Of course this is a personal exercise - anyone can come to an different result - here is what I did: I picked the top 8 events, news, acquisitions, conferences, analyst events etc. of the quarter, they had to have a blog post published by yours truly. Threw them in a bucket, draw them and then had them 'play' out the bracket... based on what myPOV was in regards of enterprise relevance and impact for our clients, the CxOs, with special weight to people leaders out there. Needless to say - some where easier, some harder.
Here you go for Q2 2016 - all related to NextGen Apps - the research area that covers when enterprises build new software - what are the use cases, the tools, the platforms, the players, the best practises etc.
[Apologies - time to market forced me to play the bracket right to left.]
Round #1 Dropouts
- Unit4 Business World On - A complete, start from scratch, built on next gen capabilities that technology offers, ERP package was launched by Unit4. Runs on IaaS, uses BigData and Machine Learning, includes an assistant etc. (read more here). Unfortunately squared against CloudFoundry, which has seen broad adoption and mind-share amongst CxOs in 2016 (read here).
- AWS in India - Few locations, maybe Germany, have garnered more anticipation and interest for AWS opening up a location for its IaaS services than the one in India (read here). Unfortunately the draw squared it against another big AWS announcement, the joint statement of both Salesforce and AWS of making AWS its production IaaS. Both are important for AWS, but getting load leads to opening locations, so the partnership wins this one (read here).
- OpenStack Summit - What used to be the tangible, widely adopted alternative to public IaaS, OpenStack, showed signs of weakening at OpenStack Summit in Austin (read here), where no commercial company talked about usage in the keynote (ISVs and Telcos where there in force). SAP choosing Azure as the (or one? Not clear yet today.) IaaS partner for production loads eclipses this easily. (see here).
- Infosys Confluence - Infosys laid down its vision on how enterprises will operate in the future, but most impressively laying out its vision on how to disrupt its own business for the better with Mana (read here). But Google I/O was a tough opponent and wins this round (see here).
Round #2 Dropouts
- Salesforce and AWS - While an impressive partnership - that will show further announcements in the year (stay tuned, think foliage), it did resonate in the Salesforce ecosystem only (read here), but the CloudFoundry victory lap continued strong in 2016, dominating both CxO conversations and plans as well as IVS and IaaS uptake, read here (read here).
- Google I/O - Google staged its yearly developer conference in Mountain View this time and it was loaded with announcements, mainly in Machine Learning (by now everyone said AI), VR / AR, Assistants and much more (read here). But the SAP / Microsoft partnership garnered more, probably immediate enterprise attention and squares the #1 enterprise load in the direction of the #2 IaaS vendor, read here.
Q2 Finals - CloudFoundry beats Microsoft Azure getting SAP load
Two key evens in Q2 2016, both operating at different levels of the stack. The Microsoft / SAP partnership on attracting load for Azure on the IaaS level, also marking (the not confirmed) end of SAP's in house IaaS ambition (read here). CloudFoundry is squarely on a PaaS level, with load portability across IaaS being one of the major reasons to attract enterprises (read here). Even if they may never move loads across IaaS - they still remain very attracted to the topic, trying to avoid the dreaded lock-in. Apps beat IaaS here, so congrats to CloudFoundry to win the Q2 Finals of 2016 in the NextGen Apps category. See you in the Finals.
How would you have scored the Q2 2016 news? Please comment!
Here are all blog posts:
- News Analysis - Unit4 announces Business World On – A modern ERP offering - read here.
- News Analysis - Amazon Web Services Cloud now speaks… Hindi - Indian AWS Data Centers available - read here.
- Event Report - OpenStack Summit 2016 - Austin - OpenStack matures - read here.
- Event Report - Infosys Confluence - The Future Watch is Software + People - read here.
- News Analysis - Salesforce selects AWS as preferred Public Cloud Infrastructure Provider - Good move - read here.
- Event Report - Google I/O 2016 - Android N soon, Google assistant sooner and VR / AR later - read here.
- News Analysis - SAP and Microsoft usher in new era of partnership to accelerate digital transformation in the cloud - read here.
- Event Report - Cloud Foundry Cloud Foundry Summit - It's good to be king of PaaS - read here.
Other Shootouts for 2016: