If you count the hum of engaged customers as a sign of success, then Infor’s recent Inforum user conference was a major high-point for the come-back enterprise software vendor. The customers, all 6000 of them, were definitely there to praise Infor, not to bury it.

But the real issue for Infor will be to do more than just roll out some great strategies for turning over an historically moribund product set and making these products – and their customers – innovators. The big challenge is to maintain this Inforum buzz, and translate it into new software purchasing, as these strategies evolve and are realized in a sweeping set of new products and some interesting updates to its older product lines.

This is the classic “ability to execute” problem that all ambitious companies ultimately face, and Infor is no exception. The strategies look good, without a doubt, but there’s a broad, churning Rubicon to cross before Infor can say it has fully arrived as a 21st century innovator.

There are three major legs to this new vision that were highlighted at Inforum: ION, the company’s loosely-coupled middleware layer that’s tasked with stitching together the old and the new; SoHo, the company’s new cross-product user experience; and the vertical industry focus that Phillips promised at an analyst event earlier this year. Infor’s challenge is to execute on all three, while keeping the updates flowing to key products like SyteLine, Hansen, LN, and S3, among others.

Not surprisingly, keeping the updates flowing to the core products is the easy part. Many of these products, like SyteLine, have a strong product management team that’s been with the product for ages and understands what the customers and partners want and need to keep thing moving forward. I sat in on a couple of update sessions for these products and was impressed with how Infor is moving its core forward.

Infor is also progressing on its new products, of which ION is perhaps the most important, but that progress is tempered by the huge challenge that Infor faces with respect to executing on the ION vision. The challenge with ION is two-fold. The first is to sell ION as a concept that customers can bank on, and in the process make ION the go-to technology for application integration inside the Infor customer base. The second is to keep the customers interested and excited as ION moves through its early teething phases and acquires the robustness necessary to make the dream come true.

Both are always harder than they seem to be. The trick for Infor is to avoid the mistakes that Infor CEO Charles Phillips’ former company, Oracle, made with its Application Integration Architecture (AIA). Faced with a similar problem – the need to provide business process and technology innovation spanning multiple product lines – Oracle came up with an extremely top-heavy, master-data centric approach that required customers to build and maintain a canonical data model, inside AIA, that would make AIA the hub of process and application integration.

To make a long disaster story short, AIA collapsed under its own complexity (along with some other problems that have contributed to the lag Oracle is now experiencing in its software business), and Oracle’s customers went back to building and maintaining application and process integration the hard way: hardwired and peer to peer, and guaranteed to require lots of attention and maintenance as the applications that were hardwired together evolve. Vision: a solid A, ability to execute: a solid E.

This is exactly the fate that Phillips is trying to avoid with ION, while adding some very interesting capabilities. ION promises Infor customers a library of business objects (BODs) that can be used to integrate any of the dozens of Infor products to one another as well integrating third party apps like SAP or Salesforce.com and middleware like WebSphere. The goal, of course, is to make the BODs largely immutable, such that when any of the applications change, ION provides a valuable form of upgrade insurance that makes rewiring the connections between applications unnecessary.

ION has an added functionality that I find impressive: When ION is run in federated mode, all the data in the business objects that flows through ION can be used to populate what Infor calls its Business Vault, essentially a data mart that can in turn feed BI and analytics apps with operational data. With Business Vault able to capture all the cross-application and process data, this becomes a great way to run BI and analytics without touching the operational systems.

This ability to provide upgrade-proof integration and reporting is extremely compelling, but of course it comes with some execution challenges. First and foremost is the need for lots and lots of connectors and business object documents, or BODs. While the number of integration points in any cross-application process are usually limited, the sheer number of potential processes, when combined with the number of applications – Infor and non-Infor – that customers would want to integrate, makes for an interesting combinatorial challenge.

Staying ahead of that challenge is a non-trivial exercise, and essential to the execution side of the ION opportunity. Customers who sign on to the theory of ION will expect to see the BODs they need when they need them, and Infor will have to deliver and/or manage expectations about how long it will take to flesh out the BOD library.

Or else: customers that need integration – and can’t wait – will be building point to point integrations as a stop-gap measure. SyteLine customers, for example, who upgrade to the latest version will have to do that today. And the lack of future-proofing inherent in that model will make it hard for Infor to leverage the kind of cross-product business process integration – adding its enterprise asset management or warehouse management products to an existing application like SyteLine or LN – that is core to the new Infor Phillips is trying to create.

It’s a race – keeping customers interested and excited as the BOD library builds to a critical mass – that Infor can ill-afford to lose. Which makes ION an important bellwether for the overall success of the new Infor.

SoHo, the new cross-platform user experience that Infor is promoting, is another must-win capability that needs to succeed as quickly as possible in order to keep the dream alive. SoHo has three main components, in addition to a new look and feel for all of Infor’s core applications: Ming.le, the company’s social/collaborative software; Motion, its mobile platform; and its BI/analytics platform.

Ming.le is perhaps the most ambitious, and it has a basic design criteria that is near and dear to my heart – the promise of injecting business context into social collaboration, and vice versa. Ming.le demos this capability better than most social collaboration tools that aspire to be business process aware, and it definitely promises to make social collaboration an intuitive part of most standard business processes.

But Ming.le has some teething pains of its own to overcome. The first is ION, on which Ming.le is highly dependent. Customers that want Ming.le first have to implement ION, and that means that ION has to be up to stuff when it comes to integrating the applications and processes that customers want Ming.le to use. Customers also have to do some separate programming in JSON to make Ming.le work: This is particularly essential when it comes to the ability to “drill back” from a Ming.le alert or notification to the actual application where the content that needs taking care of originates – that all-essential business context that makes Ming.le more than just a tabula rasa activity screen.

While the design goals for Ming.le are spot on, there are serious limits to what it can do today or in the near term. Right now Ming.le can’t support non-Infor applications, nor can it support other social collaboration platforms. And some key capabilities for social collaboration, like universal communications and presence detection, won’t be available when Ming.le first goes GA at the end of May. Again, a great strategy and some great plans that have to somehow be enough to keep the customers interested and still loyal to the Infor brand as they plan their social/collaboration strategies.

The third leg of the stool is the micro-vertical strategy, which is also highly differentiating and will also be a major execution challenge for the company. Infor boasts 1700 partners, including 200 focused on ION, but it’s clear that the combination of direct sales staff and channel partners needed to cover 21 micro-verticals is going to need to be seriously expanded. Infor is building a specialized sales team targeting its top 150 accounts, and it’s building stronger ties to global systems integrators in addition to the smaller and more regionally resellers channel. But right now the company has a total of less than 1000 sales reps, and that’s a relatively small number for a company with such big ambitions.

Some of Infor’s ways of tackling these micro-verticals are excellent – the company announced plans for what it calls the Dealer Cloud – powered in part by ION and Ming.le – that will provide a cloud-based network for equipment dealers, OEMs, and their customers. It’s a great idea, and one that could help Infor nail down a key market or two, with the attendant execution problems noted above.

But managing the partner network needed to make Infor’s vision work across this many industries and the globe (42% of the company’s revenue comes from outside the U.S.) is going to be another key bellwether in the journey from vision to execution. Having watched Microsoft Dynamics continually fine-tune its partner network – most of which, like Infor’s, were legacy partners inherited through acquisition – the best thing to say is that Infor has its work cut out for it. Doing this in 21 micro-verticals just makes it all the more daunting a task.

If this assessment looks more “glass half-empty” than “glass half-full”, let me correct that impression. I think Phillips has a great team, a great strategy, and some eager customers. While there are a lot of key challenges, as noted above, it’s those customers who give me hope that this combination of team and strategy could ultimately work.

It’s fair to say that the 6000 customers in Orlando were probably the vanguard of the Infor customer base, and my read on that crowd is that they are much more hungry for new products and innovations than they have been traditionally given credit for.

What many have thought of as a dinosaur burial ground is actually looking pretty lively in terms of the expectations of customers for innovation from their vendor. Many of these customers are sitting on older versions of their Infor products that are either so old or so heavily customized that they will effectively need to re-implement in order to move into the 21st century. Until Phillips showed up, re-implementing meant leaving the Infor fold and hooking up with a Microsoft Dynamics, SAP or Oracle. Now these customers have an opportunity to re-implement without leaving Infor behind. Based on what I saw at Inforum, the customers are prepared to at least give Infor a second look.

The trick will be to turn that second look into a buying decision in favor of Infor. Incumbency has its own ROI, I’ve learned in my years of watching the enterprise software market, and Infor obviously has the incumbents’ advantage in its own customer base. If it can leverage that advantage, and keep adding new customers — Infor reported 3000 new customers in the last year – then this will be one of the great comeback stories in enterprise software. And one well worth waiting for.

The concept of citizen engagement and its ability to promote a more civil and rational society isn’t just a good idea. Taking the gains in enterprise software with respect to people engagement, back office transaction processing, and the cloud, and applying them to the interplay between citizens and their governments, has enormous potential to dramatically change what has been an historically adversarial and, frankly, waste-ridden relationship.

If this is done right, the benefits to society can be enormous, and not just in terms of saving money and time, or lowering the blood pressure of citizens trying to deal with dysfunctional government processes and government employees trying to deal with irate, frustrated citizens. All worthy goals, by the way. But I also believe that taking the gains in enterprise software, particularly in terms of CRM, the cloud, and mobile, and pushing them into the government sector can provide a platform for bridging the enormous political and social polarization that exists in most democracies – ours in particular.

While we may disagree with what services government should provide – and to whom – I think everyone on both sides of the aisle can agree that engagement, efficiency, and effectiveness should be at the core those services. Admittedly, enterprise software’s track record in applying those principles in the private sector – and public sector – has often been spotty. But for the most part the core processes of government, particularly those that involve direct interaction with citizens and other stakeholders – and that includes contractors providing services to government, companies doing business within the jurisdiction of government entities, as well as government employees themselves – are so poorly automated and un-enterprisey that a little enterprise juice could go a long way in this domain.

This is why I’m interested in companies like Accela, which recently released a cloud-based platform, the very aptly named Civic Cloud, that can serve as the organizing foundation for the delivery of next-generation government services. The Civic Cloud and its associated services are based on the idea that leveraging the cloud as a means to organize core government processes like permitting, planning, zoning, and inspection is an excellent way to take enterprise efficiency to state and local government.

If you’ve ever, as I have, tried to get a building permit or tried to survive a zoning process – even ones that are very straightforward and “by the book” – you know that the bar is set extremely low for the engagement, efficiency, and effectiveness that Accela and competitors like Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Infor, and others are trying to provide.

There’s lot of activity in the public sector vertical, and open government is part of this drive to take what we know works in the tech/enterprise world and extend it to government. What’s nice about Accela’s approach is that it’s easy to see a relatively rapid return on a relatively small investment – thanks in part to cloud-based pricing, which is nothing but good for governments that are strapped for cash to fund major capital projects. It also helps that the company isn’t a startup just getting its feet wet in this new market: Accela has over existing 500 customers and a solid on-prem track record.

A final note – literally the day after I met with Accela, I received a notice from my city telling me that a review of their accounts showed that my wife and I had never paid for garbage service at a rental property we own. Apparently when the house was renovated by my wife’s family there was no garbage account ever set up. So for years we’ve been getting free garbage pickup, assuming that somehow our renters were magically paying the bill. Maybe good for us as greedy landlords, but definitely bad for our local government. The upshot, of course, is that we’ll have to do our civic duty and get paid up – no way we can argue that we don’t owe the city for these services, even though we were never actually billed for them. No doubt because the city’s back office systems were too antiquated to figure out that services were being delivered at an address for which no account apparently existed.

Why I am making this a footnote to this post? It turns out that my city is a new customer of Accela – and while I can’t be sure, I doubt this is a coincidence. Being more efficient and effective does have a price, apparently. At least the city employee I spoke with to unravel the problem was polite and well-informed. Thanks, I think, Accela 

Microsoft Dynamics has many ambitions, many of them warranted, to become a force for innovation and change in the broad enterprise software market. And Dynamics has a problem, or really a set of problems, that in essence originate from a single source: the rest of Microsoft.

As Dynamics performs yeoman’s service defining, or at least trying to define, the enterprise value of its parents company’s increasingly broad innovation portfolio, the rest of Microsoft is having trouble following suit, or a times even playing in the same card game. Windows 8 and Windows 8 phone were both launched largely devoid of any mention of the enterprise,  and the Yammer acquisition was jammered into the Office division, where the desperately needed business context for making social collaboration relevant is missing in action (unless you think collaborating over a PowerPoint preso is the raison d’etre of social collaboration). Lync 2013 was launched in a similar way – despite a lot of sloganing and some nifty demos, there was no link to real business processes (or to anything  but Lync, apparently).

It’s as if Microsoft corporate is so obsessed with maintaining its position in the consumer market that it is willing to squander an unprecedented opportunity in the enterprise – while ignoring the fact that owning the convergence of enterprise and consumer is the not-so-secret ambition of every company Microsoft is competing against – Apple, Google, Salesforce.com, SAP, and Samsung, to name a few. (Samsung recently began touting Knox, its enterprise secure version of Android,  Google’s Chromebook Pixel  is hedging a bet that touch-screen laptops will be a hit as a converged enterprise/consumer world, and even Blackberry is now trying to cheat death by advertising phones that switch between personal and business mode.)

To my biased eyes, Microsoft’s consumer first/enterprise-almost-never marketing focus is both foolish and unnecessary. Foolish because it is giving the competition a ton of runway and comfort that Microsoft might just muddle its way to mediocrity in the enterprise, and unnecessary because all the rest of Microsoft would have to do is follow Dynamics’ lead: the enterprise software division is actually doing a great job of defining the broader enterprise/consumer message for the company. So how hard would it be for Ballmer to convene all the marketing heads of his different business units, lock them in a room, turn on the blender, and have them create a master message about this enterprise/consumer opportunity?

They could start with Dynamics’ retail initiatives, which are blending Windows 8 touch-based POS systems with back office AX supply chain management and consumer-quality social marketing with enterprise-class business analytics. They’re even prototyping a Kinect-based virtual dressing room for retail – how’s that for enterprise/consumer convergence?  Or they could push customers like Revlon, which is both consolidating 21 ERP systems into a single Dynamics AX instance, but is also building Windows 8 tablet-based apps.

Putting a little enterprise into the larger Microsoft message isn’t just about helping Dynamics make its aspirations come to life. Take Windows 8 as a desktop OS: right now, IT departments are in a frenzy to upgrade an older generation of desktops running Windows XP. The problem is that Microsoft has sort of whiffed on the marketing opportunity for Windows 8 touch, and it would be a little too easy for IT departments to buy non-touch PCs (which are a few hundred dollars less expensive), particularly as Microsoft hasn’t made a great compelling argument about the relative value of Windows 8 touch versus non-touch in the enterprise, much less elsewhere.

But if Microsoft could make a better case for Windows 8 touch as something other than a consumer product, it might be able to direct that refresh towards touch-screen laptops that can double as tablets and blunt the inroads that the iPad and the Pixel Chromebook can or have already made into the enterprise. That in turn would provide the critical mass of platforms that developers need to start targeting their efforts on creating apps that can leverage the ability of Windows 8 to support an end-to-end process that spans touch, mobile, and traditional desktop productivity.

A little enterprise in the overall Microsoft message would also help Windows 8 phone, which in my opinion could use a lot of help right now. Blackberry is trying a comeback, Samsung is trying to make Android enterprise-secure, and the iPhone isn’t designed to be managed as an enterprise resource. If only there were a compelling reason to use Windows 8 phones in the enterprise. We can’t hope to know based on current Windows 8 phone marketing, which compels us to imagine ourselves as soccer moms instead of busy executives, and hipsters instead of blue collar workers.

And what about Lync, which actually is an enterprise product but is marketed in that dead-end space called unified communications? How hard would it be to show how Lync can be used to enhance a collaborative supply chain planning process, or field service maintenance? Put on some blue collars and roll up your sleeves, Lync.

On the other hand, just a couple of degrees of focus on the enterprise from Microsoft’s high-profile consumer product lines would help Dynamics face its biggest challenge: how to define a compelling case for its products in the top tier of the market against three much bigger competitors: giants SAP and Oracle, and even much smaller Infor, which at $2.8 billion in revenues is still more than double Dynamics’ size.

The draft that the rest of Microsoft could give Dynamics would help establish that all-important compelling case for why Dynamics should have a seat at the table against these three competitors, all of which have the advantage of incumbency in the top tier of the market where Dynamics now wants to play.

I think Infor makes for the most compelling case why the rest of Microsoft needs to lean in a little more and help Dynamics make its case. Infor owns a customer base that is famous for sticking with the status quo – the whole reason Infor has made it this far is that its customers have stubbornly refused to move off their ancient enterprise software systems, providing Infor with a steady stream of maintenance revenue over the last decade. Infor is banking on keeping them in thrall for another decade (or until CEO Charles Phillips can engineer an IPO or sale of the company) by refreshing the user experience and analytics capability, delivering innovation by tying its other products together using its ION middleware, and offering a hybrid cloud/on-premise deployment model.

While Dynamics has been able to pick off Infor customers over the years as they have run out runway with the Infor products, that was easy in the pre-Phillips days when Infor had nothing new to offer. But now that it does, Dynamics’ job just got twice as hard. These Infor customers have already proven their reluctance to reimplement on new software, so if Phillips can offer them a way to stay put and innovate, Dynamics now has to look even more compelling in order to get these Infor customers to go through the pain of a migration to a wholly new platform. Just relying on a feature/function bake-off in the core ERP processes won’t be enough – Dynamics has to go the extra mile, and having more air cover from the rest of Microsoft would be a good start.

This extra mile from the consumery side of Microsoft would also help support the changes it has been making in how it sells to the enterprise, which has seen major changes in how the company licenses AX in the enterprise: Microsoft has been selling enterprise licenses of Windows, SQL Server and the rest of its enterprise software for years. In the last year it added AX to the mix, and brought Microsoft Consulting Services in as well:  I spoke with a large Asian heavy equipment distributor that is engaging with MCS to do a massive, world-class business transformation, using AX as the core product. MCS is the prime contractor, and full panoply of Microsoft technology is at play in this account. This is the kind of marquee win that Microsoft will use to solidify a strategic beachhead in the enterprise. With MCS pulling and the consumer side pushing, this beachhead could be secured much more quickly and in a more compelling way.

It’s been a long journey for what is still the smallest part of Microsoft in terms of revenue, and it’s clear that on the sales and services side of Microsoft, Dynamics is getting the attention it deserves: it’s Microsoft’s overall marketing that hasn’t aligned with what Dynamics is doing or the converged enterprise/consumer opportunity. Global systems integrators are now on board, AX 2012 and Dynamics CRM are enterprise class products, and the recent acquisition of MarketingPilot adds some important capabilities in the somewhat over-hyped marketing automation, execution, and planning market. It’s starting to look like a really good enterprise story. It could be even better if only the rest of  Microsoft would play along.

Some things are just too good to be true, and Microsoft’s vision for Lync 2013 – its desktop unified communications product – is a good case in point. It’s almost a shame, because rationalizing the many different channels of communication that business users have access to – email, chat, social, video conference, voice – under a single application has enormous potential for optimizing how people collaborate.  And Microsoft’s vision for Lync, as spelled out at its sold-out first-ever Lync conference last month, was a singularly beautiful vision of instant-on, real-time communications enabling amazing feats of collaboration never before possible.

Too bad trying to make this vision happen with the current product set is just a dream – or actually, if my example is any indication  – a bloody nightmare. Based on my experience of the last week just trying to wire up Lync with my Office 365 account, Lync isn’t worth the trouble. But finding out just what Lync and Office 365 can do together once they are wired together – a big fat nothing, actually – made the four calls to Lync tech support and the two calls to my ISP’s tech support a complete and utter waste of time.

Why did I bother in the first place? Because I was intrigued by the promises that Tony Bates, the president of Microsoft’s Skype division, and Derek Burney, the SVP of Lync Engineering, gave at the Lync conference keynote. Their basic message was about how Lync could bring unified communications to my Windows 8 desktop and myriad Microsoft and non-Microsoft devices, and I had to find out if it was true. Because if it was, I wanted in: like most people, I spend a lot of time bouncing between different voice, email, chat, and video conference technologies,  all of which I have to access from different apps with no central management and no way to keep track of all my communications channels, much less rationalize their use.  Having a single pane of glass with which to manage all my communications would be a huge time savings, and would definitely lead to some much-needed efficiency as well.

This ability to manage all communications from a single application is the promise of unified communications, one of those market opportunities that I equate with social collaboration – a great theory that lacks a critical mass of equally great, compelling reasons why the enterprise should embrace the theory full force. This is mostly because, like social collaboration, unified communications proponents have tended to heave their technology up on the proverbial enterprise wall in the vain hope that it will stick, despite failing to articulate how unified communications can directly impact specific business processes.

In other words, the pitch for UC has been largely about cool technology without any attempt to tie that technology directly to that class of enterprise problems that keep line of business leaders up at night. UC is not seen as a solution to a problem these business users have: I can assure you that none of them are waking up at 2 am, smacking their foreheads, and saying “unified communications, that’s what’ll save my bacon.”

So, absent a compelling business context that could interest a business user, buying UC has been relegated to the purview of procurement departments who aren’t paid to pay attention to expensive technology-driven fantasies masquerading as strategies. The result – UC is another market that never lived up to its potential.

But I do believe there is more to this market than ignominy: if there was a great UC platform with a great consumer-like user experience, one that could support existing channels as well as new and emerging one, and it was sold by a vendor that understood how to use UC to enhance some key, bedrock business processes, unified communications, or something like it, could become a powerful force for innovation in the enterprise.

So, while I have been skeptical about the promise of UC, when I saw the Lync conference keynote I had to give Microsoft’s new entry a try. Maybe the only company that effectively plays in both the consumer and the business world will have come up with the perfect bridge product that could light a fire under the promise of UC and give this moribund market a good kick in the keister.

I also figured I was probably a good test case for trying to see if Lync can give the market that kick: I run Office 365, Windows 8, and Skype – which are three of the fundamental building blocks that were referenced in the keynote. And I know enough about the enterprise to see how Lync could give UC some much-needed enterprise context.

If only I could have gotten it to work.

As I had three of the building blocks already, all that was needed was Lync 2013, which was downloaded from the Windows 8 store and was immediately dead on arrival, as I couldn’t sign into Lync using my Office 365 credentials. The problem, once I talked to tech support, was that I had to configure the DNS records in my email domain to allow this connection to take place – easy enough if you know how to do it, though any time you need to call tech support you know you’re no longer in the realm of the obvious. And I had to check with my ISP to make sure that I wasn’t going to totally destroy something else (like kill off my email, for example) by making these changes to the arcane innards of my email account.

In the end, getting the DNS record right wasn’t actually that easy, and it took two more calls to Lync and another call to my ISP before I could sign on and open up the Lync screen. That’s a lot of support just to get to the starting gate – and no way to get there without actually talking to a human expert, as searching the Lync support database was useless. (Partly because Microsoft’s byzantine naming conventions make it hard to get past Lync Server, Lync 2010, and all the other Lyncs in order to find information specific to Lync 2013.)

But once I got Lync up and running, I had to place another call to tech support: I couldn’t figure out how to get that great UC experience up and running as well. I had expected to be able to unify my different communications channels, chat or Skype my contacts from Lync, set up video or conference calls with colleagues, and do all the cool stuff you could see Burney and Bates doing in the keynote.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. What Microsoft doesn’t tell you is that Lync is a walled in community – if the people you want to do the UC thing with aren’t using Lync, you’re SOL: you can’t chat with them, call them, video conference, nothing. Unified communications be damned – Lync can only unify Lync communications. And barely, at that: Skype integration doesn’t come for another couple of months, apparently. To add insult to injury, my attempt to chat with a Microsoft contact whom I know uses Lync returned an error message: Tech support said I needed to email my contact and ask permission to Lync to her. Lync itself couldn’t handle the request.

As for the rest of my contacts, it would nice, at least,  if you’re living inside the Lync moat to be able to tell a priori if the person you want to communicate with is a Lync user. Unfortunately, there’s no way to know who in Outlook is also a Lync user. Outlook and Lync aren’t synchronized, so you have  to guess who might have Lync, or wait until someone who uses Lync lets you know they have Lync, or… just not bother using it at all.

Just to further show what a non-starter Lync 2013 is, there’s no way to link Lync to the Outlook contact database, meaning that if you want to use Lync to communicate you have to load your Outlook contacts one by one into the Lync contact database. This forces the user to do double entry contact database management: Once you’ve moved a contact to Lync, Outlook creates a new folder called Lync Contacts, where any changes you make to a Lync contact inside Lync are replicated. But this folder is not synched with the regular Outlook contact information, so those changes aren’t propagated to Outlook. This means you get to try to use your brain, or what’s left of it after all this, to keep track of what changed in which contact list and synch them manually. Advil, anyone?

Did I miss something? That’s what I asked the Lync support person when we went through this mess. The answer was no: Microsoft’s attempt at UC for the desktop is pretty much useless as a UC tool unless everyone you want to communicate with is a Lync user. Frankly, as a pure communication tool Apple’s iOS contact database has it beat by a mile – from my iPhone I can do Facetime with other iOS users – iOS can auto-detect those iOS users – and from this one device’s unified user experience I can phone or chat or email anyone in my contact database.  There’s no management layer per se, and a lot of other UC-like features aren’t available in iOS. But then again it’s not marketed as a UC platform, while Lync, which basically can’t do anything remotely as useful, is.

The moral of the story is that Microsoft once again has let its reach exceed its grasp, and its vision for Lync 2013 as a unified communications platform is just a bunch of vision, and a poorly marketed one at that. It’s a shame that there isn’t a desktop product that could do what Lync is supposed to do, because the mess of communications channels on the desktop is worth cleaning up.

At least Microsoft tried to up the ante in the failed UC market by telling a good story at its Lync conference about making communications “fundamental” and “humanized”, with broken-down barriers and lots of “access” and “reach.” Too bad Microsoft forgot that Lync also needed the features that would make those aspirations real.

There’s never enough solid competition in the enterprise software market, and it’s been tempting to see the top tier of the market as a three-horse race, with SAP and Oracle the dominant players, and Microsoft,  in the form of Dynamics AX, moving fast to catch up, particularly in the large enterprise.

It’s looking like that’s about to change.

A little over two years ago, the ERP roll-up king, Infor, brought on board a new management team, headed by former Oracle co-president Charles Phillips, and the prospect of another horse in the race started looking pretty good. And based on a half-day meeting last week with industry analysts at Infor’s stylish New York headquarters, the top end of the enterprise software field just grew another four legs and  a tail.

There’s still a lot for Phillips and team to prove before it’s safe to say Infor’s many bets on technology and market focus have paid off, and the race is not always to the swift, however fast they may move. But it’s clear that the notion that Infor is just a collection of products best showcased in the ERP Graveyard has successfully been buried. The phoenix that is rising from the ashes of the likes of Baan, Marcam, Mapics, and more rolled up vendors than you can safely count  definitely looks like a force to be reckoned with.

Before I get into the product and technology strategy, I think it’s worth noting that there’s an important cultural side to what Phillips and his top lieutenants – among them industry veterans Duncan Angove  and Stephan Scholl – are doing. The most visible cultural component is the executive office – a single office, rather spacious, with a massive square-shaped table anchoring center court where the executive team sits and works when they’re in New York. This is no hidden, inaccessible enclave of absolute power: walk up the stairs from the meeting rooms and you might inadvertently stumble in to the only collaborative executive office I’ve ever seen. Instead of being sequestered in their respective seats of power, the Infor team sits and works together, within sound and sight of the rest of the company.

This office layout isn’t only a refreshing change from the usual mountaintop aerie Office of the CEO,  it helps define a culture of openness and accessibility – and an apparent lack of back office politics – that may be an important part of the competitive edge Infor is hoping to have in the market. Certainly it has been a big help in attracting top talent to the company – Infor is doing a good job attracting refugees eager to escape from the internecine, Machiavellian politics of its top competitors. And the collaborative/cooperative nature of the company could be a big part of the secret sauce that helps Infor have a shot at overtaking its bigger competitors – all of whom struggle with balancing competing internal interests that at times seem more problematic than their external competitors.

On to the product strategy. Infor’s major challenge has been to leverage the breadth of its myriad products and provide a coherent upgrade and innovation path for its customer base. This 5000+ company customer base was largely neglected as the old Infor focused on rolling up software companies without a clear vision for the customers’ tech future beyond their role as a source of maintenance revenue.

To rectify this Infor has embarked on an ambitious strategy to create a single user experience,  mobile and social platform, and  analytics and workflow environment for its top products, which include M3 (nee Lawson), LN (nee Baan), CPM (the former Infor 10 CPM), EAM (the former Infor 10 EAM and Datastream), Syteline, Lawson, Hospitality, and Hansen.  The single user experience is perhaps the most significant, and ambitious, part of the technology strategy. User experiences are extremely fluid these days –witness the debates about mobile vs. touch or consumer vs. enterprise – and locking down all its products and industries in a single UX will be hard to build and potentially even harder for the company’s customers to accept.

To this end Infor has created a separate design company, Hook & Loop, to create this experience. So far what they’ve done looks good – is it good enough to tip the user experience battle in Infor’s favor?  Time, and user acceptance, will tell.

In addition, the company has been building out a single integration platform, called ION, that provides what Phillips calls loosely-coupled integration between the entire Infor product set as well as third party applications, including a number of Oracle and SAP applications.  This means that, rather than build a massively bloated master data integration environment, Infor is opting for a more light-weight XML-based event pub/sub model that is easier to build, easier to maintain, and more likely to actually be used than some of what its competitors have tried, and failed, to build over the years.  The success of ION is still nascent – around 1000 customers are using  it today, which is a good start. How much they are using ION, and how extensively, will reveal  it’s true success.

There’s enough to ION to merit  a separate blog post at some point down the line – it supports on-prem, on-demand, and hybrid deployments, peer-to-peer and loosely coupled integration, and it’s based on the OAGIS  business object document standard. If ION really fulfills is promise then Infor will have done what Oracle in particular has failed to do: rationalize its portfolio through integration and make the whole greater than the sum of the parts.

Infor is also standardizing localizations and mobile access across the entire portfolio.  And the company is further refining its cloud strategy, offering new customers the option of road-testing their Infor apps in the cloud and then, as needed, deploying to an on-premise environment or remaining in the cloud, whichever makes the most sense.  This isn’t necessarily the orthodox cloud strategy that the orthodox cloud crowd would like – which is great, IMO. Customer choice should always trump orthodoxy.

In all, it’s a well-thought out approach to rationalizing a huge portfolio of products, most of which were acquired largely without any thought to rationalization.

But even more interesting than this post-hoc rationalization process is the company’s go-to-market strategy, which gives it an interesting point of differentiation in an enterprise software market that frequently lacks effective differentiation. The essence of Infor’s strategy is to tackle what is commonly referred to as the micro-vertical market, as specific vertical industries like dairy or brewing, as opposed to looking at the market through the lens of larger categories like food and beverage.

This makes a ton of sense for a couple of reasons: Infor’s rollup of dozens of enterprise software companies has given the company serious credentials in a lot of very specific markets. Some are familiar markets that don’t seem very “micro”, like aerospace, automotive, pharma, and high-tech. But the others are more micro than macro – like breweries, hospitals, hospitality, and industrial distribution.

Phillips makes this an important distinction, and I think it’s a good one. We tend to think of food and beverage as a market, whereas, according to Phillips, it’s a sector. The micro-verticals – dairy production, brewing, baking, and meat processing – have radically different requirements in terms of how raw materials are acquired and processed, and how finished goods are produced and taken to market. Building software and going to market specifically for these micro-verticals makes tremendous sense.  Whereas, building software and going to market at the sector level tends to produce one-size-fits-none software and the need for a lot of customization and configuration.

This focus also changes the competitive nature of what Infor has to do in order to succeed. Instead of taking on the Big Three head on, Infor can go after a micro-vertical market that is dominated by a combination of relatively small companies and VARs, many of which are privately held and not well-known outside their micro-vertical.

This could make life hard for the Big Three.  Many of these companies Infor wants to compete against are Microsoft VARs that have been getting a little less love from Microsoft since it decided to focus its partner efforts on building a cadre of larger, more globally effective VARs and going direct to the large enterprise.  SAP’s approach to the mid-market – particularly with All-in-One – has lacked a strong degree of micro-vertical focus and could make it vulnerable to Infor’s ability to focus a specific product set on a specific market. And Oracle’s inability to provide an upgrade path to Fusion for many of its micro-vertical customers – particularly its JDE customers – is a point of vulnerability that Infor can attack with this micro-vertical approach.

The Infor team provided some insight into a set of recent wins that highlighted these opportunities, including an impressive number of SAP wins, as well some PeopleSoft and an early knock-out for Microsoft Dynamics. The details were given under NDA, and there was time to discuss only a handful, but suffice to say that they prove a point: Infor isn’t just selling maintenance contacts for aging software– it can compete, and win, against the best.

If they can do that consistently, and keep their renewals up and continue to entice their customers to upgrade instead of shack up with a competitor, Infor will be a great turnaround story and make for a helluva interesting IPO or acquisition (I vote for the latter) down the road.

The great thing about the enterprise software market is that, once you leave the domain of the very largest companies, the number one competitor in most geographies and verticals is “other” – a set of companies too small to be statistically relevant by themselves in any large scale market survey.  If Infor has its way they’re going to seriously dent the impact of “other” in the market. And if they do, the non-others – SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft – are going to have another big competitors to worry about.

I’ve been saying for a while that the so-called mobile market isn’t really about mobility at all, but about touch and better user experiences. And with the advent of Windows 8, whether Microsoft really knocks it out of the park or not, the hybrid desktop/mobile experience is going to redefine enterprise software – not mobile vs. desktop, but mobile/touch  as an extension of the desktop, and vice versa.

Backing me up on this is SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe, who spoke to me just after his company announced a strong Q4 and fiscal year that emphasized the importance of the growing innovation strategy that SAP has embraced around cloud, mobile, social, HANA, and analytics.

Snabe told me that the fiscal year that SAP just reported also represents the last time SAP will break out separate numbers for its mobile revenue, which I offer as proof that the mobile market is over. The cynics may try to read into this something about the relatively poor track record of SAP’s mobile platform strategy and its accompanying products, particularly as the company’s two platforms come from SAP’s most recent acquisitions, Sybase and Syclo, which were designed to place SAP squarely in the center of the very mobile market I’m now preparing to relegate to the recycle bin of history. But regardless of the state of the mobile platform strategy, I think Snabe is right to stop calling out mobile apps revenue, and here’s why.

Mobile as a standalone market is really a consumer market, and consumer mobile apps are consumed the way most technology is consumed outside the enterprise: as a means to a very specific and targeted functional end. Peruse the Apple Store’s top paid and free apps and you’ll largely see single purpose apps solving a very specific, and limited, need: A game, a funky camera,  a YouTube viewer, etc.  These apps need nothing more than an iPhone or iPad and an Internet connection to do pretty much everything the customer expects them to do.

The enterprise market initially tried to adopt this micro-process model, and the initial apps were reflective of this. But, as I have said in the afore-cited post, driving the initial design criteria of mobile apps was an artificial distinction Apple placed in the market between consumption (the iPad) and creation (the Mac or PC desktop), mostly as a ploy to sell us two devices instead of just one. But as we have learned over the years, while it made big bucks for Apple, this consumption orientation limited these initial enterprise apps’ usefulness and made a mess out of end-to-end business process software design.

Most enterprise processes are broad enough to need data and process connectivity to the enterprise back office, and increasingly the front-office and cloud-office,  and having developers working in one modality for the mobile component and a completely different one for the rest of the application’s process functionality created a break in the encoding of the process, to be blunt, that was stupid and messy.

One of the reasons I like what Microsoft has done with Windows 8 is that it allows enterprise developers to do what Snabe thinks SAP should do: look at all new enterprise applications as end-to-end processors that can have a mobile and a desktop component, and, regardless of which modality is currently in operation, will be designed to be touch-enabled.

That’s because I firmly believe that touch is more important, much more important, than mobile. If your experience with touch is only on a smart phone or tablet, you’re not seeing the full picture. Adding touch to what is effectively a 20^th century tool like my PC laptop running Office 2010 is a huge innovation gain for me, even without specific touch-enabled, net-new apps designed to leverage Windows 8. And making touch the key to next generation apps, and not just mobility, allows developers to imagine – and build – a much broader application environment than just building the next cool iPhone app.

Going back to Snabe’s reasoning for no longer reporting mobility as a separate revenue stream, it’s clear to me that if mobile is a capability, and not a means unto itself, then it makes as much sense to count mobile revenue as it does for a car company to count its revenues from anti-lock brakes. Which once upon a time may have made sense, but with anti-lock brakes being standard equipment, there’s nothing special in having them and no reason to call it out.

What makes more sense is to move towards building, selling, and accounting for complete, highly verticalized solutions that may or may not have a mobile component, something that Snabe said is the ultimate goal for SAP. In this world, there is no way to effectively monetize the individual mobile component: if every app has a mobile component, then there’s no way to call out those revenues as a separate revenue stream.

And if every enterprise app has a mobile component, then there is no separate mobile market. The standalone nature of the consumer market means that the mobile consumer market will endure for some time. But, only slightly hyperbolically, the mobile enterprise market as a standalone market is about to die off.

This follows a time-honored tradition of co-opting and subsuming innovation: does anyone sell client/server software anymore? Internet access? Web services? Those markets have come and gone, and now it’s the mobile enterprise market’s time to be subsumed. And soon some other new big market will rise up and then take the dive.

What’s next? Right now I’m torn between announcing the end of the cloud market or the end of the social collaboration market. It’s not a question of whether these two are next – they most assuredly are – but when the ax will fall.

And fall it will: not because they’re unimportant but precisely because of how important they are.

The ability of Microsoft to ride the consumer/IT juggernaut to glory rests on a large combination of factors, but two of the most important are the success of Windows 8 and Office 365. And while Microsoft is generally to be credited for doing better than expected in both domains, there are serious flaws and omissions in their strategies for both that threaten the company’s run for glory.

Both are related to how well Microsoft positions itself as the bridge between the consumer and the enterprise world –  a manifest destiny it cannot afford to flub. Both are also eminently fixable, but the fact that these problems exist in the middle of Microsoft’s biggest bet since the launch of Windows in 1986 speaks to the continuing gaps in how the company is executing on CEO Steve Ballmer’s vision.

Let’s start with Microsoft’s Windows 8 problem. First, I’m happy to report that it’s not a technical one. I upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 8 on my Lenovo X220 laptop about three weeks ago, and the operating system has been largely perfect. Lenovo’s attempts to add its own upgrades to my PC were the only screw-up, adding some unwelcome drama to an otherwise trouble-free upgrade.

I’m also happy to report that the touchscreen laptop experience with Windows 8 is as impressive as I had expected. (This review couldn’t be more wrong, IMO).  In the office, I run Windows 8 in extended screen mode, with my “desktop” apps running on my 24-inch monitor and my touchscreen apps running on the laptop’s screen. On the road, I swipe back and forth between desktop and touch mode as needed, and the intuitiveness of the interaction between keyboard and touchscreen increases with every day. This multi-mode interaction model will be very appealing in the enterprise, which is why I think Microsoft is in position about to teach Apple a lesson about human/computer interfaces and user engagement – having the two modes in a single machine is an enormous productivity boost, and makes my iPad and my single mode PCs look old and backwards by comparison.

But while early adopters like me are generally enjoying the touch experience, Microsoft is having some problems in how it is marketing Windows 8 that I think will pose problems for consumer adoption, and hence for Microsoft’s goal of copying Apple by using massive consumer demand to land a beachhead in the enterprise for Windows 8’s unique touch-enabled user experience.

The main problem with marketing Windows 8 is this: someone forgot to brand the touch experience and highlight its unique value-add to Windows 8. There’s plenty of advertising that’s showing off how Windows 8 works as a touch-based OS, particularly on the Surface. But in one big arena, branding the hybrid touch/desktop experience, Microsoft has flopped. And nowhere is that more apparent than in the home courts of the big box retailers that drive consumer and small business buying on a massive scale.

Last Sunday the big box retailers in my area – Fry’s, Best Buy, Office Depot, Office Max, and Staples – all ran ads hawking various PCs running Windows 8. What was clear from scanning these ads is that it’s not clear which PCs are touch-enabled and which are not. And with on average three-fourths of the PCs in the Sunday ads being not touch-enabled, the consumer’s ability to identify Windows 8 with a next-generation touch experience is confused by this mix of touch and non-touch enable PCs. And the lack of visual cues to help consumers understand what they are looking at in a Windows PC ad makes that confusion a big problem.

The confusion that drives this – to touch or not to touch – speaks to the larger issue of whether the only touch-worthy Windows 8 experience should come from a Surface, or how much Microsoft and its hardware partners should be promoting Windows 8 touch on laptops at all. In my opinion Microsoft fails if touch remain largely synonymous with Surface, and does not become de rigeur for laptops too. And right now it’s heading towards fail mode.

In an attempt to make things clearer – which has actually made things worse – some of the retailers, Fry’s, Best Buy, Office Depot, and Office Max, created their own (lousy-looking) touch icons to layer over their ads, while Staples just threw a little “touch screen” text overlay on the screen shots of its touch-enabled PCs. Which means the consumer browsing for a new PC has to hunt for a visual cue, unique to each retailer, in order to align their buying experience with the opportunity to buy a new, touch-enabled PC. While the retailers’ ratio of touch to non-touch PCs may make sense in terms of the current demand and price curve (touch-enabled laptops are typically $300 more than a non-touch laptop), the lack of clarity makes the shopping experience surrounding Windows 8 more than a little confusing.

This is in sharp contrast to what happens when prospective buyers look at an iPad or Android tablet or Surface, or an Apple computer or laptop, for that matter. There is absolutely no doubt that a consumer looking at an ad for any of those device types knows instantly what they are getting – touch-enabled tablet and non-touch computer (okay, there’s touchpad on Apple laptops, but that’s not what we are talking about here.) Whereas the same consumer, looking at a Windows PC ad, has to wonder, as I do every time, whether what I’m looking includes a touch screen. Despite these icons – which are of course not specific to Windows 8 and could be used to designate any old touch-based device – the shopper looking for a touch-enabled Windows 8 machine is going to have look harder than he or she should.

Why this discourse on the branding and iconography of Windows 8? Because it’s part of the reason Microsoft isn’t doing as well as it could with Windows 8. Not only does Microsoft need consumers to buy Windows 8 because it’s touch-enabled (as opposed to being a somewhat better-performing upgrade to Windows 7), Ballmer and Co. also want to emulate Apple and use consumer pull to drive Windows 8 touch into the enterprise. This dual purpose means that the initial consumer experience has to be as unambiguous as possible: if consumers can’t easily and readily identify Windows 8 with a touch-enabled user experience, then they’re likely to see Windows 8 as just another upgrade with a cost and learning curve that isn’t necessarily justified if touch isn’t part of the reason to buy. And thereupon Microsoft fails.

Sure, they can just by a Surface, and have the unambiguous experience, but to be frank, if the Surface remains the major touch-based system for Windows 8, then Microsoft has also failed. There is simply no way that Microsoft can make Windows 8 touch successful without its hardware partners. And the big box ad/icon problem is indicative of how confusing the buying experience can be – and by contrast how simple it is to know what you’re looking at when you glance at an ad for an iOs or Android device. If Microsoft can’t brand the touch experience, and brand it visually so that consumers equate Windows 8 with touch, then the battle is lost before it can begin.

Most importantly, losing the consumer battle means the enterprise market – which needs a compelling reason to forestall or leapfrog its XP to Windows 7 upgrade plans in favor of a touch-enabled hardware refresh to Window 8 — will never ever happen for Windows 8. This, I am sure, would be a missed opportunity from which Microsoft might never recover.

Which brings us to the other case of consumer/enterprise disconnect way, way over in Office 365 land. Office 365 is another important leg to the Microsoft strategy: offer a great online experience for its flagship Office productivity tools that can blunt the impact of Google’s burgeoning online apps strategy and drive acceptance of Microsoft as a major cloud services player with a serious consumer/enterprise bridge offering.

Success in consumer-class cloud services has its own special set of criteria, which boils down to providing a simple way for a customer to sign up, pay for, and start using the service without little or no human-to-human interaction. This self-service model has become the most basic component of any online service, and while the task of linking up an existing desktop Outlook environment to Office 365 is non-trivial, by and large Office 365 fits the online self-service model well.

With one enormous omission – self-service upgrades. Microsoft’s Office 365 team has, probably inadvertently, completely messed up what should be as simple as anything – and everything – in the online world: upgrading a customers’ class of service. Instead, early adopters of Office 365, of which I am one, have found ourselves in a veritable online services Catch-22 that is a perfect example of how not to succeed in the cloud.

The sad story goes like this. Anyone who signed up to Office 365 a year ago, including me, had only one option that made any sense to a single-user operation: the service level known as P1, “P” as in professional. It was very well-priced, $6/month, and for that price we were given phone support – an absolute necessity in those early teething phases of use. Problems like the aforementioned issue about running desktop Outlook in synch with Office 365 took a lot of phone support to solve, in particular because whatever online documentation and community support was available simply didn’t couldn’t provide the required level of assistance. I also used phone support to deal with the complexities of linking my email, hosted by a separate hosting service, to Office 365. In both cases I need some serious phone support to resolve the problems.

So when I was informed late last year by Office 365 that the terms of service for P1 would be changed  and that phone support would no longer be offered, I immediately looked into upgrading my service. And there it was, the E1 service level: $8/month with phone support. Not a problem – I can afford another $24 a year, and I figure one phone call to tech support will make the extra $2/month worth it. So I set out to upgrade the service, and then the fun began.

First, while E1 was listed as an available plan on the home page for Office 365, when I went to upgrade from within my account E1 wasn’t available. Instead, my only option was Professional Plus, listed at $15/month. As this was more than double what I was currently paying, and almost double what I had expected to be paying with E1, I wasn’t thrilled. I clicked the “learn more” tab and then found out that while Professional Plus was listed in the next page for $12/month, the landing page made it seem that it didn’t include Office 365, if that was even possible.

Confused? Me too. So I called sales support to find out how to get E1. And then the enormity of Microsoft’s consumer cloud disconnect became evident.

Sales support told me that I couldn’t actually upgrade to E1, but would have to cancel my P1 account and sign up for a new E1 account. This, of course, would mean backing up all my Outlook data, killing the old account, reloading the data into the new account, resetting all the different devices that connect to my Office 365 Exchange server (five), and reconfiguring the email forwarding set up with my ISP. Reloading the data would also probably change my desktop Outlook configuration, and, considering my track record with the interplay between desktop Office, Office 365, and my ISP, this alone could be a couple of days work.

“But all I want is phone support,” I told the earnest young man trying to make sense of this mess for me. “I’m running my business on Office 365, I don’t want to troll for answers in some online forum. Is there any way to get some phone support?” And, just to make it clear that I believe that you get what you pay for, I threw in the kicker:  “I’m willing to pay.”

The answer was simple: Not without upgrading – I mean migrating – to a new plan.

So I tried a different tack: Is there any way to automate that migration, are there any tools available to do this seamlessly? That elicited an answer that actually made me smile, however ridiculous it was.

“You need to call Office 365 tech support and ask them,” I was told.

But wait – I don’t have phone support, remember? I told the sales support guy. “Well, the best I can suggest is that you sign up for E1 before you upgrade, and then you can phone tech support under the E1 plan.”

Thanks, and good night.

Actually, before I said good night he told me an important fact that no consumer should ever ever ever give a damn about: the reason I just can’t upgrade to E1 is that P1 services are on a different set of servers than E1, and, well, that means that the consumer has to manually move the data from one system to another. In reality, of course, the technical details of migrating a service from one set of servers to another is a red herring: this really means that Microsoft couldn’t be arsed, to use my favorite Briticism for willful negligence, about automating this migration.

The fact that this required in order for the consumer to pay the service provider more money for more service just adds insult to injury. Ugh.

So here I sit, an otherwise happy consumer, credit card in hand, just trying to make sure he has phone support to keep his business running. And there sits Microsoft Office 365, sincerely trying to be a consumer-grade service provider, having despite its best efforts found a way to deprive itself of revenue while making the most simple and basic of service requirements not just hard, but impossible and infuriating.

I’ll end here by saying that I still think Microsoft has more than a fighting chance of making mincemeat of the touch-based market by offering a dual-mode touch/desktop experience, and I still think Office 365 has a chance to help define Microsoft as a bona fide cloud services vendor. But forgetting to brand the touch experience in the minds of consumers is going to make finding the path to the Microsoft touch experience much harder than it has to be. And making service changes that require customers to jump through flaming hoops to keep up is going to make Microsoft look oafish at a time when it desperately needs to look cool and slick.

The moral of the story is this: the two problems I’ve written about here are things Microsoft shouldn’t have gotten wrong in the first place. Microsoft knows more about branding than most companies, and should have figured out the touch branding problem from the get-go. And, with the online services market over a decade old, there’s no excuse for messing up the P1 to E1 transition, other than someone got sloppy at a time when sloppiness can’t be allowed.If this was the first time Microsoft thought so inside the box it boxed itself in, i would be less annoyed. But this example of how to be tone deaf to consumer requirements is unfortunately not the first that I’ve felt the need to write about.

Luckily this is Microsoft, and if I’ve learned one thing in the 25 years or so I’ve following these guys, they do second and third acts better than most. So, stay tuned for version two of the Windows 8 touch experience, there will be stickers and logos and lots of swag too. And stay tuned for the Office 365 simple service upgrade service, seamless and painless. I’m sure it will make its debut any day now.

It’s not like they really have a choice.

The United States Air Force recently announced that the $1 billion you were hoping would be spent on something useful (or not at all) has been lost forever to Oracle and Computer Sciences Corp. in the wake of a failed attempt to upgrade the Air Force’s back office.

While there are usually as many reasons for project failure as there are stars in the sky, I think I found a smoking gun buried in some of the language used by the Air Force to announce what was supposed to be a major improvement in modernizing the military and controlling costs that turned into yet another major setback. What emerges is a cautionary tale about how enterprise software is sold and marketed, particularly by a company like Oracle that has make the ready integration of disparate enterprise software products a “feature” honored more in the breach than not.

The original award had the lofty goal of upgrading over 400 legacy systems in order better support how the Air Force goes to war. Considering what is at stake – making sure the 750,000 men and women in the Air Force are well supported and provisioned – the goals of the project were laudable.

Also laudable was the focus on COTS – commercial, off-the-shelf software – which the U.S. government has been using more and more to lower overall IT costs and promote standards across the board. Which is why Oracle 11i was chosen to be the enterprise software anchor of the project.

So, how did the Air Force, Oracle, and CSC blow it? The how is a little tricky, but the what – $1 billion in tax dollars shot to hell – pretty much points to the usual combination of bad planning, scope creep, cost-overruns, and other classic mistakes that you’d think would be avoidable in the 21^st century.

Indeed, it’s obvious that this was a typical big bang project gone sour… But with a twist.

The twist can be found in the following statement, made in September, 2006 when the award was made: “As a result of this selection, CSC will use processes within the Oracle 11i product suite to support all logistics functions including product lifecycle management, advanced planning and scheduling, repair and maintenance, and distribution and transportation. The integrated suite (my emphasis) will replace more than 400 legacy systems.”

Oracle 11i, , a.k.a E-Business Suite, in 2006 was itself integrated, but it had relatively limited capabilities in such key areas as PLM, planning and scheduling, and transportation, among others. Fair enough – apparently the Air Force procurement office decided that these functions were good enough for the government, and Oracle got the nod.

But the functionality inherent in EBS at the time wasn’t good enough for Oracle, and in fact much of the functionality that was essential to the Air Force project was already or about to be the subject of an acquisition spree by Oracle. Transportation management in the form of G-Log had been acquired in 2005, and Demantra’s planning software was acquired three months before the Air Force award was announced. PLM market leader Agile was acquired in 2007.

So, what was the “integrated suite” the Air Force thought it was buying in 2006, and what was the integrated suite that Oracle and CSC were trying to implement starting in 2008 (when the requirements blueprint was to have been finished)? It’s really hard to tell without an actual copy of the award document, but any decent requirements blueprint for a client like the Air Force would have stipulated the very best that the vendor could provide (that’s how these things are written – no one wants to implement mediocrity, right?). That in turn would have meant that by 2008 it was apparent that key functionality like PLM, planning, and transportation management should be based on Oracle’s newly acquired products, and not the core of Oracle 11i.

The problem is that the use of these or any other pieces of acquired software not part of E-Business Suite would have meant that the solution the Air Force was thinking was “integrated”, and consisted of “processes” that lived within Oracle 11i in reality consisted of a bunch of recently acquired products in desperate need of data and process integration. And while Oracle has tried to make application integration a virtue, and has thrown unsuccessful products like Application Integration Architecture at the problem it has created by buying dozens of incompatible products over the last 17 years, the fact remains that integrating Oracle’s applications are still complicated, costly, and a major bottleneck for its customers’ implementation plans.

Also note that it was during this timeframe that Oracle Fusion hove into view, and in fact at the time of the award Oracle was preparing to claim that it was “halfway to Fusion”, as well as promising an upgrade to Oracle 11i and a comprehensive Fusion integration strategy in the ensuing year. So you can probably add a new version of EBS, some Fusion apps and middleware to the blueprint as it was being readied to be part of a billion dollar barrel of pork.

So, while the evidence is purely circumstantial, the fact that the Air Force is basically writing off the project and dooming our flyers and support personnel to living in a legacy environment for the conceivable future points to a failure that very likely included the effects of “portfolio creep” on the part of the vendor as it added new products to the mix and further complicated an already complex “big bang”.

While any project failure of this magnitude has plenty of blame to go around – CSC and the Air Force need to be taken to the woodshed too – it’s clear that if the Air Force thought it was getting an integrated suite in 2006, it picked the wrong vendor. And at each milestone, 2008 when the blueprint was finished, and 2012 when the plug was pulled, Oracle’s portfolio only got more complicated, and the integration challenge more complex.

The moral of the story, to be fair, isn’t just about Oracle. It’s about every software vendor’s promise of integration – to its own products and those of its competitors and partners: Integration is hard, and is a common and costly point of failure. The tendency is to over-promise, and the temptation to do so in order to win a chunk of a billion dollar job is too tempting.

This moral extends to the customer as well – we all like to believe what we want to hear, and surely the Air Force, struggling to overcome a massive legacy quagmire, was happy to believe that it was buying an integrated suite with integrated processes that spanned logistics, PLM, planning, and the like when it was buying something else.

And while we’re at it let’s call out CSC, which has some duty – legal, moral, or probably both – to protect the clientele that funds the bulk of its revenue – U.S. taxpayers – from its own stupid mistakes. How this project got to be a total failure is clearly as much or more about CSC than it is about Oracle. Bad software and naïve customers alone can’t kill a project, you need bad consultants too.

And we’re all stuck paying the bill.

Jeff Immelt of GE has the biggest calling card I’ve ever seen, and he wasn’t adverse to flaunting it on stage late last month at GE Software’s coming out party. Flanked by a 12 foot tall GEnx jet aircraft engine, Immelt took to the stage to make clear that GE’s next big bet would be on the what I’ve called the sensor revolution, what others call the internet of things, and what GE calls the industrial internet.

The risk that this bet will fail to make an impact on GE and its customers is largely zero –the company’s smart devices are everywhere, from GEnx engines loaded with sensors measuring temperature, airflow, and turbine spin rates to massive locomotive engines collecting accelerometer and location data to hospital equipment sending out patient and equipment status updates to consumer appliances providing energy consumption data. These sensors are everywhere – numbering literally in the billions. Which is why this sensor data revolution is, in my opinion, orders of magnitude more valuable than the click-stream and location data that is currently being mined from consumer devices and web-based customer interactions and hyped as the primary source of the so-called big data revolution.

The big data revolution is so-called for the simple reason that data is as data does, which is not much. The key to this revolution, and GE’s bet on the industrial internet, isn’t just about creating and gathering data, it’s about analyzing and operationalizing it. And it’s at the analytics level that GE will see its greatest challenge. More on the big analytics  issue in a moment.

But first, let’s make it clear that these issues – sensor data and analytics — are, of course, much larger than just GE (which, at $140 billion in revenues, is saying a lot). GE has plenty of company in this industrial internet, with the likes of Siemens,  Johnson Controls, and Honeywell, to name just a few, all scrambling to sell what is estimated as $14 billion in sensors this year.

It’s also much bigger than GE because there are an almost infinite number of markets that could become part of this industrial internet revolution: Automotive, communications, security, utilities, aerospace and defense, and imaging are just some of the areas where sensors are generating unimaginably large quantities of data that need to be turned into analytical gold. (A quick aside: what do you call this quantity of data? Someone at the GE event referred to this much data as a “hellabyte”, which is a helluva great word, IMO).

This depth and breadth makes the worthiness of GE’s efforts indisputable. Immelt made a great case for the butterfly effect of using the industrial internet to drive a next wave of optimization and efficiency in a broad range of industries – like aviation, rail, healthcare, power generation and oil and gas exploration and refining – as well as industrial disciplines like material science. A one percent saving – which Immelt postulated would be readily available by  optimizing the industrial internet – could result in annual savings of $30 billion in aviation fuel, $2 billion in railroad productivity, and $63 billion in  healthcare productivity, among others.  Not a bad set of goals overall.

As long as the effort to capture the industrial internet’s data as well as analyze it are combined, or at least engaged simultaneously, these goals are likely to catalyze a whole host of companies to get on the bandwagon with GE. Exactly how those billion dollar goals are actually going to be realized will take more than one GE Software event to answer, though the gaggle of Silicon Valley VCs and assorted digerati assembled in the shadow of the GEnx engine was a good start.

But only a start. The fact that the enterprise software industry was largely absent from the event, both on the podium and in the audience, points very much to where GE needs to take its message next. And what the big analytics challenge looks like to GE’s customers.

The enterprise connection is essential to GE’s effort’s because, rather than being a new new thing, the race to tame the industrial internet is a movie we in the enterprise software market have been standing in line to watch for years. The manufacturing shop floor has been full of industrial internets based on control standards like SCADA or DNC/CNC for decades, and companies like OSIsoft have been effectively capturing and unleashing the industrial internet in industries like refining, chemical manufacturing, and paper products for over 30 years. Railroad cars and jet aircraft are already bristling with sensors, and hospitals are replete with machinery annoying patients and providers with their lonely and much too audible digital heartbeats. Industrial-strength data has been around for a long time.

But while these data have been well-analyzed within the context of their domains of origin, moving these data to the next analytical level is the real challenge. The shop floor controller data stream already informs a manager when something is wrong with a vital piece of equipment and needs remediation, just as the GEnx can send data on the resonant frequency of every critical bearing in the engine in order to detect whether the bearings are wearing out and need replacing. But that’s barely scratching the analytical – and operational – surface when it comes to GE’s dreams of the industrial internet.

The big payoff comes from taking those data outside their domains of origin and using them for a higher purpose. That’s where the shop floor control data is used in combination with external demand data to optimize the supply chain and reconfigure the shop floor for a rush job  in real time. And where the hospital analyzes the data stream from its infusion pumps  and uses it to both plan maintenance as well as inform epidemiological studies analyzing patient outcomes based on infusion data. Or when an airline analyzes  bearing frequency data reported in flight  from the GEnx to not only schedule maintenance  but also check on parts availability and schedule the mechanics needed to do the job.

These analytical examples require a blending of enterprise software – ERP, materials management, maintenance management, human resource management, and the like – with the sensor data that makes up GE’s industrial internet. That analytical cross-pollination yields information significantly greater than the sum of its parts, and begins to explain where Immelt gets a one percent improvement in operations that can yield billions in cost savings and other benefits.

GE Software definitely has plans to work with the enterprise software gang, some of whom, like SAP, are waking up to the fact that they need to be part of the sensor revolution as well. And much of what enterprise software has been doing in terms of data management, integration, and analysis will apply quite nicely to the problem of taking those data from the industrial internet and turning them into more than just a bunch of reports. I’m looking forward to hearing how GE plans to move in the direction of the enterprise software market, just as I am looking forward to seeing more enterprise software companies take note of the opportunities that await them and their customers in the industrial internet.

With GE staffing up its new software team in San Ramon, CA, we can expect to hear a lot more about the industrial internet and GE Software going forward. The efficiencies that Immelt spoke about aren’t pie in the sky – while the exact numbers are estimates, the order of magnitude of change that is possible is irrefutable. Also irrefutable is the complexity of blending the world of the industrial internet – which is really many many different data ecosystems as opposed to a single, unified system – with the world of enterprise data.

But the journey to the industrial internet is a worthy one, and GE Software’s ability to catalyze a much-needed revolution in big analytics is even more worthy. Immelt wasn’t just showing off a cool example of a smart device that can also deliver 70,000 pounds of thrust, he was really about the future of the enterprise and enterprise software.  It’s a journey that’s been a long long time in coming, and if, GE can pull it off, that journey is about to reach cruising altitude.

The latest debacle at Hewlett-Packard involving the allegations of accounting wrong-doing at Autonomy make for a particularly sticky wicket for CEO Meg Whitman. While there have been some attempts to blame her predecessor, Léo Apotheker, for the decision to buy Autonomy, it’s impossible for Whitman to avoid taking ultimate responsibility for the deal. And when the dust finally settles on this latest in a series of miss-steps at HP, the question of what can be done to save this storied Silicon Valley icon from itself will be harder and harder to answer.

Part of the problem is that even if Autonomy had knocked it out of the park, instead of fouling out, it never would have turned HP around. Not even close. The fact that it’s now another big HP deal gone bad just adds to the sense that all we can do is watch a Greek tragedy unfolding on stage before our eyes.

Whitman’s blame problem starts with the fact that the Autonomy deal was on the table even before Apotheker showed up, and became a component in the strategic planning for the company pretty much from day one of Apotheker’s short reign. Considering the board’s role during the interregnum between Mark Hurd’s departure and Apotheker’s appointment, the board, of which Whitman was a member, had to have been considering, if not vetting, the Autonomy deal during that period. So rather than blame Apotheker, Whitman has only to look to the HP board – of which she was a member – to find where the blame game starts, and stops.

The allegations of financial impropriety on the part of Autonomy have also to be taken into context in light of the failure of two other major acquisitions, EDS and Palm. With former CEO Mike Lynch making a spirited and public defense of his former company and its accounting, the fact the HP’s track record with big M&A is so poor weighs heavily in Lynch’s favor. Certainly, given that track record, it’s easier to think that HP and its board screwed up yet again rather than to think that the many audit firms and other companies and individuals charged with making sure the Autonomy acquisition was on the up and up were all simultaneously asleep at the wheel. Same with Lynch – I’d rather bet on HP’s board being wrong that on Lynch being foolish enough to publicly challenge allegations of financial misconduct that he knew were true. On the contrary : At this point I give him the benefit of the doubt, the circumstantial evidence indicts Whitman and the HP board more than it does Lynch and Autonomy.

It’s pretty clear that buying Autonomy at all  was a misstep, certainly in light of the fact that, at $10.3 billion, HP wasn’t likely to be able to make another big software acquisition unless its financial position improved significantly. Ironically, rather than being the architect of the Autonomy deal, Apotheker was initially lukewarm to it. And while the exact reasons for his initial ambivalence are not known to me, it’s clear that, regardless of the innate qualities of the deal, Autonomy wasn’t going to be big enough – in terms of strategic potential and revenue contribution – to move the needle at HP far enough to make the Apotheker era a success.

Part of the problem with Autonomy was that its revenues were simply too small to have the impact Apotheker needed to have. At the time the acquisition was on the table, Autonomy had just turned in fiscal 2010 revenues of $870 million. Not a bad number, but not enough for an acquiring company pulling in $120 billion a year. In fact, in order for HP to really start turning the corner, particularly in light of the fall-off in its printing, server, and PC businesses, and the on-going failure-to-execute problems with its services business, Apotheker needed to figure out how to add more than the equivalent of Autonomy’s annual revenue every month in order to do the job he was hired to do.

Hampering that target was the fact that the other M&A assets at HP that were supposed to be pitching in were in fact horribly behind in their own plans. EDS and Palm, which together were acquired for over $14 billion in 2008 and 2010 respectively, were underperforming at a depressing rate. While there was much optimistic talk by Apotheker and others about how Palm’s WebOS was going to be part of a unifying operating system fabric for HP’s PC, printer, and enterprise business, behind the scenes Palm was screwing up the development of the Touchpad so badly that it launched the clunky and inelegant tablet in July 2011 – in the face of a sleek iPad II launch three months earlier  – with little software and no real business plan. The result was an unmitigated disaster, a product with a great OS and an industrial, throwback feel that couldn’t run Netflix, read a PDF document or a Kindle book, or even surf the web very well (it runs an open source version of WebKit that performed only adequately at best.)

I was told later that year that a post-hoc analysis showed that HP would have had to spend hundreds of millions on WebOS just to get it to where it had a snowball’s chance in hell of competing with Apple. And considering that the Touchpad was not even a close competitor to the iPad, and had limited developer traction,  killing Palm and the WebOS market (okay, it was put out to pasture as freeware, pretty much the same thing) turned out to be the only merciful option.

Meanwhile, EDS kept missing its numbers mostly because the acquisition that was supposed to lead HP into the promised land of strategic enterprise consulting services was stuck in the past selling massive non-strategic outsourcing deals, or trying to. But because these deals were so huge, and so driven by commodity pricing considerations, EDS was losing enough of them every quarter – and not gaining the more coveted strategic deals in competition against the likes of IBM Global Services and Accenture – that it kept missing its numbers. And when you miss a couple of big deals in a quarter, you miss big. And EDS’ ability to help fix HP turned into another albatross draped around Apotheker’s neck.

It’s important to see that these two big deals were harbingers for the Autonomy fiasco, and not just because HP eventually wrote off $885 million of the $1.2 billion it paid for Palm and $8 billion of the $13.9 billion it paid for EDS. More importantly, in both cases, HP’s board, and its executive team, were simply unable to make these acquisitions effective, and integrated, parts of the company. The problems that led up to M&A failure being part of the HP Way were institutionalized before Apotheker showed up, and were so overwhelming that neither Apotheker in his year in office nor Whitman in her year of office could hope to have changed them.

The basic problem was – and remains — that there was no common culture, the HP Way being really many, different, and competing ways. The way of the servers, the way of the printers, the way of the PCs – it was almost comical how uncooperative these traditional HP business units could be with one another, much less with newly acquired assets. Of course, you can blame Mark Hurd for much of that anti-culture: he ran HP like a loose confederation of medieval city-states, each one competing with each other for the attention of King Mark, whose main concern was making his numbers, not building synergy or cooperation, and, God forbid, vision. The board, in case it’s not obvious, condoned this operating model as a way to keep investors on board.

King Mark also created a relatively hostile workplace, one that shocked employees from acquired companies who were used to a minimum of respect and a decent place to work. Not only did HP embrace a dehumanizing cubicle farm model housed in depressingly cavernous warehouse/offices, it provided no WiFi in its headquarters, no subsidized lunches for its employees, no regular janitorial services (this is not a joke – employees had to empty their own waste baskets!), and an amazing arcane accounting and HR system that demoralized the old-timers who stuck it out and horrified the newcomers who showed up on the M&A train.

Not surprisingly, employees of both EDS and Palm – and, later, Autonomy – made it clear they really didn’t feel they were part of HP. They continued to use eds.com and palm.com domains for their email accounts long after the acquisitions, and they acted as though the best thing for all concerned was to remain apart from the rest of HP. Having witnessed this studied apartness firsthand, and having seen the results of the internecine fighting inside the rest of HP, all I can say is that Autonomy was doomed from the start.

So, whether there were financial improprieties or not is pretty much immaterial in terms of judging whether buying Autonomy was a good idea or not. For Autonomy to succeed it would have had to buck the dominant anti-culture and pull off an amazing coup-de-finance that would have seen its revenues somehow driving a huge surge in new business for HP. That fact that it would have had to go against the real HP Way to do so made it look highly unlikely. The fact it would have to do that in a company that had just fired its second CEO in two years and had one of the most demoralized workforces in Silicon Valley – imagine the meet and greet with the new colleagues following Apotheker’s departure and Whitman’s ascension – was ludicrous.

Which brings us to the final, ultimate question: can anything be done to save this company? The answer is probably yes, as long as preserving shareholder equity is not an issue. But considering this is a public corporation, with a board that at least understands, if not practices, the concept of fiduciary responsibility, I see no way to make the HP of today greater than the sum of its parts. That ship sailed a long time ago….

…and, as befitting the Greek tragedy that is Hewlett-Packard, sank in the wine dark sea.