Managed Services and Outsourcing are a big topic in B2B these days, but people interpret these phrases in different ways, particularly “outsourcing”.  Outsourcing’s traditional meaning — paying someone else to do something for you (like ADP in payroll) — has morphed to include other meanings, including:

• Paying someone else to “employ” your staff
• Paying someone else in another country to “employ” their staff as your staff

That’s too bad, because these are not the same things at all…

Real “outsourcing” is about taking advantage of another organizations skills, scale and technology to more efficiently accomplish some task — freeing capital up for some other use, NOT finding a way to do it yourself for less money.  Many technology outsourcing firms are actually outsourcing HR, not technology.  This has gotten so confusing I tend to call our B2B outsourcing business “managed services” so that people do not think we are selling bodies. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve spent the last two days at webMethods Fairfax Headquarters, receiving “preview training” of Fabric 7.0, which includes a revamped Process Engine, My WebMethods Server and Optimize (the BAM, or Business Activity Monitoring, tool).  I’m really excited about the new platform, as it is a nice combination of new features, improved integration and improved performance.

But these two days got me thinking about the evolution that enterprise software companies go through, starting from software — routines that solve a specific problem, to platforms — a set of complementary capabilities that customers can combine to build their own solutions, and finally to ecosystems Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t intend to shamelessly plug popular business authors this year, but I am a big fan of Geoffrey A. Moore.  He is probably most famous for his book Crossing the Chasm, but lately I’ve been reading his latest, Dealing with Darwin.  Where Crossing the Chasm dealt in a compelling way with introducing new technology that could define whole new markets, Darwin deals with evolution strategies for all kinds of companies, even ones with existing markets.

What I find particularly interesting is the notion of innovating in mature markets.  Mature markets are not “cash cows”, or markets the sun is setting on — they are simply established markets where competition is fierce, buyers are savvy, and the broad requirements have been met.  For the record, Moore defines the telephone market as mature, and it is definitely not a dull place!  Specifically, Moore suggests a mantra for this world:

Add value on the surface; extract resources from the base.

This struck me as interesting, because it helped me better explain why so many companies that are good with technology are embracing the software as a service model for many core IT functions… Read the rest of this entry »

I’m planning more posts on product data management — as well as a series on partner enablement — but first I need to dig out from the holidays!  Happy New Year.

In the meantime, I was delighted to learn that one of my favorite business book authors, Ram Charan, has a new book coming out.  It has just been published, and you can get a general sense of the content from this article.  There are probably too many leadership books in the world, but if this is anywhere equal to Charan’s previous books, Execution and Profitable Growth is Everybody’s Business; I expect it will be terrific.

I’m very partial to this author because I thought his collaboration with Larry Bossidy (Execution) actually explained GE’s culture under Jack Welch better than Welch’s own books (though they are also excellent).  If you read any of these, please post or email your thoughts…