New Forum for Software Executives and Independent Software Vendors (ISV)

I am very excited to be part of a portal sponsored by the International Association of Microsoft Certified Partners (http://www.iamcp.org) that is intended to become THE PLACE for software executives to go to find information about different topics such as marketing, development etc.

I am managing a forum about development, R&D and my interest is specifically topics about WEB 2.0 and how it is going to change the way software is created, maintained and innovated.

This site http://www.softwarebizexchange.com is officially launched and ready to rock and create a collective podium for ISV's around the world.

Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel

I found the book "Naked Conversations from Robert Scoble and Shel Israel and I can hihly recommend it specifically to people that has a need to learn about blogging for bussiness. I still amazes me how both regular US businessmen and businessmen in my native country Finland do not understand the power of Internet as a vehicle of getting the word out there. I am wondering if a country like Finland with its limited popolation of 5.2 million will ever get the exposure due to its language of Finnish. Will Finnish executives see the value of blogging as a form of communication channel.

WEB 2.0 topics on the rise at SD West Software Conference

I had the pleasure to visit last week SD West Conference in Santa Clara, the heart of Silicon Valley. This coference is arranged by CMP Media and there are three events each year that I have visited.... SD Best Practices in Boston during the fall, Dr. Dobbs Architecture and Design World in July and SD West that took place last week.

When I review the difference in the conference topics, WEB 2.0 seems to be the big topic of the sessions and CMP media even launched a virtual reality site mimicing second life with real-life characters such as Grady Booch.

The results of this change of topic is obvious to me.... More people attending and when I talked to some of them, they said topics such as Ajax etc interested them and they had participated to some of these sessions.

We are living in a tremendous time of change and as a businessman and researcher, I can not express enough the opportunities that we all have.

Domain-specific Modeling (DSM) on the rise?

SD West 2007 gave me the opportunity to interview tens of different people of their initiatives in software development. The overwhelming majority said that they hate UML as it is not addressing any of their domains and does not translate the models to real code. UML is a generic language and tries to cover everything under the sun, but does not do anything especially well. What is also important to understand is that UML does not generate real domain-specific code, only stubs and skeletons that somebody has to write and maintain.

What really made my day was a discussion with one of the original inventors of UML (worked with the three amigos) within Rational who stated that UML was never intended to take care of code generation... That was something that came around almost accidentally due to some entreprenours being innovative. We all know that it did not work out and now we are seeing the results of it... People are reluctant to use UML.... But what is even more alarming is that the ones that have decided to scrap UML, have not chosen a replacement to it.... That comment came from a well know authority that I met during the conference.

So, why is there a sudden interest in Domain-specific Modeling (DSM). Let me try to summarize what I learned from the audience and by speaking to lots of very smart people:

1) People have a need to decrease the complexity to address ONLY the needs of the problem domain, not the problems of the entire world as UML sometimes has a tendency of

2) People need a way to sync their domain models with the implementation (code) which increases reuse and quality of code

3) Every company has one or two very smart and effective developers and their skills in algoritims etc. has to be captured in one way or the other. Why not reuse the skills of the good ones to be used by the majority of developers.

4) There is a need of change among software development. I have not seen any big improvements in productivity the past 15 years.... Yes, we have component-based development, object-oriented development but until people like Mr. Martin etc. admit that object-orientation is not the only wholy grail to development, things will not change. Mr. Martin stated in July 2006 as part of a panel in Dr. Dobbs Architecture and Design World in Chicago that software development should still be a craft..... Go and tell this to Fortune 1000 companies and their executives.... They will not be happy....

I am excited that DSM is finally getting there and people "get it" when you talk about it.

Integrating MS CRM to other Microsoft technologies

MS CRM is all about a platform and this provides the platform the ability to be integrated to other technologies such as Biztalk Server technology for messaging and some of the other technology stacks such as Siebel, Oracle etc. Integration is the key in of these technologies and I am very excited of how my company is gradually taking MS Dynamics CRM to its worldwide use.

Speculation of Palm Buyout Rises - Does it make any sense?

Speculation of a buyout of Palm Inc. heightened Tuesday after an industry online publication reported a deal could occur this week.The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based maker of Treo smart phones and handheld computers hired investment banker Morgan Stanley a few weeks ago to explore its strategic options, including a possible sale, according to a person. When I review the speculation from a technology perspective, it is hard to me to see why Nokia would be doing this specifically as they are not compliant in any shape or form with Symbian platform. Also, the rumors is saying that Nokia is withdrawing their E-series development in the US which really is to me that they are giving up on whatever they have tried to do. Go and figure out... This could be a tremendous opportunity for both Microsoft as well as BlackBerry.

CRN Interview: Microsoft's Doug Burgum

Doug Burgum, senior vice president of Microsoft Business Solutions, is leaving the company in late June. I had a chance to hear Steve Ballmer thank Doug Burgum at the Microsoft Convergence 2007 event on Wednesday this week.

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Cisco and Webex: It Takes Two to Tango with Microsoft

Cisco Systems' planned $2.9 billion acquisition of leading Web conferencing provider Webex sets up a complex and interesting dance between itself and Microsoft as both vendors work through the need to both cooperate and compete in the same customer accounts. I was a user of WebEx for years (in fact one of the first clients), but got upset as they started to overcharge old clients and I did not get anything of the new features of functionalities with the monthly subscription. They were also overcharging for larger conference calls... Today, I am a happy user of http://www.gotomeeting.com and this has worked well with me.

Microsoft Takes on SAP, Oracle and Salesforce.com with Dynamics

The Titan release, demonstrated by Brad Wilson, general manager of Dynamics CRM, is a good example of what the company is trying to accomplish with its Live, or SAAS (software as a service) initiative. I was part of the audience when Brad Wilson demonstrated this solution and it is very, very powerful. What really made a huge impression on me was the way the customization can be executed. I have used CRM 3.0 since it came out and we are very happy with it.

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Nokia Sees India as 2nd Biggest Market by 2010

MUMBAI (Reuters)—Nokia expects India to become its second-largest market by volume by 2010, or even sooner, the world's top cell phone maker said on Monday.Indian market is booming and the buying power due to the growth in economy is also causing this phenomenon. However, Nokia has failed in the US market, there is no question about that.

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The End of Software, and a New Way of Doing Business

The article describes how Salesforce.com came about and what type of impact is has had on the markets.

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Microsoft ups Dynamics' industry focus - new vertical markets elected

eWeek reported today Microsoft wants to make its Dynamics business applications more immediately relevant to customers in five vertical markets -- manufacturing, distribution, retail, services and the public sector. Microsoft also announced Certified for Microsoft Dynamics, an ISV software certification program to give customers a better sense of the 3,000-plus ISV offerings in the market and their compatibility with Dynamics as tested by third parties. What will be interesting to see how existing ISV's can play in this market and how deep Microsoft will dive into the solutions themselves.

Steve Ballmer Keynote

It is time for Mr. Ballmer to get to the stage to announce CRM Live among other things. This Convergence is the 11th in its history. I had the opportunity to participate in Convergence 2006 in Dallas, Texas. This year was tremendous for me personally as this brought my thinking together of where Microsoft sits on multiple things such as BI, CRM, Biztalk, SOA, Dynamics ERP family such as SL, AX, GP, and NAV. I think the biggest thing for me during this event was the way SOA has enabled Microsoft to tie together its solutions into one cohesive solution and this is a tremendous opportunity for ISV's as I have stated in my previous posts.

Mr. Ballmer gave a farewell speech to Doug Burgum and Doug gave his farewell speech to the audience.

Ballmer emphasized the importance of linking personal productivity tools to LOB line of business applications. The gap is what I have discussed about the integration between applications in the Microsoft stack.

The keynote included a demo of future manufacturing control and this looked very futuristic.



Dynamic CRM General Manager Brad Wilson demonstrated the new upcoming release of CRM live that looked exactly the same as the excisting version of CRM 3.0 today. The live version can also be used from from regular Outlook environment as can be done today. It looked very slick. Also, Mr. Wilson showed how one can import customizations to the live environment.

The session ended up with a Q&A.

Microsoft Mobility Solutions on the go

The speech outlined the factors that mobility applications have to fullfill.

- rolebased and task driven
- simple and intuitive
- designed for ther limited form factor
- works occasionally connected
- flexible and configurable
- seamless backend configuration

Microsoft has created a Mobile Application Framework that enhances the productivity of mobile development for Microsoft. This also helps ISV's to integrate its applications to backend systems such as Dynamics AX etc.

The demo of the solution was from thy:solutions.

We live in the world of SOA

The presentation of Maureen Hughes was one of the best presentations of SOA that I have heard. The notion of exposing web services from sources such as Dynamics, composing the business processes and then the consume of these in applications such as Microsoft Office Sharepoint is a beautiful setup that I just love!

Jet Support Services has used Biztalk with Dynamics GP to create an overall solution to improve business results.
The demo an speech showed very well how SOA can be used to combine customer portals with Biztalk, Sharepoint portal, Dynamics GP ERP backend. Very impressive implementation.

Extensibility of MS Dynamics CRM

I learned today how Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 can be extended by exposing MS CRM to web services and the other way around. MS CRM can be regarded as a pure platform that can be used as the foundation for ISV's to build new solutions. They have even gone to the extent that you can build a completely customized user interface for MS CRM and to me this is a sign of effective use of a platform concept.

Retailers in MS Dynamics world

Dynamics plays also in the retail world with Dynamics RMS and I saw a few MS partners and it looks to me that they pretty much provide their own tools to help with different tasks such as integration etc.

It looks like that the retail community needs partners and that is something that is very good for ISV's like us. This type of partnership is what drives the Microsoft community. As a 10 year ISV partner with IBM (no longer), the same can not be said of them. As corporate CEO for a BI vendor in the past, I never got a call to ask how we were doing. We were dependent on iSeries hardware and lived and died on the platform. How more dedicated could one have been?
That is something that most Microsoft business partners have never been exposed to.

Microsoft is getting to the RFID world

I attended today in an interesting session about Microsoft Biztalk 2006 RFID. The program manager and product manager discussed how Microsoft is going to play in the RFID world and what really impressed me was how Microsoft sees the hardware device play in that world. The vision that they have is to be able to plug-and-play different RFID readers to the application without a hassle in similar way that we are used to do with any USB device. Whether this will happen is going to be interesting to see as the RFID world is still very unstable with lots of standardization efforts to be made. The session included a case study of RFID implemented by Killdeer Mountain Manufacturing, a 270 person contract manufacturing facility. They are implementing state-of-the-art RFID supply chain solution that has already decreased their cycle times to half from 40 days to 20 days.

Dynamics AX with Application Integration Framework (AIF)

Dynamics AX product team has built an impressive Application Integration Framework (AIF) that enables AX users to create web services for different purposes. AIF includes bunch of predefined actions, channels, end point management that provides organizations the means to expose AX to outside world. I am surprised how well the architecture is constructed to really consider using AX as a platform for additional ISV development with valueadd solutions. SOA is here to stay!

MS CRM Integration to backoffice applications using SOA

Microsoft CRM has created multiple options how you can integrate CRM to the backoffice applications and one of the things I saw today is how it can be done using Biztalk 2006. Microsoft provides a Real-time Integration framework that runs a runtime version of Biztalk and this enables seamless integration between any type of application to MS CRM and enables functionality such as credit checking from Dynamics GP (Great Plains) and other nice orchestration functions. The .NET stack really gives you the ability to integrate any application to each other and this is the power of building platforms, not separate applications.

Day three at Convergence 2007 - Keynote by Joel Barker

Microsoft Corporate VP Tami Reller introduced Joel A. Barker, Ed.D, hc. Tami must lost one day as she was asking the audience how the first day was. This is my fourth day (as partner) and the third for Dynamics clients) Barker's speech concentrates on innovation in the new world economy.

According to Barker, 60 percentg of the annual growth comes from innovation. Innovation at verge - definition of a verge: where something and something else meets. Barker gave multiple examples of innovation at verge such as Toyota Prious (new electric engine technology meets old engine technology). Debbe Kennedy, from Leadership Solutions, Inc has done verge innovation and achieved leadership position in her domain.

Three approches to the verge: One win/: FedEx Win/loose: sony eBook Win/win/win: robocoaster, giftback As a Sony eBook owner, what the verge means in the example above is that Sony will compete with other forms of reading so there will be somebody loosing in the game.

Barkers speech has interesting alignment with the book from Johanssen "Medici Effect" that explains how two different domains will jointly will create more innovation. Platforms are the basis for superverge. Examples of this is mobile phones with camera and other such technologies. Barker asked the audience to check out the site http://www.implicationswheel.com

Daniel Boorstin "the fertile verge" includes discussion of this verge concept.

MS Dynamics CRM Analytics Foundation

The merger between BI and CRM is finally here. In late 90s, I was leading a BI company and we built a solution that merged BI information with CRM data. The solution was based on technology that existed at that point in time and as you might already guess.... It was not that intuitive and easy to use as one wanted it to be.
The MS CRM 3.0 with Dynamics CRM Analytics Foundation is built to merge CRM information with BI information in a very integrated way. This work is based on the Microsoft BI technology stack so Microsoft is not reinventing the wheel in this space.
The integration to Office such as Excel is very impressive and intuitive. Excel can utilize the CRM database directly. This is where the power lies and this gives the power to end users to report on the CRM activity.

MS Dynamics CRM with mobility - accessing mobile information using mobile phone

Microsoft has released cool mobility solutions to the MS CRM community. Two solutions exists today to be deployed (besides third-party vendors). The one that can be used by any device is CRM Mobile Express client that uses the Internet browser of the device and has a very light footprint. The other one is a true Microsoft Mobile version that requires installation on Microsoft mobile phone. I personally thing the online "always on" version of the solution is more appealing and provides realtime integration to the database. The other good news with the Mobile Express version is that Microsoft has open sourced it for anybody to change, create products and resell the solutions.

Business Intelligence on the rise at Convergence 2007

When I compare the messaging from 2006 to 2007, both from Microsoft and vendors, it is all about business intelligence in the Dynamics family. Last year at Convergence 2006, we had a couple of serious BI vendors presenting their solution in the expo and this year, there are quite a lot of them. As a 20 year veteran in the BI space, I have my personal view on who will survive and who will not and it will be interesting to see how it turns out when coming to Convergence 2007.

Dynamics AX GM Mogens Elsberg

Dynamics 4.x was released 9 months ago, so today, we are listening to what has been there for the last few months.

Dynamics AX can be adapted to the business processes, not the way like SAP forces to do..... adapt your business processes to SAP. AX also has the role management functionality as explained in Mr. Nadella's keynote today.

AX can really scale to 1000 plus concurrent users, which is very impressive viewed from any perspective.

SOA plays a big role in AX as it enables organizations to integrate their solutions to AX. It is very obvious to me that SOA has made a huge difference to Microsoft as the foundation of integration betwwen its products.

Brad Wilson, GM for Microsoft Dynamics CRM - Vision and experiences of past year

Microsoft will push MS CRM to the masses, in similar way as they do with Office. According to GM Brad Wilson, the typical scenario of the past has been that CRM Power Users have bought CRM solutions for everyday users and this causes issues and dissatisfaction among users.

The other issue CRM applications face is the instability of business processes, salespeople get realigned, and organizations need to get the customer interaction to be consistent. Third thing is the flexibility: Choose where you run it, choose how you pay for it.

Microsoft sees the reason of their success to be based on reducing the risks and proven technology. The first one is about the fact that MS CRM is embraced by users and the second is based on the factb that the technology is based on proven Microsoft technology such as SQL Server 2005.

Here again, a client Raymond James Financial VP emphasized that MS CRM is really about a platform enabling organizations to customize the application to your needs. Microsoft does not claim to know the business of each vertical, but let clients and ISV's to do the customization. Polaris Industries chose MS CRM chose Sharepoint as user interface for their CRM install and this shows pretty well the composite design and use as Mr. Nadella discussed about in his keynote. The MS CRM v3c demo showed how SOA can be used to bring in lightweight information from service providers such as UPS, but in the same way, it can be anything that has exposure to SOA. I love the fact what SOA is doing for application development of today.

Sataya Nadella Keynote. - Connected Business

Microsoft has the aim to get every employee acess to information in the enterprise.

Today, Microsoft announced Microsoft Dynamics Client for Office. Microsoft is going to provide a composite view of all business information in the enterprise.

It is clear to me that Microsoft is moving aggressively to have Office as the main UI to all applications. This is a very strong message to ISV's as well and this is where the opportunity is.

The notion of role management around the Microsoft solutions was introduced in Convergence 2006 and this is now really spread broadly across all Microsoft products.

The other very obvious thing that Microsoft is focusing on is the integration to Office from the ERP packages. I just saw a demo of the new upcoming GP 10 that enables endusers to analyze data in Microsoft Excel.

Microsoft announced today Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step and one of the tools is business modeler.

SOA is a key element of Dynamics where the platforms can expose API's to streamline business processes.

Microsoft has eleced manufacturing, distribution, professional services, retail, and public sector as part of adding additional industry-specific solutions. ISV's can tap into. Microsoft is announcing new Dynamics certifications that partners will have to take to become certified.

Microsoft announced today an online community for financial professionals.

(http://community.microsoftdynamicslive.com)

This is really a move from Microsoft to enter WEB 2.0 space.

Microsoft Convergence 2007 Doug Burgum farewell speech

Doug Burgum is leaving after two and half decades and to be whitnessing hos speech here in San Diego is a privilege. The amount of information that we can absorbe from a daily New York Times is more than a person in the 1700 century absorbed in a lifetime. The message from Mr. Burgum is all about being able to manage the information we have avalilable each day for us to absorbe.

Do not ignore Microsoft Dynamics CRM customer service modules

MS CRM might be considered as a salesforce automation tool, but it is much more than people realize. Customer service, knowledge management, contract management etc. is also embedded and companies, even large ones are now taking advantage of that.

Finally, Microsoft is providing a platform for ISV's and this is obviously a big thing for vendors that want to capitalize on the platform.

Microsoft CRM deployment at Nortel

I heard how Nortel is deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM to its global workforce is an impressive task that should take away the discussion of scalability of Microsoft Dynamics 3.0 in larger organizations. There is also a session of Microsoft's own deployment of Microsoft Dynamics CRM to its global organization from Siebel install.

Microsoft vision of BI future

Today, I participated in Microsoft's session of how they perceive the BI going forward. The thing that I think was the post important thing that I heard was the move from specialized BI tools towards BI for masses... ease of use, the analogy of "light switch" is something that will make traditional vendors to have to innovate and figure out how to compete.

Suggestion to Convergence 2007 participants

Microsoft has released a bunch of new technologies in the past 12 months and I truly believe that this is a perfect time to look at how things can be tightly integrated and how the Microsoft technology stack with .NET platform can be utilized to create even higher value proposition. I saw an example of an exciting CMS solution yesterday that had linkages to Dynamics CRM 3.0 release. This type of integration work will increase going forward.

Microsoft Convergence 2007 - vendor review yesterday

This is my second Convergence (previous one was in my home town Dallas, Texas) and I spent last evening reviewing vendors in the expo hall. Convergence has changed the structured networking tool to a new one (convergence connect) I have to say that it does not give me what the former one did. The new tool does not let me review geographical listings of participants... There are some other cool features, but overall, it does not work for me in the same way as the former tool did. Let's see if I change my mind during the week...

Goo Goo Google Ga Ga

Google's decision to take its Microsoft Office killer, Google Apps Premier Edition, to market without any channel component shows that in more ways than one, the company is still a child. I love this article as it really points out well that Google does not have a strategy in place for solution providers and Microsoft is all about them. The Microsoft ecosystem is huge and Microsoft is putting lots of efforts in getting its solutions in the WEB 2.0 age.

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Microsoft Sees Billions in VOIP Shift

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. sees the shift by business organizations to Web-based phone systems running on its software to generate "billions" of dollars in revenue for the company, a top executive said on Tuesday. This move is a tremendous opportunity to Microsoft as it can integrate Office applications with VOIP



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European Retailer to Put RFID Chips in Shoes - RFID market is getting there

CIO.com reports that one of Europe’s largest shoe companies plans to embed wireless chips in shoes sold at hundreds of stores across the continent. This trend towards RFID is tremendous and we can ready each and every day how organizations are using RFID to get their organization more effective.

IBM and Business Objects to team up - does IBM never learn from their mistakes?

As a 20-year veteran in the BI industry, I can only be amazed that IBM continues to change their strategy on the BI front. Tietoviikko.fi reports that IBM and Business Objects have teamed up to form a solution to the SMB market. My former company where I was corporate CEO was playing in the IBM field and we saw IBM changing horse probably 10 times during 10 years and left customers stranded. My question is how these clients are able to take IBM seriously in the BI space as they seem not to be able to make up their mind of whom to concentrate on. Microsoft is going to gain market share due to this and this is only good for them. At least the client knows what they are buying into.

Oracle, Not Done Yet, To Buy Hyperion For $3.3B

In a bid to further bolster its analytics capability, Oracle said it is buying Hyperion Solutions for $52.00 per share or $3.3 billion in cash. The deal is expected to close in April. I have to say that I am happy to have been right in my assesment for a quite a while. A few days ago, I stated in my blog that the traditional BI companies are looking for alternative ways to grow. I guess Hyperion realized that their time was up and Larry Ellison put some serios cash on the table. As client, I would be concerned and this is a tremendous opportunity for Microsoft to take a few wins under their belt. I assume that there is going to be more of consolidation going on in the field. Next victims will be Cognos, Business Objects etc. as they will have to work out how to get the growth going.

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