AbleBrains

AbleAdvisory: Marty Homlish Joins HP As New CMO

In a surprise move, Marty Homlish has left SAP to join HP as its new CMO.   What's not surprising is Leo Apotheker reaching out to Marty to join his team.  They had a close working relationship while both were at SAP.   And Marty does come out of the consumer hardware space having spent over 15 years @ Sony Corporation.  After 1o years at SAP, Marty also now has an appreciation for the intricacies of B2B marketing in the enterprise technology space. Marty's strongest asset though is his ability to create and grow a strong brand for an organization.

Will he be able to pull off a strategy that can unify all of HP's disparate businesses and make them look like a unified brand?  Will he be able to create a compelling customer experience - something he talks about often?  Hope he builds a strong team.

I had thought Marty had had enough after ten years in "The Matrix."  Guess not. (Hat tip to Ed Brice for coining "The Matrix" term as applied to SAP.

 

 

AbleAdvisory: CA Technologies Buys Hyperperformix

TechcrunchIT posted on CA buying Hyperformix, a provider of capacity management software for dynamic physical, virtual, and cloud IT infrastructures.

Capacity management enables customers to discover how physical, virtual, hardware, software, storage, and network resources are being used, and to determine what resources will be needed in the future. The technology also helps customers optimize the deployment of those resources to meet business objectives.

CA says the acquisition of Hyperformix will help it enhance its own virtualization management solutions. According to our own CrunchBase, Hyperformix raised close to $12 million.

AbleAdvisory: WiFi Getting Kids Sick, So Say Some Ontario Parents

Some parents in the Barrie, Ontario area say their children are getting sick from the WiFi set up in their elementary schools. The symptoms, which include memory loss, trouble concentrating, skin rashes, hyperactivity, night sweats and insomnia, have been reported in 14 Ontario schools in Barrie, Bradford, Collingwood, Orillia and Wasaga Beach since the board decided to go wireless, Palmer said. "These kids are getting sick at school but not at home," he said.

AbleAdvisory: Jive Readies For An IPO

According to TechCrunch, Jive Software having just raised $30M in Series C funding from Kleiner and Sequoia is preparing for an IPO in the next 12 months.  I like what's happening with their sales numbers. 

The company is seeing sales in the range of $75,000-$150,000 per customer, which is increasing. Jive has closed ten $1 million deals, four of which closed in the last two quarters. While Jive is not yet cash-flow positive, [t]he company has 3,000 customers, 15 million users, and will end the year on a $100 million run-rate. This is impressive revenue considering Jive is competing against a number of worthy competitors in the social enterprise space, including Sociatext and Salesforce's chatter.

AbleAdvisory: Ex-Facebook Exec Backs 'Google Me' Social Network Rumors

Looks like Google is gonna take another run at the Social Networking space.  According to PC Mag

Early this week, however, ex-Facebook executive and Quora co-founder, Adam D'Angelo, backed up Rose's rumor on his own site. "This is not a rumor," wrote D'Angelo, pointing to information culled from "reliable sources. This is a real project. There are a large number of people working on it. I am completely confident about this," he wrote.

What's interesting is that D'Angelo said that Google began the project because they realized that "that Buzz wasn't enough." No kidding?  When did they figure that out?  Not very good strategery as far as I'm concerned. The real question is why was Buzz ever launched to begin with.  Supposedly "Google Me" will be modeled after Facebook.

Update with correct link

AbleAdvisory: Benioff Says Cloud 2 Era Upon Us

Hat tip to fellow Irregular Dennis Moore for the tweet on this article. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says we're on the cusp of entering the Cloud 2 era, even though most IT organizations are just discovering Cloud 1.0.  What I found particularly fascinating  was this item:

"There's a shift going on from Amazon to Facebook: Where I was having to pull information from the Internet, now it's  being pushed at me," Benioff said. "[We use] computers that we are touching, not clicking. We're adopting this new technology really fast; you're walking around with your iPad, but it's subtle what kind of a change this is."

I never feel as if I have to pull information from the likes of Amazon.  I think Amazon was the proving ground for B2C personalization, as I discussed the other day.   Amazon's business model does not require the push intensive modality that Facebook has deployed (but that's not to say they couldn't see some incremental value from it).  Any way an interesting read.  Especially the competitive swipes...

The big existing players -- IT companies such as Microsoft and IBM, Benioff said -- are getting "dropped away, they're just gone, in terms of new purchase decisions, new technology decisions, and great new technologies getting dropped straight into the mainstream of the market. That's what's really exciting to me right now... the first shift was -- us [Salesforce] moving our customers from the client-server model of the old Siebel/Oracle/SAP stuff into the cloud."

AbleAdvisory: Foursquare Halts Talks With Facebook, Completes Next Round

According to Kara Swisher, Foursquare is close to completing a funding deal with the Andressen Horowitz, the firm that "had publicly dissed the hot social location site and walked away from earlier talks.The last curve came with serious talks for Foursquare to be acquired by Facebook, which very close to happening–”one inch to the end zone,” as one person close to the situation described it."   Ok, this I don't get, how can you be "one inch to the end zone" yet be apart on such fundamental issues such as "price, strategy and control issues." Huh????  That's not one inch.  That's an entire football field.

AbleAdvisory: FTC Calls Twitter On the Carpet for its Great Data Security. NOT!

The Federal Trade Commission intends to show how seriously it is taking concerns over consumer privacy online by making Twitter create an independently audited information security program.

The FTC and Twitter came to a settlement today on charges that the site "deceived consumers and put their privacy at risk." This was in response to significant lapses in Twitter's data security that allowed hackers on two separate occasions in 2009 to take control of accounts including those of then President-elect Barack Obama, Fox News and Britney Spears. This was the 30th case the FTC has filed targeting faulty data security but the first one ever filed against a social-networking service.

AbleAdvisory: Jailbreaking Your iOS 4 for iPhone 3G

RWW posts today on how to Jailbreak your iphone.  "Jailbreaking" unlocks a device in order to install unapproved, third-party applications. Its goodness though in that you can add lots of new features, not the least of which is turning your iPhone into a WiFi Hotspot, customizing all the icons, forcing Wi-Fi only apps to run over 3G and so much more.

AbleAdvisory: Finally, A Tech Mashup With Transportation Policy That Doesn't Suck!

Stewart Mader blogs about 4-id creative network, a Barcelona-based transportation design firm. They've created a system that helps you figure out where the best place to board a subway is in order to find a seat. He picked it up from 2nd Avenue Sagas a blog devoted to, yes you guessed it, the NYC Subway system (with an homage to the painful construction of the 2nd Avenue Subway here in NYC).  I digress. Anyway, the system they have proposed, scans subway cars using imaging sensors placed inside train cars or “artificial vision software applied to existing security cameras” to highlight which areas of the train are emptiest and which still have seats. Holy Fare Increase Batman!!! I wonder if NYC's Metropolitan Transportation Authority could see it's way clear to actually applying technology to some of the most painful problems its ridership faces.