Managing Paper in the Enterprise

Today, we observe the World Paper-Free Day to remind ourselves that we all are on a mission to get rid of the paper waste in the enterprise. I am a strong proponent of reducing the use of paper, even if I sometimes struggle. I read most of my books and magazines on my iPad, I use tools such as Evernote to take notes, and I have pretty much never any cash on me. If you look around my office, you’d probably score me as an 8 out of 10 on being paper-free except for my bookcase full of books. I really like books...

Many of our customers, however, struggle going paper-free. Indeed, flipping the switch from one day to another might be a little daunting. In reality, this transition has to be made easy to be realistic - this is more often a paper evolution than a revolution. That reminds me of some of the scenarios where our customers manage paper in the enterprise today:

1. Inbound
This is the most obvious situation where our customers deal with paper. This is the front-line in the war on paper. Many of our customers still receive paper-based information via snail mail and fax. They use our capture software to scan the paper documents right in the mailroom and to automatically extract as much information out of the scans as possible via optical character recognition (OCR) and data extraction which recognizes important data in the document (i.e. address, date, PO number etc.) to extract the metadata. Same thing happens with faxes that are captured using our fax software where the same OCR technique can be applied.

2. Outbound
At the tail end of many business processes is a new piece of content that has been produced to communicate to the stakeholders. This communication comes in two forms:

- Publishing - which is a form of communication using the same content asset(s) for a given target audience (more than one person). Publishing can occur online, on a portal, via mobile devices, email, etc. but it can also happen using paper - for example as a book or a marketing brochure.

- Customer Communication Management (also known as Output Management) which is a communication that has been personalized for a single individual. An example of such communication can be a utility bill which contains data about your monthly charges but it can also include useful, personalized tips on how to lower your next bill. This type of communication can again occur via a multi-channel delivery, one of which is often paper.

3. Physical Records
Managing records involves often the capability to manage physical records as well. The physical records - usually pieces of paper, but sometimes also objects such as police evidence - need to be kept the same way as electronic records, except that they don’t fit into a digital content repository. With physical records, the cost of storage is a major issue and records disposition usually means freeing up physical space on a shelf in a warehouse where those boxes of physical records are stored. The physical warehouse space is a major cost factor and many customers are approaching us today with projects to convert existing physical records stores into electronic records en masse.

4. Paper Processes
Yes, I know that the main idea of business process management (BPM) is to route information quickly from step to step and task to task - which is ideally done in an electronic form. But a few of our customers have to live with the paper-based process for now and yet they find inefficiencies in using BPM to track the status of each process instance. The workers complete their tasks on paper and then they “check off” the task in the BPM system to alert the next person that a task is coming. I know, I know...this is not the kind of BPM I usually recommend to our customers but I’ve seen it happen. Actually, this approach still delivers many of the BPM benefits. The manager can monitor the status of all the workers and processes, the processes can be optimized, the bottlenecks can be identified and the work teams can be re-aligned as needed. Those are some really cool benefits of BPM. Still, the plan is usually to add the capture software to get rid of paper altogether!

These are some of the use cases where our customers deal with paper - often as an intermediate step on the way to a paper-free enterprise. The paper-free vision is a great one but we will be probably dealing with paper for a long time. Any step that moves us in the right direction deserves a credit.

Here is to a Paper-Free World! 

These Filler Words

We marketers live by making up names - names of markets, products, and technologies. In the English language, names are easily created by chaining words together. New terms can be created very easily: mountain standard time (MST), automated teller machine (ATM), and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are just a few examples of how nouns and adjectives can be strung together in English to create smart sounding new terms and names. Acronyms such as NBC, CIA, NFL, LAX, JFK, SAT, BTW, CEO, and USA are part of our everyday language.

Technology marketing often resembles the Alphabet Soup. (Source)

The problem is that technology marketers like to fall in love with three letter acronyms. Consequently, the terms and names they coin have to consist of three words. Random Access Memory, Content Distribution Network, Subscriber Identity Module are just a few examples of such three word names. Consequently, we have three letter acronyms such as RAM, CDN, SIM that dominate our technology language. We love it so much that we even have an acronym for the term ‘three letter acronym’: TLA.

It seems that sometimes we even add an unnecessary word just to make a name consist of three words. For example, I think that Enterprise Content Management could do without the word ‘enterprise’. Since there is no Consumer Content Management (unless you count Picasa and iTunes), we could easily get by with just Content Management. Similarly, I don’t see much difference between Business Process Management and just Process Management. Indeed, the words ‘enterprise’ and ‘business’ are often being added without much reason. We say ‘business ethics’ where just ‘ethics’ would do perfectly fine.

But there are even worst transgressions of this kind. When I hear Advanced Case Management, I have to chuckle. ‘Advanced’ as opposed to Retarded Case Management? Or, how about Extended Data Processing? ‘Extended’ as opposed to Limited Data Processing? And then, there is the omnipresent word ‘Management’. Marketing Automation Management? Hmm... Marketing Automation would probably do. Customer Experience Management? I vote for Customer Experience!

Don’t take me wrong, I am not saying that all three letter names are wrong. Supply Chain Management is a perfectly good term and none of the three words can be dropped. Similarly, there is a difference between Asset Management and Digital Asset Management. There is definitely a place for three and even four letter names. But what I am suggesting is that we should examine the meaning before we get carried away by the language rhythm, melody, or whatever it is that makes us construct sometimes ridiculously sounding names.

Yet, there is hope. I see examples of new industry terms that consist of just two or even one word. Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Analytics - here are some very new industry terms we have settled on without messing them up. I’m sure that we could have coined Advanced Virtualization Management or Extended Information Analytics but we didn’t. Simplicity and logic have prevailed.

I know, it’s too late to reverse the course of history. The 10-year old terms such as Enterprise Content Management or Business Process Management will hardly be changed at this point. Although, if you follow my blog, I usually write just ‘content management’. Yes, with lower case characters because back in school I learned that only proper names should be capitalized. (Sigh...) Anyway, let’s create names and terms for new technologies that are simple, easily understandable, and free of redundant words!

Here is to good marketing!

Abstinence is not a Solution

Facebook just announced 1 billion active users last week. One BILLION is an incredible number. There is hardly any other product in the world that has 1 billion customers. OK, maybe Coca-Cola but I don’t drink coke, I do Facebook...

We all know that Facebook and other social media revolutionized the social interactions between people. Social media enabled us to be much more connected with friends and create relationships with new people. Facebook makes things possible and easy that were not possible before. The announcement, however, prompted me to think about a neglected factoid: There are 7 billion people on the planet and if only 1 billion are on Facebook, what the heck are the other 6 billion doing?

Yes, sure, among those 6 billion are many babies and other folks who are not using any computer. But still, there must be at least 3 billion people that have so far resisted Facebook. WHY???

I have many such Facebook abstinents among my friends and no amount of encouragement has moved the needle so far. Usually, they tell me that they don’t want to waste their time on frivolous conversations about what people had for dinner tonight. Another common argument is the narcissistic nature of many of the Facebook posts - it is more about advertising yourself than any other cause. Yet, the most frequent argument against Facebook is security and privacy. Disclosing any kind of information in such public forum will ultimately compromise your privacy and security. Won’t it?

Well, I have some news for you, dear Facebook abstinents. One of the greatest security threats that you can expose yourself to is not being on Facebook. Surprised? I’m serious!

If you don’t claim your own identity on Facebook (and other social sites), you expose yourself to someone else doing it in your name. It is really easy today to join Facebook as John Smith with a validated email address on Gmail or Yahoo Mail. The bad guys can establish a pretty decent profile with pictures, engage with your colleagues from remote locations, and collect a lot of personal data about you from others. Before you know it, they can pretend to be you. This is social engineering in the social media world.

With Facebook Connect, it gets even scarier. Facebook Connect is increasingly the preferred method of authentication to many other sites and services. Now, the perpetrator who has stolen your identity on Facebook gets access to many other sites on the Internet - as you!

The moral of the story is very simple. As much as a you may not be a fan of Facebook, it is important to establish your own identity online. Because if you don’t do it, someone else might do it for you...

The Family Album of the Facebook Generation

When I was a kid, my parents had a small camera and, like most parents, they took many pictures of their offspring. As a result, there are a couple of family albums and a shoebox full of family pictures somewhere in the basement. Among those pictures are a couple hundred photographs of me.

Now, fast forward to the present time. I have literally thousands of pictures of my children. Those pictures are easily shared with other family members on flash drives and via Dropbox and often uploaded to Facebook or Flickr. When our children are grown, they will live in a world where their lives are well documented in pictures. Really well.

Yep, I have thousands of pictures of my kids...and those pics last forever!

What’s more, all those pictures will be fairly broadly distributed - our kids will have limited control over where their pictures are used. The pictures will be in many hands - many people will have a copy. Being camera shy just won’t fly.

This development is the result of two major events. First, the advent of digital photography has made taking pictures significantly less expensive - almost free. They are not entirely free as we are paying for the storage and often for the transmission cost. But compared to what pictures used to cost, they are pretty much free today. Back in the days of negatives and prints, each picture had an explicit price. A roll of 35mm film used to cost about $8 and the development plus those 36 prints would cost about $12 - that means each picture came to approximately $0.50. That made even the most avid photographer quite selective about when to squeeze the trigger!

The second event was the convergence of cameras and mobile phones. For years now, most mobile phones and smartphones include a camera and since pretty much everybody has a mobile phone today, everybody is a photographer. There are over 6 billion mobile phones out there and a significant portion of them have a built-in camera (at least 50%). On top of that, millions of digital cameras from the point-and-shoot to the fancy digital SLR cameras are sold every year. In the days of film cameras, there were only very few photographers among any group of people: weddings, group travel, or sports events. Today, everybody is taking pictures at all times. Some events in front of large audiences (i.e. concerts) have been completely transformed by the constant flashes from thousands of cameras.

All of the sudden, photography is free and ubiquitous and the result is predictable. Our lives are being documented like never before. Approximately 250 million pictures are being uploaded onto Facebook every day which is almost 25% of all pictures taken worldwide. In 2011, an estimated 375 billion pictures were taken in the world. That’s over 52 pictures for every single human being each year - at least one picture each week. Given the likelihood that the picture taking is concentrated into a smaller percentage of the world population, the likely number of pictures is much higher. Every one of the 950 million Facebook users uploads almost 100 pictures per year. That’s right, “uploads”, not “takes”. I’m guessing that if one out of every 10 pictures taken ends up on Facebook, the average Facebook user might be taking about 1,000 pictures a year. That’s 18,000 pictures before a child has a chance to hide in college from the parental picture taking.

That’s a pretty big shoe box. Our lives are documented way more than any generation before. And, we need to learn to live with it.

Darwin Meets the Innovator's Dilemma - in the Cloud

In his book Dealing with Darwin, Geoffrey Moore - the one of the Crossing the Chasm fame - has explained the difference between the complex systems and volume operations. According to this concept, technology vendors fall into one of two categories. The complex systems vendors focus on a relatively small number of high-value, high-touch transactions that are delivered in the form of sophisticated, customized solutions, usually integrated with other systems.

Geoffrey Moore's model for Complex Systems vs Volume Operations

The volume operators are doing exactly the opposite. They deliver relatively simple, inexpensive solutions through low-touch transactions - no direct sales force but resellers, retailers or online sales. These solutions come with no customization, no integration with other systems, and a limited feature set - one size fits all. While there are many scenarios in between (i.e. small business offerings), Geoffrey Moore suggests the the more a vendor is focused on one or the other extreme, the more effective the business model. IBM and Oracle are examples of complex system vendors while Apple and Google are volume operators.

The most important point that Moore makes is that vendor business models become so optimized for one or the other business architecture that crossing from one side to the other is impossible. Having started on one side of the model, the vendor’s business model, business processes, and key performance metrics are completely hard-wired towards the particular model that makes switching practically impossible.

Geoffrey Moore at an AIIM project

Now, let’s mesh the Moore model with another one - the Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. Professor Christensen suggests that disruptive innovations will always be attacking the incumbents from the bottom up - by providing low-end solutions for the less demanding customers and thus flying under the radar of the incumbent market leaders - until they gain the critical mass and sufficient functionality to challenge the incumbents.

Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma model 

OK, time to put the two models to work - in enterprise software. The established vendors including IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle are supposedly being challenged by the disruptors coming from the lower end of capabilities - just like the Innovator’s Dilemma predicted. Those disruptors are companies such as Salesforce, Google, Dropbox and others. They all have one thing in common - they are cloud based. But how do they do it when we look through the Geoffrey Moore lense?

Salesforce is a cloud based disruptor that has initially targeted the sales force automation (SFA) market and later the customer relationship management (CRM) market with a cloud based solution. Salesforce has clearly started as a complex system from day one and they have continued evolving in that direction. Their initial customer base were mostly smaller companies and departments but they continued focusing on complex systems - evolving towards more valuable and more complex deployments. Salesforce never had to shift from one side to another on the Geoffrey Moore model. Today, a typical Salesforce deployment involves integration to marketing automation and enterprise resource planning systems.

Microsoft started as a complex systems vendor with enterprise on-premise offerings such as Exchange and SharePoint (note: I’m discussing the enterprise software here, not their Xbox business). To take on the cloud challenge seriously, Microsoft created Office 365 - a cloud based offering that is clearly going in the direction of volume operations on the Moore model. That actually explains why Microsoft uses different branding for the cloud based solution and why they are not particularly worried about the integration between Office 365 and the on-premise offerings. While Microsoft shouldn’t be able to switch from the complex systems model to a volume operations model, they are applying their considerable financial resources to power through those challenges, ignoring the business model altogether.

Clayton Christensen during his visit in Waterloo, ON

Google and Dropbox started as cloud-based offerings focused purely on volume operations - on the consumers. The consumer focus and free price helped them to grow their user base quickly, often infiltrating the enterprise. But the offerings have been clearly designed as consumer software aiming to attract as many eyeballs as possible at the least possible cost. That means basic feature set, no customizations, no integrations, no direct sales force - simply one size fits all service.

While vendors such as Google, Dropbox - and also Apple, Amazon, Evernote, etc. - have a good formula to drive user adoption and even penetrate the enterprise, their business model has been designed to cater to the consumer and not to the enterprise. Enterprises need, I repeat “need” customization and integration with other systems. Just think of managing user lists and groups. Sharing content on Dropbox with your friends might be easy, sharing something with all the employees in Sales or Marketing in your company is much less trivial. You can’t manage all the user groups by hand and thus you need to integrate with other existing systems - i.e. directory services and HR Management system. Enterprise software can do that. Consumer software can’t.  

The consumer vendors might be penetrating the enterprise but today, they don’t have any enterprise offerings.

PS: This post has been inspired by a spirited discussion during the last AIIM Board meeting. I love these conversations with my fellow Board members!

Your Digital Shadow Won't Matter That Much

The 2012 US presidential elections are in full swing and the campaigns on both sides are doing the best they can to attract voters. Well, their best and sometimes not so best mud-slinging is today an integral part of the presidential show. Those constant questions about who’s done what at some point in their lives as both sides hope that they can dig out something bad. Something that will swing those undecided voters who seem to be making up their mind based on what they hear in a late night commercial sponsored by a presidential candidate.

But don’t despair, it won’t always stay like this. The time is coming, where the digging won’t be necessary any longer. Thanks to the Internet, our lives are becoming more and more transparent. Increasingly, the information about our work, hobbies, networks, likes and dislikes is being documented. You want to know what I’m doing for living? Well, just Google my name and see what comes up. Are you the member of a club? Do you compete on weekends? Are you associated with people in a particular organization? Have you taken part in a fundraiser? All of that is out there. For posterity.

Lot of information is out there about all of us

Today, it is still a novelty as we are discovering all these information sources - LinkedIn, Twitter, SlideShare, YouTube, Flickr, and other social media tell a lot about us and not just to our friends. Our property records were always public but now they are increasingly available - just check out Zillow. If you want to see how well Will Ferrell did in the 2003 Boston Marathon or how your neighbor did in last week’s race, just check out www.althlinks.com. It’s all there, online. Together with your employment history, info about your friends, your education, your phone number and so much more. All of us have a digital shadow that is already available today. And we are barely getting started.

Not to pick on Mr. Gates - do you know the value of his house?

I believe, that all this transparency will eventually lead to a profound change in our attitude. Simply said, we won’t care as much. I don’t mean that we won’t care about what people do. Sure, it will always be interesting finding out about our friends’ recent travel or about some unexpected hobbies of a celebrity. And we might even care about what the politicians have done in the past. But we won’t care about finding out. Right now, it is still a novelty finding something out about somebody - a friend, a colleague or a presidential candidate. Finding out something is surprising and thus fascinating. But that novelty will wear off.

Pretty soon, our life story will be just a mouse click away. Everybody’s past will be well documented. The story will be right in front of us if we chose so. We might walk around with  “Google goggles” that will be applying augmented reality techniques to overlay the information about everything and everyone we look at. We will be used to it and it won’t matter by far as much. All this info will have about the same value as which town you live in today. Sure, that’s interesting for the first 5 seconds after you meet someone but 10 seconds later, it doesn’t matter anymore. Everybody lives somewhere and most of the time, it is not worth writing articles about. Even if it is a presidential candidate.

Your digital shadow won’t matter that much - because everybody will have one.

Is Cloud More Secure Than On-Premises Software?

Security is the most common objection people - or companies - raise against the adoption of a cloud based solution. There have certainly been enough stories reported about compromised passwords and other security breaches at cloud based services such as Dropbox or iCloud. Emotionally, it feels like having our data stored somewhere where we can’t see it is just not very secure.

But let’s face it, we’ve had our money stored somewhere where we can’t see it for decades. Yet we seem to be completely trusting of our banks. Nobody is arguing that our money would be more secure under our mattresses. Quite the contrary, we rush to put our money into the banks knowing full well that the bank doesn’t actually keep the money. At the end of the day, it is just an entry in a computer database somewhere...somewhere...in a cloud. Or private cloud to be more precise. In any case, we consider banks highly secure today.

And so, the latest argument about cloud security goes in the opposite direction. We are beginning to realize that the cloud companies have more at stake, and so they are likely investing into security more so than a typical company ever would or could afford for its on-premises software.

Let’s take an example. Thousands of companies across North America have been using ADP to process their payroll for many years. ADP’s payroll processing is a cloud based application - it has been long before we knew what the cloud was all about. ADP even offers to outsource the service, not just the app.  Yet as far as security goes, nobody is screaming that it is preposterous having all the highly confidential personal data stored at ADP. In fact, most people think that it is probably safer at ADP than it would be if processed by their own employer.

Indeed, cloud companies are increasingly considered capable of providing more security features than companies running on-premises software. Just yesterday, Dropbox raised the bar by rolling out a two-factor authentication. How many of your on-premises applications have that?

But then again, the cloud companies are a much bigger and more attractive target for the bad guys. The hackers might never pay attention to your company and your data center but they sure know about Google Apps, Dropbox, Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, and Apple iCloud. Hacking a big name cloud company is just a very lucrative target that many hackers see as a challenge they can’t resist.

So what gives? Is our data more secure on-premises or in the cloud? Well, I suppose there is no black-and-white answer out there today. There are many considerations that need to go into software selection - on-premises or in the cloud. Security is certainly one of them. And we can be sure that the security debate will remain a hot one for quite a while.

Records Management Is Easy, Disposal is Hard

Records management is one of the traditional disciplines in the vast field of enterprise content management. The purpose of records management is to satisfy the regulators and the court of law by ensuring that official records of transactions and activities are being preserved for future reference. The regulators typically prescribe a retention period - the length of time for which your organization needs to keep the record.

From the outset, records managers focus on making sure that all records are being retained, that they cannot be tampered with, that the retention period is being enforced, and that the records are properly classified so that they can be easily found when requested. The more sophisticated records management solutions also deal with advanced capabilities such as access control, storage optimization and legal holds to pause the retention clock in the case of a lawsuit.  

However, the most important part of records management is, in my opinion, the disposition. The idea of disposition is pretty straightforward - once the retention period expires, the best practice in records management is to dispose of the now no longer needed records. This is nothing shady in the ways of Enron but rather a perfectly legal and recommended practice. A reliable records disposition, though, is very hard.

Photo by bartmaquire Flickr

Indeed, filing records and locking them up for the prescribed number of years is not trivial but it is a solved problem today. Disposing of the record in the official records repository is also relatively easy. The problem is to dispose of all copies of the record. That’s right, records disposition is pointless unless you can ensure that the record has been completely expunged. Gone. Forever. If not, you can rest assured that a copy of the record will be found by investigators or by a subpoena and it can and will be used against you.

But, a reliable and secure disposition of records and all its copies is the tough part.

Chances are, that a copy your record exists in more than a dozen locations - on your co-workers’ desktops, on various servers, on SharePoint sites, and as an attachment in many email inboxes. Add all the iPads and other mobile devices to the mix and combine it with the popular cloud-based file sharing services such as Dropbox, Microsoft SkyDrive, Apple iCloud, Amazon Cloud Drive, or Google Drive and you have a very challenging scenario for records disposal. How can you ever be sure that you are expunging all copies of your records?

There are ways to solve this challenge. It starts with a common enterprise governance infrastructure that applies de-duplication across your email and all servers. That way, the record only exists in one instance while keeping the links to all the SharePoint sites and email inboxes. It also requires the ability to give employees a secure alternative to Dropbox that can be part of the same de-duplication infrastructure. In extreme cases where you know that your documents are regularly shared with external parties, the solution may need to involve rights management as well. While I usually try to stay away from blatantly promoting my employer’s products, we have some really good solutions for all of that.

Don’t get fooled into believing that you have solved your records management problems by applying retention rules to your documents. While that may satisfy the regulators, it won’t address your need to reduce unnecessary liability. Reliable records disposal is difficult but very important. Because you can be sure that if a copy of that smoking gun document exists on someone’s iPad or in Dropbox, it will be found when you least expect it.

NBC's Olympics of Denial

After two weeks of a sport bonanza, the London 2012 Olympics are over. I am a big fan of the Olympics and I enjoy (re)learning about all the exotic sports once every four years. As a cord-cutter, I must say I was quite worried about the Olympics this year. Will I be able to see the action? My heart skipped a beat many a time at the thought of watching the highlights on YouTube two weeks after.

But I didn’t need to worry. While I don’t have any cable or satellite TV at home, I do get one channel with an over-the-air antenna, CTV, which was the primary channel providing Canadian Olympic coverage. The coverage was provided live and there was also a daily 3 ½ hour summary in prime time. But the programming delivered via my little indoor antenna was actually just a fraction of the content available free of charge online at www.ctvolympics.ca. There, I could find live coverage of virtually all events going on and a recording of every competition, sometimes a dozen of online channels simultaneously. If that wasn’t enough, I was able to go to BBC’s site which provided live coverage and a recording of every London 2012 event.

That was simply awesome. Sure, I was still exposed to the annoying commercials, even online, but I was able to watch everything live, in a tape delay, or on-demand!

Contrast that with NBC. NBC infuriated TV viewers by airing the Olympic events only with a tape delay. In today’s day and age, it is impossible to stay away from the results and so the viewers had to watch the Olympic event while knowing the results. But what was even worse was the online coverage. NBC required viewers to sign on with their cable accounts. That eliminated all the cord-cutters like me, all international audiences, and anyone on vacation in the US like I was for a few days. Strange decision, actually, as online viewers can be a target audience for commercials just like the viewers watching on cable.

NBC online streaming required a cable account.

When exposed to criticism, NBC bragged about their viewership, which was breaking all records yet again. NBC’s interpretation was that the numbers have shown that the viewers loved the service NBC delivered. Well, I beg to differ. The growing numbers reflect the rising popularity of the Olympics, the ever greater media buzz and the higher notoriety of the top athletes such as Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt. The American viewers can’t get enough of the Olympics and NBC didn’t give them any choices. So they had to watch on NBC terms.

But the Olympics can be covered differently which has been shown by CTV and BBC. I realize that NBC paid $1.2 bln for the rights to broadcast the London 2012 Olympics coverage in the United States. That’s a huge sum of money and NBC has to be careful to make sure that they at least break even. But what I am seeing is a company in denial that is clinging on to its old ways of business while the world has moved on. Pretty soon, the US audiences will figure out alternate ways of watching their favorite programming and right now, it looks like NBC may not be a part of the picture. Just go to the BBC web site, folks.

Who needs NBC?

The End of Partner Ecosystems

For three decades, the formula for success in software was pretty well understood. Not easy to execute but clear. It was called the ecosystem. You need a channel of resellers and perhaps even distributors around the world to sell your software. You need implementation partners - small, local boutique firms as well as professional services practices at the large system integrators. You need ISVs - partners who build their solutions in a way that complements yours. You need training delivered by your training partners and perhaps also partners to administer the tests and certifications. And you may also need some influencers in your camp - journalists, bloggers, analysts, or marketing agencies. A magazine named after your software platform will do just fine...

If you have a magazine, you have an ecosystem alright!

Microsoft hasn’t invented this formula - that honor goes probably to Novell all the way to the late 80s - but Microsoft perfected it. For decades, Microsoft’s authorized resellers, authorized distributors, certified partners, certified professionals, MVPs, authorized testing centers, ISVs, system integrators, consultants, OEMs and other types of partners were helping Microsoft to attain its dominance. An entire ecosystem of partners participated in the massive software economy created by Microsoft and other vendors. These partners were necessary to scale the business by providing local point of sale, planning and deployment services, training, and complementary software and hardware. The vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle, HP, or IBM provided the platforms that enabled their respective ecosystems. It was a symbiotic relationship - the platform vendors needed the partners and the partners depended on the platform vendor.

Symbiotic relationships can work

Fast forward to 2012 - when a new type of information technology economy is being shaped. The platforms are running in the cloud and the platform vendors are striving to provide the most integrated set of services - from infrastructure software to applications, from servers to mobile devices. Apple and Google are leading the way and vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle are rushing to catch up.  They are building their own cloud offerings and also the hardware - tablets and servers.

The big difference is that the new economy does not require an ecosystem of partners. As the software is sold and delivered via the cloud, it no longer requires a channel of resellers, consultants, and system integrators to implement the solutions. The software is increasingly simple which reduces training needs and the only hardware required is the hardware that runs the cloud. And even that hardware is increasingly custom made - just think about the custom server blades that comprise the famous Google data centers!

Sure, there will probably always be the independent software vendors (ISVs) with apps that leverage the platforms but most of them will be under constant pressure of being squeezed out. As for other types of partners - they are no longer required. The consultants might find work providing advice on the best use of the software and system integrators may find opportunities around migration projects or projects related to hybrid environments. But in the  long term, they are not wanted anymore. Just think about it - what partners do you need when you switch to Gmail? Or to Office 365?

It’s a new world now and the partner ecosystems might no longer have a place in it. Or do they?