Slashdot Mirror
So, HP, What Exactly Are You Trying To Sell Us?
billtom writes "There's an article over at c|net news where the normally fawning technology business press actually takes an HP VP to task for the extremely vague statements that usually surround enterprise software 'products.' With some gems like 'That could be boilerplate applying to any company,' and 'But again, how does that differ from what's been around?' and 'But hasn't that always been the goal?'" I'd like to see Charles Cooper interview whoever came up with .Net, too.
Every software company is guilty of this. A program that does general ledger and billing sounds much sexier when called a "best-of-breed integrated calculation solution, designed to drive your business into the 21st century and beyond." And a server-monitoring tool sounds better when you call it a "proactive fault-finding and troubleshooting environment, making your data center fully autonomic and self-healing."
It's kind of wierd for the press to actually start asking hard questions. Think tanks like Gartner et al live and die by techno-hype. The latest thing going around in CIO-land is Utility Computing, so we'll see what comes of that.
The slashdot article makes it sound pretty bad, and admittedly c|net doesn't make it look great (honestly I thought this was a case of a bad interviewer, not a good one). However, this is not really that bad.
AE is more just a term to associate with a different way of looking at the enterprise. While, it is not terribly different from what went on before, it is an evolutionary change. As the HP VP says, it's not a product or a technology, just a way of looking at using technology in an Enterprise.
I can tell you in the Enterprise space 10 years ago, folks used to get excited about being able to add new products to their IT systems within 6 months (I kid you not). The notion of AE is that it should be measured in days. I'm sure some day it'll be down to hours or even minutes.
Traditional Enterprise systems were increadibly static and rigid, and over time they are evolving to be much more dynamic and malleable. While this is nothing new to tech folks like us, it's a bit of a wake up call to the business folks who are just getting used to implications of how to mix business and IT based on how things were 5 years ago.
Again as the VP says, it's not that you can't work towards AE without HP. You can go to anybody for it. His claims about HP's uniqueness are another story (let's face it, all that can be unique when you're talking about providing expertise to execute on an abstract busines strategy is the brand name, and the trust/confidence associated with it).
So yeah, on one hand it is marketing BS, but on the other hand you need a marketing message in order to communicate to business folks how IT capabilities have evolved and how they can go beyond the existing set of limitations they have come to expect of IT.
sigs are a waste of space
The VP's real problem is her attitude to information that suggests potential customers don't understand what the hell their AE angle is supposed to be about. When prompted that no customers understood Carly's presentation, she said she thought the customers were wrong and that she thought it was very clear.
While kissing the boss's ass is usually a good thing, it doesn't matter how clear you think something is - if the customers don't understand it, it's NOT CLEAR. And that's the bottom line.
The interviewer was a good litmus for that too. He is (presumably) somewhat well versed in IT, had the benefit of asking follow-up questions, and still couldn't figure out what the hell HP is doing. Not good for HP.
Really, the HP crowd give the impression that they've talked this up so much between each other that it must be gold. Sounds like some serious groupthink. They think they've got this great operation defined by killer buzzwords, we think they're an IBM knockoff with a bad PR campaign.
If you ask me, it sounds like .Net all over again. What the hell was .Net? I still don't know. They need to learn from IBM - clearly explained yet funny commercials. IBM's commercials tell me their software puts customer data together. HP's tell me that vigilante plus-signs put bad guys in jail. How? I dunno.
And that's a problem for HP.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
You ought to be modded +5 Insightful on that one. As a professional developer, I'm sick of PHB's buying into the white-shoed-salesman jargon. At JPMorgan Chase, my PHB bought a $200,000 "system" from Cisco for handling customer service team e-mails. When it failed miserably, I and another developer wrote an SMTP front end in a matter of weeks (our time cost JMPC $7200) and it had more features.
Our manager asked why we didn't mention we could do that before, which shocked me. My response was that he never mentioned this new "system" until it was already paid for. We were his programmers, and this was a programming issue. In the future he should consider talking to his programmers before he spent massive sums on ideas.
He's since been fired.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
I hate to spring to the defense of Big Corporations, but it's really not that hard to interpret Marketsp'aek positively:
:)
"I define AE as a business strategy for customers who want to respond in real time to changes affecting their business."
My translation: AE is (an expensive product which helps companies setup) a business strategy under which trends trigger actions. The use of 'business strategy' sounds meaningless, but it's actually two words which imply two paragraphs. 'Strategy' in this case is an overloaded term referring to a collection of tools, policies, and proceedures.
The use of 'real time' in business means something very different from its meaning in computer science. It means 'today' instead of 'eventually'. I work for a large media company with an animal for a mascot, and it takes us years to respond to changes in the marketplace. Most of our innertia is rooted in size, conservative management, and fear of risk. However, if we had a system of automation which identified potentially interesting changes in the marketplace, especially in merchandising, it could save us a lot of money.
For example, how much should we invest in online sales, and how much in more traditional sales? We make money from both, now, so it's a very serious question. A missed sale is a lost sale, but there's no point in trying to extract blood from a turnip. We have people who try to figure out where the tastiest blood is, but they are limited by their tools and proceedures. This AE might actually be just the thing they need.
I don't know if AE is any good, or if it's what it claims to be, but I do know that marketing speak CAN have a real meaning in a marketing context. When we geeks ridicule the suits for talking gibberish, it's no better than when they ridicule us for our acronyms, l33t, tech talk and other not-quite-english that we use. "We aggregate packet-based transactions, over-selling a large pipe to small nodes who could collectively saturate that pipe, but in practice don't" would mean nothing to a marketing type, but to an ISP sysadmin it's her raison d'etre.
If we hope to make any progress in the things that really matter (digital freedom), we need to learn to communicate with these people. Their protocols may be bad, but it works for them, and marketing types don't have firmware upgrades, so we need to learn to speak their protocols if we hope to route any traffic through them, or to comandeer them for our noble purposes.