box.com appointment is portent of IPO

Yesterday's (19 February 2014) announcement that Box.com is appointing Graham Younger  as  Executive Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations, demonstrates yet again the ambitions of the company that I personally feel has changed the paradigm of enterprise content management (ECM) from an in-house edifice to a cloud-based utility service.
Whilst the major Technology News covered by the press during the day was the $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook (I may comment on that in another piece #notimpressed), for businesses around the world the new member of Aaron Levie's team is a major move, and takes it a step nearer the speculated $2 billion IPO.

How box.com has made its mark

Providing an enterprise-ready platform for storing content in the cloud was a combination of design, good technology and timing.
Recognising that organisations, whether public or private, would not make the physical and psychological leap to the cloud without corporate control was the foundation (and I believe the major strength) of the design. The seamless Box Sync app, in addition to the cloud based platform, makes the most of the technologies that organisations have available whilst allowing for the vagaries of internet connections. The acquisition of the HTML5 viewing and collaboration tool crocdoc means that a lack high bandwidth internet connections does not impede use of box.com. Going mainstream as the world started looking seriously at holistic corporate IT costs for the first time as the world headed into recession was just a 'perfect storm' for both the product and company.
I confess up-front that I have used Box.com since I started my business in 2012, not because it was 'free', but because it gave a corporate growth path. Whilst the 'freemium' model of "no cost until you get to a particular size or want particular features", has been central to box.com's marketing approach, it is also notable that flagship customers such as Disney paid up front for the service(s) from the start.

Realising the ambition

Graham joins box.com from SAP (a crocdoc customer), where he was the head of SuccessFactors. In Aaran's blog post regarding the appointment, the CEO states "Now it’s time to bring Box into every other enterprise in the world — helping them use their information in new ways, collaborate across boundaries, and work far more productively on new devices and platforms. And Graham is just the person to help us do this."
Those who have seen Arron speak, and follow his tweets, know he means and believes exactly what he says. That ambition requires investment well beyond the 'guesstimated' $150 million revenues for 2013. So despite the contrary tweet last year, this appears the strongest message yet that box.com is preparing to float.

Internet access at home - there are many gaps

The following headline on the BBC News website on January 14 caught my eye - 'Internet gap hits poorer children, campaigners claim'. The item refers to the fact that an estimated 500,000 pupils do not have the internet access at home that is increasingly required to complete homework, or access lesson content.
The reason this piece rang true for me relates to my time, 12 years ago, as a governor of our village primary school. In an effort to address the problem of pupils lacking access to the internet at home the school was given 12 PCs with dial-up modems to lend to families. The eligibility requirements being that the family was both receiving income support and had a landline for the modem.
What had not been considered in the initiative was the fact that those on income support were not considered credit worthy enough by BT to provide a landline. In our locality, some of the target group had previously been disconnected and still had outstanding arrears with BT. Only three of the 12 PCs were ever lent out.
The action group Mind the Gap is aiming for 100,000 more schoolchildren to be connected at home within the next year. One of the proposals is that schools use their pupil premium monies to pay for equipment and fixed broadband to be installed. Sadly this will still not address the barrier we came across in 2001.
Technology has obviously moved on, and there is now the potential for 3G/4G access to the internet for some schools and families. This may be an option, but it ignores that other barrier highlighted by the word 'village'. Rural access to broadband whether fixed line or via mobile telephony is still woefully inadequate across the UK and looks likely to remain so, with the target of 90% broadband coverage by 2015 recently amended to provide for 95% of homes by 2017.
In my village, because I am in 'stone throwing' distance of our exchange I can get 6.1 megabits download during the day, but when the local children with access to broadband come home from school, and start steaming, performance for all of us can become be as good as those modems in the PCs 12 years ago. I certainly can't get 4G on any network and even 3G is variable, despite the O2 mast being on the previously mentioned telephone exchange.
Good news however is that a number of rural communities are seeking themselves to fix gaps left by BT coverage, and I will reflect on my current favourites in a future post.

Work and Play on the same page

As readers will know from my profile, I am a trainee guard on the North York Moors Railway. Whilst a heritage line and labour of love for volunteers like myself, it still has to pay bills for the likes of coal etc.
One 'nice little earner' is using the railway for photo and film shoots, the most recent being for the fashion house Ted Baker.
The trains are normally completely divorced from my analyst role and day time work, so imagine my surprise/delight to see an advert including a shot from the shoot on a page of the irreverent online rag TheRegister - totally distracted me (the train shot, not the model).

If you are into stylish clothes, and looking at the attendees at this week's Oracle Open World that doesn't apply to many in the IT fraternity, the full set can be found on the Ted Baker blog.

IBM Cognos Finance Forum 2013 - 20 June - It is a good elephant in the room

I was delighted to be invited to speak on Big Data in finance by UK based Budgeting Solutions, as it appears that many in the finance field are still (often rightly) sceptical about so called 'Big Data'. They have seen multiple definitions, got all excited when they heard the software was 'free', because it was open source, and then scared when told the analysis was best done outside the organisation's boundaries in 'the cloud'. Finally when they went looking for some meaningful information at a conference or exhibition they find the 'logo' (for Hadoop) is a yellow elephant that belonged to the child of Cloudera's founder Doug Cutting.

Whilst I recognise that many of my finance colleagues are not as 'serious' as the stereotypes would have us believe, we rely on the presumption that they are naturally conservative in nature and like to work on facts and evidence. Certainly not on hype and definitely not on fashionable logos. We like finance people to be innovative and open, but 2008 onward has shown us what happens when some get too 'creative' and ignore the conservative instinct.

On Thursday I wont be bringing a yellow elephant, and I may not wear a tie, but I hope I can show some great examples how Big Data is more than a fad, and has a great deal to offer the finance community in making better and less risky business decisions.

Gamification?

I am currently reflecting having posted the two tweets I have copied below:

Why do we need 'Municipal Gamification' to incentivise public workers to do their jobs? why did we kill vocation? #sad

why is it, whenever I hear the term #gamification I think of Hans Christian Andersen? http://bit.ly/zzbbaZ #gsummit13

Having just undertaking an extensive bit of consultancy/research for a customer on exploiting big data in the retail arena, I am currently thinking that a considered opinion on Gamification is needed. It probably needs more psychologists than entrepreneurs.

Would love to debate, but it needs to be away fro the buzz of a San Francisco 'hype fest'.

Who is my broadband provider?

The announcement by BSkyB (Sky) that it had bought the half milion broadband customer accounts from O2 illustrates both the pros and the cons of a 'semi' regulated market for communications (whether Broadband, telephony, wifi, radio, satellite or terrestrial televison). Of course the pros and the cons differ if you are a customer rather than a provider.
BSkyB has, with a £180 million cheque, become the second largest broadband provider in the UK after BT, leapfrogging Virgin Media and Talk Talk.
So customers have the pros of being having a relationship with an organisation which makes its money form multichannel content delivery, and the cons of the same (expcet a lot of upsell/crossell emails phone calls etc).
BSkyB has the pros of a bigger market for its multichannel products, but pushes itself closer to the centre of the regulator's (Ofcom) radar.
O2 of course can now concentrate on its core business i.e. getting money out of mobile contracts, and £180 million will by a significant number of 4G masts.
There was speculation that in the recent UK 4G auctions Sky would want to acquire some spectrum. This deal gives it a whole lot of customers without costs and risks of establishing the infrastructure to become a mobile network operator (MNO). Lets hope that the so called 4-play operator also extends it Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) so that the former O2 customers see service benefit in addition to the increase in marketing calls.

Blasts from the past

Just found two videos of myself on the interweb. One at EMC Documentum in Lisbon, and the other at the EU ICT conference in Lyon. Quite scary, but they do give the confidence a boost. Links here if you promise not to criticise.