and it ain’t so good for us general practitioners either.)

If I were (even) more cynical than I pretend to be, I would think the inability of most vendor AR teams to understand the need to cross-pollinate the analyst community with the full scope of the vendor’s product lines – or at least offer up the opportunity for analysts to try to understand the big picture – was deliberate, sort of a divide and conquer strategy intended to keep out any dangerous , holistic analysis that might reveal key dis-synergies in the strategy.

And if I were immodest I would claim that this total vendor coverage is easy and fits well with the capabilities and interests of most industry analysts and AR departments. As someone who tries to do this, I can assure you it’s hard, and at times damn near impossible.

But not completely impossible, and, in many ways, very possible indeed.  And very much needed, now more than ever.

The reasons are simple: if a customer wants to buy the very best software at the very best price and with the very best performance possible, how that software interacts with the rest of the IT stack is critical (this has been the rationale for my analyst coverage for years, and the basis of my strategy advisory practice as well.) And as more and more vendors are not only providing more and more of the stack, but are actually optimizing their enterprise software for their own stacks, advising the customer requires an understanding of how all the pieces fit together. Merely commenting on the capabilities of discrete pieces of enterprise software without understanding the rest of picture just doesn’t cut it anymore.

The other pieces – hardware, middleware, database, deployment options, development tools, advanced UI tools, etc. – aren’t just important, they are often key points of differentiation between vendors and provide key selection criteria for customers. Customers almost never implement in a greenfield manner, rather, their selections for new software are intertwined with their existing infrastructures and applications portfolios. Which means that just buying the very best ERP system won’t cut it if that system doesn’t interoperate with the customer’s existing software and hardware infrastructure. And, in more and more cases, whether its Oracle touting the synergies of its enterprise software running on its Exalogics systems, or Microsoft showcasing how its Kinect gaming interface can be used on the shop floor, understanding these interactions and how all these pieces interoperate are must-haves for any well-qualified decision-making process.

Which leaves us with a dilemma: how to make the analyst and the analyst relations role a better fit for the analytical requirements of the enterprise software market? The answer isn’t simple:  vendors with complex portfolios need to cultivate analysts who can understand that complexity, and provide them with a level of access intended to make sure the synergistic, holistic view is articulated and understood. This requires in many cases both a revamping of how AR thinks and acts as well as a similar reconsideration of how analysts look at individual companies.

These shifts are not always easy, for functional as well as political/cultural reasons: AR teams often reflect their respective product and solution marketing teams, which in turn means that changing the status quo means changing the structure of how products go to market, and even how products are developed (or acquired, depending on the vendor’s particular innovation strategy.) That makes this concept of total or holistic vendor coverage holy hell for anyone trying to make it happen, inside or outside a particular vendor.

But I’m convinced more and more that this is a necessary evil that must be confronted, assuming the goal of educating and informing customers so that they make the right choices is the goal of the vendors’ market communications. Unless that misplaced cynicism noted above is actually justified…

Over the ten years in which Microsoft has struggled to find a place for its Dynamics enterprise software products inside the company, the question of whether Microsoft should jettison the business  unit altogether has surfaced more than once. And on the face of it, it’s hard not to ask the question. Despite the annoying secrecy that Microsoft maintains about the revenues of its Dynamics products, it’s pretty obvious that the original goal of “10 years and $10 billion” in revenues is off by something resembling an order of magnitude.

And yet, the two-day analyst summit hosted by Microsoft just before Thanksgiving week made it abundantly clear that Dynamics isn’t a so-so success for Microsoft: the company’s enterprise software portfolio, in particular AX and CRM, has become the lodestar for virtually every important piece of technology produced across Microsoft’s vast technology empire.

More importantly, Dynamics is increasingly the place where the cross-company synergies that have eluded this famously siloed company are now becoming reality. And those emerging synergies bring with them the potential to dramatically alter Microsoft’s overall competitive profile in the enterprise and that critical point of convergence between the enterprise and the consumer that very few companies, Microsoft being perhaps the most advanced, are in a position to truly take advantage of.

The idea of the Dynamics lodestar came to me about one hour into the analyst briefings, when Dynamics exec Michael Park, in an off-hand remark, referred to some forthcoming capability in Windows 8 that would significantly improve Microsoft’s mobile enterprise offerings, as though we Dynamics followers already knew all about it (which many of us we didn’t, highlighting the fact that covering enterprise software, whether it’s from Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, IBM, HP, or SAP, is more and more an exercise in covering everything that Microsoft does.)

Kirill Tartarinov, the head of the Dynamics group, had already mentioned Windows 8, as well as Kinect as a user interface device for the enterprise, in his opening remarks, and we were soon to hear one of the first mentions of Skype in a Microsoft briefing since the deal was finalized, also in the context of enterprise functionality.  As the morning wore on the list of Microsoft products that were being woven into the company’s enterprise software strategy grew to become nothing less than a what’s what of virtually the entire Microsoft top-tier  technology palette.

Here’s a list I compiled during the day of the different pieces of the Microsoft product set that are finding some of their most important use cases alongside Microsoft Dynamics:

• Azure and the cloud, including Office 365
• SQL Server
• Visual Studio and .NET
• Windows 8, especially mobile
• Kinect
• Lync and Skype
• Business Intelligence
• Sharepoint
• Bing

I’m not even sure that covers all the possible products and synergies, but it’s a good start. When you weave these different offerings into AX and Dynamics CRM in particular, the result is an impressive array of new and innovative functionality that gives Microsoft a strong standing in the enterprise. In a separate post I’ll highlight some of the synergies between Dynamics and the rest of the Microsoft portfolio, suffice to say for now that combining these assets and making them core parts of the overall Microsoft enterprise offering makes for an impressive portfolio.

What’s also impressive is how these capabilities sync up with the Dynamics’ plans to harness a direct sales force and consulting team in order to take on the large enterprise market. This is, of course, absolutely essential for tackling the large enterprise market. Without having some degree of direct responsibility for project success – either as a prime, or more likely, as a sub-contractor – Microsoft can’t hope to compete in this space against SAP and Oracle.

With this direct sales-plus-services team now ramping up, Microsoft will have some great assets to bring to the large enterprise table:  A portfolio of well-integrated products that support traditional ERP and DBMS functionality, as well as on-demand/SaaS CRM, mobility, cloud-computing, new user experiences like full-motion gesture control (Kinect), integrated communications, collaboration, analytics, search and mapping, office productivity, and applications development . As many of these products are already market leaders in their respective domains, the new Dynamics direct sales and services team is starting from a definite position of strengths.

The result is that Microsoft will soon become a factor in the large enterprise market in ways that could seriously realign the market in coming years. And that’s before we get to the consumer/enterprise bridge that Microsoft can now form.

This consumer/enterprise opportunity is one that Microsoft has a distinct advantage in realizing. Only Hewlett-Packard has an equally impressive position in both sides of this opportunity, now that it has chosen to keep the PC group in-house. Apple is coming in quickly on the heels of the iPad and iPhone, and Google, if it could ever figure out how to deal with security and enterprise-class service, may one day break out of its consumerist focus and make a real play for the enterprise. But all the other erstwhile Microsoft competitors – IBM, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce.com, and many others – have no legitimate presence in the consumer side of the market.

This leaves Microsoft with a pretty big runway for dominating this convergence. Assuming it can keep up with a consumer tech market that is looking for Facebook like social connectivity and Amazon-like simplicity, in an iPad-like user experience – and that’s not a small assumption, though Bing, Kinect, and Windows 8 should help in that regard – Microsoft could emerge as the essential marriage broker between the enterprise and the consumer in a way that will be the envy of the market.

For now, this  position is aspirational, and it may take at least two years before we can judge how well the Dynamics direct sales effort is working and how well the synergies between the larger Microsoft portfolio are productized and brought  to market. But in terms of potential energy, Microsoft Dynamics is an up and coming market leader.

They may have missed the goal of $10 billion in the first ten years, but I would expect that it won’t take them anywhere near ten years to reach that goal now.  And that’s not including what Dynamics should be able to do to boost the revenues of the rest of Microsoft’s business units.  Playing the role of proving ground for new technology, particularly in the high-margin enterprise space, isn’t just good for Dynamics, it’s good for Microsoft too.

As the enterprise software market parses the news that SuccessFactors will become SuccessFactors, an SAP company, the question of how well SAP manages its M&A strategy is coming to the fore.

SAP has been buying small and large companies for a while, and though nowhere near as avaricious as Oracle or IBM, there are now three big buys – BusinessObjects, Sybase, and SuccessFactors – and countless smaller ones – most recently Right Hemisphere and Crossgate – to look at in judging how well SAP is doing in the M&A business.

The short answer of how well is easy: not well enough. That’s not to say that SAP is screwing up (though the early days of the BusinessObjects acquisition were hardly smooth sailing), but it does say that SAP needs to have a better-oiled M&A strategy to match the well-oiled technology and go-to-market strategy it is trying to build with these acquisitions.

The current case in point is mobile: The acquisition of Sybase was announced over 18 months ago, eons ago in the tech world, and SAP’s mobile strategy is still fragmented. There are some great gems amidst the fragments, and the SAP Mobile Apps store is a good starting point for understanding (not using, the apps aren’t available yet) where SAP is going. But it seems that every time I turn around there’s another mobile app from another group at SAP that is not necessarily connected to a pan-SAP strategy.

While this fragmentation is hardly a disaster, it does speak to the larger question of what happens when SAP buys a big technology company. One can argue whether Sybase was good buy, and whether Sybase Unwired Platform and Afaria are the be-all and end-all of mobile enterprise platforms, but it should go without saying that spending upwards of $6 billion on Sybase, not to mention the extraordinary executive time and effort that had to go into that deal, should put an end to internal fragmentation. Instead, it’s clear that a unified, singular mobility strategy is still pending.

We saw a similar effect with the BusinessObjects acquisition: fragmentation, competing product lines, and internal struggles over product and technology strategy. It’s easy to forgive SAP the chaos of the early years of that acquisition, considering its indisputable strength in BI and analytics today, but it was a pretty messy process that took, in my opinion, too long to sort out.

Part of what’s going on is the bi-polarity of the world of SAP. There’s more than continents and oceans that divide SAP’s Waldorf and SAP’s Palo Alto offices. The cultural gap between the two poles, however smoothed over by moving personnel back and forth and having both the CMO and CTO sitting in Palo Alto, is still vast and complex. This bipolarity pits different design, development, and business culture factors against one another in a global battle that is won as much by attrition as it is by the pure merit of one or another choice.

Into this complexity SAP overlays a consensus management process, with an executive board, a supervisory board, and teams of executives all over the world  weighing in on key decisions. At times this works extremely well, but all too often it yields a surplus of cooks and a potentially spoiled broth: Without the command and control structure of, say an Apple or an IBM, SAP sometimes has trouble matching the dictatorship of the markets with the dictates SAP needs to thrive.

Into this complexity SAP is now buying SuccessFactors. And sorting out the fragmentation in SAP’s HRMS strategy makes sorting out a mobility strategy look easy. As ably pointed out by the grande dame of HRMS, Naomi Bloom. SAP is sitting on a virtual hairball of HRMS code bases and products. Adding SuccessFactors to the tune of $3.4 billion should put the onus on SAP to figure out this mess and drive a unified strategy into the market. Will it be able to do so?

My concern doesn’t come with the SuccessFactors acquisition itself – this is a great choice for SAP, one that is desperately needed both in terms of what it means for SAP’s HRMS strategy as much as for its on-demand strategy. My concern comes with the suffix “an SAP company.” This works extremely well from a personnel standpoint, and is consistent with SAP’s culture, but, with the teething problems of BusinessObjects, and to a lesser extent Sybase, in mind, will keeping SuccessFactors independent be the right way to go? I’m not advocating the slash and burn strategies pioneered by Computer Associates and continued by Oracle, but I am a little wary of friendly acquisitions when the result is too much friendliness and not enough acquisition.

Why does SAP need this kind of unification so badly? After all, as I just said, BusinessObjects has helped make SAP a top BI and analytics company. The answer is simple: Oracle. SAP is fighting Oracle’s “engineered for investors” strategy by putting forth a more cohesive, better integrated, and therefore more cost-effective platform+applications strategy. One of the key value-adds that SAP can offer is a more integrated stack, better rationalized across the different pieces of its portfolio, that lies in sharp contrast to the dis-integrated, heterogeneous offerings and big integration price tag in the  Oracle applications strategy.

The point is simple: The more SAP makes these big acquisitions, the more it must ensure that this key point of differentiation is protected. This is less imperative in mobility, which is by definition new and different enough that any expectation of deep, built-in code-base integration is low. But HRMS is a very different, and if SAP is going to use SuccessFactors to beat Workday, Oracle Fusion, and Oracle PeopleSoft in the SAP core customer base, it’s going to have to build that integrated strategy quickly and convincingly.

Can SAP do this? I wish I was more confident that it could. I trust that the different market imperative for HRMS – and the enormous opportunity that SuccessFactors presents – can sharpen the company’s resolution and help quiet the internal politics, but it won’t necessarily be easy. Time is of the essence here – Workday is definitely on a role, and the PeopleSoft market is full of customers for whom an upgrade will in reality require a full re-implementation, and for whom non-Oracle SaaS opportunities are making the shortlist – and SAP has the chance to truly be in the right place at the right time with SuccessFactors.

But only if SAP can get this acquisition right, and get it right the first time…

I spent an extremely entertaining and informative day with Kinaxis at their user conference last month, and it struck me how much supply chain management seems to be stuck in the past, even as it increasingly occupies one of the hottest of hot seats in the corporate world, and even as companies like Kinaxis strive to bring the supply chain into the future.

And if you don’t think supply chain management is in the hot seat, ask the world’s disk drive makers about what’s happening in Thailand, or the Japanese automotive manufacturers about what happened with this year’s earthquake and tsunami. Or Boeing and their many delays and problems getting the Dreamliner out the door. In the globally interconnected economy, it’s the supply chain that rules.

Not that Kinaxis is guilty of living in the past – though it’s been decades since I heard a vendor talk about the virtues of a hierarchical database. Au contraire. It’s the rest of the supply chain market that seems to be relying on older business and technology models, to the detriment of the big enterprise software companies and to the benefit of best of breed vendors like Kinaxis.

This living in the past problem was evident at multiple points during the day, most obviously when it came time for Kinaxis’ customers to stand up and tell their stories. As is common at a best of breed vendor show, the customer stories were replete with references to the SAP and Oracle software that these customers still use, even though the core strategic supply chain functionality they were touting that day belonged to Kinaxis.

What every user story boiled down to was the following formula: my company still uses [insert big enterprise suite], but for this core function [insert S&OP,  demand-driven planning, outsourced supplier management, advanced supply chain analytics], we’re going with Kinaxis.

And every justification for going with Kinaxis contained a similar formula.  While [insert big enterprise suite] is still my system of record, it’s too [slow, ignorant of how to manage outsourced supplier, not good enough for S&OP] and we couldn’t wait around for them to [add the functionality I need, make it cost effective, make their user experience more user-friendly, put the resources into my company to make sure my needs are being met].  And so Kinaxis’ supply chain best of breed story goes.

What’s amazing about these stories to me is that I heard a similar set of stories – including some of the same customers and suite vendors – when I attended an E2open conference three years ago. And when I toured Silicon Valley’s top manufacturers in 2005 as part of a supply chain research project, stories such as these were the order of the day at every company I visited. In a recent visit to E2open, one of its executives reminisced about discussing these issues when he was Oracle in 2000.

What’s up with that?

Part of the problem is clearly the rapidity with which business models are changing.  And the breadth of what constitutes supply chain management keeps shifting as more stakeholders become involved and more data becomes available to do more complex analysis and build more comprehensive supply chain plans.

Even new product introductions are changing: One of Kinaxis’ customers is Barnes and Noble, which introduced its Nook reader in 2009 to great fanfare. There were two problems with this NPI for Barnes and Noble: the first was that the company is a novice at manufacturing supply chains, being a book distributor doesn’t really prepare a company to be a consumer product manufacturer. The second, most importantly, was that the Nook is part of an entirely new wave of tablets tied to a retail distribution company, not a traditional consumer electronics company: how could Barnes and Noble do supply chain planning the old, rear-view-mirror way when there is little or no comparable product on which to base a demand plan for the Nook?

So Barnes and Noble signed up for a new point-of-sale-based, demand-driven supply chain run by  Kinaxis software. Turns out this is a bit of a gamble, as Kinaxis has never tried to wire up over 10,000 POS systems, and Kinaxis’ pricing structure for its software wasn’t designed for this volume of end points either (let’s just say at list price, 10,000 POS systems would have made this one of the most expensive supply chain management implementations ever – safe to say Kinaxis and Barnes and Noble managed to come to an agreement on a more reasonable price.)

The other reason the supply chain management status quo seems stuck in the past is that really transformative supply chain management is as much a business process journey as it is a software journey. That’s hard, very hard, and even harder in companies that don’t understand how strategic their supply chain needs to be. In my wanderings about the supply chain world I have often been amazed at how good enough keeps being good enough, despite the fact that at a corporate competition level good enough is usually the domain of losers and also rans. This fact alone often relegates true supply chain transformation to those renegades and rogues that dare think out of the box. And lucky for them, there’s products like Kinaxis RapidResponse that allows these transformers to do their thing and still keep the big ERP suite advocates in their jobs too.

The good enough syndrome turns out to be a major conundrum for any big enterprise software vendor. Becoming an entrenched interest at a customer site often leads to – or is a leading indicator of – a good enough mentality that helps maintain incumbency at the cost of innovation. This makes it hard for the SAPs and Oracles of the world to be identified as the innovators among their core, entrenched user communities, and it makes it easy for a Kinaxis to appeal to those who don’t mind upsetting the good enough, entrenched thinkers and driving a little innovation into the enterprise.

One more comment about Kinaxis that bears mentioning: their user conference was downright fun, and they managed more than once to make supply chain leadership funny. Yes, as in LOL funny. Hats off to Bill Dubois in particular for playing the role of talk show host and stand up (really sit-down) comic so well that I had to wonder why he ever left Broadway or whatever the Canadian equivalent would be to become the Pied Piper of supply chain geekdom. Okay, maybe I’m impressed for the wrong reasons, but a company that is comfortable enough with its products and customers to make it fun and funny has a lot going for it. That was a best of breed show if I ever saw one.

Providing cloud-based storage seems so commodity-like, and so hard to defend as a unique differentiator, that it would seem that Box.net, despite the dynamic vigor of the company and its CEO, Aaron Levie, couldn’t really make a go of it in the market. After all, some very very big companies, like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, are competing in this space. And don’t forget Box.net’s many small-fry competitors, including Dropbox, among others. You’d think that with these kinds of enemies, how the heck can Box.net find enough customer and investor love to keep the flame alive.

That’s before I went to Box’s user conference a few weeks ago, where several important reasons why Box.net might stand a chance came to the fore. And that was before I started keeping track of all the times Box.net came up in conversations about social/collaborative software, And before I  actually started using the free Box.net account that came with my HP Touchpad.

Suddenly, Box.net’s real opportunities started to make a whole lot of sense.

The first inkling that Box .net was doing something right came when I ran into some folks from SAP at the conference. These weren’t your tire-kicking market-researchers, or even someone from the partnership organization. These were the investor types, the guys you send over to do the due diligence before you put your money down. And it was clear they were there to do a deal and follow the footsteps of Salesforce.com and investor Marc Andreessen, among others,  in buying a piece of the Box. That the company has raised $162 million so far is far from the only reason to pay attention to it (unfortunately, the amount of money a company raises is not highly correlated with success), but when you see SAP Ventures and Salesforce.com putting their money where the mouths are (or want to be) it’s definitely food for thought.

The other indication that Box.net has legs came from presentations and casual conversations with its customers, who were fairly gushing about the company’s value to their organizations. Having used Box.net  now for a few weeks, I can agree that it’s a great productivity tool (despite a little glitch I’m having with Office 2010 on my desktop PC). There’s a nice app for my new iPhone, my Touchpad, my iPad, and, on my laptop, the Office 2010 integration makes it pretty easy to move documents from the cloud to my devices and back again.

But is that really enough to make Box.net worth whatever multiple of $162 million is needed to make back its investor’s money? The answer is simple: no.

What Box.net needs – and fear not, dear investors, I’m pretty sure Levie gets this– is an understanding of the meta-opportunities that add value on top of what is otherwise a cloud-based version of good-old sneakernet. Those meta-opportunities come from three major areas, in my opinion:

The Social/Collaborative Box.  Using Box.net as an adjunct to social and collaborative software is one of those no-brainers that was dissected in great detail at the conference. And outside the conference as well. I’ve been keeping a running tally of the times I see and hear Box in the context of some other vendor’s social or collaborative offering, and so far Box is batting 1000. A recent briefing with SAP about Streamwork included a Box reference, and my favorite social/collaborative start-up, Sococo, can make use of Box.net as part of its amazing visual communications/collaboration environment. There’s Box.net  and Chatter. The list seems endless.

The Analytical Box. We’re only just starting to crack the nut on how to use metadata for business advantage, and the folks at Box.net  seem to grok the fact that data about how data are used could be an extremely valuable asset for businesses trying to improve anything from customer satisfaction to data governance and risk management. There’s a lot we don’t know about how data really get used, and by putting the data in the cloud, Box.net can use the cloud to collect every aspect of data usage, and use that data for some interesting analysis. Analytical services on top of Box.net could prove to be as valuable as the company’s original content sharing raison-d’etre.

The Innovative Box. This is where the real challenge – and opportunity – lie. If Box.net is to rise above the noise and make good on all those millions from it investors it will have to be in the forefront of defining a new set of processes and functions around content collaboration that weren’t ever possible before. This is a corollary to what I call the SaaS 2.0 imperative. It’s not enough to just flip an established process from on-premise to the cloud, a la Salesforce.com. In order for Box.net to really make its mark, it has to be on the forefront of defining and bringing to market the things we only dreamed of doing – or never even dreamed we could dream of – that are now possible with the functionality that Box.net can provide.

Using Box.net in a social/collaborative context is a good place for the company to begin to define this opportunity to the market. That’s why I like the marriage of Sococo and Box: Sococo creates virtual workspaces for collaboration where collaborators can show up – online, using their avatar – and, in addition to communicating and working with one another, they can participate in the creation, editing, and development of documents and other content. One of Sococo’s fascinating capabilities is the abiliyy to create task-specific virtual rooms, that are open only fellow-collaborators by permission. This effectively adds context to the documents that are being used in the virtual room, and that context, especially when combined with workflow and other collaborative tools, takes the commodity-level concept of clolud-based storage up a notch or two.

As the innovation opportunities grow – and the above example is merely one iota amongst the many possible scenarios for using Box.net in a value-added process – the key to Box.net’s continued success will be similar to what every innovative must do in order for innovation to be adopted: proscribe the ways in which the new capabilities can be used. This is true for almost any truly innovative product, but especially true in areas where collaboration and analytics are part of the process: it turns out that there are enormous cultural gaps in the business community’s understanding of how to collaborate and how to analyze, and every truly innovative collaboration or analytical tool needs to include methods and other proscriptive help or, no matter how cool a tool it is, real world users just won’t get what to do with it .

Cloud-based storage is a useful, but  hardly sufficient business case for the success of Box.net. Value-added services are where Box has to go, and it’s clear that there’s an entire class of new innovative applications and services waited to be created on the back of their core capability. It’s going to fun watching what Box.net does next…..

Insofar as I characterized Oracle Open World as a communications disaster in my last blog post, I think it’s fair to explain why I feel this way and what it means for Oracle and the market.

Oracle Open World is singularly the worst customer event I attend every year, a forced march so large and unwieldy that I and most people I know who attend – customers and influencers alike – end up trying at best to endure the event, much less benefit from it. And yet we must attend, as it is for the most part the only time in the year that Oracle will actually try to engage in a meaningful dialogue with both influencers like myself, and, indirectly and directly, with its customers and prospects. Because once the gates close and the drawbridge is drawn up on Open World, Oracle goes back to being a very closed world indeed.

Oracle has always been about controlling the message, something all companies try to do one way or another. But over the years, as the lawyers have risen in power and the company’s acquisition strategy has made a virtue out of bafflingly complex fiscal reporting, Oracle has more and more turned its communications strategy towards the goal of limiting, not expanding, the flow of information from the company to the market, and controlling those who try to cut through the PR and get to the meat of the issues surrounding the company.

This is Oracle’s prerogative, though it comes with an implied arrogance – we are so right in what we do that there is no need for any real scrutiny – and a decidedly anti-customer tilt – trust us, we’re on your side – that is belied by many of the company’s strategies. And that control has its consequences for any company – customer, partner, and competitor – that is making huge strategic bets on Oracle and needs, make that deserves, to know that those bets are based on facts, not something else.

The Open World communications disaster begins with two time-honored traditions at Oracle: The first is that Open World is the only major forum by which Oracle engages with influencers every year. Whereas most of the enterprise software market holds multiple user conferences, tech conferences, partner conferences, analyst summits, and press events, Oracle basically bottles up an entire year’s worth of new products and strategies into a five day window in October.

Into this extremely short window must fall all the aspirations of anyone looking for an understanding of this massive and increasingly important company’s products and strategy, and hoping for a dialogue and some critical thinking to boot. Sure, I am told that Oracle has thousands of events every year around the world, but those are tightly controlled, very select sales and marketing events that are all about lead generation and absolutely not about truly informing the market of what Oracle is up to. (Though, as I write these sentences, the notion that Open World is not a tightly controlled, very select sales and marketing event is starting to seem a little absurd.)

Nonetheless, Open World actually does sort of aspire to dialogue and to opening up the company to some critical thinking, despite the limits of its massive scale and the company’s focus on controlling access and information.  Of course, the fact that Open World occurs once a year and in such a short time frame makes it impossible for anyone – customer or influencer – to truly see and hear everything they’ve been yearning to know for the last twelve months.

And that’s before the second tradition, the Larry Ellison Effect, takes over.

The Larry Ellison Effect takes this once-a-year event and makes it an even bigger disaster through a peculiar twist of executive fiat: Larry likes to bat both first and last at Open World, and that means that while some opening remarks and a couple of announcements get made Sunday night (Sunday night–  Ugh) at the start of the conference, a huge chunk of the really juicy announcements don’t get made until the conference is virtually over: Wed. afternoon this year, 70 hours after Open World began.

This effectively kills any chance for a dialogue about whatever Larry wants to announce. This year it was the company’s cloud strategy, exactly the kind of complex, important announcement that could really benefit from a few days of follow-up briefings, conversations, and, yes, critical thinking. With the announcement on Wed. afternoon, and with not much left of the conference and many attendees already brain dead from the previous three days chasing the Oracle story, Oracle’s cloud strategy was left to be merely pondered, instead of actually understood.

(To their credit, the communications team tried to fix this problem by sending out an email at 3:40 PM on Wed. – right as Larry’s keynote was getting underway – that Thomas Kurian would be available at 5 PM that evening for a deep dive on cloud strategy. Needless to say, with that kind of advanced notice, many influencers, myself included, couldn’t make it.)

The applications team has recently been the major victim of the Larry Effect, as hardware announcements – remember, Oracle’s investors need the company to sell a lot of hardware – have dominated the Sunday night keynote. This means that the apps gang has to sit on its hands and basically say nothing about the most important announcements of the conference, waiting for Larry to deign to deliver their key messages. It makes for an almost comical interchange between otherwise intelligent and capable Oracle execs who have been forced to play dumb and dumber about key issues and strategies for fear of stepping on Larry’s toes.

But wait, there’s more – or less, really. Oracle also makes no bones about Open World being a sales event – point noted – and that means that there are virtually no meetings between influencers and executives, at least not by the standards of the industry: The four or so events Oracle’s competitors hold each year include multiple opportunities to put influencers in front of the execs and get the dialogue going. In doing so, most of Oracle’s competitors believe – or at least pay lip service to – the notion that they learn from the dialogue as much as the influencers. Oracle, with so much to learn, thinks otherwise.

The real question that I keep trying to figure out is whether this is all deliberate – as in, Oracle’s top leadership really doesn’t want to have this dialogue – or whether it’s more just a matter of style. As I ponder the question I am reminded of how Tom Siebel used to conduct his eponymous company’s quarterly financial calls. Rather than discuss meaningful strategy and other useful information, Tom would quickly dive into a level of financial minutia that could put a triple black belt accountant to sleep. Tables, charts, data points, all analyzed in excruciating detail. Minute after minute, on and on he would drone, until time was up and there really wasn’t anything anyone wanted to know other than how to get off the phone.

Could this be the real purpose of Open World: listen to the story we want to tell and don’t expect us to leave time or energy for dialogue? Take the information we want to give you and to hell with the information you think you need to know? This certainly has been the underpinning of the analyst program that I used to be part (I’m now a blogger, according to Oracle, analysts apparently work for big firms that sell Oracle lots of research and over which Oracle feels it has some leverage as a result.) My “handler” at the 2010 Open World said exactly that to me when I dared deviate from the program she put together for “me” in order to try to find out what I had come there to learn.

Regardless, I think that it’s indisputable that the result of this lacuna is a dearth of information and openness about the company’s products and strategy, a company that sits on top of a massive ecosystem of customers and partners who, as I said earlier, need to know a lot more about the Oracle than the company is willing to discuss. Too bad for all concerned. While Oracle seems to get richer by the minute no matter what it does, Oracle’s customers and the market at large are made all the more poorer by what is clearly a deliberate  communications disaster.