Since it has been awhile since I have posted anything here at my blog – I’ve been reflecting quite a bit on what direction to take with the postings for 2010. Part of my approach will be to shorter postings to try and share ideas and gather some perspectives from marketing in high-tech, as well as other key parts of the global economy.
Over the weekend I saw for the first time the new Dominos ad campaign, which shows how they finally “heard” the common feedback about their pizza being bland, or their crust tasting like “cardboard.” In fact the cardboard comment is exactly what my son says everytime we order Dominos! So it really resonated with me… If you haven’t seen the ads – you can find them all here —> http://www.pizzaturnaround.com/
More importantly though – I think the ads show that their VP of Marketing & Innovation (a classmate of mine at Notre Dame – Brandon Solano) had to find a way to get the external feedback acted on within the company. One of the key challenges we often face as marketers is to understand the commonly held perceptions that exist about our products or services. Then we have to mobilize our companies to make the difficult changes required to overcome them. Often the first step is the hardest – enabling our companies to “face the music” and recognize the truth of “hard to hear” client feedback.
So are their common perceptions of IBM that we need to “face up to” and then begin to act on? Do we have anyone thinking our product is like “cardboard?”
This week I was at Lotusphere – and had a great set of days with clients and partners. For anyone who was there – you saw it – there was was a great buzz at the event, the kind of buzz and exictement I haven’t seen at a big event in years, probably not since the late 90’s. And why the excitement?
I think it was two-fold. First – there’s a general sense of optimism that we have all survived one of the worst economic downturns in more than 50 years, and everyone I spoke with seems to be signs of business turning around. Second – Lotus has undergone an incredible transformation in the past two years, and now with the great integration between Lotus Notes, Lotus Live, and Lotus COnnections+Quickr, clients and end-users are seeing how powerful real collaboration can be …..and with the apps unveiled for the iPhone, the Android, and the RIM products, you can use Lotus anytime and anywhere.
If you are interested in seeing some of the highlights of the Showcase demos from Lotusphere (always one of the best parts of the event!) – you can see them here.
And a special congratulations to iEnterprises – one of our key software partners – for winning IBM’s Best in Showcase award at Lotusphere 2010. iEnterprieses won the award for their unique and powerful solution that provides significant customer value based on the newest Lotus technologies!
iExtensions CRM helps companies transform the way they do business by providing a flexible customer relationship management solution available anytime, anywhere including the IBM Lotus Notes Client, Web Browser, WebSphere Portal and on the RIM BlackBerry and Apple iPhone smartphones. Make sure you check them out!
It’s hard to believe today is December 1st, and it’s been about a month since I did a blog post! As I reflect on why it’s taken me so long – I concluded it’s due to lots of -ING.
Listening – to all our Partners at our European and North American Advisory Councils that were held in the Hursley, England and in Chicago, Illinois. We received an enormous amount of feedback regarding our Smarter Planet strategy (they love it and need more help with it), our partner programs, and our priorities for 2010! Special thanks to our partners that were part of the Advisory Council – 3Com, Adobe, Akamai, Carefx, Corent, Crossview, Fundtech, iEnterprises, Mesa Technology, Panduit, Rackwise, Sterling Commerce, and VAI.
Learning – I have spent quite a bit of time talking with our partners to understand what they are seeing in the market. So far, I would say there is cautious optimism that the economy is getting better and will be on the reboud for 2010.
And especially Thanksgiving! – here is the USA this is probably my favorite holiday. The tradition is all about getting together with family, and spending time being thankful for the blessings of the past year. It’s not encumbered by expectations or the hustle-bustle of gift-giving, and it’s alwaysa nice four-day weekend. So to my American colleagues around the world – I hope you had a great Thanksgiving!
Join me at the SIIA On Demand Cloud Computing Event next week in San Jose!
Yep that’s me talking about cloud computing and the SIIA OnDemand conference. And I meant what I said: you should join me at the SIIA On Demand Conference (www.siia.net/ondemand) in San Jose. This conference will have such great practical advice – we’ll be hearing from experts about how to drive more revenue in this tough economy. They’ll talk about using social media marketing techniques, new pricing strategies, and lots of other ways you can see results quickly. There’s also going to be a large forum for hearing actual real world success (and failures) that you can learn from and apply to your business.
As I mentioned in the video, if you come for the first day, you can join me at an IBM-hosted pre-conference event Oct. 28. And come by and say hi on the second day, when I’ll be part of a panel discussing “Channel Strategies That Win: A View From the Top.”
Find out more about the conference at these links:
This week we announced the results of another smart grid pilot project here in North Carolina. IBM and our partner Consert worked to install energy management devices on specific appliances at each location – such as hot water heaters, pool pumps, HVAC, etc. – to give consumers the ability match the device power consumption to their use. For example – why not turn off the hot water heater when no one is home all day!
The pilot was run for 100 residential and business customers of the Fayetteville Public Works Commission, the local utility. The result – customers were able to reduce their consumption by ~20% in the first month!
Lately I’ve been thinking quite a bit about food – not so much because I’m hungry but because it seems to be a topic that keeps popping up in both my work and personal life.
A few weeks ago our family helped hand out grocery bags with shopping lists to members of our church. We were part of an effort to help the Raleigh Catholic Parish Outreach replenish their food bank, as they have seen a 42% increase in families seeking aid this summer compared to last year. Clearly the recession is worsening the situation for many families across North Carolina who seek out CPO for a week’’s worth of groceries. Families take the shopping bags with a shopping list of items attached, fill the bag with the items, and bring it back the following week to be collected and taken to the CPO Food Bank. Essentially this work of charity is to gather food from those able to procure it to share it and redistribute it to those less fortunate.
Last week our family also enjoyed our weekly delivery of The Produce Box. It’s a great service we subscribe to that deliver locally grown, farm-fresh produce to our door every week during our North Carolina growing season. Why – because it not only supports local farmers, but it tastes better and is healthier too!
Then last week we also saw the passing and death of Norman Borlaug. As you may know, Norman won the Nobel Prize in 1970 for his revolutionary work to create genetically altered strains of wheat and rice that significantly increased the crop yields. He is universally credited with saving the lives of hundreds of millions of people by enabling many developing economies to become self-sufficient in their agricultural production during the 1960s.
During the recent downturn there have also been quite a few media articles and reports about the increasing number of citizens (and especially Americans) who have taken to growing their own produce. Given the global economic downturn they are now frequently called “recession gardens.“
Thanks in large part to the innovation of Mr. Borlaug there is now sufficient food on the earth to feed the world’s population. Similarly, thanks to programs like the Produce Box, my family can enjoy organic food from a local farm as an alternative to the very good and high quality produce in the grocery store that is shipped in from all parts of the globe.
But still we have a hunger problem in many parts of the world. As you can see at the Stop the Hunger site – approximately 27,000 people die of hunger each day in the world, and 78% of the malnourished children live in countries with food surpluses. So if we have enough food – it must just be a question of getting it to the right places…..
As many of you know, I’ve been traveling in India last week and this week to work both with key software partners, as well as to spend time with our rapidly expanding IBM India Software Marketing Center of Excellence.
As part of IBM’s transformation to become a globally integrated enterprise, our goal is to ensure we are leverage the best talent available all around the world, while simultaneously shifting talent to the best market opportunities. Obviously this requires quite an adept organization and strong leadership to ensure we are always focusing on the right product areas (software, services, high-value servers and not longer PCs), the right geographic markets (more focus on high-growth emerging markets like China, India, Brazil, etc.) and the right client opportunities (more focus in the last few years on small and mid-size clients.)
Managing to keep, retain, and shift talent to meet this ever changing business dynamic requires careful leadership and a truly global perspective. As I sat at breakfast this morning in Mumbai, India I was reading today’s The Economic Times – and ironically enough, they had a piece on their op-ed page that talks precisely about global leadership and managing talent. The author – Kumar Mangalam Birla is chairman of the Aditya Birla Group – which is a $28B Indian Company that is part of the Fortune 500 and has subsidiaries that compete in everything from cement and aluminum production to mobile telephones and grocery stores.
“Being a true-blue MNC [multi-national company] is only partly about geographic spread. It is relatively simple to address cross-border issues pertaining to technology, finance, markets and products. But extremely difficult to cope up with challenges relating to the human dimension. Global leadership is all about developing a mindset that wants to leverage resources seamlessly, across geographic boundaries. A mindset that is eager to build unique capabilities, to transcend the barriers of cultures in order to create value. It’s about being global in attitudes — but without letting go of your roots.”
I think this offers a great perspective on the true nature of global leadership. Last week I had the privilege of meeting many of our newest members of the IBM Software Marketing Center of Excellence Team here in India – and I know they will help us blaze the trail toward creating the best possible value for our IBM clients by leveraging resources seamlessly regardless of their geographic location.
Below are a couple of photos of our new teammates!
As I travel around the world working with our software partners – I try and keep an eye out for interesting and effective marketing campaigns. Today as I changed planes in Boston Logan airport on my way to London and then Bangalore, I saw a series of adds for Dentyne gum that caught my eye.
Here’s one of the ads below -
And then another one next to it was -
Given that my wife and I were living in Boston and Washington DC during our year of engagement, and our wedding anniversary is today (don’t worry – we celebrated with a fine dinner at Sequoia in Georgetown last night!) – I can relate this image in a special way!
But more importantly, from a marketing point of view, these ads seem to be pretty effective at a nice juxtaposition of the online world with the real world. And if you check out their web site, it has a 3-minute limit on it (check out the creative different “clocks” you can choose from in upper right corner), so that you can get back to the business of face-time with real people.
Kind of an interesting marketing campaign, check it out and let me know what you think!
Yesterday I mentioned our new arrangements with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and cloud computing. Since this is all new, we’ve created two workshops – and we’re planning more – to help get you started:
For startups: Running IBM on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Server (S3): Learn how to use IBM product images in the Amazon EC2 to create and deploy applications in the Amazon cloud. We will show you how to add your own product functionality to the IBM images by rebundling them. More info here…
Getting started with IBM software on Amazon Web Services featuring sMash & DB2: Learn how you can get an existing application up and running in the Amazon EC2 environment with pre-loaded IBM middleware. Details here…
You can contact your local IBM Innovation Center to find out about these and other upcoming workshops for partners.
Given all the excitement around cloud computing, as I travel around meeting with partners I’ve been receiving a lot of questions about the IBM-Amazon partnership to feature our IBM Software on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform.
Quite simply, clients told us that they wanted IBM software available on AWS and we’re delivering it. Customers and developers can now use IBM software on a public elastic cloud environment. Our partnership provides a new “pay-as-you-go” model that provides unprecedented access to development and production instances of many IBM software products.
There are three ways to take advantage of this cloud solution: 1) Development and Test Environments – Those of you building commercially available solutions can access IBM Development Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that include product-level code – with all features and options enabled on a scalable, secure, and cost-effective cloud computing environment. You pay AWS only for your time and the capacity – there is no charge for the IBM software component. Have a proof of concept project? Need to do some training and don’t have idle server capacity? Use any of the Development AMIs in EC2 and only pay for the minimal EC2 charges which start at just $0.10 an hour. Find out more here!
2) Production Environments – All developers and customers can run development and full production instances of IBM software for an hourly price per instance and these can be used for revenue generating activities (unlike the development only environment above). The Production AMIs include the IBM software, the Novell SUSE operating system and the Amazon EC2 service for a single hourly charge per instance. All charges are billed by Amazon Web Services and use of service is governed by Amazon Web Services.
Do you have an event you’re planning? To get the project moving quickly and avoid lengthy procurement cycles and capital expenditures etc, you can get started in a matter of minutes with the WebSphere Portal Server with Lotus Web Content Management AMI. You pay hourly for use – there’s no license, no contract needed. And – you can bring down the site when the event is over without a penalty or additional charges. Details are here!
3) Run your existing IBM Software in the cloud – new licensing guidelines now allow you to run your already-purchased IBM software on Amazon EC2. Do you have licenses sitting idle because you can’t get the hardware in place? Just need more compute infrastructure? You can now move your licenses into the cloud without additional capital expenditures for your customers! Here is how to get started with BYOL….
Let me know if you are using these environments and how it’s working for your business!
Posted by mikeriegel 
