Michael Fauscette

Software, When is Good Enough, Good Enough?

I was reading through my RSS feeds this morning, my regular morning research, and I came across an interesting post discussing Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst's keynote from the Red Hat Summit in Boston yesterday. I won't rehash the post, you can read that for yourself, but in reading it two concepts came out that are worth digging into a bit more. The first is the concept that CIO's are under siege from end users who want an enterprise user experience that is comparable to the experience they have on the consumer web (something I've written about may times, here are 2 posts). The other concept is, do end users really want to continue down the path of bloated software that adds new feature after new feature in the standard software vendor model of incremental innovation in release after release designed to entice perpetual upgrade and maintenance (and continued cash flow)? As I think about these concepts and Jim's keynote it strikes me that this is really the intersection of several issues that could be leading us back to the concept of "good enough" software. What do end users want out of enterprise software anyway?

Looking at this from the business user's perspective, not IT, I'd say that when I talk to people about enterprise software the focus is almost always on doing some task or solving some problem(s) (maybe that's the same thing, actually). Think about it, in the end software is about getting your job done in an efficient and effective manner with some improvement in productivity over doing the same task without the software tool. It's that simple. So maybe that is, in some ways, counter to the way we have looked at the enterprise software market. In our software vendor / IT "more is better" mind set, year after year we pack more into the products. From the vendor perspective this makes sense, offering more features should entice customers to renew maintenance contracts and purchase new seats. From the IT perspective, offering end user constituents more functionality seems like a logical value added approach.

The social web with's its proliferation of free, easy to use, simple apps has changed end user expectations of the software they use. IT and CIO's are "under attack" to provide a user experience that mimics employees personal web experiences. In the "bring your own" workplace that the social employee is creating IT control is slipping. Employees want simple tools that empower them to get their jobs done. One of the CIO stories that was shared at the Red Hat summit was one of a CIO who was approached by the CMO with a project request.  The request was for a way to enable marketing staff around the world to build docs together and perform other collaboration tasks. The CIO consulted his apps development team and response came up with an estimate time of delivery of $14M+ and a delivery timeline of about 9 months. The CMO's reply..."what are you talking about, I was describing my daughters science project and they were using Google Docs for free?"

I wrote yesterday about activity streams and how they could be one path to a simplified enterprise user experience. On a broader look though, one has to wonder if we aren't at an inflection point where a wider change in enterprise software and the business models surrounding it is necessary. This doesn't even take into account things like platform as a service offerings, where for less money and in less time end users could get apps that are almost exactly what they require. It's early for PaaS but in a good enough world, PaaS has a huge potential for disruption. Is good enough, good enough?

Tags: software, social web, web 2.0, Red Hat, PaaS

Activity Streams

You don't have to look far these days to find a vendor touting the benefits of implementing an enterprise activity stream solution. Activity streams are emerging as a favored alternative to everything from traditional employee collaboration tools to putting a new face on tired traditional enterprise applications. On one hand the activity stream paradigm is something we're become very accustomed to on the consumer social web with facebook, Google Wave, Google Buzz, etc. That makes the user interface and user experience very familiar and comfortable for most users. So what makes an effective activity stream? Here's what I think are basic requirements:

• Unified user interface that combines personal connections, user profile (private corporate social network), access to other constituents' profiles, email integration, microblog integration (public and provides a private microblogging tool or integration), public social network integration, integration to user selected enterprise applications, access to enterprise content and data, search.
• Ability to filter stream content based on user defined parameters
• Ability to form ad hoc workgroups
• Ability for user defined groups with security
• Ability to bring in non-members for ad hoc collaboration with security
• Integration with enterprise directory / LDAP
• Enterprise class security
• User configurable interface

 What value do these tools offer?

• Increased employee interaction and collaboration
• More employee engagement and increase in satisfaction with a new UI for the enterprise
• A more familiar user experience
• Access to aggregated enterprise information and search
• Ability to form and manage ad hoc work teams and rapidly collect resources to deal with corporate issues
• One UI to manage the intersection of people, enterprise data, content, social data and enterprise applications.
• Enterprise performance increased due to better informed and managed decision making
• Ability to collaborate inside and outside the enterprise with appropriate security
• Enterprise security to answer IT concerns

Some providers of activity stream software:

• Jive Software
• Novell Pulse
• Salesforce.com Chatter
• SocialCast
• SocialText
• SuccessFactors (CubeTree acquisition)
• SugarCRM

Did I miss any solutions? What do you think about enterprise activity streams?

Jive Software, The Journey from e2.0 to Social Business

I had the opportunity to catch up with Jive Software several times over the last two weeks, in a meeting with CEO Tony Zingale who recently removed the "interim" from his title, and most of the executive team in Palo Alto, at their Boston launch event last week and at Enterprise 2.0 Conference and Expo. Working through their new messaging and product roadmap, I'm convinced that they are taking a leading position as a social business tool provider. Most of the current offerings in social business software are focused on a small subset of a complete enterprise solution. That's not a criticism, it's a normal evolution in a new software category. Consolidation is often the next step, and we've already seen some of that in this market recently with Lithium's acquisition of Scout Labs and Attensity's acquisition of Biz360. Jive is taking a different strategy and has chosen to use the build + partner approach. During the roadshow they made several announcements and also shared some more color and strategy in my meeting with the team.

Let's start with the partner announcements, then look at the product enhancements and strategy. The partnerships fall into the standard categories, strategic, distribution and system integration / consulting. On the strategic front Jive has licensed the full Twitter Firehose API which provides integration to the full live Twitter stream for monitoring and analysis. To increase its distribution footprint Jive has partnered with Google and CSC. The Google partnership makes the Jive SBS platform available on the Google Apps Marketplace and includes a light version called Jive Express that is offered with a 30 day free trial. CSC, a large Jive customer with ~45K users, is extending its relationship by becoming a VAR and ISV, building apps on the Jive platform. For SI / consulting Jive added two new partners, Isobar and Dachis Group. Isobar is a digital media agency and plans to use Jive SBS to design and deliver branded communities for its clients. The Dachis Group is a consulting / SI organization that focuses on social projects.

From a product perspective Jive is adding capabilities to compliment their SBS platform offering. These offerings range from the basic API level up to user experience. As social solutions become more integrated into the enterprise workflows it will be necessary to integrate the social platform with a wide variety of existing systems. To facilitate this Jive is providing Jive Connect, an API layer with pre-built integrations to specific systems like Exchange, Lotus Notes,. Sharepoint, etc. I posted previously about the need to provide a new user experience for the enterprise that let's employees interact with each other and enterprise resources in an environment that is more web 2.0-like. Several companies have built products based on the activity stream paradigm to address this (and other) needs. Jive's new product is called Jive What Matters, and uses the activity stream paradigm to provide a new UX for the enterprise and adds two key features, Jive Chatter Filter that allow the user to filter content and Jive Genius, an intelligent recommendation engine much like Apple's iTunes Genius to help find relevant social content.

The last announcement that Jive made is sort of product related, in an attempt to jump start their ISV ecosystem Jive is launching the Jive Apps Marketplace. Like other marketplace offerings Jive is working with ISV's and customers to build social apps to enhance and add depth to Jive SBS offered in the Jive Marketplace.

It has been a busy few months for the Jive team and that activity is paying off with significant progress in the social business tools market. Jive has seen strong growth even during last year when most software vendors were struggling. Moving into the social business solutions space with broader products and partnerships is timely and should help them accelerate growth. Jive is private so their actual revenue is not known but rumors and research indicate that they are one of the largest vendors in the social platforms market. There are also rumors of an impending IPO later this year...but rumors are just rumors at this point. Jive is definitely a company to watch in the social business space, especially with its strong and energetic management team driving the strategy. 

Customer Experience: Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

I'm writing this post from my 14 year old daughter's room at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). I've been here now for 2 days without leaving the hospital. I say that not to discuss my daughters issues at all but to establish that I have enough experience to  talk about our experience here so far.

I write and talk a lot about the customer conversation and how the most important thing in building advocates is creating customer experience. I will use my current situation to illustrate this. Hospital experiences are by their nature fraught with all sorts of pitfalls both for the patient and the parents, guardians, spouses, and partners. By its nature medicine is intrusive, a bit mysterious, emotional and often highlighted by your lack of control over even the most basic things. I think that's the biggest issue really, the loss of control. That's true as a patient and as the parent / spouse, etc.

I'm writing this post because for the first time ever I'm having a very different experience. I've been in hospitals as patient and as concerned and involved person many times in my life, starting when I was a child. I think my first experience as a patient for other than emergency room visits was probably when I was in law school and had my appendix out. I've been in VA hospitals and hospitals all around the country. In all that time I never had an experience that would have made me feel compelled to write about it (well, there are some really bad experiences that I would probably would have blogged about if blogging had existed). Although I'm really worried about my daughter and very tied up in everything that's happening I have to say that this hospital is a model for what can be made right in a very tough situation.

So what are they doing? At the most fundamental level the hospital has returned control to patient and parent where ever possible. Instead of providing mystery food on a predefined schedule that the hospital controls they provide the patient a "room service" menu that is available anytime between 6:30am and 8pm with 45 minute delivery on call. And this is not the" rubber chicken, Jello, pudding, apple juice" type of menu, there's build-your-own omelet's and pancakes, fruits. granola, hot and cold cereal, made to order hot and cold sandwiches, soups, made to order pizza and stir fry, hot off the grill, home-style fare, appetizers, deserts...you get the idea. There's a snack room on each floor for patients and parents that has crackers, cookie, tea, juices, sodas, milk, a refrigerator and microwave for patient use and all of this is free and accessible 24 hours a day. The linen closet with towels, sheets, gowns open for patient use. Two activity rooms with games, art supplies, toys etc. per floor and again left open all the time.

For the parents, they get a special bracelet that identifies them so there is no need to constantly justify your reason for being there and also gets you into special parking garages. In the room there's a sofa that's plenty big enough to sleep on (and I'm a tall person). For food I have access to the normal hospital cafeteria of course, but there's also a food court with everything from sushi to pizza and a 24 hours McDonalds. The hospital store has the requisite stuffed animals and cards but also has snacks, drinks, frozen microwave-able food and other essentials.

My point is this, someone here has thought through the whole experience for the patient and the parent and optimized it whenever possible. It's not perfect but the situation is not perfect. When you are under emotional stress you do not need extra aggravations and when you are in a situation where by its nature you will feel loss of control, every little thing that you can control matters. Understanding your business and understanding your customer and what they need is critical to creating a positive experience. I don't know if they have patient / parent surveys or advisory councils but I'd believe that they must. Someone here is listening to what the customer has to say AND doing something about it. The staff has a great attitude and they seem to love their jobs, that is not something you mandate. Instead it seems like the employees are having a good work experience and in that experience they pass along their experience to the patients and the parents. All I can say to them is thank you. For those of you reading this I say, listen and give your customers and experience that you are proud of, if you do, you create an advocate and advocates are what builds a great and successful brand.     

Tags: SCRM, social CRM, social business, SocBiz, experience, social customer

Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2010, a quick review

I don't usually review conferences but after attending e2.0 this week I have a few comments that I think are worth sharing. I've been to e2.0 a few times but I had actually decided that I didn't have time in my crazy schedule to make it to Boston this year, but then I ended up with a few other things to do there this week as well, so I managed to spend some time at the conference. I walked away feeling somewhat less than satisfied and with the need to dig into that a little.

From my perspective, and maybe because I spend so much time focusing on the broader concepts around social business, e2.0 now feels narrow. It's at best addresses only half of the business, looking at the internal employee processes in isolation. Collaboration is extremely important and moving a business to a model that is people-centric internally is critical but so is engaging your customer, knitting a closer network with your suppliers and moving partners from a point-to-point model to an ecosystem. I think the prevailing base of understanding around social in the enterprise is advancing and evolving rapidly, so rapidly in fact that there's a danger of getting lost. Collaboration is an overused term and has many different meanings and maybe e2.0 is on its way there too. In general we as technologist often get so focused on technology that we don't see what really has to change to make things work. For my taste I didn't hear near enough about the culture change that is the real core of a move to a social business.

On to the conference itself. I love opportunities to catch up with friends, colleagues and clients and e2.0 did not disappoint on that front. Three of the analysts from my group, Mary Wardley, Erin Traudt and Sanjeev Pal were able to get out to the conference for awhile and we had some time to catch up on some projects, always better in person. Mitch Lieberman, who has just launched his own consulting business, was in attendance and we had a great conversation on all things social business and social CRM. Also on the new business front, Jacob Morgan and I caught up on his new venture ChessMedia Group. I won't list all of the other colleagues and friends that I saw, but it's a solid list, from a conference networking perspective e2.0 is one of the best.

On Monday Jive Software hosted a launch event that was a continuation of a multi-city road show explaining their vision for social business focused solutions. I will do a separate post on their announcements.

Vendor exhibitors represented a wide range from new start ups to old line technology vendors. In fact, there were a surprising number of the more traditional vendors present this year, a sign that at least e2.0 is getting traction, although I'd say all things social are the real draw. It's good validation that companies like IBM, SAP, Microsoft, Cisco and Novell are so visible as sponsors and participants at e2.0. The increased visibility is good but frankly its a double edged sword. I'll talk more about that later.

In a vendor rich environment (just a fact in a market that now has over 200 vendors) I managed to get updates from several companies I follow closely and also meet a few new and very interesting vendors. On the update front I caught up with Cisco, Spigit, MangoSpring (great new iPad app for their Engage platform), NewsGator, PartnerPedia, Yammer, InnoCentive and Mzinga. Two new offerings caught my attention, QxygenCloud, a company created by the founders of LeapFile, and Social 27. I'll save the OxygenCloud discussion for another post, I promised I'd hold off until their product announcement in a week or so. Social 27 is a feature rich new virtual conference platform that has a lot of embedded social connectivity features that I think will help them differentiate from a growing number of competitors. They have made good traction, in fact a week long Microsoft Dynamics virtual event was underway all last week on the platform.

The socialytics market is really heating up and I see new entrants in that market regularly, e2.0 was no exception. In a conversation with CrowdCast CEO Mat Fogerty and Chief Scientist Leslie Fine I got a good preview of where they are taking their strategy. Socialytic vendors tend to focus on the use of social data, often things like sentiment, mentions, etc. but I think the greatest value in socialytics is found at the intersection of the social data with existing enterprise data. The CrowdCast crew definitely gets that and are moving to enhance the intersection of information.

The e2.0 sessions themselves were something of a mixed bag this year. There certainly were some strong participants, with people like Dennis Howlett, Mitch Lieberman, Rachel Happe, Dion Hinchcliffe, Susan Scrupski, Andrew McAfee, and many others. The conference used a submit - then community evaluation process for session topics but there was no evidence that the topics that were voted up got any additional consideration, at least that was my perception. I was thinking about thought leadership and the number of thought leader participants this year versus last year and this year seems light. As an example look this list recent list of social thought leaders from Paul Greenberg and compare it to the conference speakers list this year and last...short of the people I already mentioned its quite a big difference year over year (not that this is the only valid list, it's just an example).

The biggest shortfall in my book was the keynote sessions. It's a difficult task to manage large sponsors' desire to promote their products with the need to provide thought provoking keynotes that address the key issues currently being discussed among e2.0 and social business experts. In my opinion the conference this year, especially considering the rapidly growing number of large sponsors, did not manage that balance. Way to many keynotes were demo-fests and did not provide broader e2.0 thought leadership and discussion. Note to conference organizers and sponsors, the Expo is for demos, the keynotes are for thought leadership.

So that's my take for this year, great networking, mostly good sessions and keynotes that for the most part seriously missed the mark. What do you think?  

Tags: social business, e2.0, enterprise 2.0, web 2.0, conference, software

Moving to the People-centric Enterprise

The fun thing about trying to figure out what might happen next in software and business in general is the ability to evolve your thinking over time as you gain more data and more clarity. I suppose that's why IDC's tag line is "analyze the future", that's effectively what my job is, at least a large part of it. Sometimes the process is sort of like putting together a puzzle that is mostly blank pieces, but the pieces slowly reveal themselves to you over time. The more pieces you reveal the better the overall picture becomes. Ok, enough rambling around inside my head, what's the point of this anyway? The point is this, I started a few years ago thinking and talking about social media, social networking and enterprise 2.0. That evolved into social enterprise which I used to mean the combination of e2.0 and social CRM and eventually we started calling the movement social business. As a part of social business I started to dig into a concept that I think is an important key to understanding what is happening, that is, in the transformation of business people become the new enterprise platform. That people-centricity is absolutely critical to understanding and building the processes and systems that facilitate the social business transformation. I'm starting to think though, that social business is really just a part of a bigger thing, the people-centric enterprise.

People-centricity defines our current social and business progression past the industrial society's focus on business, technology and process. Not that business or technology or process go away, but instead they become supporting structures that facilitate new ways of collaborating and interacting with customers, suppliers, partners and employees. The idea also has to permeate system and process design. Here's a simple example from collaboration systems. In the past collaboration was more often that not defined as the ability to share and work on a file, so let's call the system file-centric. File-centricity defines the core of how the system works, it's core workflow. In the defined process you create a file, upload a file, share a file, edit a file, review a file, approve a file, etc. So as long as the collaborative work is about a file the system process is fine. What happens though, when I need to deal with a customer who calls in a service issue, the product they ordered from their account executive is on backorder and won't meet a critical deadline? I probably start by logging the issue in my CRM system of course and then maybe I look up the order history in the order management system...so far so good, I'm doing system-centric tasks. But if the answers are not clearly in the system the work changes. Maybe there is conflicting information in the system so I have to talk to the account executive or the warehouse supervisor (phone, IM, do we have presence or unified communications...email). Perhaps it's a logistics problem or a production problem...all of these are people-centric tasks. From a system perspective the customer service rep needs something to bring interaction with systems, information and people together, not a file.

Working with customers, internal and external business partners, suppliers, logistics providers, at the core they're all people-centric issues. Not that you don't need to share files or work together on files, co-creating documents, sharing information, all of those things support the work and need to be accounted for in a collaboration system, but the focus is on enabling people to people interaction. This concept also extends to process. Current systems do an adequate job of facilitating work process (one might argue some systems are much to rigid, but that's a topic for another post). The problem arises when the work doesn't fit the process. Workers today often spend much more time on problems that fall outside of the business process, or exception processing. Exception processing often involves working outside of systems and gathering temporary teams to work through the issues. These ad hoc work requirements are a necessary part of the business but can take an inordinate amount of the resources. Because they tend to be people-centric, most fall outside the enterprise systems and processes. We need collaboration systems that are social, or people-centric and capable of effectively dealing with the ad hoc nature of information-based work.

This extends to most enterprise systems as well. Project management is really about executing against a plan, or in other words about people working together to accomplish some end goal...which is by its nature social or people-centric. Content management is file centric but if you step above the files and start to think about curation of content, people are once again the key to accomplishment. Many enterprise tasks today have moved to a more people-centric method and the systems have not caught up.

So where am I going with this train of thought...I'm not sure yet. I do know that the concept of people-centric enterprise is important and that it needs to be built into our systems and processes. The shift in focus from process and technology to people is the key to working in a post-industrial information driven business, IMHO. I'm starting to think about a broader research project to try and tie this together across the enterprise and across the underlying systems but the thought is only just starting to come together.

The Social Customer Bill of Rights

The social web has empowered and changed behavior and in general is having a broad impact on the way people find information, share information, make decisions and interact on both an individual level and with organizations. In previous posts I've looked at the new generation of hyper-connected or Gen C and looked at how the social web is changing employees. In this post I will dive in a little deeper with the concept of a social customer. In examining social CRM we've started to look at how organizations are changing to more effectively engage the social customer, but that has been more from the business perspective. Now let's look at this transformation from the customer's perspective. What is a social customer entitled to expect from brands in this new era of social business?

• The social customer has the right to interact with companies "when, where and how" the customer chooses.

• The social customer has the right to expect ethical behavior from brands with which they choose to interact.

• The social customer has the right to transparency in their dealings with your company.

• The social customer has the right to responsibly comment on your performance as a company in the social channel of the customer's choice and for the company to be open to and take action on this feedback.

• The social customer has the right to seek trusted purchase and operational advice from the customer's social network not just your company sponsored sources.

• The social customer has the right to expect that companies for which the customer is engaged will provide that customer with what's important to the individual customer. This presumes that the company provide responses at a personal level to the customer.

• The social customer has the right to expect the company to perform to the companies published or implied service levels and have a repeatable process for interactions that are individualized to the customer's needs.

• The social customer has the right to choose not to engage with your brand.

• The social customer has the right to choose whether and how to involve themselves with the companies online presence (facebook pages, communities, Twitter, etc.).

• The social customer has the right to choose to join in a conversation with your company and perhaps engage at a higher level required for co-creation of value (or not).

• The social customer has the right to increase or decrease their relationship to and interaction level with your brand based on their perception of your company and brand. That perception can be shaped by your actions, your reported actions or by the recommendations of trusted sources to the customer.

• The social customer has the right to expect your company to respect and abide by the customer's privacy settings and choices.

• The social customer has the right to experience your brand and choose which brands to experience.

• The social customer has the right to be given enough information to make an informed decision on how they choose to interact with a company.

What do you think of this list? What did I miss?

Deltek announces intent to acquire Maconomy

Today Deltek announced its intent to acquire Maconomy, a European based services resource planning (SRP) vendor. In the realm of project based businesses there are only a handful of vendors that offer complete, end-to-end solutions, and this acquisition brings together two of those vendors, each with strong products and each with unique focus areas both in geography and micro-vertical. Both companies are public so first let's look at the financials:

Maconomy:

Total Revenue 2009: $41.1M

Breakout: $9.8M new license, $15M maintenance and $16.3 services

This statement is taken from their consolidated financials report for 2009: "Total revenue declined 5 percent compared to 2008. This was mainly due to a licence revenue decline of 19 percent, which means that this revenue comprised 24 percent of total revenue in 2009. Subscription revenue rose by 10 percent to comprise 36 percent of total revenue, while consulting revenue dropped by 5 percent to make up 38 percent of total revenue."

Approximately 211 employees

Deltek:

Total Revenue 2009: $271M

Breakout: $72.2 new license, $108.8M maintenance, and $90.1M services

From a product perspective Maconomy X1 is similar to Deltek Vision but is tailored for different segments of the professional services vertical, specifically its micro-segments are agency, consulting, audit and tax, research and PR Consulting. Deltek Vision is mostly sold and deployed into architectural, engineering and consulting firms (AEC) and some consulting firms, which was a new area of product focus over the last two years. Maconomy has another interesting product that could offer opportunity across the entire Deltek customer base, People Planner. People Planner, a resource and capacity planning solution, could be offered in the Vision customer base but also could be appealing to Deltek's government contracting CostPoint customers. The product would also make a good cloud-based add-on offering. Maconomy has already moved toward cloud offerings with roughly 1/3 of its revenue from subscription last year, which could help Deltek accelerate its moves in that direction. Deltek is committed to fully supporting and investing in Maconomy's product portfolio and the Vision product line moving forward, which is consistent with the treatment of its other acquired products.   

Here's a simple graphic depiction of the X1 product:

From a geographic perspective there is great synergy between the two companies, Deltek is strongest in the North American market and Maconomy is strongest in Europe. Deltek gains a seasoned sales organization in Europe, a chance to take Vision to AEC firms there and a solid product in X1 to sell in the NA market in adjacent verticals. Europe is clearly the next growth opportunity for Deltek and the addition of a seasoned distribution organization that has local expertise will accelerate that move. Maconomy headquartered in Copenhagen has offices in The Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, UK and Boston.

Overall this is a smart move on the part of both companies and strengthens Deltek's offerings through expanded verticals, geographies, delivery models and additional vertical expertise. The combined company is a strong player in the SRP market, a market that has and should continue to outpace the overall applications market for the foreseeable future.

HP Investing in the Cloud

Today Hewlett-Packard announced a program to invest over $1B in its Enterprise Services business for datacenter modernization, standardization and automation. The move is seen as a continuation of its efforts begun with the acquisition of Opsware (datacenter automation vendor) in 2007 and EDS over a year and a half ago to compete more effectively with IBM, Dell and others in enterprise services. The restructuring will impact around 9,000 jobs and consolidate data centers and management platforms over the next few years. The automation is important to HP's strategy to deliver enterprise services at attractive prices while maintaining high quality, increasing their competitive advantage while leveraging their software assets more effectively.

Its sad when jobs go away, especially in tough economic times (HP also plans to add about 6000 jobs as a result of the transition), but the announcement is interesting for several reasons. The downstream benefits of automation at HP are estimated at $500M-$700M after the reinvestment. Certainly the move strengthens HP in the cloud services market and provides opportunity for HP to offer competitive services for customers to offload apps from their own data centers but another attractive area of opportunity for cloud "arms dealers" like HP is in enterprise transition to private cloud. HP's experience in transitioning its own operations to a more automated and consolidated structure provides some tangible evidence of significant cost and efficiency gains in private cloud, assuming that the benefits outlined come to fruition through the execution phase. HP's own transition becomes a case study in datacenter automation for perspective enterprise private cloud customers.