AbleBrains

SUSE Linux Optimization for SAP Apps... Now?

There was a little blurb on internet.com a couple of days ago mentioning that Novell would be optimizing the SUSE Linux OS for SAP applications.

Linux vendor Novell is releasing an optimized version of its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server tailored for applications from software vendor SAP.

Now I don't expect Novell's business to stand still right now, but this is interesting given that there were reports a couple of weeks back that that Novell was about to break itself into 2 parts and sell itself off. From the NY Post believe it or not:

Novell Inc. has reached a deal in principle to sell itself in two parts, and is three to four weeks away from signing a deal, according to people close to the process.

A strategic buyer will buy the piece of the software provider that develops and delivers Linux SUSE systems, with a private-equity firm picking up much of the rest. Both deals are expected to close simultaneously and the company will be de-listed, according to one source, who noted that the talks are in a sensitive stage and could fall apart.

This feels right considering that Elliott Associates, a Waltham, Mass-based Hedge Fund, made an offer to buy Novell back in March.  The offer was rejected. An optimized Linux enterprise server for SAP applications will benefit the new SUSE Linux owner, whoever that may be.  I will be sad to see an independent Novell go the way of so many other enterprise software vendors... how Darwinian eh?

An Apple [Fill in the blank]. The New Black?

So.... this morning I got up to make some coffee but realized I forgot to buy some yesterday, No problem. I'll  just walk up the street to my local Starbucks.   Its just past the morning rush so its relatively tame in there.   As I'm waiting for my Triple Grande Non-Fat Cappucino I peruse the store. And everywhere, and I mean everywhere,  at every table, seat, line... doesn't matter, folks have an Apple device of some sort.    I counted 3 ipads, 4 iPods, 8 iphones and about half a dozen Macs. It was an impressive sight.  Amazing in fact to see the Apple Brand as a living vibrant entity.   All the more impressive for what was not in the store.  A Windows-based PC or smartphone.  Oh and of course there are the iTunes song give aways at the cash register. 

The brand has clearly taken on a life of its own and here in New York and I suspect in most other places, owning an Apple branded device is the new black.  Its a status symbol that says... "hey, I'm cool, just look at this cool Apple [fill in the blank] that I have."  Note that I am not immune to this either - having  just come back to the gym and listening to my ipod touch and writing this post on my MacBook Pro.  I also think its a bit of a revolt.  A revolt against being locked in to Windows devices, having to do things the Microsoft way.   I wonder if that's going to happen to Apple?

The bar is now set particularly high for the organization. And as Jimmy Cliff says, The Harder They Come, The Harder They Fall.

German User Groups Stepping Up The Pressure On SAP

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung notes that after the quarrelsome and strained relationship with former CEO Léo Apotheker, starting with but certainly not ending over proposed maintenance hikes, the SAP German User Group - DSAG is experiencing a better relationship with the SAP's new co-CEO, Jim Snabe. 

What I gleaned from the article is that  DSAG is moving from "critical distance" to "critical closeness" with SAP.  At least that's what  DSAG chairman Karl Liebstückel said.

It also looks like SAP customers are demanding that that they be more involved in product development and pricing decisions.  I gotta tell ya. I love this simply because, the company has been preaching co-innovation with customers and the market for years now. In fact that was one of the founding reasons to create the SAP Community Network. Now customers are coming back to SAP and saying "ok, put your money where your mouth is (literally!) and co-innovate with us."

So for customers to be demanding this "critical closeness" it says to me that the customer relationship (as viewed by the customer) is not as close as SAP thinks.  Only time will tell.

Oracle's Influencer Relations: Mom Are We There Yet?

A fellow Enterprise Irregular posed this question to the EI's relative to the maturity of the industry and the acceptance of bloggers @ Oracle Open World:

Especially after the Workday session where 20 of us from small and large firms all sat in same room and had a hugely productive session I thought the industry had reached a certain level of maturity when it came to recognizing enterprise bloggers. Last year Benioff even gave bloggers first row seats at Dreamforce.

Till yesterday.

Dennis Howlett, Frank Scavo and I were initially allowed to enter a session at Oracle Openworld then asked to leave because our badges did not say "analyst'. How Mike Krigsman and Josh Greenbaum qualify for that title and others don't was something I posed to Karen Tillman, the VP of corp communications - nicely. Her answer was even more bothersome - 'several different factors go into that decision" Now I like Karen and we had a nice drink afterwards, but chickenshit like this continues to happen 5 years after Nolan et al tried to break those barriers at SAP.

Another EI said:

The larger issue in the industry, that every corp comm team struggles
with, is what these lines are -- analyst/consultant/blogger/journalist. I'm in all four camps, and depending on the company and the situation I'm in a meeting under the guise of one or more of these titles.

With a response from yet another being:

It's only a challenge for corp comm teams that have not acknowledged that the lines don't mean anything. Even if you carry all four titles, so what... the objective is the same, to influence you positively in order to draft your influence in the market.

Exactly.

Workday got it right!  They're looking for insight from multiple parties with multiple viewpoints.  That's what its all about.  Not just driving affiliations.  It has been five years since SAP took down those walls.  The fact that stuff like this still happens and it happens to influential bloggers caught me off guard.   Oracle has evolved their BR function to create a credible and effective program for bloggers.  But my belly button says that there is still a lot of old thinking out there regarding the boxes that companies think they should be placing influencers into and what access they should be accorded. The lines are quite artificial.   Market influencers are market influencers and if one is important enough to a company to be invited to be there then a blogger should be accorded the access that any another influencer would be accorded.

AbleAdvisory: Living With Complexity (book)

Here's a thumbs up to Don Norman's (for a discussion on complex v. simple software applications and bootstrapping click thru to Joel Spolsky's discussion on simplicity) New book, Living with Complexity. Business Week has named named him one of the world’s most influential designers.  "He has been both a professor and an executive: he was Vice President of Advanced Technology at Apple; his company, the Nielsen Norman Group, helps companies produce human-centered products and services; he has been on the faculty at Harvard, the University of California, San Diego, Northwestern University, and KAIST, in South Korea. He is the author of many books, including The Design of Everyday Things, The Invisible Computer (MIT Press, 1998), Emotional Design."

This is a worthwhile read.   Personally, I've always said that simplicity is more difficult than complexity.  It demands an elegance in design that few are able to achieve. But Norman takes a different and compelling view, namely that complexity is good and that simplicity is often times misleading - however even the complex needs to be understandable and meanignful in whatever context such complexity appears:

Norman gives us a crash course in the virtues of complexity. But even such simple things as salt and pepper shakers, doors, and light switches become complicated when we have to deal with many of them, each somewhat different. Managing complexity, says Norman, is a partnership. Designers have to produce things that tame complexity. But we too have to do our part: we have to take the time to learn the structure and practice the skills. This is how we mastered reading and writing, driving a car, and playing sports, and this is how we can master our complex tools.

Read first chapter

AbleAdvisory: Does Your Language Affect How You Think?

Fascinating article in of all places the NYTimes on how your native tongue affects the way one thinks.

And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways.

There is data to support such a notion...

French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it. More recently, psychologists have even shown that “gendered languages” imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory.

Google Instant makes SEO Irrelevant? Who cares?

Steve Rubel makes an the argument that Google Instant will kill SEO because:

Here's what this [Google Instant] means: no two people will see the same web. Once a single search would do the trick - and everyone saw the same results. That's what made search engine optimization work. Now, with this, everyone is going to start tweaking their searches in real-time. The reason this is a game changer is feedback. When you get feedback, you change your behaviors.

Searches will be more unique -- Agree

When you get feedback, you change your behavior -- Agree

Once a single search would do the trick - and everyone saw the same results - Big deal

Search has always been a very personalized engagement with the Web. Just because people will be tweaking their searches does not mean that that search isn't part of a common cluster of search terms that folks use.  How many different ways can one search for a restaurant in Aspen Colorado?  There are just so many terms that one can use.  So I don't believe that search will kill SEO. Pulling from Bob Warfield's blog...Even the Google Smarter Predictions folks say, “Even when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, we will push you in the direction of what the masses are looking for.  We will perturb search in the direction of sameness.”  Again, there are masses of same search types out there which one could optimize around.

The more fundamental question is... should you have even been bothering with SEO to begin with?  After all, as Bob Warfield points out, its content that's king.

For marketing, content trumps SEO and links back to your site.  That’s not to say there is no value in SEO or links, just that if you have to choose or prioritize, content is at the top of the heap.  If you’re a big company, you can probably choose to invest in all with far more resources than perhaps are even needed.  But the smaller your budget, the more likely you had better choose and make the right choice.  Pssst: the right choice is Content!

Regarding SEO being marginalized, Bob argues:

If, instead of feedback changing behaviors to be less predictable as Rubel implies, it actually makes the behaviors more predictable because we are guided to sameness, SEO is still dead, but for a much less interesting reason.  This sameness makes it much harder to game.  You can no longer count on the Long Tail queries to help you out when you can’t secure the top spots on the common queries.  It is a repressive tax on the Long Tail, in other words.

Agree that you can't game the SEO system easily with Google Instant, although search providers have been making it harder to game the system for years now.  So.. forget about Google Instant making SEO irrelevant.  You can still optimize around those "sameness  clusters" and focus on driving traffic with your compelling content. 

The New Year

In a few hours it will be sun down and the Jewish New Year - Rosh HaShanah - literally, "the head of the year" will start.  As in most cycles, reflections back on the past year and hopes for the next cycle are healthy.  My reflections focus largely on being the father of beautiful triplet daughters who have brought me so much love and happiness this past year and of all the special people that have truly filled my life (you know who you are).  And of course my wonderful family who made this past year so special for me.

As I look forward to the coming year, I wish for myself and my loved ones the things that we all wish for, a healthy, happy, sweet and prosperous year.  And a few more things... a life filled with adventure, excitement, and a fulfillment of dreams, major or minor.

Shanah Tovah.

Augmented Reality. Will it ever become a part of the marketing technology mix?

There was a lot of buzz about new visualization techniques back in 2009. About a year ago, Mashable posted on an Apple patent called Apple ID:

[it] recognizes an object based on visuals (through the iPhone’s camera), a RFID reader or through GPS, and then fetches the data from related databases. I like to imagine all this happening in real-time, with a layer of visual information superimposed on the actual camera image, but in the beginning it’ll probably just take you to a related Wikipedia page. Still, it’s a start.

What's being described is Augmented Reality (AR) - in which information is paired with, merged and displayed with a real time, real world image.  Here's a fun example.  This augmented reality app displays information on where the nearest London Tube station can be found.

And here's an app called Wikitude, an augmented reality browser created by Mobilizy, an Austrian startup.

So kinda cool stuff has it evolved? And does it make business sense? Will Augmented Reality ever become part of the marketing mix?  Will it become a standard arrow in the quiver for marketers?  And all on the back of the more than 4.1 billion mobile devices out there.

1. Imagine a company like Bazaarvoice not only instrumenting a client's web site to provide ratings and reviews of their products but enabling a broad swath of its client base to have those reviews accessed  at brick and mortar outlets.  Or even getting reviews of theme park rides when the kids insist they won't be able to go on living unless you take them to Disney World?
2. Serve up interactive offers when scanning products at a retail outlet or even a billboard -- "get 20% off this widget when you use promo code XYZ."
3. For you B2B types, how about a complete merging of virtual and real time events enabling interaction of both audience types with one another.
4. Using AR to see how clothes and accessories would look on you without having to even have the accessory or item of clothing in hand

Marketers are already blurring the lines between the type of AR described above and what I would call AA (don't even go there!) -- Augmented Animation, in which real-world images are being used on a web site in an animated fashion.  Example? Wise potato chips created a marketing campaign called Rock the Cheez! that asks customers to print out and cut out small squares from a web site and put them in front of their web cam. The square is then animated on the web site and the consumer can produce a video.  I think the notion of animating real-life objects is both a clever and engaging marketing strategy but its not Augmented Reality to my way of thinking.

Clearly, there's a place for true AR in marketing.  As the data stream surrounding products gets richer, AR becomes more applicable.  Its no longer a matter of "if", its a matter of "when."

Yes, Content Trumps SEO & Links But Get Your Technical House In Order

Bob Warfield, a fellow Enterprise Irregular writes a great post about how superior content trumps SEO and links as a means of driving traffic:

For marketing, content trumps SEO and links back to your site.  That’s not to say there is no value in SEO or links, just that if you have to choose or prioritize, content is at the top of the heap.  If you’re a big company, you can probably choose to invest in all with far more resources than perhaps are even needed.  But the smaller your budget, the more likely you had better choose and make the right choice.  Pssst: the right choice is Content!

But to do content right?  You need two things (1) an honest-to-goodness content strategy and (2) the right technology infrastructure to deploy on... you just can't throw content out there and expect it to work for you.

Strategy

You have strategies for everything else in your business, why not for your hard working content? A content strategy must be in lockstep with the progression of your business as it moves through its cycles.  You need to sit down and map out those cycles and how your content will interlink to easily demonstrate how your  products and services make your client's lives easier.  You need to decide what value for value exchanges you will make with your visitors - for instance, is there any content that is behind a registration wall?    Where should you use video, product demos, graphics vs. the written word?    The end goal is to create a superior customer experience that will drive demand.  Without the smooth ability to move a prospect down the demand funnel then your efforts are for naught.  Your content strategy, which includes, nurturing and the specific touches that you give a prospect are all meant to move your visitor down the demand funnel by giving them the answers to their questions.

Technology

The technology you select to create, serve and manage your content is critically important, especially if you want to exploit your tight marketing budget and ensure you have an effective content reuse strategy in place.   The tools of the trade that you need at a minimum include:

1. Component Content Management Systems - enables you to manage core content at a particularly granular level. We're not talking about a document such as a white paper but down to the paragraph, sentence or even the word if your business calls for it.  Think of the CCMS as the central repository of all core content that an organization uses no matter which channel its to be sent thru.  The CCMS make content reuse a reality.  Without it there is no content reuse or at least very limited.   Utilizing a CCMS enables you to store your content once in a single trusted environment.   Doing this also drives consistency of voice. Many clients I have spoken to complain about how disparate their "corporate voice" is.  How each division seems to speak differently to the market.   A CCMS and the appropriate rules and processes for content use dramatically reduce this issue as it enforces content standards. 
2. Digital/Media Asset Management Systems enable organizations to store and manage content at the asset level - a document, a video, an audio file, photographs etc. Asset types are keyed off of metadata descriptions of the asset in question.   Some Enterprise Content Management systems (we'll get to those in a moment) subsume DAM functionality within them obviating the need for a DAM implementation. 
3. Web Content Management - is a system for authoring and managing web site content.   Many of these systems not only allow one to easily edit content and manage it but allow you to output executable HTML, JSP, ASP, PHP, Coldfusion or PERL pages as well. Smart systems store their content in XML thereby ensuring content reuse along multiple fronts by separating content from its presentation.  WCM functionality can be subsumed into a an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system as well.
4. Enterprise Content Integration can be found as part of a middleware integration stack that's used to integrate all your content-related systems together.  You'd want this primarily for managing content in multiple databases or repositories as well synchronizing and searching across such databases.  Content Integration middleware also enables your organization to publish content out of your content management system thru multiple channels.
5. Web Analytics - are measurement packages which collect and analyze user behavior on a site so that the site can be optimized to make it easier for visitors to find the information they are seeking. Such a tool is also used to understand movement through a site to see if it can be made more user-friendly thus improving navigation and pathing thru the site.  These tools can also help you understand the how your marketing campaigns are working by analyzing the number of visitors to unique landing pages and how those pages are performing in terms of funneling prospects toward conversion.
6. Search - what good is content if you can't find it?  Powerful and effective Search must be in place so that those absorbing your content can actually find what they are looking for.
7. Enterprise Content Management - is a set of related systems and processes which are used to create, manage, archive and deliver content and documents to the appropriate internal or external channel.  But its not always a clean and simple set of technologies. ECM sometimes represents the above set of best of breed solutions cobbled together to form a complete ECM solution or it can refer to a pre-integrated suite of solutions. Suite-based ECM providers typically cover functionality such as:

• Document Management
• Web CM
• Content authoring
• Content versioning
• Digital/Media Asset Management
• Forms generation
• Publishing
• Archiving
• Workflow
• Script generation

This is the Minimum Equipment List to manage your content effectively but yes, there's much more and as your strategies evolve, say to include personalization - the identification of a unique visitor and the serving of dynamic content personalized to their preferences, then you'll need additional technical solutions to meet those needs as well.