Simple Is The New Cool

We've all heard it: "simple is the new cool".  It's true.

We certainly see it in the UX world.  Simple designs for human interaction.  Tell me what I need to do, how to do it, and make it easy.  If I only had a dollar for every time I heard that mantra... And when we consider the market moving to the cloud, UX is the major differentiation - and simple is carrying the day every day.

That last paragraph?  Double-down on it for mobile.

And we see it in system architecture as well.  Big emphasis on unraveling institutional spaghetti bowls of interfaces, services and business processes in favor of simple, straight-forward enterprise architectures.

Packaged enterprise applications?  Sure.  How many times over the past five years have we heard and seen examples of "reconsider your customizations"?

And let's not forget about embedded analytics that blur the line between business intelligence and transactional reporting.  We're making it simpler to identify and understand the information we need, rather than getting wrapped around the axle about how to classify the source of that information.

Everywhere you look in the enterprise applications world these days, it's all about simplification.  Simple is the new cool.

So how do you start with simple?  You start with a strong focus on the problem you're trying to solve.  What are you making better?  And, by the way, problems like "our company needs to sell more software/services to end users"?  Not the type of problem I have in mind here.  Think about a warehouse working taking inventory.  A college freshman attempting to register.  An AP specialist attempting to identify and analyze payables trends.  Those are the types of problems you want to solve.  Those are the types of situations you want to make better.

Get focused.  Simple is the new cool.

The Impact of SaaS - The Times They Are A-Changin'

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.
            -Fron Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'

It was my good fortune to have telecons last week with three different Fortune 500 CIOs.  Big companies.  You would know them if I named them, although I won't do so out of respect for their privacy.  One from brick-and-mortar retail, one from engineering services, and one from health care.  A few observations from those conversations:

• Each of those CIOs sought advice on one particular idea:  driving down the cost of in-house IT by moving from on-premise packaged Enterprise Applications to cloud applications, signing up for a SaaS model.  
• All three of those CIOs were actually considering switching products (and in one case, vendors) with the intent of reducing in-house IT costs.  And all three were doing so in response to pressure from CFOs and CEOs.  
• Two of the three were willing to scrap all their customizations.  The third was curious about the ability of customize with SaaS (I pointed out that both Oracle and Workday allowed for customizations in a SaaS environment).  
• All admitted to data security concerns, but all three found that the need to reduce costs trumped any security concerns.  One of the CIOs indicated that her enterprise had already done the liability analysis and figured they could pay for any foreseeable cost from a security breach with the savings from the first 24 months after switching to SaaS.  And they are all willing to live with scrutiny from the US Government (under the Patriot Act) in exchange for the cost reduction.

For all three of these companies, IT is a cost center.  It's not a profit generator nor it's not a comparative advantage; it's simply the cost of doing business in today's world.  So, from a "follow the money" standpoint, I'd have to say that all three of these CIOs are spot on with their analysis.  Maintenance, infrastructure, support costs, upgrading, license fees…all those costs and more simply "go away" in return for a recurring subscription fee.

Now I've heard this spiel before.  So have you.  Nothing new.  What struck me was that, in three unrelated encounters, CIOs of major customers were willing to sacrifice the unique elements of  their business processes as well as privacy and security considerations in order to cut in-house IT costs.  And they saw SaaS as the most expedient path to cutting those costs.

I suspect we'll see more and more Enterprise Application customers moving to SaaS as they begin to recognize the short-term cost savings.  And, as John Maynard Keynes pointed out, "in the long run, we're all dead."  A bit of a dark perspective, but nevertheless true.  It's the short-run that matters these days.

One other thing:  all three of these CIOs had also figured out that they had squeezed about all the benefits they possibly could out of automating their business operations - they'd reached the point of diminishing returns.  Each of them thought (and I tend to agree) that the big benefits remaining to be realized rested with getting information out of their data.  They're anticipating that moving to SaaS will free up more of their operating budgets to focus on delivering that information.

The times, they are a-changin'.

EiS at Collaborate 13

With Collaborate 13 on the near horizon, I'm hearing quite a bit of "Hey Floyd, what's EiS doing at Collab 13?"...the short answer is that we have a pretty significant presence at the conference.  Here's the long answer:

Sessions

Da Booth

Hey, you can't be an Oracle Partner and not have a booth at a conference, right?  So, we have a booth.  I'll even be hanging out there a bit myself.  So, if you want to see some cool reporting and BI products to compliment Oracle products...including the new Splash BI...come by and see us in Booth #1121.  We'll have the well-known Treasure Chest going as well as a drawing for an iPad 3.  And, besides all that, we can talk at "da booth".  Speaking of having a conversation...if you mention @eistechnologies in a tweet, we'll give you a free two-day reporting assessment.

See ya'all in Denver.

Collaborate 13 Teaser

Those of you who follow either this blog or my Twitter account (@fteter) know that I've been up to my eyeballs in new product development over the past three or four months.  You know that I've been using ADF Essentials in building that product.  You also know that my team at EiS Technologies is planning to roll out the new product on a Controlled Availability Release basis at Collaborate 13.

A few notes on the overall experience:

•  ADF Essentials has not only performed better than advertised, it's changed our development team's thinking about how applications are developed.
• Thanks to ADF Essentials, we've built this product from scratch in under four months.
• The ADF Design Patterns, the ADF Rich Client User Interface Guidelines and the UX Direct tools were huge enablers in increasing productivity and cutting development cycle time.

Time for me to shut up now and let the product speak for itself.  Here is a landing page screen shot from our latest iteration.

Take a look.  Zoom in. Blow up the screen shot.  Leave first impressions in the comments.