Mass Customisation

John Jordan writes:

The people who buy mass-produced stuff, often called "consumers," want in some deep-rooted way to shape their environment beyond just piling up purchased goods. How much people want to stand out as unique, and how much they want to create something tangible, is of course impossible to differentiate or quantify, and of course sometimes an artifact embodies both consumption (or conspicuousness) and workmanship. But the current business landscape provides too many examples for this to be a fad: there's something very potent afoot in the rise of personalization and customization.

Companies that fail to understand and market to the customization mentality will face an uphill climb: General Motors and Ford, the paragons of mass production, are in deep financial trouble. Toyota and Honda serve more niches more profitably and are thriving. Subway, where each sandwich is made to order, has severely dented McDonalds' industrial model. Dell's dominance of the PC market begins with customization. Financial services companies that rely on brokers and brokers' commission structures like Merrill Lynch have had to respond to the Schwabs of the world - but now that firm is fighting a two-front battle against lower-cost low-service brokerages and established firms like Fidelity that provide a range of interaction options.

US Online Marketing Forecast

Charlene Li of Forrester writes that the forecast is for $26 billion in 2010.

This is not the return of “The Bubble”. The growth is coming from marketers having to make tough decisions about allocating scarce advertising dollars – in many cases, funding online channels from traditional channels. Back in 1999/2000, spending often came from exuberant spending, fueled by venture money.

It’s more than just about search. Search is great, it’s growing, but it’s not the whole story. In fact, I anticipate that search will become much more integrated into traditional brand advertising – witness what Google and Yahoo! are doing in terms of tying CPM- and CPC-based products into the same ad ordering system.

Marketers will shift channels away from traditional channels to fund online marketing. The key is perceived effectiveness -- most marketers saw traditional channels like TV and print becoming less effective over the next three years. Given the pressure marketers face to make every dollar count, they will shift spending to channels they believe are more effective. But note: this doesn't mean a wholesale flight away from traditional media -- I think it's more of an adjustment in the marketing mix that takes into account the greater time and influence Internet use plays in our lives.

SOA Executive Forum

Chad Dickerson has a recap and links to some of the presentation.

Mobile Enterprise Email

Daniel Taylor has a series of posts [1 2 3]. Some excerpts:

We have two very different approaches to mobile e-mail.

1) The RIM model is a traditional IT approach that engages a range of ISVs, integrators, solutions providers and other partners in bringing an ultimate solution to market. The wireless operators are a channel to market, but the key component of their involvement is the mobile data network they bring to the table. With 802.11 radios in BlackBerry (or BlackBerry Built-In or BlackBerry Connect) devices, the wireless operators are not as significant.

I liken RIM's model to the AS/400 and other corporate computing platforms that involve lots of ISV partners and integrators to build additional functionality to the basic platform and service.

For many corporate mobile environments, the RIM model is appropriate for one primary reason -- security. Maintaining data integrity is a good reason to keep the valuable data on a server in a data center...as opposed to a device and a memory card.

2) This alternative approach is best exemplified by Visto. There are others, but I will focus on Visto in large part because of their announcement with Vodafone Global two weeks ago.

As I have discussed in other postings, Visto's approach is not linked to a specific client software. Like other vendors (e.g. Intellisync), Visto is very much about synchronizing information between a networked server and a relatively "smart" client device. I know Visto holds a number of patents in this regard, but I don't want to head in that direction.

More important to the Visto equation is the next-generation mobile telephone. Call it a smartphone, a Treo, a Symbian phone: it doesn't matter. There are many e-mail clients available today for these devices. And millions of these phones are pouring onto the marketplace.

The second component of the Visto equation is the wireless operator - as in operator-provisioned mobile e-mail. This is the key to a much larger market: a market of smaller companies with less IT support staff and lower budgets for integration.

Cellphones Featuritis

The New York Times writes:

There is a digital land rush going on, driven by rapid advances in technology that make it possible to put more and more tools of higher and higher quality into phones. The recognition that talk is only part of the cellphone's future -that it is becoming a personal window into an evolving blend of communications, computing and media - has the existing players in the cellphone market scrambling, and new entrants looking for a way in.

Wireless carriers like Cingular, Verizon Wireless and Sprint are rolling out high-speed networks that can handle television, movie clips and music, in addition to all kinds of information, from e-mail to news. They are searching desperately to find a money-making future beyond talk, which is destined to become a mature business, highly competitive and less profitable.

Handset makers like Nokia, Motorola and Samsung are introducing the next generation: multimedia phones. The latest entrants, announced last week by Nokia, include a model that can hold up to 3,000 songs, and another phone that doubles as a high-quality camera and video recorder that can shoot and store an hour of video. Media companies - from Time Warner and Viacom to Google and Yahoo - are looking to the cellphone as a new market for their entertainment, news and search products, and software makers, led by Microsoft, have also entered the fray.

More articles here.

TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: Technology Building Blocks (Part 2)

2. Open-Source Software

The past few years have seen a rapid growth in the adoption of open-source software (OSS). It has moved up the software stack. Consider what SpikeSource uses for its IT infrastructure, according to SiliconBeat:

They run their whole website using OSS. Features include:
- discussion forums - PhpBB
- trouble tickets - OTRS
- Naming directory - Open LDAP
- Web Server - Apache
- Servlet container - Tomcat
- Database - MySQL
- Search - Nutch

They use OSS on intranet. Here is the list:
- MoinMoin wiki for capturing processes, policies, feature requirements, evolving design etc.
- Bugzilla for bug tracking
- Subversion for source code versioning
- Intranet Portal - JetSpeed
- Web email client - SquirrelMail
- Naming Directory - OpenLDAP
- email server - Courier-IMAP

Desktops:
- Operating System and desktop - RHAT, SuSE
- email client - Ximian Evolution
- desktop productivity tools - Open Office
- Browser - Mozilla, FireFox
- Source code editor - Eclipse

Customer relations:
- SugarCRM

It should be possible to make many of these applications available on a hosted basis from centralized servers so that the SMEs in Emerging Markets (SMEEMs) do not have to worry about setting up their own IT infrastructure. Open-source software can, at times, be hard to deploy given the cross-dependencies that packages have. These problems go away in the case of the applications being delivered from the Internet.

3. Web Services and Service-oriented Architectures

Web services can help glue the various software components together into composite applications. Bill Burnham writes: “While the term ‘composite application’ has rapidly become a kind of marketing catch-all term for any kind of next generation EAI or web service technology, the most straight forward definition of composite applications is that they are applications created by loosely coupling several different services and data stores via standardized message layers. Theoretically, the component parts of a composite application can be mixed and matched, much like lego blocks, allowing developers to create a wide variety of applications with a relatively small set of services.”

What will be needed is that existing applications (open-source or from independent software vendors) will need to have a web services interface, which will allow them to be integrated on the services grid. The alternative to this is writing applications from scratch – this can be an extremely time-consuming and expensive process. Companies like Grand Central can play an important role in providing the glue services.

Tomorrow: Technology Building Blocks (continued)

Related Entries:  [All]
TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: Looking Ahead [June 3, 2005]
TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: The Problems [June 2, 2005]
TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: The Seller’s View [June 1, 2005]
TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: The Buyer’s View [May 31, 2005]
TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: Technology Building Blocks (Part 4) [May 30, 2005]