More Acquistions : SAP buys Sybase 5.6B

The enterprise mobility market has been hot in the last year or so and the recent news of the SAPs acquisition of Sybase will make it even more interesting.

SAP is one of the leaders in the enterprise software space and mobility is being looked as a very effective channel in this space in the last few years. SAP already has been toying around with different strategies to explore this market ..SAP Netweaver program was one such initiative which, I understand was not very successfull. Subsequently, they have a created a SAP ecosystem for mobility where it has mobility partners such Syclo, Sybase and few others.

Few random observations :

Sybase provides a mobile middleware platform for developing and customizing mobile solutions. However, it in itself does not have the mobile applications.

Sybase rev would be around 400 M and hence the acquisition has come at a steep price !

For large enterprises running SAP, the mobile solutions naturally would be based on Sybase iAnywhere platform and the customization could be done through the third party vendors.

SAP will benefit from the license fees that Sybase used to charge earlier. It may be possible to bring down the overall cost of the mobile solutions for the end enterprise.

It needs to be seen how Sybase iAnywhere platform will be changed to accomodate different customer segments that included non-SAP users as well.

The other vendors like Syclo, Sky will possibly need to re-work their strategies without SAP now ..

Overall, I would rate this as right move that will add the required arsenal for SAP in the long term. For Sybase, its a great exit and a great partner who can take them higher ..

Apple : change in licensing agreement

Apple recently announced OS 4.0 with some major functionality changes. I have covered in high level the functionality additions in my previous post.

One other interesting addition is the change to the licensing agreement. Apple now prohibits any of the cross platform toolkits in its platform. Example would be the Adobe toolkit, there may be several others too who fall under that bucket. Let us analyse the same:

Earlier, any third party vendor with a cross platform toolkit would have been able to develop iphone native apps. With this change, iphone native apps can only be developed by iphone SDK and native objective C through the Cocoa API's provided by Apple.

Why this change ?

• Apple does not want to loose control
• Apple wants to maintain the quality of applications
• Apple does not want the third party vendors( like Adobe ) to benefit at the cost of Apple.
• Apple Appstore is growing and has close to 180000 applications as of now and it will only grow based on the growth in the industry. With this change, Apple would be the sole beneficiary and will not let any other companies take advantage and create another monopoly appstore that could potentially also have iphone apps.

What is in it for the Developers ?

• No change for the iphone developers.

What is in it for the cross platform toolkit providers ?

• They cant have iphone apps as a part of the toolkits. They will have the ability to build other apps from other platforms, if they do so.
• They will loose on the investments that they would have done so far.

What is in it for the other OEMs ?

• Some of the other platform providers may take cue and prohibit cross platform toolkits on their platforms.

On a general note, what might possibly happen is that we may only end up having only a fewer application stores from bigger vendors ( Apple, Microsoft, RIM etc ) that will become popular.

While we can continue to argue on Apple's strategy and what it does for the ecosystem, it certainly seems to be a well thought of strategy by apple considering the longer term growth that this industry provides.

My Article in IT Next - April edition

The link to my article on Enterprise Mobility in the April edition of the IT Next magazine.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/29424645/IT-Next-April-2010

iPhone OS 4.0

It was quite some time since I had posted my last post. However, there have been some interesting events in the past few weeks wrt Apple that I thought require a post ..

First event was a the release of much awaited iPAD. This device surely has a disrupting potential in the publishing/ereader industry. Since the release on Apr 3, abbout 450,000 iPads have been sold to date.

Second event has been the announcement wrt iphone OS 4.0. It comes with several new APIs ( 1500 or so ). The major new functionality could be bucketed as follows:

• MultiTasking
• Enhanced Email / Additional Exhange account provision.
• iAD
• iBooks
  
• Enterprise features

Each of the above probably deserve a seperate post, that possibly I will hope to post ...

Quote : DQ Channels

Link to my quote to DQ channels:

http://dqchannels.ciol.com/content/space/110011406.asp

Voice & Data Interview

Here are the links to my recent interviews to VoiceNData that appeared in Print in the new year special edition

http://voicendata.ciol.com/content/service_provider/110010504.asp

http://voicendata.ciol.com/content/top_stories/210010402.asp

Express Computer : Interview links

Recent interview links of mine on Mobile Unified Communications..

http://www.expresscomputeronline.com/20091130/unifiedcommunicationsspecial04.shtml

http://www.expresscomputeronline.com/20091130/unifiedcommunicationsspecial01.shtml

Sunil Gavaskar

Well, I had a chance to meet the legend - Sunil Gavaskar today in the office. He was here as a Deutche Bank sponsor. It was a great opportunity to see him in person, infact he was just sitting in the row ahead of me before going on stage.

He lived upto the expectation and infact he also does great Mimicry. He did the same of Javed Miandad and Geoff Boycott.

Interview / Voice and Data

One of my recent interviews wrt smartphones and mobility. It has been published in the latest version of Voice and Data.

http://voicendata.ciol.com/content/service_provider/109110204.asp

Mobile Coupons

There has been lot of activity and ( hype ) in the mobile coupon space. It may be good to understand what is a mobile coupon at the first place. 'Coupon' is a marketing terminology.

According to Wikipedia..

In marketing a coupon is a ticket or document that can be exchanged for a financial discount or rebate when purchasing a product. Customarily, coupons are issued by manufacturers of consumer packaged goods or by retailers, to be used in retail stores as a part of sales promotions. They are often widely distributed through mail, magazines, newspapers, the Internet, and mobile devices such as cell phones.

Before Mobile Coupons, Internet based coupons were in vogue. Internet coupons typically provide for reduced cost or free shipping, a specific dollar or percentage discount, or some other offer to encourage consumers to purchase specific products or to purchase from specific retailers.

Mobile Coupon is a coupon that leverages the mobile channel for delivery/redemption. There has been a recent interest in this space because of possibly the following reasons:

• Mobile industry has exploded;
• Mobile data services are on the rise;
• Mobile as a marketing channel is getting increasingly popular and has better statistics in all forms of click rates
• In US, the paper coupons are estimated to be 300 Billion every year. Mobile as a channel surely can replace a certain % of this.
  
• Paper coupons are expensive and the results are not as good as the Mobile channel
  

Here's a breakdown of what percentage of U.S. consumers get their coupons from each medium, according to Scarborough Research:

• Sunday newspaper: 51 percent
• In store: 35 percent
• Direct mail: 31 percent
• Loyalty programs: 21 percent
• Circulars: 20 percent
• Weekday newspaper: 17 percent
• Product packaging: 16 percent
• Magazines: 15 percent
• Email/text messages: 8 percent
• Websites: 7 percent

Please note that in India, these figures might be much different.

The process that is involved in launching Mobile Coupons would be :

Begin to have a database of Opt-in users ( Opt-in users are the ones who are willing to receive mobile marketing message / coupon their mobiles ; It is like a email subscription in the desktop world ! )

Analyse the profiles of users

Design marketing campaign ( delivery means, timing, content, Awareness etc )

Launch

Analyse the results ( Reports of CXX statistics ).( There are so many statistics CPM, CPE, CPO, CPA, CPL CTR, CTV etc ). This subject can be a seperate post in itself. The thing to note is most of these statistics are used by companies in a manner that can benefit them :-)


Without digressing too much, below are the defintions :

• CPM (Cost Per Mille), also called "Cost Per Thousand (CPT), is where advertisers pay for exposure of their message to a specific audience. "Per mille" means per thousand impressions, or loads of an advertisement. However, some impressions may not be counted, such as a reload or internal user action. The M in the acronym is the Roman numeral for one thousand.

• CPV (Cost Per Visitor) or (Cost per View in the case of Pop Ups and Unders) is where advertisers pay for the delivery of a Targeted Visitor to the advertisers website.

• CPC (Cost Per Click) is also known as Pay per click (PPC). Advertisers pay each time a user clicks on their listing and is redirected to their website. They do not actually pay for the listing, but only when the listing is clicked on. This system allows advertising specialists to refine searches and gain information about their market. Under the Pay per click pricing system, advertisers pay for the right to be listed under a series of target rich words that direct relevant traffic to their website, and pay only when someone clicks on their listing which links directly to their website. CPC differs from CPV in that each click is paid for regardless of whether the user makes it to the target site.

• CPA (Cost Per Action) or (Cost Per Acquisition) advertising is performance based and is common in the affiliate marketing sector of the business. In this payment scheme, the publisher takes all the risk of running the ad, and the advertiser pays only for the amount of users who complete a transaction, such as a purchase or sign-up. This is the best type of rate to pay for banner advertisements and the worst type of rate to charge.
  • Similarly, CPL (Cost Per Lead) advertising is identical to CPA advertising and is based on the user completing a form, registering for a newsletter or some other action that the merchant feels will lead to a sale.
  • Also common, CPO (Cost Per Order) advertising is based on each time an order is transacted.
  • CPE (Cost Per Engagement) is a form of Cost Per Action pricing first introduced in March 2008. Differing from cost-per-impression or cost-per-click models, a CPE model means advertising impressions are free and advertisers pay only when a user engages with their specific ad unit. Engagement is defined as a user interacting with an ad in any number of ways.^[3]

• Cost per conversion Describes the cost of acquiring a customer, typically calculated by dividing the total cost of an ad campaign by the number of conversions. The definition of "Conversion" varies depending on the situation: it is sometimes considered to be a lead, a sale, or a purchase.

Enterpreneur Statistics

Below are some interesting stats that I had saved ( and forgot the linke ) regarding founders/entrepreneurs :

1. The average and median age of company founders when they started their current companies was 40.

2. 95.1 percent of respondents themselves had earned bachelor’s degrees, and 47 percent had more advanced degrees.

3. Less than 1 percent came from extremely rich or extremely poor backgrounds

4. 15.2% of founders had a sibling that previously started a business.


5. 69.9 percent of respondents indicated they were married when they launched their first business. An additional 5.2 percent were divorced, separated, or widowed.

6. 59.7 percent of respondents indicated they had at least one child when they launched their first business, and 43.5 percent had two or more children.

7. The majority of the entrepreneurs in the sample were serial entrepreneurs. The average number of businesses launched by respondents was approximately 2.3.

8. 74.8 percent indicated desire to build wealth as an important motivation in becoming an entrepreneur.

9. Only 4.5 percent said the inability to find traditional employment was an important factor in starting a business.

10. Entrepreneurs are usually better educated than their parents.

11. Entrepreneurship doesn’t always run in the family. More than half (51.9 percent) of respondents were the first in their families to launch a business.

12. The majority of respondents (75.4 percent) had worked as employees at other companies for more than six years before launching their own companies.

Mobile Marketing / 2009

Mobile Marketing has been a hot topic in the mobile arena. Even during the worst of the times, this is considered to be growing.











Couple of important takeaways :

Mobile as a marketing channel is showing increased acceptance and hence growing
Number of marketers looking to leverage mobile is on the rise


Mobile Marketing as a market segment itself is growing
Rise of different mobile channels - SMS, Widgets, WAP, Bluetooth, Voice etc

Yahoo/Microsoft Deal

Yahoo and MS announced a partnership towards 'search'. Below are some useful pointers:

-The partnership is to provide an alternative to Google for Search. At the moment, Google has 80% market share.

-The deal leverages the strengths of MS and Yahoo, while allowing the companies to invest in other areas and can lead to innovation.

-Microsoft will now power Yahoo search, while Yahoo will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies' premium search advertisers

-The details on the Mobile Search is not crystal clear.

-The PC part is exclusive, whereas mobile is not—Yahoo can partner with other vendors in the future if it chooses

-Forrester’s U.S. Interactive marketing forecast shows that search spend is forecast to continue to grow at around 15 percent a year, to more than $30 billion in 2014 in the U.S. alone, which explains why Microsoft is so keen to play in this market.

-With the Yahoo partnership, Microsoft will increase its mobile search presence significantly, while Google is still dominating the market

-This is strategic attack from Microsoft to defend its core businesses, as Google is targeting its future growth from the software market( Chrome ! Android ! )

-Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10-year license to Yahoo's core search technologies, and Microsoft will have the ability to integrate Yahoo search technologies into its existing Web search platforms

-Microsoft will guarantee Yahoo’s owned-and-operated revenue per search in each country for the first 18 months following initial implementation in that country

-At full implementation, expected to occur within two years following regulatory approval, Yahoo estimates that this agreement will provide a benefit to annual GAAP operating income of approximately $500 million and capital expenditure savings of approximately $200 million

CXOtoday interview

Link to the CXOtoday interview.

http://www.cxotoday.com/India/News/M-VAS_to_Emerge_Bigger_With_3G_Services/551-103375-908.html

Mobile Couponing G

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