STKI Summit 2012

On March 19th I participated in STKI Summit.
participating in this Israeli Market analysis conference is  an habit. I aprticpated in 2011, 2010 and 2008. My consist particiaption indicates that, at  least in my opinion, it is a valuable event. 
This year theme was IT Revolution Consumer Power.
The Consumer centirc IT revolution is not totally new, it was discussed in previous year Summit Presentations, as one of the driving forces.


I am attaching links to the presentations:


Jimmy Schwarzkopf - IT Market in Israel 2012
Pini  Cohen - Trends in Infrastructure: Paradigm Shift

Shahar Geiger Maor - Networking Trends, EndPoints Trends

Einat Shimoni - Trends in Enterprise Applications, Web & Analytics

Galit Fein - Office of the CIO Office of the CMO market Trends 2012

I did not find a link to the new analyst and Research Assistant Liza Bodogin's presentation on ECM, Talent Training and Social Applications. Probably it is included in Einat Shimoni's presentation.

  My Take

Expect Recession in the Israeli market in 2012 
I agree with Jimmy Schwarzkopf's coclusion. This conclusion is applicable to the Global market and the Israeli market is part of it. However, Jimmy's Recession Indicator is interesting: every year (including 2012) in which the Public sector market is greater than the Banking sector market is a Recession year in Israel.

The Consumer Revolution is an interesting trend 

I would add to what was presented the concept of Personal Cloud used by Gartner and others. 
Few years ago I had to carry a Mobile Computer for my presentations. Afterwards I carried Disk Onkey. Now I am sending the presentation to myself in gmail and upload it.

Apple is going to lead nendors pack?
I disagree with Forrester's George Colony cited by Jimmy, as far as Long Term prediction. See my posts:

Did you find Apple? , Vendors Survival: Will Apple survive until 2021? and A Quarter is not a Long Term Indicator

Very limited Cloud Computing and SaaS market in Israel

This evidence was discussed by Pini Cohen (Infrastructure) and Einat Shimoni (Applications).

It is a pitty that Israeli Enterprises especially SMBs are not using SaaS and other Public Cloud Services more than they do. Some of the benefits were discussed in my posts ERP as SaaS Maturity indicator, SaaS is going Mainstream, Future applications: SaaS or traditional?

ERP as SaaS Maturity indicator

I recently read Tien Tzue's post titled The End of ERP. As usual, I suspect the validity of statements beginning with the End of ... without a question mark in the end. Tien Tzue's statement is not an exception.


According to Tien Tzue there is a shift from 20th century products based economy to 21th century Service subscription economy, therefore ERP is doomed. He refers to the acquisitions of Cloud ERP solutions companies, Successful Factors by SAP and Taleo by Oracle, as an End Of Life signs of traditional ERP.  


No ERP company can afford to ignore Cloud based ERP, but that does not mean that SAP, Oracle and other traditional vendor, are going to kill the goose who lays golden eggs i.e. their traditional On-Premise ERP suits.


SaaS based ERP is a better fit for some enterprises and Traditional ERP fits better for other enterprises.


Three years ago I already discussed the issue of Future Applications: SaaS or Traditional.  
Basically it is a tradeoff between Maturity and Robust Functionality (Traditional On-Premise ERP suits) and Agility (SaaS based ERP suits).


What was changed since 2009?

• Many SaaS ERP vendors instead of few

Three years ago SaaS ERP suits vendors list includes NetSuite and SalesForce.com and few other vendors offering single or few components e.g. Workday HR and many CRM only vendors. 


Today  SalesForce.com  and Netsuite are still the dominant vendors, but there are many other full SaaS ERP suits vendors.
Workday is no longer an HR only vendor. The SaaS ERP Suits vendors list includes:  Infor, Intacct, Epicor (Architecturally, it is my favorite due to its innovative approach and full SOA support) etc.      

•  SalesForce.com and Netsuite are the "SAP" and "Oracle" of the SaaS based ERP market.

 The approaches to ERP of these relatively giant rivals are different.
Netsuite nickname is "Little Oracle". The nickname is dew to Netsuite's investor Larry Ellison, the similar Corporate Cultures and a lot of past Oracle's employees employed by Netsuite.
Netsuite is building a full SaaS ERP suite.


Saleforce.com, the leading SaaS CRM vendor, is building an ERP PaaS environment named Force.com Development Environment. SaaS ERP vendors such as Infor use it for developing their products and are Salesforce.com's Value Added Resellers (VARs). 
I will not be surprised if SalesForce.com will acquire one of these resellers.   

• Growing SaaS ERP market share

SaaS Continues to get Traction. According to Panorama Consulting Solutions, 6% of organizations implementing ERP in 2009 were deploying SaaS options. This number was nearly tripled (17%) in 2010.  

• SaaS ERP is not adequate yet for Large and Complex Enterprises.

The result is that most of the SaaS ERP implementations are in the SMB market. On-Premise ERP is still dominating Large Enterprises. 


My Take
The patterns of SaaS ERP adoption are a major indicator of SaaS Maturity Level. 
If and when, most large and complex enterprises will deploy SaaS ERP then it will reach high Maturity Level. 


The future deployment by Large Enterprises cited above, should include all, or at least, most Core ERP components. Currently, Large Enterprises implement SaaS CRM and SaaS HR, but most frequently use On-Premise Traditional ERP for core components implementations.


Only when SaaS Maturity will reach this high level, we can start dwelling upon The End of Traditional ERP.
In my opinion it will take a long time.    

Bug 2000 (Y2K) is back in Microsoft's Azure

In my Vendor's Survival posts I wrote about many leading vendors. Few posts were on Microsoft: 

Will Microsoft survive until 2021? - revisited

Will Microsoft survive until 2021?

Vendors Survival: Will Microsoft Survive until 2018?

I also posted about Vendors technologies, strategies and acquisitions related to their Long Term survival. The post 

Microsoft's Skype acquisition: Warning Signs ahead

is an example.

Yesterday, there was a long Microsoft Azure Service Outage.

The reason for the outage was a time miscalculation for a leap year.

 A long Service Outage is not unique to Windows Azure's PaaS platform. There were long Service Outage in services provided by other Cloud Computing vendors such as Amazon and Google.

The outage has nothing to do with Microsoft's Long Term Survival probability.  

The reason for the outage is related to Microsoft's Survival: It is an indication of a very poor Software Quality Assurance.

Yesterday Microsoft proved that it learned nothing from Year 2000 Bug (Y2K), which was a major issue more than a decade ago.

We may discover tomorrow or in a year or two years or four years, what else Microsoft did not learn lesson from. 

Y2K IT and Business

My blog's name is SOA Filling the Gaps because of gaps between IT and Business, which SOA is about addressing them (as well as BPM and Business Oriented Architecture).

Y2K was a major cause for widening these gaps: IT mangers promised to the Business Managers that if they will spend a lot of money and resources, the organization's computerized systems will not collapse.

The IT managers did not promise any functional extensions or software improvements.

Y2K  FUDS and Facts

Y2K is about systems failures, due to usage of two digits year presentation in a date field. The result is that both 1900 and 2000 are represented by 00 and therefore calculations will use 1900 instead of 2000 by mistake.

Y2K projects were actually Risk Management projects. However, they were justified by a lot of FUDS  and few real risk evidence.

The so called risks range span from sending to 105 years woman invitation to join kindergarten (Low severity risk) up to Nuclear Reactors explosions (High severity Risk).   

The only real evidences were Case Studies of few installations failed to address the leap year of 1996. 

Y2k is a higher severity risk than leap year miscalculation.

Addressing Y2K is a lot more complex issue than addressing leap year miscalculation.

The conclusion was that Y2K damage potential, can be quantified as hundreds or thousands multiples of measured 1996 leap year  miscalculation measured damages.

 

If I remember correctly, the most cited example of 1996 leap year problem was The Brussels Stock Exchange. This risk event occurrence could be quantified to actual sums of money lost due to treating February 29th as if it was March 1st. 

I am sure that Windows Azure Outage due to Leap Year miscalculation costs a lot more than the Brussels Stock Exchange same miscalculation in 1996.