@tiffanywinman wrote a good post at the IBM Software Blog to celebrate Social Media Day. It's full of impressive statistics which show how far IBM has come as a social business and the impressive number of employees who are part of this transformation. All the more need for Partners to get up to speed and to leverage and take advantage of that massive IBM investment. I see Partners being the ones dragging the chain.
I had a minor twitch when I read that IBM has been using social software for 15 years. I think that a lot of firms have been using traditional collaborative tools, but they have not transformed into social businesses - so in that sense IBM is devaluing it's own achievements in social business by claiming to have been doing it for so long.
That's a pity because they are one of the most social media savvy organisations on the planet, at the same level of social business development as Microsoft, and the very astute EMC, and the highly invested Cisco. Even though Microsoft has topped IBM in a couple of polls of social business (Microsoft tops social media savvy companies - survey), these businesses are all clustered up in the high achievers.
Social business is about reinventing customer relationships, and this also means with Partners and the channel. I consistently see that the channel is the tortoise in this race to social business, and that they fail to really and fundamentally pick up on the assets which the vendors are providing them through the social business transformation. Microsoft is focusing on partner enablement through social business as a competitive edge, and also to help move their channel partners to better understand the customer buying process.
IBM is also directing many initiatves towards Partners, to help them grow their social media skills, social media marketing skills, and social business transformation. The IBM post outlines many of these, and there's been great work done by @sandy_carter - see IBM's social media skills initiative for partners.
To do that, to transform, they need a good strategy. And to develop a good social business strategy Partners need time (and resources). But luckily they have great examples in their vendors, and the smart partners will work that for everything that it is worth - and the vendors will pleased to help, it's their future at stake as well!
What's the partner maturity level in social business that you see? - please comment below.
So with all this optimism what gives with Barron's headline "A Private Party" - Big companies are quickly adopting new computer networks known as "private clouds." That may mean trouble for major tech suppliers?
Question: If companies are buying more private clouds - that is in layman's terms buying more of the same stuff to load up their data centres - then how can vendors be on the losing side? (It stands to reason, although it is not common logic, that the losers are the customers. The vendors are going to suck $12 billion out of customers, and that's just on hardware, and in return the customers essentially get business as usual.)
Great question, and it turns out the answer is that companies are converting to "private cloud" so fast that they are becoming more and more confident to take the next step to the real cloud.
It's that next step which is the Cloud Shift, and where real business benefits can start to accumulate. "Private cloud" is just gaining better productivity from your owned IT resources by using some of the technologies from the real cloud. It's more of the same and business as usual for customers, but a gold mine for salespeople selling "stuff" and that was the hope for the next 4 or 5 years.
It's an easy sell. A CEO hears about cost savings in moving to the cloud and calls up his IT chief. The IT chief, fully armed and briefed by the vendors who want to sell their products, slides into the chair, nods wisely about the potential savings and better use of capital, and then throws out the usual FUD about security etc. The CEO reflects on these risks to his bonus, and then during that pregnant pause the IT chief throws a lifeline into the ring - but we can get all those benefits if we built a cloud ourselves!
Viola! Everyone wins, on the surface at least, and the lastest round of gear is readied to be shipped into the data centre along with the upgrades to air conditioning, energy equipment, physical security, power supplies, and all those other things which add nothing to your competitive offer.
But the reality is that the customer's business has lost. And the vendors know that they have a limited window to exploit the opportunity to extract money from the customer's shareholders. What the Barron's report shows is that this window is closing much faster then we expected (at least in the US).
It's a good account. The key point being that the shift to "private" clouds, is going so well that big companies may be ready for the next phase of cloud computing years sooner than either Wall Street or Silicon Valley expected".
In other words, corporate customers gradually will be cutting back on big-ticket items and redirecting smaller amounts of money to computer-services providers.
That's tectonic news! Not only because sales will drop because of the massive efficiencies of the real cloud providers, but because:
[public cloud providers are] not willing to pay premium prices for branded hardware. A well-known example of this is Google, who bypasses traditional vendors and specifies and procures its servers directly from Asian contract manufacturers. Other large-scale datacenter operators are starting to pursue a similar strategy. Vendors like Dell and HP have responded by offering stripped-down servers designed to customer requirements. The problem for these vendors is that the selling prices and profit margins on these systems is lower than traditional models, as noted by a comment to the article.
That's one huge aspect, and the other is the fundamental one that massive cloud operators are enormously more efficient at managing and allocating resources than 99.9% of the of the world's IT shops. The big impact will be on the capital spending portion of the in-house IT spend, which some Wall St analysts are now predicting to decline significantly in a relatively short time frame. That must send a shiver up the spine of the likes of EMC for example.
Barron's says that for "Cisco, Oracle and HP to get in the game, it will probably require some key acquisitions... As their customers turn to the cloud, these fierce competitors will be fighting over a shrinking enterprise pie, increasingly selling their servers, storage and networking gear to what's expected to be just a handful of major cloud-service providers".
From an investor's viewpoint the real winner might just be Microsoft. Other public cloud providers such as Google and Amazon are trading on high multiples due to the success and growth prospects of their other lines of business. In contrast, Microsoft's price has been depressed, yet is has the best on-premise to cloud offers in the market and is poised for rapid growth in cloud services.
What's really going to happen to the others? Well it's not likely that HP nor Oracle are about to disappear, but it is likely that there will be major industry disruptions and new players emerging to claim their share of the public cloud of the future. The winners will actually be those businesses that best get their head around the Cloud Shift and cease investing in internal infrastructure that is not related to achieving that shift to the cloud.
Tammy Bruce said of Jesse James - last married to Sandra Bullock - "you can take the boy out of the ghetto but not the ghetto out of the boy". In a similar vein you can take the computing out of cloud computing but not cloud computing out of the cloud. The Cloud Shift hinges on that realization, and thankfully it's progressing well.
Do you see an acceleration of the transition through "private cloud" to real cloud?
How do you think the hardware and software product vendors will respond?
Which new entrant into public cloud do you think will cause the biggest industry disruption?
There's a good conversation going on over at Social Media B2B where Jeffrey Cohen's post Cisco Social Media Manager Talks Facebook brought in a swift response from "Cisco non-believer":
...So you have a full-time job to maintain a facebook page? seriously?
What happened to the model Cisco’s Anne Plese talked about at Blogworld where the employees engaged actively and built these capabilities in a collaborative model themselves and it did not take additional headcount and funding and was not a centralized command and control environment?"
It's a good challenge, because we then got more insight. Although personally I take the view that a company like Cisco, and on the back of the GFC, isn't going to have any corporate positions that don't make business sense and are hard-justified. But hey the question was asked, and the conversation is great.
Autumn Truong @autumntt rose to the challenge with a very positive and open response, and explained the corporate coordination role and how "In my role, I’ve been very focused internally – working with various functional groups within my organization and across Cisco to understand how to effectively leverage social media to share information and communicate externally with our existing audience as well as a new set of influencers."
To me that makes a lot of sense. It's an overhead yes, but the price of lack of coordination could be much higher. I also believe that having someone free of the "operational" pressures allows them to spark new (often incremental) ideas which span functional groups and create real value from new social media initiatives. Without that person these opportunities fall through the cracks.
It's all about balance
Coordination is necessary, and usually starts as a role. When the load gets big enough as in Cisco, these roles become jobs. Me being a graduate of the Social Media Academy one part of our methodology addresses the Cross Functional Corporate Social Media Framework.
This Framework, which we name the Comstar model, provides the understanding that a social media oriented corporation is actually applying a new state of mind to its culture and processes. The framework includes all departments such as sales, marketing, service & support, product management, HR, Logistics, and all other groups and its respective teams. The ComStar model suggest a social media service-team-based organization structure.
The Comstar Principle
At its core, the ComStar Model has one key principle, and it is this:
Develop a social media service team (SMST) that supports all departments in the organization
The SMST members do not necessarily tweet, blog, comment themselves instead empowers others to do so.
Similar to IT team, finance support or HR that services an entire company, the SMST functions the same way.
Cisco has this same idea in the cross-functional role described by Autumn Truong.
What do you think, is this "overhead" or a valuable and perhaps necessary role of cross-functional coordination in any larger firm moving towards a social business model?
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=4f03dec4-2468-4dfc-af31-658e800b51c3)
Recent Comments