Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

I’m privileged to be doing a keynote discussion with ZDNet columnist and Asuret CEO Michael Krigsman at a pre-conference event at ASUG / SAP SAPPHIRE event tomorrow (Sunday).  The larger topic is consumerization of IT and the move to the Cloud, but in many ways, the idea is to talk about the reset of the relationship between IT and the LoB as purchase patterns move towards the latter.

It’s a natural tendency for this to often be an antagonistic relationship But where this gets productive is when IT starts to understand the larger trends in changing expectations of prospects and customers and the LoB is often dealing with especially with the advent of the public social web. As you start to peel those layers away, one by one, you start to see how IT can not only support but lead on the task of supporting and serving today’s increasingly social, sometimes vocal but definitely informed prospect and customer.

We will probably ruffle some feathers but I think we’ll leave attendees with a few new ideas about how to play this out. I’ll update this post with details of the push back I receive and what the audience teaches me.

Oh, off topic but if you’re attending SAPPHIRE, come ask me about “Project Robus”.

Eric Norlin, organizer of Defrag, Blur and Glue Conferences and seed investor, has a good post up today about what enterprise development means in the age of big data, mobile and cloud and the coming age of convergence of these big innovation spurts.

I really recommend that you take 3 minutes to read his post for proper context but here’s the quote that summarizes his stance:

Amidst these three mega-trends [Mobile, Cloud, Big Data] sits a lynchpin. The developers know it because they’re building. The buzzword maniacs haven’t caught it yet, and they may never (we can only hope), but it’s there. That lynchpin: APIs. APIs tie together the mega-trends in a fundamental and unalterable way. APIs are the lingua franca of the new wave of enterprise development.

So, as these three mega trends (and our super top-secret, don’t tell the marketers, lynchpin) converge, we’re seeing one overriding trend: the opportunity, means and necessity for the developer (engineer, architect) to play the central role in building and rolling out new enterprise IT capabilities.

He’s right. I wanted to build on two specific repercussions or elephants in the room in this discussion around what convergence means for the enterprise developer community:

• Changing Customer Expectations: Cloud and SaaS have once again started to move the buying pendulum to a decentralized model and towards the Line of Business buyer. And whilst its way early in the enterprise setting, mobile is threatening to move the buying power even further way towards the end participant. Enterprise developers need to understand what selling and supporting into the Line of Business and appealing to the end participant means. Whilst IT might have hired a traditional analyst firm to do a feature shoot out or looked at a Quadrant, the Line Of Business will want an integrated result of cloud, big data and mobile that speaks to specific business scenarios and use cases. So if enterprise software developers were to build competing products, feature parity is price of entry. You can’t shy away from really really understanding usage models and design thresholds. That’s a big cultural shift at least for those developers who’ve been supporting IT – which includes most on and offshore SIs.
• Monetization: In my mind, each of these three technology trends (on their own) will be on the fast track to commoditization and will risk facing the same fate as did most social business software plays. The magic and the premiums will come from contextual application of this innovation and as Eric says, smart integration. Take storage for example: Dropbox as storage without document and device sync is commodity. Box.net as storage without document and device sync and collaboration is commodity. Apple’s iCloud as storage without ubiquitous local and iTunes media sync across devices is commodity. And Google Drive (as discussed here in Ben Kepes’ CloudU community) is also a commodity business not worth getting into had it not been for Google’s services such as Google Apps, Piccasa, and its media and unified communication capabilities under the Google Plus brand. The premiums from big data, mobile access and cloud comes from  a) dynamically assembled media and content, and interpreted data in the cloud, b) available wherever you need to consume and / or collaborate and c) insanely focused and simple interfaces to complex backends. That’s what enterprise developers are looking at if they really want to be on the money making side of these innovations.

These are the elephants as I see it.

Side Note/Disclaimer: Eric puts on mind-bending summits (he calls them conferences but I keep telling him that that doesn’t do justice to the content he produces). I’ve been an advisor to Defrag and  I’ve been privileged to keynote Defrag before and will be doing so again, later this year. But this is about Glue.

Designed to build a transparent, results-driven work culture, Rypple replaces the traditional performance review with an easy, social and collaborative approach. People always know where they stand, and are accountable for achieving their goals.

To me, this is more about strengthening SFs ownership of the professional social graph first and foremost. Radian6 gave Salesforce.com more intelligence into the prospect and customer social graph and the ability to infuse said insight into their front line apps such as Sales and Service Cloud. This purchase, along with Chatter and Chatterlytics strengthens SFs control over exactly who is good at what inside the organization and allows them to federate this information into SF apps today and into AppExchange apps in the near future. That moves this intelligence data set to the front office and right at the point of employee decision making, as opposed to just HCM insight for HR professionals.

I spent fifteen minutes with Oracle’s President, Mark Hurd, along with Sudhir Chowdhary from the Financial Express yesterday at Oracle OpenWorld 2011.  These were the big take aways from our conversation:

1. Collaboration Moving Front and Center

Oracle seems to have rationalized its’ investments in the areas of content and collaboration technology and has come to terms with the idea that collaboration needs to be front and center in its’ portfolio offering. I asked Mark how he rationalized not catering to the other 80 odd percent of the average employees’ daily time that isn’t spent in one of Oracles’ ERP/CRM and other process apps in any integrated way. At a previous meeting with Oracle’s executive team earlier this year, it was clear that customers do have collaboration on their minds. And earlier yesterday, Anthony Lye, SVP, CRM, also confirmed that the subject of activity streams will be broached during the CRM keynotes. Mark responded with “I absolutely agree and stay tuned – there’s an announcement coming over the next 48 hours on collaboration”. Across these conversations what’s clear to me is this: Oracle will be declaring its intentions in both traditional collaboration and also some of the newer flavors characterized by enterprise social networking and activity streams.

We’r seeing a growing need for this in the market as collaboration needs mature and become more sophisticated beyond general purpose sharing. And so I have high hopes for a fitting response to collaboration that’s cognizant of process. Oracle is also one of the few companies that can, in principle, get this right. Given what I saw of Fusion’s Rich Identity features last year, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to expect that Oracle will infuse findability and collaboration into its overall business systems offering. So consider this a heads up for you fellow Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business gear heads out there. Fingers crossed that it isn’t just silo’d collaboration that ignores the needed context hidden inside the various business systems it offers.

2. Catering to the Exa-customer’s Cloud vs On-premise Needs.

Exalogic, Exadata, Exalytics. It’s all about the mammoth and gynormous here. Mark’s assessment is that Oracles’ primary customer base will look for a staged move to the cloud, if at all. In the way that it was described by Mark, the logic was this: large companies expanding to new regional markets may choose to go cloud and leave the mother ship on-premise. They may change that configuration at a later time and go all cloud, or extend cloud solutions to front end back end installations.   Oracle proposes to offer the needed flexibility using one code base as customers move to all cloud or partial cloud…or never cloud.

The message was that from a customer stand point, Oracle is ready if and when the customer is. An alternate interpretation of this would be the following: stretch out the license and maintenance revenue model of on-premise software for as long as the customer is willing / needs to keep an on premise foot print. Be ready with a plan B if the customer decides to shop its technology needs and considers cloud based systems a viable option.

3. On the new crop of Competition:

It seems as if Oracle finally has a game plan to play both offense and defense with cloud based providers. To be clear, no names were named but its easy to connect the dots and see that companies such as Workday and Salesforce.com were reference points. The market view presented by Mark was this:

• Newer cloud based offerings already have an older code base compared to Oracles’ OnDemand line.
• They don’t currently have the vertical specialty that Oracle’s customers look for.
• They don’t have the safe pair of hands /maturity of Oracle.
• They don’t have the integrated suite of all ERP applications.
• And finally, Oracle has the kind of scale of operations that’s needed to carpet bomb the large company buyer landscape with an OnDemand value proposition.

Looked at in totality, this a very different message from the previous points of view that went from the cloud isn’t new to the cloud exists but it’s best in a box. Clearly there was a recognition that Oracle’s market is in fact considering alternate solutions that don’t only come from the likes of SAP. And so it’s game on, from Oracle’s stand-point.

So there you go. I’m looking forward to seeing how this all comes to fruition over the next couple of days….

Comments rolling in on Google Plus, here.

Image Credit: Mike Maloney

Almost two and a half years ago in March of 2009, I suggested the following:

“Don’t confuse Enterprise 2.0 with social computing concepts”.

Ignoring the dated terminology for a second, my premise was that social in the enterprise doesn’t mean throwing all sorts of features at the end user in an attempt to get them to emulate some combination of Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia for the enterprise. Rather, its the decisive use of social and collaborative concepts to get work done.

If there is one single take away from Dreamforce, its that enterprises are systemically closer to this reality than ever before. Not that we needed the declaration of the social enterprise for this to kick off or that Salesforce.com is the only option. We’ve been seeing users of social platforms find their own ways to self organize and improve business activity, but in many cases, in a silo’d fashion and one devoid of context: join a community on your social platform to have un structured conversations on a business activity. Then head over to your CEM/CRM/ERP/Call Center/system to make updates. Sounds fine in theory but the reality is the system of record remained your primary residence and the new collaboration system, your second home that you visit when you have time.  Salesforce.com is now also playing a pivotal role in leading the cut over to contextual collaboration.

Dreamforce conveyed that Salesforce.com has been immersed in twelve months of integration and investment rationalization. Only a few of the product related announcements really blew me away but that’s fine. Putting your investments and technology advancements to work is arguably as important as filling the top of the idea funnel. Even with respect to Chatter, the new functional additions were par for the course stuff. IM and presence, customer and product networks are really not that new and are available in the market. And like every other collaboration software, Chatter has its fair share of ‘can do better’s’. The three-part story on customer, employee and product networks is no doubt a step forward towards illustrating tangible use. But for those of us in the trenches with clients trying to make this work (and I strongly suspect Salesforce.com knows this as Marc Benioff alluded to it in the Q&A session), it takes a lot more of cultural, political and change management will to make this a reality.

But in the spirit of contextual collaboration, the implications of some of the ISV announcements at Dreamforce are just huge and amount to this:

• A social service layer now powers process centric collaboration for critical business processes in the enterprise.
• The Enterprise partner announcements include cloud based leaders who have their sights on the large enterprise market.
• Most of the ISVs offer a forklift solution and can make a go at it, alone. In other words they don’t ‘need’ Salesforce.com to build a successful business. So its a balanced partnership where both sides have as much to gain. If you’ve ever run biz dev, you know that’s generally the most healthy and practical way to truly get results from any tie-up.

Here’s a taste:

• HR: Workday will integrate core HR processes such as approval requests, payroll, budgeting and spend with Chatter.  See Larry Dignan’s post on this. I’ll post separately about Workdays Technology Summit.
• Quote and Proposal, and Marketing Automation: Infor, the third largest ERP vendor after SAP and Oracle will offer a 360-degree view of key processes and data such as invoice, contacts, quotes, shipments, receivables, orders, and RMAs across the enterprise. Chatter will turn these into social objects to foster collaboration.
• Travel and Expense Management: Concur Technologies will pipe both Concur and TripIt data into Chatter for both updates and collaboration/coordination between teams on the same trip. Brian Jackson at PC Advisor has the details.
• Supply Chain: Kenandy, the new startup shepherd by Sandra Kurtzig and backed by Ray Lane, will build a collaborative supply chain on the force.com platform and use Chatter to inject collaboration. I’m really big on this topic. Dean Takahashi at Venture Beat had more and Frank Scavo shares seasoned insight, here.
• Finally, Marc Benioff touched on two announcements that have really big implications on gaining traction. First, the Data Residency Option (DRO) connects the cloud to data centers behind the fire wall. Second, Chatter not only integrates with SharePoint but also allows a feed to even live on MOSS. This hybrid connectivity makes the cloud far more palatable for a lot of companies who want to selectively leverage the cloud. Our work on the ground on blending process and collaboration absolutely confirms this need.

The interesting thing is Salesforce.com calls all of this “Social Enterprise” which can sound just as evangelical and nebulous as a good chunk of enterprise 2.0 and social business fare. But beyond marketing air cover, this is a move towards offering get work done systems that can enhance the quality of repeatable process on one hand and on the other, rescue the wild west world of exception handing that plagues our daily work. Chatter now stands to offer one of the most compelling pathways to 21st century collaboration.

From my vantage point, Salesforce.com will still need to keep an eye on the following:

• Salesforce.com will have to live up to this gigantic endorsement it just received from the ISV community. As these partners work on client deployments, the level of required handholding on getting collaboration right will be significant. As important, there is zero room for error with Chatter’s usability, its ability to scale collaboration (very different from registered users), its functional offering, security, and its filtering capabilities. Failing this, these self sufficient ISVs can easily jump ship (this is the cloud, after all).
• For me, the most critical missing element in the Chatter discussion was that Chatter usage was largely uni directional. In other words, pipe data and events into the stream. Chatter needs to showcase the writing back to systems of record to close the activity loop if it wants to truly become the workbench.  And from a managerial stand point, social analytics need to flow back to BI systems as well.
• Whilst the keynote stage showed forward thinking executives from Burberry and BMC talking about the social enterprise, there are as many CEOs who will find the social enterprise message a tad bit racy. To his credit, Marc Benioff did recognize in later meetings that this can’t be overlooked. The Sales teams will have to make this translation from hope to the needed elbow grease, effectively.
• Last year’s message was of the inspirational kind. This year could have been more of the perspiration variety that illustrates operational and financial results from successfully embracing collaborative ways of work. I wished we had some hard hitting facts on the keynote stage that showed hard results: more wining products in the market, lower support costs, agility, etc.).
• I was really glad to see Radian6 and Jigsaw data inside CRM. Speaking with folks such as Tristan Bishop from Symantec and Chris James from GNC, it was clear that R6 is being used to solve big call center and product development challenges. But the Radian6 magic could have been far more central to responding to the larger challenge of unified customer touch point integration.
• Salesforce.com is certainly not the only one to bring process collaboration to organizations. Jive Software has proven to be a juggernaut in the space and its Appstore offers an ecosystem as well. Yammer has a deal with NetSuite and integrates with Salesforce.com. Newcomer Tibbr from TIBCO offers by-directional interaction between activity streams and ERP Systems that is really promising. And many more, including Oracle who is working on socializing BPM and CMS content. The customer still has choice.

To summarize….

All up – if you’ve read this blog before, you know why this is closer to my strand of collaboration. The giant discuss button that should have always been sandwiched between the submit and cancel buttons in enterprise systems is finally looking like its going to go mainstream. That will have a profound impact on our ability to source the best insight at every stage of a process or activity. And if done right, will significantly improve the accuracy of what we eventually input into our systems of record. Better data quality for those managers relying on inputs and better analytics for those trying to make sense of data to steer the business.

ZDNet’s Dennis Howlett made the money shot on Twitter (presumably after digesting the ERP cloud announcements of the week) which I think encapsulates the opportunity for Salesforce.com:

@dahowlett: Anyone who writes off ANY business app in the cloud as ‘not happening’ is plain <expletive> mad.

To every enterprise CEO and those forward thinking CIO’s, Dreamforce and the associated ISV announcements illustrated a beautiful future that’s not so distant for those organizations who want to play, and is characterized by this:

• All your systems of record apps can in principle live in the cloud, if it makes sense for your business.
• The pipes are being laid to enable process and decisive collaboration in cloud based systems from the get go. So if employees are getting trained on Infor or Workday when their CIO makes the switch, collaboration know-how on how to improve business activity will be an integrated part of this cut over.
• With native BRO and SharePoint connectors and a significant investment in systems integrator Appirio, a hybrid connectivity world is most certainly needed and available to hand hold those not fully converted.
• And finally, that competitive advantage will not come from customizing commodity business processes apps or from, in my mind, questionable claims of better economics from cloud based solutions. Rather, it will come from superior user experiences, a balance between structured and collaborative work, device ubiquity, and significantly better speed of business execution that cloud based systems are extremely well positioned to accommodate.

Comments rolling in on Google Plus as well, here.

Device ubiquity across home and work is the new item on the CIO’s to do list.

Interesting stat in The Telegraph about how employees are more productive if they use their own gadgets:

According to a YouGov survey, businesses who let employees use their own technology see productivity increases of up to 30 per cent.

That makes it more important than ever that technology is as good for the home as it is for the office – with 45 per cent of businesses already allowing employees to use their own computer equipment, the number of reasons to put up with poor kit are diminishing. […] in 50 per cent of cases, a personal device offers greater functionality or flexibility than the one provided by the employer.

Single-purpose devices are looking a lot less attractive. In the consumer space:

• iPads for educational games are more practical than say a LeapFrog device.
• Tablets serve as dual purpose in-car entertainment consoles.
• Less proven but iPad Kindle app vs. the Kindle itself. Personally, I wont carry 2 devices and would ‘deal’ with the sub optimal experience for convenience sake.

It’s important to baseline todays consumer experience that we’ve all come to expect. Think Amazon’s mobile barcode scanner for a price check when you’re in a retail store. Or Evernote’s voice transcriber. Or using your iPhone as a tile rack when you play Scrabble on an iPad. Or Plants vs. Zombies, the tablet game my kid is hooked on to (damn you, thank you Josh Moore).  The Jetsons have in fact arrived.

On to the Enterprise….

Single purpose devices for work vs. play are starting to make less sense as well.  But for CIOs, deciding whether to relinquish control of devices has more to it than just ignoring Dell or Apple’s sales call.

Beyond governance (see Maribel Lopez’ post) and structural/economic issues (see Dennis Howlett’s post) with the enterprise mobile subset, we risk tripping over the following two cinderblocks:

Klunk

Consumer device proliferation has far exceeded the pace of enterprise software design for the most part and so, expect the opposite problem where its our software that can’t handle our hardware. Using our personal hardware is really going to expose how terrible our interfaces are in the enterprise. Just think about the devices you use in your personal lives and imagine double clicking on the iPad button to toggle between say Evernote and your kludgy ERP Expense Workflow. The contrast is blinding.   And because the presentation layer is still so deeply hard wired into the back end with limited OR nonexistent access to a presentation layer APIs (think Twitter.com vs. Seesmic or Hootsuite), I shudder to think of trying to maneuver most ERP financials or even a tangled SharePoint web part on a 2011 era device.

Getting Work Done

This is far more critical. Historically, enterprise software has focused on a) Executive benefit and b) Manager benefit. This translated to: Get the right input forms and workflows in place with a database at the backend so you can control execution and monitor progress.

But we’ve ignored a third wheel and that’s helping employees, customers and partners get-work-done, by focusing on their needs.

No doubt there’s newer, approachable technology being built these days, often powered by cloud computing. But we’re getting somewhat hypnotized by this elegantly designed enterprise software just because it looks and feels warmer than the klunkware we’ve been subjected to over the years.  And there’s a good chance were forgetting to consider whether the same degree of end user utility we’ve come to expect from our consumer software is in fact available in our work software.

As you look deeper, its pretty easy to spot enterprise software that has gone so far as to provide compelling interfaces but only far enough to get you to do more of what traditional software did – fill form based screens for executives and middle managers. Contrast that with those who truly re-think the business activity instead of, say, just force fitting a web app to a mobile browser. In many cases, the get-work-done factor for employee/customer/partner hasn’t really been addressed in a meaningful way. That comes from a) re-thinking the process or activity from the end users perspective, b) a more balanced approach to catering to the needs of managers, executives and end users and c) leveraging state of the art hardware and software design innovation to make it happen.

The business of collaboration and at a meta level, “the future of work”, often puts us squarely in the midst of these discussions as collaboration and systems of engagement are often seen as but one important way to deliver technology and working environments that account for the “get work done” factor for end users. But consider the broader innovation kitchen sink that impacts people centric software design: device capabilities, open APIs, app stores, in-memory processing, location awareness and browser technology advancements.  Get-work-done capabilities emanates from carefully combining these advancements for the benefit of the end user. In the enterprise context, that’s the employee, the customer and the partner. All in an effort to do more and with better accuracy and at faster throughput.

We often take it for granted but it is this culminated magic that we experience when we fire up our personal devices and use software designed for them. And that’s a high bar to keep front and center, as we start to use work software on our own devices.

A great example of get-work-done software is Expensify, an app that ties mobile photos of receipts to line items on your credit card statement to generate expense reports in minutes (H/T Jeff Nolan). Echosign for speedy contract execution is yet another. And DoubleDutch is coming at the mobile enterprise with a suite of get-work-done’ offerings. And on and on.

Whats important to note is that increasingly, customers expect get-work-done facilities not only from stand alone social software vendors or start ups. But because the benefit comes from so much more than just collaboration or ‘social’, customers expect to see it from their CRM and HR and even ERP vendors.

The technology vendor conference/summit season kicks off in a few weeks and around this time of the year, I have software on my mind. I’ve already had the chance to see how Oracle and many of the social software vendors are treating this. More such opportunities to come in the next few weeks, starting with Workday and Salesforce.com.  I’ll follow up on this post with what I’ve learnt in early September.

This third wheel in the enterprise software stack that delivers on the get-work-done promise is going to be the most compelling benefit that your organizations realize as you democratize the value of your technology investments beyond just the bean counters, LOB heads and line managers, and on to the do-ers.  Re-balancing the value of enterprise software amongst all three constituencies will not only improve uptake of your purchased technology (a chronic problem in many organizations ) but will also significantly improve accuracy of numbers reported upstream.  And so I’ll reluctantly extend my least favorite phrase in the world and call this a ‘win/win/win’ for all stakeholders concerned.

Comments rolling in on Google +, here.

About this time last year, I threw out a prediction that in 2010 Telcos will get into the Enterprise 2.0 business by bundling social software solutions for the SMB space. In December of 2009, I said:

Telcos will start looking at picking up affordable SaaS Enterprise 2.0 suites. Why? As mindshare starts to get split between Email and Microblogging/Activity streams, telcos and CSPs that offer white label business email hosting for the SMB market will see these as a natural extension. In the SMB market, standalone solutions are key to allow for simple, cheap distribution directly as well as via small reseller partners that don’t want service and customization headaches. E2.0 SaaS offerings meet those criteria. In addition they offer ready plug ins into other popular SMB apps such as SalesForce for those that want integration.

That could mean a huge buyer market outside of the traditional enterprise players who seem to prefer build as opposed to buy scenarios (Salesforce Chatter, TIBCO Tibbr, SharePoint 2010, SAP Constellation, etc).

If I’m somewhat correct, expect the likes of British Telecom, Singtel and Comcast etc jump in. If I’m very right and my commoditization assessment from last year holds true, we’ll see more players such as RackSpace and XO communications start to pay attention as well.

Fast forward to November and it looks like I was on target albeit by the skin of my teeth. Cisco Systems, the makers of Cisco Quad, announced a hosted SMB solution for their existing Telco channel to distribute. Says Murali Sitaram, VP at Cisco who oversees the collaboration business:

"We think our telecom partners over time will have the opportunity to deliver full services using our products." Murali Sitaram, the Cisco vice president in charge of Quad, told me in a recent interview. "So [that can include] cloud-based, or private cloud based or hosted services for our customers, using the range of UC and collaboration components we have."

Where I expected that a telco will have made an acquisition by now, this move by Cisco puts the products in the hands of Telcos to resell. Don’t be surprised if this triggers a few large telcos to acquire social software technology and keep the entire spread. Most of what an SMB requires is basic social software functionality and most likely, that can be attained at a commodity price. Whilst we’ve seen over and over again that larger companies continue to chose the build over buy route (Novell, NetSuite and Epicor for example) when it comes to social software solutions, there is an argument to be made for the IP that’s gone into building scalable and purpose driven experiences by the more mature start ups (relatively speaking).

Looking at 2011….

It’s only November but since Starbucks in the US has already started selling coffee in red and green paper cups (gulp), I’ll take the liberty of penning a 2011 prediction that I’ve already stated to many industry insiders:

Expect Intuit/its’ competitors to make a SaaS-based social software acquisition (such as Yammer, Basecamp or Socialcast) or enter the business organically. Intuit’s core competency in my view is less about its’ ability to sell hosted business process services but it’s close relationship with a gynormous SMB base, thanks in part to its amazing community building efforts. They’re way ahead of the curve that I laid out here over the summer. And tacking on collaboration for an additional $1-$3 a month looks like a slam dunk way to own employee engagement  – a capability that’s an extremely fragmented or even down right neglected system-of-record in the SMB software stack.

Based on what were seeing in the market in our work with large-co buyers that are looking to execute social software enabled business programs, I see a few more industry shifts coming to market that buyers and sellers need to get ready for. But this was worth an open discussion right about now.

Enterprise social software is in for a wild ride in 2011 as large companies enter the market and smaller ones alter their focus to solving known business and process inefficiencies. As a result of this, expect the sell-side to get very very noisy with their marketing.

As someone who cut his teeth in the traditional strategy consulting business, SWAGs (‘strategic wild ass guess’) were common back then. Thankfully (hopefully?) we all get better with age by adding experience and logic to what we expect to see coming down the pike : – )

For research on market moves as you make/validate critical business directional decisions and technology choices, get in touch.