The difficulty in selling analytics is that it represents an existential threat to various fiefdoms, managers, and experts throughout the enterprise.
Take database marketing, an obvious candidate for the application of analytics. Somewhere in every such company there is a room full of "data base jocks" who compose magnificent SQL statements to extract just the right people for a specific mailing. Now here you come to sell them what amounts to a 'bot' that will not only do their jobs faster, but better. Well, guess what. They will oppose you at every turn, did up horror stories about other analytics deployments, and so on.
Sales forecasting is another obvious application. Except that here you are encroaching on the turf of the Sales VP, who uses the forecast to manipulate which products get built and which don't. He doesn't like your analytics either.
Obviously, analytics projects do happen, they do get sold, and many of them are quite successful. But selling them is a long, slow, slog through corporate mud.
Hewlett-Packard CEO Leo Apotheker laid out a master plan this week that had a heavy dose of cloudspeak, WebOS and software. How credible is the plan?
Now that a few days have gone by, it’s worth doing a credibility check on the strategy and assess whether HP has the chops to turn its 30,000 foot view into real execution.
On Sunday, I previewed the HP meeting. The hot topics going into the meeting were:
- Software.
- Services.
- WebOS.
- Innovation.
- The PC business and Apple envy.
Following the meeting it’s worth expanding that list by one topic to include cloud computing.
The overall message from the HP meeting boils down to the following:
- HP intends to be a cloud platform and SaaS player.
- The company has a lot of software intellectual property that hasn’t bubbled up to become products.
- Apotheker thinks HP can be an analytics player.
- HP is going to force feed WebOS with its distribution.
- The company still values its consumer business and doesn’t intend to be “a junior player” in the tablet market.
Now for the reality check. Following HP’s meeting and all the cloud chatter there were two responses from observers. The skeptical crowd said that HP was cloudwashing the same old stack it has been trying to sell. As for HP’s plans to become an app market for consumer and enterprise apps, critics said that any freshly minted MBA could have spun Apotheker’s strategy.
The folks who were more constructive about HP said that the company was delivering a broad strategy and could fill in details later. Apotheker said that HP’s cloud strategy—including an app market launch—would become more evident in 2011 and 2012. These observers also thought HP could become a credible cloud platform provider.
Here’s a look at the big issues for HP and whether the company’s strategy day clarified anything.
Software. Going into the HP Summit it was clear that the company would talk about building and buying a software business. Analysts were expecting a mix of open source and SaaS.
Instead, HP talked a lot about analytics. “Analytics is a huge space that is poorly served today,” said Apotheker. After his keynote and Q&A session, Apotheker told me HP would attack analytics via SaaS, on-premise and appliances. The timeline: 12 months. Apotheker noted that a host of HPers spend their days on analytics.
More importantly, HP didn’t talk about reinventing the wheel. HP has no interest in competing with Oracle and SAP. The Oracle relationship will revolve around coopetition. Apotheker hinted that SAP and HP will become tighter. That outcome isn’t much of a surprise since HP now has a bevy of SAP veterans—including Apotheker—running around the executive suite. Related: HP to go software shopping: Here’s the potential hit list
Cowen analyst Peter Goldmacher said:
From the perspective of a software investor, HP has decided to leave the high end of the enterprise to IBM and Oracle in favor of a broad based platform strategy designed to create a variety of low cost cloud computing alternatives focused on connectivity to a myriad of end points including PCs, mobile devices and printers. While the company intends to continue to compete aggressively at the high end of the server market, it explicitly stated it has no intention of owning transactional apps or purchasing legacy software franchises. This comment is sure to dampen much of the take out discussion in Enterprise Software. We believe HP’s platform will appeal to the broadest spectrum of users and use cases possible. While going after the low end user will open up new markets, the creation of a low cost “build/test/deploy” platform with enterprise chops will definitely matter to Oracle and IBM over time. Execution is a lot harder than vision, but the vision is compelling.
Credibility check: HP’s software plans were credible and logical. HP outlined a high level software vision that made sense because it didn’t involve disrupting existing software giants. In addition, it’s quite believable that HP has software intellectual property that hasn’t been turned into products. The analytics execution remains to be seen, but the vision works.
