One of my beefs with the enterprise software industry is the pretense that a particular app vendor “owns” a customer and, by implication, has a footprint at said customer all the way from the C-suite to cubicle-land. Reality, for the most part, is quite different. Most companies in the upper midmarket and above have large portfolios of products run by distinct groups that have little or no interconnection. While there may be a first among equals vendor at the company, it’s more common that vendors have special relationships with the CIO or a line of business exec, but no one “owns” a customer any more than the local grocery store owns you or me.
It’s always a sign of a healthy grasp of reality to see a software vendor slide deck replete with other software vendor logos. Solving the problems that come with heterogeneity, instead of pretending they should be solved by eliminating heterogeneity, is a pretty customer-friendly move. This was the gist of a slide, replete with the logos of 18 vendors, Informatica recently showed analysts as a way of explaining the coverage of its Intelligent Data Management Cloud platform. It was also a little humorous to note that the vendors listed were divided into two categories – legacy and next gen – the former of which included some vendors who would definitely take umbrage with that designation. Oh well.
In addition to humorous, it may have been a little ironic as well: after all, some of those legacy vendors bear direct responsibility for the fragmented nature of the enterprise software customer base. The acquisition of line of business apps by the major suite vendors usually resulted in one of two sales scenarios: The acquiring vendor either injected these best-of-breed products into the infrastructures of suite customers without providing out of the box integration; and/or they continued to sell the products as standalone system in part as a way to get a toehold into some other suite vendor’s customer base. Add those sales motions to the activities of the remaining best-of-breed vendors to defend and expand their markets, and the result was a pretty complicated enterprise infrastructure.
Extreme heterogeneity was also aided and abetted by the customer’s own strategies, or lack thereof. The constant drumbeat of mergers and acquisitions in every sector of the global economy made a farce out of whatever holistic vendor strategy the office of the CIO could come up with: all too often the acquired company had completely different enterprise software tools that had to be immediately integrated or the fabled accretive value of the acquisition would be lost. Meanwhile, subsidiary and line of business execs were often given considerable leeway as to what software they were allowed to run, substantially increasing the complexity of an enterprise. This meant that it was increasingly common to see not only multiple different enterprise systems running in a given company, but also multiple versions of different individual products.
As if the IT hairball weren’t tangled enough, vendors started pushing their on-premise customers to move to the latest versions of their software, running in various versions of the cloud. As many companies could not afford to move everything at once – nor could they in many cases cost-justify the move – an emergent hybrid platform heterogeneity further compounded the mess.
So every time someone notices that overall growth in productivity across all industries in the world has barely topped 2 percent per year for the entire century, despite IT spending growth that can easily be in double digits multiple years in a row, I tell them about the barriers to productivity that result from this giant heterogeneous IT hairball. Sad but true, this self-inflicted pain has continued unabated, despite huge innovations in application functionality, user experience, and new buzzword technologies like AI, ML, and RPA. While pinning the lack of productivity growth solely on heterogeneity would be unfair, it’s a huge contributing factor, no doubt about it.
This is why I liked what I saw from Informatica. And what I didn’t see as well. The message around a full vision of the challenge facing heterogeneous enterprises was excellent, and really spoke to the need to look holistically at the concomitant challenge presented by a multi-cloud, hybridized heterogenous enterprise. So instead of focusing on a single silo, Informatica can support a full range of requirements, from data, app, and API integration to data quality and governance, and master data management, among others.
This vision supports an important concept that I’ve embodied in an aphorism: the biggest mistake enterprise software vendors make is to try to sell products the way they build them, not the way the customer wants to consume them. The range of functionality supported by Informatica can be found in a collection – literally – of siloed solutions from an easy couple dozen different vendors, but few if any can really look at this problem and deliver solutions holistically the way Informatica can. I think this isn’t just a great message for IT leaders. It has a lot of relevance to LOB leaders trying themselves to take a more holistic view of their jobs. More and more LOB key performance indicators are driven – or should be driven – by end-to-end processes that span a wide range of otherwise siloed apps. While these LOB leaders don’t need to be the engineers that make that happen, it behooves them to have an appreciation for the complexity of the problem and the relative complexity of the vendor solutions available to IT.
With the LOB in mind, what I didn’t see that I liked was an attempt by Informatica to usurp the primacy of any individual app or otherwise compete with the myriad vendors that provide the siloed functionality that are the foundation for this heterogeneous hairball. While I wouldn’t necessarily have expected Informatica to do this, it’s always refreshing to see a vendor embrace extreme heterogeneity and work with it instead of decrying it and trying to prove that the solution to the heterogeneity hairball is an enterprise software core based on that vendor’s products.
I freely admit I need to get out more and stop spending so much time with apps vendors, for whom it’s antithetical, even for those with broad portfolios that include infrastructure glue, to avoid expressing the fantasy that these problems are best solved by a rip and replace exercise that would install the vendor’s integrated suite as the center of the enterprise universe. Sales reflexes are hard to break out of, and, it’s been a struggle to get many of the apps vendors to see the possibilities of meeting the customer at their individual point of pain with instead of trying to sublimate, subvert, or simply ignore it.
So hats off to Informatica for defining a core part of problem that only a few see as an essential starting point for a dialogue on true customer success.
Finally, I have to end with a nod to the picture that heads up this post. It’s a Porthole, an award-winning infuser that Informatica offered to analysts as a way to make their special analyst event a little more, pun-intended, palatable. I don’t know if the erstwhile head of analyst relations, Peggy O’Neil, saw it as a metaphor for Informatica, but I couldn’t help but make the connection.
The Porthole is a tool for blending ingredients in order to make infusions, liqueurs, and other magical draughts and potions. The basic notion is to take a bunch of ingredients that normally stand relatively well by themselves, and, by combining them and letting them infuse their essence into each other, produce a final product that more than exceeds the sum of its ingredients. While I’m not a big cocktail drinker, the current mix of cherries, lemon zest and juice, simple syrup and vodka in the Porthole, produced a lovely blend that, when added to some bubble water, made for a dangerously delicious drink on a hot day. Part of the genius of the Porthole is that it has gotten me to experiment with the possibilities of doing some creative blending and see what happens – plums from my trees, cherries, and peaches have all gone into the Porthole and emerged universally delicious.
Which is indeed a metaphor for what Informatica can do for the enterprise. Creative blending sounds like something a lot of companies should be experimenting in order to not just break down their silos but find creative ways to innovate with the apps they have in their own garden.
Caution: could be habit-forming. 🤓
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