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Digital Transformation Digest: 2020 Census Poised for Security Nightmare, VMWare Strengthens SDN Play, Salesforce to Unveil Success Cloud

Digital Transformation Digest: 2020 Census Poised for Security Nightmare, VMWare Strengthens SDN Play, Salesforce to Unveil Success Cloud

Constellation Insights

2020 U.S. Census system grapping with security risks: The United States conducts its Census once per decade, and the deadline for the 2020 edition is approaching quickly. As part of a modernization effort, officials have been introducing technical innovations in the Census's supporting systems, including the deployment of tablet devices with census-takers out in the field.

However, a series of troubling security issues must be addressed before the 2020 Census gets underway, lest they lead to disruptions by hackers and ultimately, compromised data that could have a significant impact on the nation, the Government Accountability Office told lawmakers this week.

Meanwhile, the cost of the Census has grown steadily, estimated at $15.6 billion for 2020, up from $12.3 billion in the 2010 rendition. Some 43 systems in total will be used for the Census, but as of now the required integration and development work have been completed on only four of them, the GAO said.

Moreover, there are supposed to be strict controls in place on the Census's protection of PII (personally identifiable information), yet none of the 43 systems have satisfied the necessary security certifications required for use in an end-to-end testing program set for completion next year:

The amount of work remaining is concerning because the test has already begun and the delays experienced in system development and testing mentioned earlier reduce the time available for performing the security assessments needed to fully authorize these systems[.]

POV: There is much more fodder for thought—and concern—in the GAO's full report, which was first flagged by the Register. The U.S. government has a mediocre track record when it comes to IT projects and it appears the 2020 Census, as ambitious and laudable as its goals are, may suffer a similar fate. The stakes for citizen privacy are high indeed, as are the implications for U.S. democracy.

More than just a tool for analyzing economic data, the Census is used for all manner of government planning and funding, such as for infrastructure development, healthcare and education. It also helps determine how legislative districts are drawn up. This is a particularly sensitive topic, given the history of gerrymandering in U.S. politics.

The U.S. is already roiling over the potential influence of foreign governments on the last presidential election; if hackers with bad intentions manage to compromise the 2020 Census, the ripple effects could be severe and lasting.

VMWare buying VeloCloud SDN startup: Boosting its play in software-defined networking, VMWare has inked a deal to buy SDN startup VeloCloud for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition, which is expected to close in VMWare's Q4 fiscal 2018, builds on its previous purchase of Nicira in 2012. Nicira's technology became what is now VMWare NSX, and the addition of VeloCloud puts VMWare in even closer competition with Cisco on the networking front.

VeloCloud also gives VMWare's SDN business a significant boost in footprint. Its SD-WAN technology is in use at more than 1,000 service providers and customers, including AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Sprint, Telstra, Brooks Brothers, Saber Healthcare and NCR. Here's how VMWare describes VeloCloud's value:

VeloCloud's cloud-delivered SD-WAN combines the economics and flexibility of the hybrid wide-area network (WAN) with the deployment speed and low maintenance of cloud-based services. It dramatically simplifies the WAN by delivering virtualized services from the cloud to branch offices and mobile users everywhere. VeloCloud leverages intelligent x86 edge appliances to aggregate multiple broadband links at the branch office, and using cloud-based orchestration, connects the branch office to any of type of data center: enterprise, cloud, or software-as-a-service.

Customers choose VMware NSX because it delivers network and security services closest to the application. With VeloCloud, VMware will bring the same properties to the WAN, resulting in visibility, security, automation with performance and availability for enterprise and cloud applications.

POV: Nicira was a signature acquisition for VMware—and one it reportedly beat out none other than Cisco for—but adding VeloCloud to the mix is a good move. Nicira's technology has been aging and lacking in investment; VeloCloud represents new blood, says Constellation VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller.

Overall, the deal is another key move on the next-generation networking chessboard—a playing field both rival vendors and enterprises contemplating major new investments in network architecture must watch closely.

Salesforce's new Success Cloud: Dreamforce 2017 is just a few days away, and while Salesforce has plenty of news it's keeping close to the vest until event time, one important announcement has already surfaced. It's Success Cloud, the latest pillar in its family of cloud service offerings. Success Cloud is not really about new technologies, however. Rather, it is geared toward helping Salesforce customers get the most out of their investments in the company's other clouds, as the keynote description explains:

In this keynote, you will leave with an understanding of how Salesforce has always-on, adoption, and advisory services to help businesses of every size achieve sustainable success. You will hear directly from trailblazing executives at Toyota Financial Services, LVMH, and more as they demonstrate how they reinvented their business with Salesforce Success Cloud.

POV: Salesforce pledges that it will reveal, for the first time, its "secret sauce" for driving customer success. Perhaps a more accurate way to put it is that with Success Cloud, Salesforce is introducing a formal framework around customer adoption, and at least in part is looking to monetize it in a more structured way.

There are already a number of Salesforce partners, such as Shellblack and Hyphen8, focused on end-user adoption services and training for the company's platform. Success Cloud would appear to compete with these third-party options. It also builds upon the success of Trailhead, Salesforce's online skills training program, which is aimed at fostering citizen developers and power users in the interest of driving long-term loyalty and stickiness for its products.

While much of Dreamforce's attention will be paid to flashier topics such as AI, the Success Cloud may end up being the conference's sleeper hit among attendees, and a possible cause for concern among some partners.

Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Future of Work Marketing Transformation Next-Generation Customer Experience Tech Optimization Chief Customer Officer Chief People Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Digital Officer

Digital Transformation Digest: IBM Tackles Hybrid with Cloud Private, Google's New AI Incubator Focuses On Healthcare, Under Armour's Growing Pains

Digital Transformation Digest: IBM Tackles Hybrid with Cloud Private, Google's New AI Incubator Focuses On Healthcare, Under Armour's Growing Pains

Constellation Insights

IBM tackles the hybrid cloud question anew with Cloud Private: While the concept of private clouds is nothing new, IBM has come up with a new take on it in the form of Cloud Private, a Kubernetes-based container orchestration platform that's compatible with both Docker containers and Cloud Foundry. Big Blue says the stack can help customers move on-premises workloads to any public cloud they choose, when they desire.

In addition, IBM has rolled out "container-optimized" versions of WebSphere Liberty, DB2 and MQ that can work in concert with Cloud Private. So what are the use cases? Here are a couple of scenarios IBM proposed for Cloud Private:

An airline, for example, could use IBM Cloud Private to bring a core application that tracks frequent flyer miles into a private cloud environment and connect it to a new mobile app in the public cloud. A financial services firm could use it to keep customer data in-house as it works to meet its security and regulatory requirements while taking advantage of new analytic tools and machine learning in the public cloud to quickly identify investment trends and opportunities.

IBM's release cites Ilmarinen, a Finnish company that oversees pensions for about 900,000 Finns, as an early adopter of Cloud private. The release also indicates that Hertz Corporation is kicking the tires.


Cloud Private includes management tooling, security and data encryption, database integrations and devops tools to go along with the core cloud platform; additional fees may apply. It is supported on IBM Power Systems, System Z mainframes and IBM Hyperconverged systems, along with servers from Cisco, Dell EMC, NetApp, Lenovo and Intel.

POV: IBM is far from the first big cloud vendor to embrace Kubernetes, but the rollout of Cloud Private is nonetheless a welcome one for enterprises.

"Enterprises want to avoid lock-in and prefer load portability," says Constellation VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. "Kubernetes does the trick here and being able to transfer Kubernetes loads across public and private clouds gives that portability. It's always good to see more choices for enterprises on how to operate their next-gen apps."

Google's AI startup incubator kicks off with healthcare focus: Earlier this year, Google announced plans for Launchpad Studio, a six-month program for startups focused on applying machine learning to a variety of business and social problems. Now the first four members of Launchpad have been revealed, and all of them are focused on some aspect of healthcare. They include:

  • Augmedix, which is developing a system for increasing doctors' productivity while lowering burnout.
  • BrainQ, a company focused on helping patients regain motion in paralyzed limbs.
  • Byteflies, which is centered on speeding up clinical trials.
  • Cytovale, which is developing a set of biomarkers that can detect sepsis—the presence of dangerous bacteria—earlier on.

Google describes each startup's pursuits in greater detail in this blog post.

POV: The startups will get help from Google engineers, as well as training and credits for Google Cloud Platform without having to provide any equity stake to Google in return. While Google is focused on healthcare and biotechnology for now with the program, more verticals will be added later.

However no-strings-attached the startups' participation may be, there's no question that Google chose them for a reason and that in turn, the startups' founders and funders are eager to get inside Google's research orbit. Under the program, each startup identifies a sizable machine learning program, and Google's goal is to help them solve it within the six-month period.

Healthcare is a top target for machine learning and AI applications, with the sheer size of the market being one major reason. Healthcare costs in the U.S. alone amounted to $3.4 trillion in 2016. The Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services, which oversees those massive government programs, has projected that healthcare spending will reach $5.5 trillion by 2025—that's 20 percent of GDP.

Under Armour sweating out its digital transformation: Active apparel maker Under Armour has made serious strides toward digital transformation in recent years, through introducing a broad connected fitness platform, developing large data sets for analytics and retail optimization and other moves. But Under Armour this week reported a bit of a shaky third quarter, posting a drop in profits and cutting its forecast.

On a conference call, CEO Kevin Plank attributed the company's problems to that old bugaboo of growing pains:

Yet for as much as this rapid growth, realize amazing milestones, stories and accomplishments, we are now dealing with issues related to that growth. In the past few years, while we delivered industry-leading innovation, built an amazing roster of athletes and assets, accelerated our footwear business, expanded DTC in our wholesale distribution, while gaining traction in our International business, our operations have become increasingly more complex.

Under Armour has developed a plan that's aimed at building stronger bridges with customer, helping it fine-tune new products to ensure they're in line with trends and real-life customer demand. The company is also dealing with the on-ramp of its new SAP ERP system, which went live on July 1. The project impacted supply chain activities during the quarter, causing delayed shipments and other issues that hurt Under Armour's financial results. The company also cited change management issues with the new system among its workforce and partner ecosystem.

POV: It's not unheard of for a big ERP system rollout to impact company earnings, especially ones with complex physical supply chains like Under Armour. The company says the system is stable and running well, but that change management issues are still ongoing in the fourth quarter and could drift into 2018.

Overall, there doesn't seem to be much cause for panic at this point; Under Armour has been one of SAP's highest-profile reference customers in recent years and there's little doubt SAP will do everything it can to ensure a rapid resolution to the problems. Still, it's something to watch, and with the Consumer Electronics Show just a couple of months away, Under Armour will be looking to showcase and get its newest innovations to market as smoothly as possible.

Data to Decisions Marketing Transformation Matrix Commerce Next-Generation Customer Experience Tech Optimization Chief Customer Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Financial Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Revenue Officer Chief Supply Chain Officer

Fall Reading List 2017

Fall Reading List 2017

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Some of these books are new for 2017. Others, published before 2017, may be even more important now than they were when first published... at least for me. You'll see a clear focus on the future of work, as well as some heavy hitting general management books. Some link to my earlier reviews, others I'll just share what I was looking for and what I found. If these sound good to you, here is a set from prior years

I'm trying something new and will be posting one a day. How long will this take? Depends on how fast I read! I started the list early in the summer, but still have a few in the hopper. Here is the full list if you can't wait. Disclaimers: Where I have received a free copy, I have also purchased at least one more. I am using affiliate links.

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines By Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby OnlyHumansCover.jpg

I'm working on a new project focused on human-centric integration of artificial intelligence into work. You'll see many related books in this list. I started my reading here given Tom Davenport and Julia Kirby are key in the world of technology and work. They do a nice job outlining how AI might affect your work, and then given your situation, some personal strategies for action. (My focus is more proactive, how you might craft the work you do given new possibilities.)

What To Do When Machines Do Everything: How to Get Ahead in a World of AI, Algorithms, Bots, and Big Data By Malcolm Frank, Paul Roehrig, Ben Pring WhenMachinesCover.jpg

Similar to Davenport & Kirby, this is a great heads-up for what is coming. The authors hail from Cognizant's Center for the Future of Work. Besides a nice job on the footnotes (thank you!) they offer new data from their survey of over 2000 companies. Five approaches from personal to strategic are offered for taking advantage of the changes to come.

 

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future By Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson MachinePlatformCover.jpg

McAfee and Brynjolfsson have done the most to bring the idea of "racing with machines" versus racing against the machine (phrase from their prior books, The Second Machine Age, and Race Against the Machine) to the general public. In Machine, Platform, Crowd, they take a broad view of the roles digital tools play in organizations and work. If you haven't read their other books, you can start here to see their most recent perspectives.

Under New Management: How Leading Organizations Are Upending Business as Usual By David Burkus UnderNewCover.jpg

This one is a great primer for the options we have in our futures of work (plural intended: we should be crafting these futures, not focused on any one). From killing email, to pay transparency and reduced hierarchies, this is a book that will appear when I do my "business books: fact or fiction" class (under fact). Students may not want to hear it from a professor, but maybe they'll take heed from Burkus. Many of the techniques in modern organizations are still built for the organizations, technology, and people of the 50s.

Analytics: The Agile Way (Wiley and SAS Business Series) By Phil Simon AnalyticsCover.jpg

I have to keep up my technical skills, and Phil Simon's work is a huge help. When contacted about teaching a short course on the managerial aspects of  business analytics, I suggested they contact Phil instead. They still thought my background would be a better fit given my "plugged-in" approach, but were happy to hear I'd use this book in the class. Didn't work out that time, but now I'm prepared!

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World By Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott BlockchainCover.jpg

This is another book I was reading to be sure I stay a step a head of at least some of my students. If you know that blockchain is something related to cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, but that's about it, this is the book for you. Reading it isn't like sitting down with a novel, but you will get a much better perspective of how blockchain technologies will enable new industries and vast improvements to the ones we have. My favorite is only mentioned in passing -- educational transcripts -- but you'll likely see something that affects the work you do today.

Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy By Carl Shapiro, Hal R. Varian InformationRules.jpg

Shapiro and Varian are hardcore economists, but with important translation skills. Both started as academics, but Varian is now Chief Economist at Google. Margo Beth Fleming, then an editor at Stanford University Press, recommended Information Rules to me as the style of book I might try to write. Approachable book about complex issues.

The Power of Onlyness: Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World By Nilofer Merchant onlynesscover.jpg

Here the list takes a turn away from digital organization and the future of work -- except that our digital world enables all of us to take a much taller stand and have vast impact if we want. Merchant notes, “You’re standing in the spot in the world that only you stand in, a function of your history and experiences, visions, and hopes. From this spot where only you stand, you offer a distinct point of view, novel insights, and even groundbreaking ideas.” Full review here from a prior post.

The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt By Robert I. Sutton AssholeCover.jpg

Bob Sutton is a Stanford professor and one of the first colleagues I point to as both able to take on tough academic topics and real world issues. This is an actionable follow-on to Bob's books, The No Asshole Rule, and Good Boss, Bad Boss. He mentions 8000 emails readers have sent his way. That makes me sad, but I guess I'm not surprised. Perhaps with this book, Nilofer Merchant's earlier, and the next two on my list, Leadership Learning, and The Advantage, we can all start enacting the changes to reduce Bob's in-box. Like his prior work, the background research is there, but presented in a way that brings you into the community.

Learning Leadership: The Five Fundamentals of Becoming an Exemplary Leader By James M. Kouzes, Barry Z. Posner LeadershipLearningCover.jpg

This is a recent contribution presenting Kouzes and Posner's deep expertise and data on leadership (over the years they've surveyed more than 2 million people from around the world) . Building from the foundations presented in The Leadership Challenge, Learning Leadership takes on damaging myths that may be holding you back. Many of these are tough to read as they take away excuses you may have lurking in the back of your mind (speaking from personal experience). As you're seeing in this list, I like actionable books. This one gives you chances to pause for preparation, then guides you through next steps to take action. My favorite nugget: "Great leaders are great learners." Excellent advice now, and for our futures of work.

The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business By Patrick M. Lencioni TheAdvantageCover.jpg

This is the book that is motivating me to build the course, Business Books: Fact or Fiction. Presented with deep examples from industry, I can then tie back to deep examples in research. Given the examples I see in Bob Sutton's books (e.g., The Asshole Survival Guide) and in the news, I don't think traditional organizational behavior and design courses are having the outcomes my colleagues and I hope for. The Advantage, built on Pat and his colleagues' deep experience in management and consulting, puts organizational health at the center of organizational design. It isn't enough to be organizationally smart (great strategy, technology, etc.), you also need to the organization to be healthy. I can teach an entire course by focusing on his key health issues of clarity, communication, reinforcement, and cohesion. Link to prior review.

Own It: The Power of Women at Work By Sallie Krawcheck

OwnItCover.jpgI read Own It after hearing Sallie Krawcheck interviewed on NPR. Besides describing her tumultuous career on Wall Street, she shares her reasons for starting her firm Ellevest, an investment platformed focused on women's needs. Women live longer, make less, and tend to be less risky (for good and for bad reasons). Yes, the book feels like marketing for Ellevest, but by the end I'd decided that was ok. 

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite By Duff McDonald GoldenPassportCover.png

Very interesting history and analysis. Given the early foundations of my field of organizational behavior were built at Harvard (Taylor, Mayo, Raiffa, Chandler, and more), it's a bit like People magazine for academics. For MBAs, it's a bit of a cautionary tale or a window into the sausage making of a business school. Especially interesting given the likely shifts we will see in the future of graduate business education. What can we learn from more than 100 years of history?

Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions By Richard Harris RigorMortisCover.png

Just starting Rigor Mortis. Timely for me as my colleagues and I are looking at a new National Science Foundation proposal. This is another where an NPR interview triggered my interest. Harkens back to my time as a doctoral student involved in a secondary analysis of a medical study. Our results could be replicated. The opposing author's could not. Our results show up in another interesting book, Impure Science (1992, Robert Bell).

 

Change Agent: A Novel By Daniel Suarez ChangeAgentCover.png

All work and no play.... Change Agent is fabulous hard science fiction. I heard about this one from the podcast, Triangulation. Suarez does his homework before starting in on a book and this one is set in a world with genetic editing available for hire. The big picture questions will have you ready for your next cocktail party, or will motivate you to take an online class about biohacking.

 

2017 Thinkers 50 Distinguished Achievement Awards Shortlist

thinkers-50-2017.png

I'll end my Fall Reading list with another list. The 2017 Thinkers50 includes authors already on my short list (e.g., Nilofer Merchant's, The Power of Onlyness, and Tapscott and Tapscott's, Blockchain Revolution), but there are many others I'll be taking a look at. I'm honored to be attending this year's Gala (as a guest) and expect the recommendations I hear there will go far beyond the books on my or their current list. Time to start on my 2018 reading....

Open Business Ecosystems and Closed Technology Platforms Business Enabler, or Business Market Disrupter?

Open Business Ecosystems and Closed Technology Platforms Business Enabler, or Business Market Disrupter?

WARNING; If you work for an Industry Sector leading Enterprise this piece may serious disturb your piece of mind in respect of your Digital Business strategy. Shifting from Products, to Services, to Outcomes to gain increased revenues at higher margins will be at the heart of your Enterprise Digital Business strategy. To maximizing Business opportunities through interactions almost certainly requires participation in an industry sector Business Ecosystem, and, that requires functionality to be provided by a Technology Platform. Enterprise IT department view Technology Platforms as a mixed blessing trading internal functionality ease against the restrictions of a closed proprietary environment. Will it any different externally when the Platform provider is supporting a Business ecosystem?

The next big business word is; Ecosystem? This is a direct quote from a Forbes article that tracks the amazing rise in the frequency that the term is used, and makes an important statement about the what it should mean. Like a lot of terms with complex meanings all too often it is a short hand to avoid having to really understand the true definition. However, underlying the whole concept of ‘Ecosystems’ is a really big question, and like so many it arises from the collision of business and technology into increasingly becoming an interchangeable and ubiquitous environment.

Using the example of App Shops; How much alignment is there between a Business definition of the value to be found in the Apple, or Google, App shop Business Ecosystems versus the technology controls imposed by the proprietary Apple, or Google, Technology Platform? Extend the example to Amazon Books and ask who has control of the resulting Ecosystem; Amazon or the Publishing houses that controlled the market for more than one hundred years?

Does it matter? Are the technology platforms and business ecosystems just two sides of the same coin and nothing to consider? Arguably it does matter as its difficult, perhaps impossible, to have a business ecosystem without some form of common shared technology to support the interactions within it, but does that have to be a vendor provided technology ‘platform’ in the format above?

From a business point of view, the value in App Shops for Mobile Devices lies in opening up, or expanding, the available marketplace resulting in the creation of economic value through bringing sellers and buyers together. Thus, the business definition of an Ecosystem, first and foremost, lies in the creation of increased trading opportunities. The statistics for Apple and Google App Shops support this by showing the numbers of participants and the value of their activities together as rising at a remarkable fast level since their introduction.

Both App Shop ecosystems exist because Apple and Google have each developed a proprietary technology Platform to enable their respective market places to form and grow. The business value in the trade that each company has created is unquestionable, it’s the nature of the underlying, and necessary, Technology Platforms that warrant some thought. To enable the business functions each is a proprietary set of software that forces a choice to support one or other, or increasingly both, in a closed environment. Its arguably a good trade off in App shops case, but is the same true in other industry sectors.

Will the outcome of the creation of Industry sector Digital Business Ecosystems be the result of Darwinian competition in each industry sector ending with the establishment of one, or two, competitive Platforms? And will the resulting Platforms, and their controlling influence, belong to new entrants, or will the existing industry sector leaders be able to maintain their position?

Amazon is a perfect example; seen first and foremost as a market place created by a massive ecosystem of sellers and buyers, with the recognition of its enabling role as a Technology platform decidedly in second place. The function of what can, and cannot, be achieved is much more closely aligned to the commercial operation of the marketplace ecosystem then to the technology functionality. In fact, the sheer usefulness of the Amazon technology and the adoption across the market into a wide variety of reading devices has left the question of technology lock-in as largely irrelevant, unless you are a competitor!

The combination of the Amazon Kindle innovation as a reading device plus the Amazon Technology Platform quickly defined the emerging online Digital market for books. Industry sector leaders such as Barnes and Noble in the USA, were relegated to selling via Amazon to reach their ecosystem of buyers as their positioning and business model slowly failed in the face of this shift.

It is an interesting shift in perspective from the internally orientated Enterprise IT adoption case for a particular product suite to gain simpler, more reliable and less costly technical integration by using a Platform, to the high profile external business strategy requiring access to an Ecosystem. However, the principle of ‘lock-in’ is still present, and in time could become a strategic threat to a market sector leader.

The danger is that in enabling your Enterprise’s new high growth Digital Business market strategy by using a leading Platform to reach the market place ecosystem may well work short term, but in the longer term you may in actuality be helping to establish a new market sector leader. How many of the 90% of C Level Executives stating their Enterprise has a Digital Strategy have recognized this? In fact, unwittingly some Digital Business strategies will actively help to build their Industry ecosystem disrupter by channeling their business via the ubiquitous Technology Platform vendor![PD1]

The Market Mogul identified the importance of Technology Platforms in building and controlling Digital Business in an article entitled; Startup Unicorns and the power of the Digital Economy. The entire article is well worth reading and the following are isolated extracts;

Uber, Airbnb, Alibaba, eBay, Facebook – everyone will have heard of these companies and how they disrupted entire industries. ….. But if one takes a closer look, it is not necessarily their products or services that enabled these companies to change the game. It is the platforms through which they sell the products and services that drive the change in the most traditional and well-established industries… Today, the top 15 public companies which have adopted a platform business model, have a cumulated $2.6trn in market capitalization. At the same time, an increasing number of start-ups are entering well-established industries with a platform strategy…. Clearly, the platform business model has great potential, and increasingly more companies in every industry become aware of this potential.

 

The frustrations, and constraints, caused by a past generation of internally deployed Enterprise IT Technology Platforms seem to have been forgotten as the new generation of Technology Platforms arrive as external Business Ecosystems. Introducing Digital Business innovative within entrepreneurial ecosystems and opening up a wealth of business opportunities to bring new revenue and proprietary limitations are seen as insignificant. Dynamic interactive Digital Business must have new forms of shared distributed revenue creating activities, and that in turn means there has to be a shared Technology platform. From a Business management perspective, there is no case to consider as this is the ‘entry fee’ to gain access to the market the ecosystem provides.

 

With the advent of Cloud based Service model the ‘entry fee’ is minimal and the lock in risk from investment and pay back obsolesce minimal, as the saying goes ‘What’s not to like’! A read through the following which is from the Wikipedia entry on Ecosystems and their development introduces a note of caution based on past commercial experience. The definition also aligns with the examples of Digital Business ecosystems used above

 

An economic community supported by a foundation of interacting organizations and individuals—the organisms of the business world. The economic community produces goods and services of value to customers, who are themselves members of the ecosystem. The member organisms also include suppliers, lead producers, competitors, and other stakeholders. Over time, they coevolve their capabilities and roles, and tend to align themselves with the directions set by one or more central companies. Those companies holding leadership roles may change over time, but the function of ecosystem leader is valued by the community because it enables members to move toward shared visions to align their investments, and to find mutually supportive roles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_ecosystem - cite_note-3

Are there alternatives that place your brand and sector leading Enterprise at the center of an Industry sector ecosystem? More importantly, what would this Business Ecosystem look like and how would it function? A few industry sector leaders have seen the opportunity and, by moving fast, have created their Industry sector Business Ecosystem - with their brand and positioning at the center. Later Business entrants, unless directly competitive, now join as the de facto ecosystem.

John Deere, an established World leader in agricultural machinery has maintained, even strengthen its position by moving early and fast. A great deal has been written about John Deere and Precision Farming, the Digital revolution of Agriculture, but little makes the point quite so starkly as Digital Social Strategy in their article ‘How John Deere turned Technology into Business Transformation’.

This ecosystem helps farmers to gain insight into their current operations and manage their farms more proactively. Not only do farmers reap benefits from this approach, John Deere does so too. By creating an entire ecosystem, John Deere extends their offering beyond products into delivering services. Moreover, only allowing John Deere products access to the ecosystem creates a buyer lock-in for the farmers. Once they own John Deere equipment and make use of their services, it will be very expensive to switch to another supplier, thus strengthening John Deere’s strategic position.

At the heart of the John Deere approach is the need to be Open to allow the Ecosystem to grow by supporting wide spread active participation through Data sharing. The open source programming language R in combination with Open DataBase Connectivity, ODBC, underpins the John Deere ability to maximize Ecosystem value to participants through data, and proves that Open Source can be deployed successfully by Industry Leaders to build their own Ecosystems.

The power of open source levels the playing field for companies both big and small. It lowers barriers and offers a neutral environment that fuels and allows companies to innovate and evolve. This open collaboration helps companies like John Deere work with the ecosystem to create the best solutions for its customers. In return, John Deere offers insight and experience and works with other companies make the ecosystem stronger.

EdgeX Foundry is a prime example of a community approach to open source value. Hosted by The Linux Foundation, EdgeX is an open source project building software that enables and facilitates an ecosystem for Internet of Things (IoT) edge computing by enabling interoperability across tools and solutions. More than 60 vendors have come together in an open forum to create this ecosystem in a way that delivers shared value across the participants rather than large rents to a single company. The underlying hope is that this will accelerate the entry of participants into the ecosystem through equal access, and increase the market size by assuring customers that solutions built with EdgeX a safe, performant, and vendor neutral choice in a confusing and emergent marketplace.

 

Summary; The imperative for gaining competitive advantage via (these) ecosystems is for firms to create sustainable ecosystems and for the lead firm how to capture the value created by the ecosystem. Quote https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/fileadmin/user_upload/research/workingpapers/wp1006.pdf

The question is whether your Enterprise will seize the lead or through a failure to realize the implications by taking the obvious route via a vendor / provider help them to become the market disruptor and new industry sector leader.


New C-Suite Innovation & Product-led Growth Tech Optimization Future of Work AI ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Generative AI Analytics Automation B2B B2C CX EX Employee Experience HR HCM business Marketing SaaS PaaS IaaS Supply Chain Growth Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology eCommerce Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP Leadership finance Customer Service Content Management Collaboration M&A Enterprise Service Chief Information Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Operating Officer

Mixed Reality AR and VR Meets The Real World

Mixed Reality AR and VR Meets The Real World

This exciting panel shows how context, mass personalization, and digital come to life with a converged reality. See how Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality create new business opportunities and experiences in a mixed reality.

https://events.bizzabo.com/203850/agenda/session/170133

Alex Barth
VP of Business Development
Mapbox

Alan Lepofsky
VP & Principal Analyst (MODERATOR)
Constellation Research

Brian Katz
Enterprise Architect & Strategist
Oath

Joel Pennington
ARVR Strategy and Development
Autodesk

On <iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/240783748?badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0" width="1920" height="1080" frameborder="0" title="Brain Trust: Mixed Reality AR and VR Meets The Real World" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe>

Fireside Chat with Aneel Bhusri, CEO and Co-Founder of Workday

Fireside Chat with Aneel Bhusri, CEO and Co-Founder of Workday

Join the audience for an exclusive interview with entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist, Aneel Bhusri. He is the co-founder and CEO of Workday, Inc., a partner at Greylock Partners, and a member of the board of directors of Intel. This no-holds barred interview brings out insights and personal point of view from one of Silicon Valley's industry icons.

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Digital Transformation Digest: MIT's Big Data Breakthrough, Google Beefs Up Private Cloud Connections, SCO-IBM Case Lives On

Digital Transformation Digest: MIT's Big Data Breakthrough, Google Beefs Up Private Cloud Connections, SCO-IBM Case Lives On

Constellation Insights

MIT-backed "Taco" system could deliver big data breakthrough: Researchers at MIT, the French Energies and Atomic Energy Commission and Adobe have collaborated on a new system that tackles the problem of "sparse" data when running big data-analysis workloads. Here's how MIT's news office describes the system:

Imagine, for instance, a massive table that mapped all of Amazon’s customers against all of its products, with a “1” for each product a given customer bought and a “0” otherwise. The table would be mostly zeroes.

With sparse data, analytic algorithms end up doing a lot of addition and multiplication by zero, which is wasted computation. Programmers get around this by writing custom code to avoid zero entries, but that code is complex, and it generally applies only to a narrow range of problems..

The system is called Taco, for tensor algebra compiler. ... If that Amazon table also mapped customers and products against the customers’ product ratings on the Amazon site and the words used in their product reviews, the result would be a four-dimensional tensor.

[Taco] offers a 100-fold speedup over existing, non-optimized software packages. And its performance is comparable to that of meticulously hand-optimized code for specific sparse-data operations, while requiring far less work on the programmer’s part.

A publicly released tensor from Amazon that associates customer ID numbers with purchases and terms from reviews consists of 107 exabytes of data, but Taco's compression can squeeze that massive data set down to an almost trivial 13 gigabytes, according to the researchers.

POV: The MIT post goes into much more detailed description of Taco's capabilities and how it was conceptualized. On paper, the researchers' work shows considerable promise, notes Constellation VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen.

The idea behind Taco is to save processing time in big data scenarios by avoiding churning through tensors (arrays) of data that are sparse, meaning full of null values that don't impact a calculation," Henschen says. "It's a common trick in big-data analyses to avoid churning through data that's irrelevant to a calculation."

Columnar databases, for example, let you skip the columns of data that aren't relevant to a query, he adds. Compression schemes, another example, let you skip across or summarize redundant values of data. "Whether it's typical or even an extreme case, the example cited in the article of turning 107 exabytes of data into 13 gigabytes of relevant information bodes well for the Taco approach," Henschen adds.

Google beefs up its Dedicated Interconnect service: Earlier this year, Google announced Dedicated Interconnect, a premium service that provides faster, private connections to its cloud platform, with an eye on hybrid cloud deployment scenarios.

Dedicated Interconnect is now generally available under a 99.9 percent or 99.99 percent service-level agreement, but as part of the GA launch Google has also added a number of additional features.

One is global routing support in Cloud Router, which gives Interconnect customers the ability to connect on-premises workloads to any Google Cloud Platform subnet in the world. This provides additional network flexibility and robustness but there are cost differences compared to the default setting of regional dynamic routing. Google claims that global routing support is "unique among leading cloud providers," which may be the case, but the question is for how long.

Google has also added Dedicated Interconnect to four additional regions: Mumbai, Munich, Montreal and Atlanta. Dedicated Interconnect works by directly connecting a customer's network to Google's in a co-location center. Google says it's also working with Equinix to add more DI locations around the world.

POV: The success or failure of Dedicated Interconnect is something to watch keenly, given that it is going GA at a time when enterprises are more concerned about security than ever, while hybrid cloud deployment models continue gaining significant momentum. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure already had offered similar services, in the form of Direct Connect and ExpressRoute, respectively. Now that Google has caught up to the competition, enterprises have a third option for private connections, but should take care to weigh each service's merits carefully on matters such as management complexity and the finer details of pricing.

Halloween nightmare as SCO-IBM case lives on: Yes, the litigation between SCO and IBM is still alive, somehow. The zombie-like case over alleged improprities by IBM with SCO's UNIX code has been dragging on since 2003, and now an appeals court judge has partially ruled in favor of SCO, as Ars Technica reports:

Last year, US District Judge David Nuffer had ruled against SCO (whose original name was Santa Cruz Operation) in two summary judgment orders, and the court refused to allow SCO to amend its initial complaint against IBM.

SCO soon appealed. On Monday, the 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals found that SCO’s claims of misappropriation could go forward while also upholding Judge Nuffer's other two orders.

In essence, SCO has argued that IBM essentially stole, or misappropriated, its proprietary code (known as UnixWare System Release 4, or SVr4) in the May 4, 2001 release of the "Monterey operating system," a new version of UNIX designed for IBM’s "Power" processors.

POV: The lawsuit has had remarkable legs, even surviving SCO's bankruptcy. Estimates of SCO's legal expenditures vary but have been pegged as high as $100 million. There is said to be billions of dollars at stake, however, so expect SCO to take its fight to the bitter end—when that will actually come is anyone's guess.

Data to Decisions Matrix Commerce Tech Optimization Chief Financial Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Digital Officer

Fear Not Marketers, GDPR Help is Here

Fear Not Marketers, GDPR Help is Here

 
As the Marketoon from Tom Fishburne shows, the term GDPR strikes fear and can lead to "The Scream" with marketers (for those that know about it). Based on my conversations with CMOs and marketers, only 43% were aware of GDPR and of which 55% were actively preparing for it. There is no lack of content and information on GDPR in general, but most were confused on what GDPR is or what specific action did they need to take when it came to their marketing programs, website, and data collection process. Many marketers assumed that their Marketing Automation or CRM provider will take care of any changes and they were “covered”. Others believe that they don’t have an office in Europe, therefore, it doesn’t apply to them. It is confusion over the impacts of GDPR and my mission to help marketers that propelled me to write my latest report, A Guide to GDPR Compliance for Marketers.
 
A quick overview on GDPR, or the General Data Protection Regulation, it was passed in 2016 and mandates new personal data-handling requirements for individuals living in the European Economic Area (EEA) which includes all 28 countries in the European Union, Norway, Iceland and Lichtenstein. GDPR imposes strict fines on organizations that are non-compliant and the fines can be as high as 4 percent of the organization’s global turnover (annual revenue) or 20 million euros, whichever is higher. The stakes are high and enforcement begins May 25, 2018. I cannot stress enough how important it is for marketers to understand GDPR and begin preparing for it NOW.
 
In the report, I distilled the sections of GDPR that apply to marketing, provided examples and an action plan to help marketers prepare for GDPR enforcement. A few privacy experts, such as my brilliant colleague Steve Wilson, reviewed the content and contributed a parallax. I met Aurelie Pols via Twitter, and she provided valuable feedback as well. I also reached out to marketing technology providers and asked them to contribute a tip or best practice to the report. I’m thrilled that many responded and provided their actionable advice to marketers. My sincerest thanks to Steve, Aurelie, the marketers I interviewed, and the teams at Act-On, Adobe, Gigya, IBM, Marketo, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP Hybris, and SAS for their contribution!
 
Here is an overview of the report’s table of contents:
 
  • Executive Summary
  • GDPR Compliance Has Massive Implications for Organizations with Business Interest in the EU
    • What is GDPR?
    • What Constitutes Personal Data?
    • What Marketers Need to Know About GDPR
  • Coordinate with Internal Stakeholders
  • Five-Step GDPR Preparation Checklist:
    1. Appoint a GDPR Lead or Team within Marketing and Review Data Handling Procedures
    2. Actions to Take When Collecting Personal Data
    3. Actively Manage Existing Contacts and Leads in a Database
    4. Update Privacy Policy Regularly and Notify Proactively
    5. Design a Data Breach Plan
  • GDPR Compliance Advice from Marketing Organizations
    • Act-On
    • Adobe
    • Gigya
    • IBM
    • Marketo
    • Oracle
    • Salesforce
    • SAP Hybris
    • SAS
  • What’s Next? Artificial Intelligence for GDPR Compliance?
  • Author’s Note
  • Parallax Point of View by Steve Wilson, Constellation’s Security and Privacy Analyst
To access the report or download an excerpt please visit: http://bit.ly/2z3ooYS.
 
If you are a marketer from our end-user Constellation Executive Network community, leave me a comment below and I’ll send you a courtesy copy.
 
Lastly, a quick disclaimer... I am not an attorney and this report was not intended to replace legal advice. Please work with your legal and privacy teams to ensure compliance.
Data to Decisions Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Marketing Transformation Next-Generation Customer Experience Distillation Aftershots New C-Suite Future of Work Innovation & Product-led Growth Marketing B2B B2C CX Customer Experience EX Employee Experience AI ML Generative AI Analytics Automation Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Growth eCommerce Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps Social Customer Service Content Management Collaboration Security Zero Trust Chief Customer Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Financial Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Privacy Officer

Beyond The Hype of Blockchain and Distributed Ledgers

Beyond The Hype of Blockchain and Distributed Ledgers

Learn from visionaries who are pioneering the future of block chain and understand how they are pushing the limits beyond human comprehension. Get the real view on synchronous ledgers.

https://events.bizzabo.com/203850/agenda/session/170129
Susanne Somerville
CEO
MediLedger Project

Matthew Kerner
Partner GM
Microsoft Corporation

Aron Dutta
CEO, Founder and Chairman
VAPHR Inc.

Steve Wilson
Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Brian Behlendorf
Executive Director, Hyperledger
The Linux Foundation

Paul Puey
CEO / Co-founder
Airbitz

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C3IoT Analyst Day - A unique approach to PaaS needs more adoption

C3IoT Analyst Day - A unique approach to PaaS needs more adoption

We had the opportunity to attend the first C3IoT analyst day at their headquarters in Redwood City. The office itself is worth mentioning as it’s a nice departure from the often bland offices in Silicon Valley, with lots of greenery, a floor crossing light alcove and a lot of wood. 


Here is the 1 slide condensation (if the slide doesn’t show up, check here):


 


Want to read on? Here you go:

Unique model driven architecture – C3IoT has built its platform with integration in mind. While traditional platforms create and then integrate, C3IoT starts with integration to create a new combined data storage, that enables Analytics, Machine Learning and C3IoT Apps. Taking advantage of a type based system, it’s fast and easy for enterprises to integrate their data and then create insight applications. The integration first approach is unique in the enterprise software industry, and acknowledges that no enterprise starts from scratch in 2017 (and beyond).

C3IoT is more than IoT – In contrast to the vendor name, C3IoT’s platform does more than ‘just’ IoT – it very much can power all seven generic next generation application use case that we track at Constellation (next to IoT, Tame the Internet, Revolutionize Inter Enterprise, Data as a Service, Digitize Value Chains, Re-Invent Communication, and Innovate the Human Machine Interface). The vendor will have to clarify its broader scope to the markets, the good news is, that C3IoT already has customers implementing beyond IoT use cases.

Broad platform support – C3IoT made the announcement of supporting AWS at last year’s reinvent conference, by now it has added support for Microsoft’s Azure. No surprise as the C3IoT customer base is formed of large multi-national enterprises, that all have their respective bets on different IaaS. It’s good to see that C3IoT with a relatively small employee base can provide its platform on different IaaS platforms so quickly. On the Machine Learning side, C3IoT is also supporting a wide variety of libraries and is adding more. As typical for these days of Machine Learning, Tensorflow support is crucial.

Good customer adoption – Small companies are not in the cross hairs for C3IoT. The vendor prefers large strategic relationships with large multinational enterprises. But large does not mean slow, as the first use cases with C3IoT go live in a few months, sometimes in a few weeks. Growth of know-how is crucial for C3IoT, so projects are often started in a jointly staffed center of expertise, with a customer’s developers and data scientist gradually taking on more responsibility. During the analyst day two large enterprises had over two dozen employees being trained at C3IoT headquarters. For 2018 the vendor plans to push education in high gear, planning a MooC course.


 

MyPOV

Overall C3IoT has shown that it has an appealing approach and architecture to enable enterprises to build next generation applications. Most PaaS offerings in the market start with build first, integrate next. Enterprise software has been built with that approach for a long time, but that has led to fractioned applications and functional silos. The nature of the C3IoT applications has a strong holistic approach to an enterprise’s data and automation, and therefore requires starting with integration into a data storage (if you wish a data lake) first, then built analytics, Machine Learning or applications on top of that information base. Usually approaches like this took years to build, often being too slow to keep up with the transactional source systems. The fast implementation times of C3IoT customers are encouraging that the vendor has provided a platform that may have broken the tide on this.

On the concern side, C3IoT is a relatively small vendor, with limited resources that must support a large solution footprint and a demanding customer base. Single projects that the C3IoT platform powers typically required a headcount larger than C3IoT’s complete employee base. Truly a David vs a Goliath task scenario, which C3IoT can only solve with scaling know how and 3rd party resources rapidly on its platform. Training customers directly is going to be too slow, so the train the trainer and center of expertise approaches are promising. Adoption by the large SI firms will help, too. But likely C3IoT will stand and fall by the adoption of its planned 2018 MooC offering.

On the flipside, having adoption challenges is a good problem to have for a vendor that has a working platform, products and is well funded. It’s now key for C3IoT to overcome the resource shortage it needs to address to become a truly successful enterprise platform. It has the DNA for it – from architecture, platform, funding and executive leadership. Time to show it in 2018.