• Added 35 new clients, the top 10 clients grew 5.9%.
• Revenue increase sequentially, volumes increased sequentially, pricing stable, utilization improved.
• Net increase in employees this quarter.
• Expect the budgets to be flat next year
• Better traction in BFSI, retail, and energy and utilities.
• Better traction in business process management, infrastructure management and in system integration.
• Consulting and package implementation has come down marginally this quarter.
• US has gone up and Europe has marginally come down.
• Pricing stable. It increased by 0.4%, but in terms of constant currency, it declined by 1.1%.
• For the next two quarters, the upper end of the guidance assumes 1% revenue growth.

More details are here.

Source: Bespoke Investment Group

Andrew McAfee, the Harvard professor who coined the term "Enterprise 2.0" writes about the positive impact of social media technologies on the Intelligence community. Andrew makes a case that while massive computing power continues to be important, rich social connections between people in the intelligence community would enable better leverage of human pattern recognition.

I feel these two aspects are interdependent and self reinforcing. Picture this: Possibly, hundreds of terabytes of raw data flows into the US intelligence system on a daily basis. Thousands of "agents", both human and machine are responsible for the data. The data is then sliced and diced by super computers and the "intelligence" is dished out to analysts.

Why not enrich the data "socially" at the source and at the edges of massive computing? I don't for a minute imply that this would make computers any more human that they are. But the intelligence that comes out of the data would have more social context that would reinforce human pattern recognition. The intelligence could be further massaged at the edge to blend in with Ent 2.0 networks within the intelligence community. The results of human analysts collaborating over social networks could further be fed back in to the computers and create a virtuous cycle.

Another interesting application could be the area of psych ops. The old fashioned way is to drop pictures of a 5000 pound bomb with Bin Laden's face on it and scare people. The Ent 2.0 is to leverage the natural trust and high influence social networks have to influence and shape young people in vulnerable communities and prevent them from becoming prey to the bad guys.

What do you think ?

The Cloud computing market place is getting Cloudier by the day. Everyone uses the word "Cloud" and in many different ways. I was looking for a neat taxonomy of everything that's out there and stumbled on Danny Goodall's excellent presentation. If you need a view from 30000 ft look no further.

IBM downgraded on limited revenue growth potential. Elephant has stopped dancing ?

Another $100M for twitter. Anaytics dashboard? Hmm.

US tech industry lost 115K jobs in H1. Did someone say recovery?

Facebook and the enterprise. Great post by JP.

Sadagopan on the changing face of enterprise software.

I missed a breakfast meeting today. The first time that has happened. Breakfasts usually start at 8 am and this one got pushed by one half hour. I timed it the usual way but hit the 8 am rush which I usually avoid. Realizing that I will be late, I called and left a voice message. The message stayed where I left it and my date waited a few minutes and left. I sent out an apology and rescheduled the meeting. If there was a way to get voice messages in email we might have still had an abbreviated meeting.

Can't wait for unified communications to become a day to day reality!  

Service Now.com has a neat SaaS model for IT service management. According to the website they provide the following applications in a subscription model:

 •  Incident Management
 •  Problem Management
 •  Change Management
 •  Release Management
 •  Configuration Management (CMDB)
 •  Request Management
 •  Service Catalog
 •  Knowledge Management
 •  Service Level Management
 •  Asset Portfolio and Contract Management
 •  Project Management
 •  Discovery (optional, additional charge) 

They have a full demo that does not require registration. Try it out!

Frank Scavo has a nice post on the downsides of vendor consolidation in the enterprise software space. His arguments are centered around vendor lock in and he writes:

• "Consolidate to a single vendor for worldwide financials, but standardize operational systems on another vendor's platform. Always leave the option open to replace one with the other.
• Consolidate to a single vendor for centralized CRM and order management, while allowing one or two different vendors to provide operational systems at the plant level, perhaps one for large plants and one for small plants.
• Revive a best of breed approach. Leave HR, asset management, and other non-core systems outside the scope of the primary vendor's implementation.
• Test vendors' touted SOA capabilities to build composite applications. If these capabilities really are what vendors say they are, they ought to allow "seamless integration" with third party applications."

Very true.

What of software services ? Vendor consolidation is low hanging fruit for both vendor and client.
The classic approach is to get a offshoring biggie to come in and clean house. Lock in is not such a big issue. Offshoring and process efficiencies that come with consolidation are big wins. But there are things to watch out for. Here are a few:

    - Keep the larger sourcing picture in mind : There are things that the offshore model is simply not suited for. Niche skill areas, choppy demand that fluctuates very frequently and onshore staff augmentation are a few things that come to mind. It's better to consolidate such requirements and give it to one local vendor - rather than to an offshore player.
    - Understand where your star contractors figure :  Great performance, good cultural fit, strong skill sets, loyal to your organization BUT offshorable. Vendor consolidation might be a good time to really examine the type of work these loyal stars are doing. Do they understand your business? Do they really have strategic value? Have they ended up managing the business relationship? If the answer is yes, consider hiring them rather than firing and replacing with an offshore provider. But think twice if you want these stars to continue to be domestic contractors and expect them to work with new resources from the offshore provider. The inherent conflict of interest could jeopardize your budding offshore relationship.
     - Closely examine productivity claims: It's easy to show improvement when your nose is in the dirt. Consider today's economy. People seem to be thrilled just because we are improving. If you are at an 80 year bottom the only way is up! Productivity norms of the current team of contractors should be base lined and the offshore provider should go up against this baseline. Also consider the fact that offshore work hours are usually longer than those of your local contractors. Apart from improvement, benchmark the norms against best in class.
      -Sign short term contracts with rewards and penalites: Vendors might give you an overall better deal if sign up a long term, 5 year contract at the outset. Guess what? You'll get an even better deal if you sign up for a year and then renew. Throw in six monthly reward and penalties and the deal becomes even sweeter.

 Financial times : " Cloud computing is threatening the business model of the Indian IT outsourcing ….". As if we needed one more negative story with all the bad news about the economy. There are two sides to this cloud thing. Let's do a reality check.

- Hit on the package implementation business : SAP goes the single instance multi tenant way. Nobody spends millions doing SAP implementations and a handful of administrators configure a single instance for many customers. This will surely kill the customization revenue that outsourcers enjoy. Reality check - The "On demand" buzz is really aimed at expanding the market to small and medium sized businesses. Here's a snippet from the SAP website " SAP Business ByDesign is fully integrated business management software designed for midsize companies or small businesses that want the benefits of large-scale business applications without the need for a large IT infrastructure. It enables preconfigured process best practices for managing financials, customer relationships, human resources, projects, procurement, and the supply chain. SAP takes care of installation, maintenance, and upgrades – so you can focus on your business, not on IT."

Two things stand out : a).Midsize and small businesses and b). Preconfigured processes. I have in the past blogged about the focus Indian outsourcers have on large clients. In fact >70% of the revenues come from clients that contribute >$10M to revenues. Surely not SMB's. Secondly, "preconfigured"  business processes imply a certain level of commoditization. The availability of a "preconfigured" SAAS alternative for a business process does not change the reasons that made you spend many millions customizing it before the SAAS alternative came along. SAAS is good for the commodity processes but not for something that is your secret sauce. Indian outsourcers make money by helping large customers with complex package customizations and that market is not getting "SAASified".

-Hit on the maintenance revenue stream: Before Clouds you'd have 10 teams of 10 people each maintaining 10 apps for 10 customers. If these 10 customers were to sign up for one Cloud based solution, you'd have 1 team of 20 people maintaining one instance for these 10 customers. Very plausible for commodity processes like email, but what about the systems integration revenue for integrating the cloud based app to what's in house ? Cloud can give offshore vendors a fresh revenue stream through systems integration.

-Private Clouds: If the secret sauce business processes need to get a cloud fillip, most large enterprises would prefer a private cloud. Outsourcers like Wipro Technologies with data centers in the US and deep existing relationships are ideally positioned to leverage the private cloud opportunity. This increases the value of the outsourcing relationship.

Full disclosure: I am an employee of Wipro Technologies.