SaaS applications meet the needs of SMB IT in more ways than one

Going forward, IT is being asked to work more closely with the business, driving value and realizing investment benefits — while also maintaining technological support for the business. In order for midmarket IT shops to meet some of these goals and deliver strategically, something’s gotta give.

And it would appear something has. Midmarket IT professionals I speak with are dabbling increasingly in cloud technologies in one way or another. Private cloud? Not so much. But Software as a Service (SaaS) applications and managed or hosted services are seeing some real pickup.

A recent study commissioned by Microsoft and conducted by analyst firm Freeform Dynamics Ltd. suggested that organizations increasingly rely on IT and cloud technology. Of the 3,193 SMBs surveyed, 55% view IT as critical to their business, and 65% are using hosted software to some extent.

Earlier this week I spoke with Jeff Kaplan, founder and managing director of ThinkStrategies Inc., a consulting firm in Wellesley, Mass., about SaaS and how it’s affected IT. According to Kaplan, many IT professionals initially felt threatened by the emergence of SaaS applications.

“IT thought that if SaaS solutions were successful, then the business side might question whether IT was delivering real value,” Kaplan said.

On the other hand, if the solutions failed after a unilateral adoption by the business side without IT being consulted, the CIO and IT staff would still be called in to clean up the mess.

But that’s not how it went down.”In reality,” Kaplan said, “SaaS was a savior.”

Helping the business find the right SaaS solution to meet its needs (including thoroughly evaluating the vendor for reliability, scalability and security) is the very value that IT delivers to the business, Kaplan said. In turn, choosing SaaS applications can reduce some of the tactical, day-to-day burdens on IT — including time spent on software deployment, maintenance and management. This frees up resources in IT, allowing more time to work strategically with the business side.

How is your IT shop balancing needs and expectations?

SharePoint 2010 good, Enterprise 2.0 tools may be better

If you’ve missed the SharePoint boat, now might not be the best time to buy your ticket.

While Microsoft unveiled some new features in SharePoint 2010, new users might not find them compelling enough to jump on board now. Many of its collaboration features and Enterprise 2.0 tools have been in the market for years and, according to a recent Forrester Research report, the feature set may be overkill for midmarket IT organizations with basic needs.

The report goes on to say that current users will most likely be pleased with the updates because SharePoint 2010 fills in some of the gaps left in the 2007 version — such as improved social networking tools and better integration with business applications.

New users should consider SharePoint 2010 a major strategic move, however, and evaluate their needs before implementing the system, the report says. Those looking to add a single workload, such as social networking tools, may find a better match in a point solution.

My first thought: What?! This complex, expensive, difficult-to-manage-and-maintain system may be overkill for some organizations? Shocking.

My second thought: Yes, SharePoint has evolved — but so has the rest of the world. Organizations that wanted social networking and Enterprise 2.0 tools were not waiting around for Microsoft to do something about it — they were looking into Web-based applications from other vendors long before Microsoft got into the game.

Social computing got the attention of the enterprise in recent years. Young, startup vendors offering Web-based Enterprise 2.0 applications, for example, quickly filled in where the larger, more established vendors (such as Microsoft) left off.

Take Socialtext: It started in 2002 as a wiki provider, is now a well-known company in the Enterprise 2.0 tools market and recently announced record quarter-over-quarter bookings growth in 2009. Jive Software also announced growth in 2009, and was placed in the Leaders Quadrant of Gartner, Inc.’s 2009 “Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace” Report.

So, if you’ve survived this long without SharePoint, is there any reason to start now? With less expensive alternatives already on the market, why wait for the Microsofts and the IBMs to catch up?

Rise of the middle manager: Jobs in IT project management still hot

2010 might be the year of the middle manager. More specifically, we’ll see the rise of the IT project manager, with organizations planning to hire more people for this position in the coming year. Changing technologies have blurred some of the lines between business and IT and carved out a larger spot for this role. The days of Dilbert-ish project management stereotypes may be numbered.

According to a recent Global Knowledge survey, jobs in IT project management are the hottest positions in this field – coming out on top over network security and network administration. The business, turning to IT to maximize investment and enable innovation, is putting new importance on the IT project manager to make sure those investments truly pay off.

The project management office was not always regarded as an effective referee of priorities and cost savings, and was commonly referred to as being the “process cop.” So what’s different today?

Changes in the way technology is delivered, such as SaaS offerings and managed services, mean that being technologically savvy is not necessarily the most important requirement for IT success. Rather than getting under the hood to learn how the car works, CIOs need to understand service costs, risks, benefits, potential ROI and how to properly compare vendors, packages and contracts to ensure they are getting the best deal.

In fact, the business is requesting more of a support role to bridge the gap between the technology and the needs of the organization and, in many cases, the CIO or IT manager is stepping up to fill that role.

In our own IT salary and careers survey, 30% of the respondents (all IT managers, directors and CIOs from midsized organizations) spend most of their time on project management. Thus, the rise of the middle manager is happening as the project manager finds a new place in IT – helping to make sure that technology is not just being pursued for the sake of more technology, but that it’s also moving the company forward.

Migrating from XP to Windows 7: When, why and how?

I’ve recently spoken with a lot of IT managers about Windows 7 in preparation for upcoming coverage. Overall, everyone wants to know when they should migrate from XP to Windows 7 and why they would want to. In fact, I’m quite curious, too.

For the most part, midmarket IT shops currently running XP are in no rush to upgrade to Windows 7. The clean-install process and the associated upgrade costs are among the reasons. Plus, in most IT shops, XP SP3 is a solid operating system.

How much will maintaining the system actually end up costing you? Concerns include Microsoft putting all of its resources behind Vista and Windows 7, grappling with known XP security flaws, losing application developers who will design for XP and Microsoft ending extended security support in April 2014. These hang-ups are proving difficult to ignore.

And Windows 7 is a big step up. It’s fast, compatible with today’s hardware and software and optimized for solid-state drive hardware and multi-core processors. But I’m interested in what IT managers are most interested in — and what would entice them to take the plunge in the near future.

But that raises the next question: When is the right time to migrate? Are you building your upgrade strategy around your hardware refresh cycle? It sounds good in theory — during hardware upgrades, just move to Windows 7. But, the end-user training would be disruptive, and how often do midmarket organizations do a big-bang companywide PC refresh, anyway? Not that often. Businesses are holding onto machines for longer periods of time, replacing them one by one. If you don’t go all out at once, can you afford to maintain two systems?

Or is everyone waiting to see what Microsoft has in store for the upcoming Windows 7 Service Pack?

Decisions, decisions….

What are some of your thoughts and concerns about the inevitable move away from Windows XP, and how (and when) do you plan on tackling it? Comment here or shoot me an email.

IT job opportunities in 2010 include BPM

I recently spoke with a number of midmarket IT managers and executives about moving on from 2009 and moving into 2010. One topic that came up quite a bit during these conversations was where IT job opportunities and careers were headed. Almost everyone agreed that broad-skilled generalists would thrive in the midmarket because they could tackle more than one job — cutting labor expenses and onboarding costs. Specialists, they said, would struggle.

And while that makes sense, this month’s Dice Report highlights a very specific (but growing in demand) skill set.

According to the report, the number of IT job opportunities for individuals experienced in working with software from Pegasystems, a BPM solutions provider, has expanded. With consistent growth even through the recession, job postings for Pegasystems-related positions are up 10% year over year — including roles for software developers, systems architects and business analysts.

What’s behind the increase in BPM jobs? Many organizations have implemented BPM software to tackle inefficiency and inconsistency — and were successful. Now, an organization can bring its BPM strategy into other areas, such as IT compliance, workforce optimization and future growth.

While some specialist jobs may be on the way out in the interest of saving money, those experienced in business process management software and strategies may find their way in for the same reason.

In BPM vendor merger, is anybody afraid of the Big Blue wolf?

IBM announced this week that it was buying Lombardi, a successful and well-known BPM technology vendor. Lombardi has a range of tools that are both innovative and affordable for midmarket organizations (a few of which I’ve spoken to this year). But with some overlap between the two BPM portfolios, I wonder what this means for Lombardi’s midmarket customers – will IBM keep the products separate, or will it try to blend and rebrand Lombardi’s offerings into a more expensive piece of technology?

Why did IBM decide to make this pre-holiday purchase? According to IDC, the market opportunity for BPM software will grow to $3 billion by 2013. IBM was looking to fill out its portfolio and extend its reach beyond enterprise-wide process management software. Lombardi tends to take a more bottom-up and departmental approach, with a human-centric perspective; IBM’s take is more of a top-down, enterprise approach. The combination of the two could pave the way for an organization to start at either end and grow its BPM initiative and strategy in the direction it needs to.

Lombardi’s senior director of analyst and press relations, Wayne Snell, told me via email that the partnering will benefit organizations of all sizes. For Lombardi, joining the IBM portfolio means getting companies started with process improvement more quickly, “at a business problem level.”

But that’s for future customers. As always with technology vendor acquisitions, the issue for existing customers is continued support and upgrade paths. According to Clay Richardson, senior analyst at Forrester Research, in his recent blog post, few vendors integrate and unify acquired software assets successfully.

“In particular, stack vendors often alienate legacy customers (i.e., customers using the platform prior to acquisition) in lieu of cross-selling to their installed customer base (i.e., customers using the stack vendor’s other assets),” he writes. Take Oracle’s acquisition of BEA, where simplicity was swallowed up by a larger corporation.

With the IBM deal, there will be some overlap. Lombardi Blueprint and IBM BlueWorks are good options for organizations starting out with BPM, as a way to guide strategy. Will IBM keep both, adding yet another decision to be made when navigating the already complex IBM BPM portfolio (WebSphere Process Server or FileNet P8?), or will it replace BlueWorks with Blueprint?

If you are an existing Lombardi customer, how much does this concern you?

Paying the price for server uptime

What’s the price for server uptime? How much would you be willing to invest to maintain five 9s of availability on your mission-critical line of business applications? With limited budgets and resources, many midmarket companies are investing an average of $20,000 in fault-tolerant servers and high-availability clusters to maximize uptime, according to a recent survey by the Information Technology Intelligence Corp (ITIC).

The ITIC survey revealed that despite limited resources and budget cuts, companies are seeing enough value and ROI potential in an investment in fault-tolerance servers and high-availability clusters for performance and availability. According to the survey, 76% of the respondents said that the TCO and ROI value of fault servers was excellent or at least good enough to justify the investment in these tight times.

In addition to the ROI value, what might be another reason cash-strapped midmarket IT shops would need to invest in new hardware and/or technologies like these? Try the increased use of virtualization. Sixty percent of the respondents said that virtualization increases the need for fault tolerance. Virtualization helps IT consolidate physical space and reduce the number of servers needed. And when optimally configured, virtualization reduces the time to manage and deploy applications. The drawback to this is that all the server-based applications are now in one physical server. Therefore, if it’s not configured properly or robust enough, it could cause an issue with performance and uptime.

So how much is availability worth to you? Think of it in these terms: 99% uptime equates to approximately 87.5 hours of downtime per server, per year. And when you move up to three 9s of availability, you’re at five hours of downtime per server, annually. It would be very difficult for any business to remain successful with that much down time.

What’s going on in IT as the CIO role changes?

As the role of the CIO evolves to include more of the business and strategic decision making and less of some of the techy details, the CIO may be missing what’s going on across IT in some situations. But is that a bad thing?

I met with an open source software vendor this week for a product briefing. As the conversation went on and we started discussing what was important to the CIO, we got into a discussion about whether or not the CIO even realizes when the IT team decides to use open source applications to help get the job done.

To prove his point, the vendor shared a number of stories where the CIO was almost completely out of the loop. In one, this particular vendor representative said that he was approached by an IT manager while at an open source conference last year. When the vendor asked him how he was enjoying his time at the conference, the IT manager said that it was actually a nice vacation – because his CIO wanted him to find some open source programs they could run to test out Linux across the organization. “The funny part was,” the vendor told me, “this guy said that they had been using Linux servers for a number of years anyway and the CIO didn’t even know it.”

But then again, how much of that actually matters? The CIO has to manage IT and support the business and know what his skilled staff is up to, but in many midsized shops, he is operating at a higher level on the technology side. Rather than being a hands-on technologist, according to Peter Kretzman in a recent blog post about how to stay tech savvy as a CIO, “at the senior executive level, it’s far more important that you stay focused on process improvement and strategy than on nuts-and-bolts techniques.”

That doesn’t pardon the CIO in the vendor’s story. CIOs should be on top of what’s in their infrastructure. But how deep into the organization does their knowledge need to go? At what point can they leave the details to their top lieutenants? And by doing that, what, if anything, do they and their organizations lose?

Salesforce.com’s Chatter: A collaboration tool worth talking about

 Salesforce.com has announced that it has developed a collaboration platform that brings social networking into the enterprise — Salesforce Chatter. And for the more than 60,000 Salesforce.com customers, Chatter should be something to talk about.

Chatter will compete against Lotus Notes and SharePoint but will be more like the social networking tools many people are already using in their personal lives. With functionality similar to Facebook, Salesforce Chatter allows employees to set up their own profiles including contact information, photo, work history and area of expertise. Users can also pull in any existing information from Facebook profiles.

Employees will then be able to collaborate internally through real-time status and content updates, similar to the way friends do on Facebook. Business applications also have a place in Chatter to keep everyone up to date on inventory, for example. Well, only those you want to stay in the loop. Chatter also allows you to filter certain information to the appropriate employees.

Even Twitter can be integrated with Chatter, allowing users to set up a search and automatically stream the results into Chatter.

Why do I think this could actually catch on in the enterprise? News of Google Wave (still in beta) hit the Web hard — with blogs, tweets and news outlets covering it from all angles. But many CIOs and IT directors still expressed a lot of hesitance when it came to the idea of Google Wave in the enterprise, citing concerns such as security, manageability and accountability.

Chatter, on the other hand, will be coming from an already enterprise-trusted source — a good steppingstone for organizations looking to bring more social networking into their corporate lives, as research firm Gartner recently suggested. There may be less resistance about bringing a cloud-based collaboration platform into the workplace if it’s atop a tried and true foundation.  Salesforce.com already stores critical business information in its cloud applications and has delivered top-notch security and a trusted sharing model. This could up the level of enterprise adoption right out of the starting gates — that and the fact that when Salesforce Chatter is available next year, it will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com.

And if you’re worried about how this will stack up in the mobile world, Chatter versions are available for BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and the iPhone.

Could this be the beginning of more collaboration and social networking within the enterprise?

Experts: Role-based access to apps can improve productivity, training

The hardest part of implementing business process management (BPM), ERP or even customer relationship management (CRM) can be training users to do their jobs using the new tool. To trim that learning curve and improve productivity with the new software, some vendors are offering role-based access or persona-based interface design.

This approach gives users a view of only the functions they need to do their job.

“Instead of having access to 20 things, you get access to the two things you really need,” said Clay Richardson, a senior analyst at Forrester Research Inc. “You’ve eliminated waste and bloat.”

Vendors like Global360 Inc. and Microsoft have developed versions of their software that allow for role-based access for users. These packages include a number of defined personas, or user types. For instance, Global360’s persona-based BPM package includes three major groups of personas: the builder, the end user or participant, and the manager. Companies can then customize persona types based on what the jobs require.

The Microsoft Dynamics line of applications also offers a role-based design, developed after years of research on how users work with their ERP and CRM applications. This type of interface can help increase users’ desire to use the software and lead to higher job satisfaction and improved productivity, according to Jakob Nielsen, user experience director for Microsoft Dynamics. It can also cut training time. People “get more quickly up to speed and [can] be more productive faster,” Nielsen explained.

Have you heard of these persona-based interfaces? What has your experience been with them?