Happy CCPA Day California! Now the Privacy is REALLY Gonna Hit the Fan

Liz Miller

Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

About Liz Miller: Liz Miller is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation, focused on the org-wide team sport known as customer experience. While covering CX as an enterprise strategy, Miller spends time zeroing in on the functional demands of Marketing and Service and the evolving role of the Chief Marketing Officer, the rise of the Chief Experience Officer, the evolution of customer engagement, and the rising requirement for a new security posture that accounts for the threat to brand trust in this age of AI. With over 30 years of marketing experience, Miller offers strategic guidance on the leadership, business transformation, and technology requirements to deliver on today’s CX strategies. She has worked with global marketing organizations to transform everything from…...

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If you have an inbox, you may have received a helpful hint or 200 about the implementation of California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). It, along with a handful of other privacy, security and protection themed bills raced through California’s legislature between 2018 and 2019 and go into effect on January 1, 2020. Happy New Year!

Some emails I have received try to tie a common thread between CCPA and its European kissing cousin, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that went into effect in 2018. For those companies that took GDPR seriously and took the tough steps toward compliance, there is absolutely an advantage. Those actions won’t cover everything.

There ARE a couple ways that the two are VERY similar:

• Both demand that an organization have a complete inventory and understanding of all sources of data. For CCPA that includes third party data.
• Both aim to make consumers feel they are in more control over their personal data.
• Both place a hefty price tag on ignoring the value of trust

Here is a not so quick list of what CCPA is and is not.

First up...who it covers:

• CCPA applies to for-profit companies established in California (i.e. companies that do business in California) or are “indirectly” doing business (i.e. parents and subsidiaries of companies doing business in California) that meet one of the following:
  • Have gross annual revenues greater than $25 million
  • Buy, receive, or sell the personal information of 50,000 or more consumers, households, or devices per year
  • Make 50 percent or more of their annual revenue from selling consumers’ personal information. Selling is broadly defined as any exchange of data for something of value.

Next up...who is off the hook:

• CCPA DOES NOT apply to:
  • Non-profits, smaller companies that don't meet the revenue thresholds, and/or those that don't traffic in large amounts of personal information

Now for what it covers and why it matters:

• CCPA has a BROAD definition of personal data including name, phone number, addresses and other identifiers like title, employers and email address, but also includes Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, credit card numbers, purchase history, and “unique personal identifiers” including IP address, device identifiers, online tracking, location information, audio and biometric data. CCPA also includes household data.
• CCPA EXCLUDES information that is publicly available such as property tax data or information from available government records, aggregated data as well as medical or health information that is otherwise governed by California’s Confidentiality of Medical Information Act or Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPPA).
• CCPA gives rights to all California residents to have access to their personal information, to have it deleted and to opt out of any sale of their data.
• Residents MUST be provided with a “Do Not Sell My Personal Information” link on all websites and mobile apps and is a mandatory inclusion on the home page of a site. Sorry, you can’t bury it in the footer. It must be “clear and conspicuous.”
• CCPA creates a "limited private right of action" for any consumer impacted by a data breach. The law permits consumers to bring a civil suit for statutory damages between $100 and $750 per consumer per incident, or actual damages, whichever is greater. This private right of action is ONLY related to breaches involving “nonredacted and unencrypted personal information” and only specific to a narrow segment of personal information.
• CCPA requires transparency about data and information use. Specifically, residents have the right to request what personal information a business has collected and whether their information is being sold or disclosed for a business purpose to other parties.
• CCPA empowers residents to request the deletion of their personal data and mandates that residents NOT be discriminated against for exercising their rights as outline by CCPA. Requests must be answered within 45 days.
• CCPA has specific Privacy Policy requirements. If you were hoping a new section on “selling your data” was going to be it…think again. Complaint notices will inform consumers about how personal information is collected, how that data is used, and the individual categories of personal information the business has sold to third parties in the past 12 months.
• The Privacy Policy must also reinforce the rights consumers have under CCPA including the ability to provide copies of personal information and the right to opt-out and the right to delete data.
• CCPA gets specific about how to handle the sale of children’s data: businesses must first obtain opt-in consent for the sale of a minor’s data. Consent must be obtained from parents for kids under 13; teens 13-15 can provide their own consent.

As someone insane enough to sit down and READ both documents, I have to say that CCPA, while not as voluminous as GDPR, is just as poorly written with loopholes, questions and ouroboros-like mandates that seem to negate themselves by the end of the tome. An important note is that there are at least a dozen amendments already waiting for vote on CCPA as legislators, special interest groups and consumer watchdogs all pile on to streamline and strengthen the bill. 

The bottom line remains the same: consumers have the expectation for data privacy and security and in the State of California, they have the right to opt-out and delete their data…if we fail them…they have the right to sue for a LOT of money.

My attitude about CCPA is like that of GDPR: we shouldn’t wait for legislators to define trust.

If we wait to secure the trust our consumers have in our brands, we will fail them, and we will be on the costly losing end of this stick. Both GDPR and CCPA are pains in our collective corporate rear ends. But they are both also an opportunity to kick our data and personalization agenda can down the road a bit.

Personalization requires data. Rich, contextual, relevant and resonant personalization that goes beyond slapping a familiar product or a customer’s name on an email demands customer data that sits at the core of CCPA. Now, we have a regulatory reason to have the tough conversations about organizational data practices to accurately and uniformly assess where and how this data is being collected, stored and used across the entire organization. It forces marketing to look beyond its walls and helps IT look within them.

Most of the CMOs I have spoken with about CCPA (and the lasting impact of GDPR) have said that it helped IT, Operations and Marketing have very different conversations about data. For smart teams, GDPR was the lightening rod to get data collected, cleaned and utilized to the benefit of the consumer. Now, CCPA is the lightening rod to further advance how third party, location and device data is integrated into the mix and better leveraged across all engagements.

You have a choice: see this as a curse or an opportunity. But know this…CCPA isn’t the last regulatory thrill ride. With legislation pending in New York, Nevada and new calls for federal data privacy and security standards, CCPA is just the beginning of the chaos.

Now…if you REALLY want to get into it…and can stand to read a little more...

Here is another bill to watch especially if you are in the game of selling connected devices in the State of California: CA SB 327 & AB 1906.

• Approved and filed by the state in September 2018 with a start date of January 1, 2020
• Together, these two companion bills regulate standards for IoT devices sold in California
• They require the manufacturer of a connected device to equip the device with a “reasonable security feature appropriate to the nature and function of the device”, and the information it collects, receives or transmits
• Also required are measures that “protect the device and any information contained therein from unauthorized access, destruction, use, modification, or disclosure”
• “Reasonable” security is further explained to be:
  • a means for authentication outside a local area network
  • a pre-programmed password unique to each device
  • OR a feature that requires a new password be generated before access to the device is granted for the first time

My take on this: these bills lack any teeth to make either of these truly worrisome for manufacturers. They have far more bark thanks to headlines around what “could” happy with bad actors getting their hands on data, passwords or devices themselves. If we are being honest, these IoT measures basically ask for stronger passwords. But we all know that passwords do not a comprehensive privacy and security practice make.

Without a clear path to enforcement, punishment and a dollar figure looming in the wake of breech, this isn’t going to counter the operational cost argument of holding up the manufacturing process to embed costly security directly into the device, so it is secured from the metal up.

So HAPPY NEW YEAR California! Let this be the decade of privacy and protection…wrapped in chaos and confusion if these bills are any indication. Regardless, the next 10 years are going to turn what we know about trust, privacy and identity on its ear so get ready. It’s going to be a fast, wild ride!

Monday Musings: The Roaring 20s and the #FutureOf2020

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

R “Ray” Wang is the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He co-hosts DisrupTV, a weekly enterprise tech and leadership webcast that averages 50,000 views per episode and blogs at www.raywang.org. His ground-breaking best-selling book on digital transformation, Disrupting Digital Business, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015. Ray's new book about Digital Giants and the future of business, titled, Everybody Wants to Rule The World was released in July 2021. Wang is well-quoted and frequently interviewed by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, and Bloomberg. Short Bio R “Ray” Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Founder, Chairman, and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He…...

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With a new decade in front of us, what happens when the confluence of politics, economics, society, technology, environmental, and legislative forces meet the forces of humanity? Here are seven deep trends that will emerge to impact the next decade and more:

1. Human Ingenuity vs Intelligent Automation

In a world of AI possibilities and pervasive technology, when will society automate, augment a machine with a human, augment a human with a machine, and fully trust human ingenuity? This question will impact the future of humanity. Should society over rely on automation, will humans lose the ability to gain intuition, will society become dumber, do humans become over-reliant on technology? Will intelligent automation widen the gap between the smart and the less intelligent? Do we create further digital divides? Over time, AI ethics will emerge taking people centered principles.

2. Autonomous Decade

The future is autonomous. Machines will deliver services that are continuous, auto-compliant, self-healing, self-learning, and self-aware. The need for greater precision decisions will require connections to data-driven digital networks and for more and more sources of data. This battle for public, private, and shared data will shape who wins in new networked economies.

3. Authenticity vs Deep Fakes

In this world of relativism and enhanced technologies, humans can no longer discern authenticity. The blurred line between reality and fiction creates issues that can cause riots, incite violence, sway public opinion, and bilk others of value. The need for authenticity still remains and those brands, enterprises, and individuals who can deliver authenticity will win over trust and significant business.

4. The US vs China, Open Vs Closed

China’s salvo to dominate the world models after how colonial powers ruled the past and how America rose to the top. From infrastructure investments to trade deals to foreign affairs, this new war for ideas is more than just open vs closed. China seeks to ensure its relevance and future before its population dynamics turn it into Japan. In the US-China trade-war, the implications move beyond just trade:

1. Currency manipulation
2. IP theft
3. Access to China markets
4. Reserve currency for dictatorships
5. HK protests
6. Spratly Islands debate
7. Belt & road
8. Battle for Africa
9. Freedom of Taiwan
10. AI dictatorships

However, like the Soviet Union in the 1950’s and 1960’s, many are attracted to the opportunities for personal enrichment at the expense of personal freedoms. This war for ideas with a backset of socialism vs capitalism will play out in the 2020’s

5. Stakeholder vs Shareholder Capitalism

The shift away from shareholder capitalism represents a backlash towards extreme capitalism in a winner takes all market. In simplistic terms shareholders own a part of the company while stakeholders have an interest in the performance of the company. Today’s wide definition of stakeholders includes employees, suppliers, the environment, and other ecosystem players. With the growing societal discontent in play and businesses caught in the cross-fire, organizations such as the Business Roundtable and World Economic Forum have embraced the stakeholder capitalism theme and mantra as a potential solution to the inequities in the market as well as addressing societal ills exacerbated by political systems and ineffective government leadership. Unfortunately a real divide will occur when institutional investors challenge the effectiveness and performance of stakeholder capitalism run companies vs shareholder run companies.

6. A Culture of Abundance Vs A Culture of Scarcity

The recent societal unrest and backlash against institutions has come from those who experience a culture of abundance and those who experience a culture of scarcity. Because basic needs are met and expectations often remain low in a culture of abundance, individuals are more willing to share, collaborate, take time to build long-term relationships. In a culture of scarcity, individuals fight for basic needs and create defenses and alliances of mutual self-interest. With rising expectations and a culture of entitlement, the recent societal unrest have come from a belief that injustice, inequality, and divide have come from those who live in a culture of abundance and that those in a culture of scarcity must attack those who are successful. Add mistrust of today’s systems and institutions, and society now must fight to defend a culture of hard work and meritocracy versus identity politics and social injustice.

7. Privacy as a Property Right

Data driven digital networks power most new companies and startups. Data to date has mostly been a free natural resource. As organizations have mined individual’s digital exhaust, digital foot print, genomic data, and personal information for profit without payment, a movement to make privacy a human right has taken hold. However, existing laws to govern this right vary from authority to authority and the policies remain inconsistent. Yet, should individual privacy data become a property right such as land titles for physical property and patents for intellectual property, existing laws could apply. Individuals would then have the authority to not sell, donate, provide one-time access, provide recurring access, or provide life-time access for value exchange. One caveat, in this model, only the rich would have privacy as they would not need to broker their data for monetary and non-monetary value exchange.

Year-End Reflections from DisrupTV and Lessons to Share in 2020

Aubrey Coggins

Constellation Research

Aubrey (Levinstone) Coggins manages Constellation's marketing and communications programs and is the producer of DisrupTV, a weekly Web series on innovation and the enterprise.  She previously served as a senior manager of corporate communications at Egnyte and held account roles at Access Communications and The Hoffman Agency. Born and raised in Texas, she received a bachelor's degree in Public Relations from The University of Texas at Austin – Hook ‘em!   ...

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As we close out the year and head into 2020, it’s a great time to reflect on what we’ve learned (good and bad) and put those lessons into practice in the new year. I believe we should also pay it forward and share those skills with our friends and community.
 

One of my favorite times of the week is during DisrupTV. The main goal of this show is to share knowledge with our community. No strings attached! Totaling 41 episodes this year, we interviewed and caught up with some incredible guests, including startup CEOs, enterprise executives, analysts, authors, media, and other disruptive leaders. Topics spanned leadership, AI, customer experience, disruptive tech, advice, marketing, healthcare, education and more.

If you have some time to listen to the podcasts or watch a few episodes in your down time, check out some of my favorite episodes of the year:

1. DisrupTV Episode 172, Guy Kawasaki, Joanne Moretti, Dave Evans
2. DisrupTV Live: Niche Down with Christopher Lochead and Heather Clancy
3. DisrupTV Episode 157, Featuring Michael Maoz, Sunny Bonnell, Ashleigh Hansberger, Larry Dignan
4. DisrupTV Episode 134, Featuring Angela Blanchard, Tim Springer, Dion Hinchcliffe
5. ?????DisrupTV Episode 133, Featuring Crawford Del Prete, Annie McKee, Larry Dignan

Cheers! Hope you have a wonderful holiday season. We’ll see you in 2020 with all new interviews to get more real-world advice and continue learning and sharing! If you want to be a guest or know someone interesting who we could all learn from, please send me a note!

A Very Constellation Christmas List

Liz Miller

Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

About Liz Miller: Liz Miller is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation, focused on the org-wide team sport known as customer experience. While covering CX as an enterprise strategy, Miller spends time zeroing in on the functional demands of Marketing and Service and the evolving role of the Chief Marketing Officer, the rise of the Chief Experience Officer, the evolution of customer engagement, and the rising requirement for a new security posture that accounts for the threat to brand trust in this age of AI. With over 30 years of marketing experience, Miller offers strategic guidance on the leadership, business transformation, and technology requirements to deliver on today’s CX strategies. She has worked with global marketing organizations to transform everything from…...

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With the holidays upon us, some of us (OK, specifically me…I have a toddler who just figured out Santa…) are racing around collecting lists and trying to make dreams come true. But what do some of the amazing brains across the Constellation network want to see from Santa? Don’t hack Santa’s inbox…I gathered the list.

(DISCLAIMER: I can neither confirm nor deny the rightful positioning of any of the below individuals on the “Naughty or Nice” list and cannot guarantee Santa can deliver on any of the below requests. Especially Richie's.)

Cindy Zhou, Chief Marketing Officer at LogRhythm: One business wish for Santa - empathy for the marketer. We're in the nexus of all-things customer experience, digital transformation, and delivering pipeline at the same time. Recognize us as part of the data tribe, and not merely arts and crafts.

Joanne Moretti, Founder & CEO of J Curve Digital: For ALL business leaders to invest in education. The education of their people, and of kids in general. To me education (before sales) is the cure-all. Unfortunately, "education by postal code" (as we experience here in the US) is wrong and leaves half our brain tied behind our backs as a country. If we have an educated country, we will thrive in a globalizing economy. Innovation will flow through naturally. Education at every level, academic or on the job wise, that is captured and shared, will foster better and faster innovation cycles. That's my wish: GREAT EDUCATION FOR ALL PEOPLE, and again not by postal code or job class, but for everyone, all the time.

Zachary Jeans, VP Marketing at AbsenceSoft: Measurements and engagement value for our brand when it comes to our people, especially how we treat our existing people in times of need and how we treat rejected job candidates. We have to start understanding the impact of a rejected job candidate – how does it negatively impact an organization’s brand over 1-10 year horizon, especially within their given industry? Can we get the real ROI on treating a candidate poorly? Same questions hold true on the subject of leave management. When we treat our colleagues poorly or mishandle a leave, for pregnancy, illness or a family medical issue, we know that when that colleague or employee returns they’re likely already searching for a new employer. So I’d like to start measuring the things that we all know are REAL, but have been left to anecdotal or vague correlation.

Geof Corb, Vice President, Higher Education Development at Oracle: Sweep away the term "digital transformation." In my opion, it has become a nonsense marketing term to describe what would have been natural, organic evolution of our organizations facing changing (disruptive or not) technology. Nothing new here. We technologists have been doing this forever, but now there is a flashy term that is getting tired and distracts from the fact that it's all about (business) outcomes and not the technology itself!

Sunder Sarangan, Strategy and Growth Leader: It is time for Santa to replace corporate jargon or political correctness in the workplace with radical candor. Brutal honesty in the most respectful manner lets us say goodbye to the compliment sandwich that plagues everything from emails to all forms of feedback. Or maybe he could bring an AI reader to interpret what people are truly trying to communicate…a bit like reverse auto-correct.

Gurvinder Singh Shani, Chief Marketing Officer at Appirio (a Wipro Company): Looking for Tech that can sync up with Marketing and make sense for CMO’s - they have been dating for while…

Richie Etwaru, Founder, Chief Executive & Chair of Board, Hu-manity.co: Automatic faucets and automatic sanitary napkin dispensers in airport bathrooms to work. We should just all admit they were a bad idea from the start. I don’t think there was ever a positive ROI on any of those things. They bring out the worst because they break, people get angry, they beat the crap out of them, they break, and then someone must pay to fix/service.

Happy Holidays to all...may the New Year bring everything on our list and much, much more!

Highlights of 2019: Reflections on the Biggest Events and Trends of the Year

Doug Henschen

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Doug Henschen is former Vice President and Principal Analyst where he focused on data-driven decision making. Henschen’s Data-to-Decisions research examines how organizations employ data analysis to reimagine their business models and gain a deeper understanding of their customers. Henschen's research acknowledges the fact that innovative applications of data analysis requires a multi-disciplinary approach starting with information and orchestration technologies, continuing through business intelligence, data-visualization, and analytics, and moving into NoSQL and big-data analysis, third-party data enrichment, and decision-management technologies. Insight-driven business models are of interest to the entire C-suite, but most particularly chief executive officers, chief digital officers,…...

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I'm piling on the annual ritual of year-end-reviews. Here's my roundup of high points from 2019, with links to my deeper analyses.

• Biggest deal of the year: Salesforce buys Tableau. At $15.7 billion, this one takes the size prize. The critics says it's just Salesforce buying revenue. I agree it's not as synergistic as it could be and they'll have to work out overlaps, but as I point out in this blog, Salesforce is the one acquiring company that tends to retain the leadership and culture of the companies it acquires. Tableau has a unique culture, as is always apparent at the annual Tableau Conference, and if the acquirer can't retain that vibe, they'll lose the value of the company. As witnessed at Dreamforce 2019, Salesforce is really good at keeping the vibe going, so I think Tableau is in good hands.
• Best acquisition of the year: Google buys Looker. Up-and-comer Looker gives Google a serious foundation for next-generation BI and analytics. Yes, Looker will have to maintain its support for third-party cloud databases, like Snowflake, Redshift, and Azure SQL, but I really like the data-modeling, reusability and embedding potential of Looker. As I note in this blog, Google is a good position to help Looker with its augmented analytics capabilities, which are nascent. It's a good sign that the Looker team is staying focused on its pre-acquisition priorities and mission.
• Analytics trend to watch: Embedding in Applications. The complaint used to be about too much data; now I'm hearing companies lament they're drowning in insights. Lots of business types are less interested in the what-happened analysis than the "what should I do about it" recommended actions. In this blog I write about how Oracle, SAP and Workday and ramping up their efforts to embed anlytics directly into their applications. Salesforce is doing the same thing with Einstein Analytics, though it puts an extra emphasis on recommended actions tied to desired outcomes. Watch this space. My first report of 2020 will be on embedded analytics, but not just in commercial, off-the-shelf apps. I'm seeing innovators and fast followers developing custom analytic applications and data- and insight-driven services that drive action, not just analysis.
• Talking the Talk prize for 2019: Cloud planning vendors. I attended every cloud-based planning event in 2019 (Anaplan, Host Analytics, Workday/Adaptive Insights, among others) and they were all talking about adding human-augmenting "AI" capabilities -- but none of them actually had anything to show. They were all positioning and previewing over the spring and early summer shows. Finally, as they year was coming to a close, Anaplan made a concrete announcement about a predictive sales planning capability based on "AI-enriched insights." The capability is said to be available as of this December 18, 2019 announcement, but I won't get a briefing until 2020. In short, I'm expecting 2020 to be the "walking the walk" year for computer-augmented planning capabilities.
• Big-picture tech trend: Open source adoption. Open source software is absolutely becoming the standard for enterprise and tech broadly. It started with Linux, which is the standard operating system of the cloud today. Open source is also winning in databases, with PostgreSQL, MongoDB and Cassandra all gaining ground in 2019. Open source dominates in data science, with Python (overtaking R) and frameworks such as TensorFlow, scikit Learn and other leading choices all being open source. In the streaming realm, Kafka is now ubiquitous. For 2020 and beyond I have my eye on the Alluxio virtual distributed file system and Presto SQL query engine as hot open source standards. It’s not so much the cost equation that's driving open source adoption, as you end up paying for support and, often, enterprise features available on top of the open source technology. The real value in open source is the pace and breadth of innovation. Healthy open source communities attract contributions that no single company could develop on its own.

I've reached an age where the years seem to go by in a flash, and I'm seeing patterns repeating, like the acquisitions in the analytics space. Consolidation was a big trend in analytics in 2019. The headline examples were Looker/Google and Tableau/Salesforce, but there were smaller examples, such as ZoomData/LogiAnalytics and Periscope Data/SiSense. That trend will continue as competition heats up, but as we’ve seen before, the cycle will repeat itself after a period of complacency leads to a fresh round of innovation. There was a wave of consolidation in 2007/2008 with BusinessObjects/SAP, Hyperion/Siebel/Oracle and Cognos/IBM deals. At the time, many thought that would leave the lion’s share of the market in the hands of the large vendors, but instead it led to the self-service revolution and wave of new competitors. I’m sure history will repeat itself.

Happy New Year to all!

Some Light but Thought-Provoking Reading for Your Holiday Travels

Aubrey Coggins

Constellation Research

Aubrey (Levinstone) Coggins manages Constellation's marketing and communications programs and is the producer of DisrupTV, a weekly Web series on innovation and the enterprise.  She previously served as a senior manager of corporate communications at Egnyte and held account roles at Access Communications and The Hoffman Agency. Born and raised in Texas, she received a bachelor's degree in Public Relations from The University of Texas at Austin – Hook ‘em!   ...

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11 more days of the decade! Can you believe it? This year has been full of ups and downs, and while I’ve learned a lot personally and professionally in 2019, I’m so ready to see what 2020 has in store.

As you head out to travel for the holidays and special new year celebrations, check out some of our favorite posts of the year. Some of these topics are very bold, disruptive and thought-provoking–and some are just fun!

1. Reframing Digital Identity as Data Protection – By Steve Wilson
2. Why I'm a CDP Skeptic...And What We Need Instead – By Nicole France
3. Creating an Employee Experience as Great as Your Customer Experience – Dion Hinchcliffe
4. The Healthcare CIO's Role in Strategy – By David Chou
5. Big Idea: Extreme Capitalism and The Dawn of Digital Duopolies – By Ray Wang

As an added bonus, be sure to also read this brand-new blog series introduced this month, playing on the funny on-going joke at this year’s CCE, #AskingForVala: #AskingFor Liz - By Liz Miller.

Are these topics in line with your plans for 2020? What are your intentions for the year?

Enjoy the next 11 days, and we are looking forward to connecting with you in the new decade on more disruptive themes and real-world case studies.

F5 to Acquire Shape Security for $1 Billion

Liz Miller

Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

About Liz Miller: Liz Miller is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation, focused on the org-wide team sport known as customer experience. While covering CX as an enterprise strategy, Miller spends time zeroing in on the functional demands of Marketing and Service and the evolving role of the Chief Marketing Officer, the rise of the Chief Experience Officer, the evolution of customer engagement, and the rising requirement for a new security posture that accounts for the threat to brand trust in this age of AI. With over 30 years of marketing experience, Miller offers strategic guidance on the leadership, business transformation, and technology requirements to deliver on today’s CX strategies. She has worked with global marketing organizations to transform everything from…...

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Interesting acquisition news in security Thursday: F5 has announced intent to acquire fraud protection platform Shape Security for $1 billion USD in an all cash deal.

• Shape evaluates the data flow into applications to discern good traffic from bad, defending web and mobile apps from malicious automated attacks. Sits in front of web and mobile app to detect and protect against automated bot attacks.
• F5 has made a big name for itself in app protection across on-prem to multi-cloud with services and platforms to address load balancing, DNS services, web application firewalls (WAF), bot management, SSL visibility, identity and access federation, and DDoS mitigation.
• Shape, once thought to be eyeing an IPO after a healthy Q3 funding bump, brings an impressive client roster across large banks, airlines, government and retail
• F5 President and CEO, François Locoh-Donou said, via press release, that the move enables F5 to protect apps from “code to customer”

Why Shape Intrigues Me:

• Positioned itself as looking beyond fraud detection and security – positioned security as an extension of customer experience friction resolution, removing the headache of constant login requests.
• Been in the mix pushing the password-free experience, envisioning a world where passwords and logins are not needed thanks to proactive, real-time, intentional traffic detection and resolution
• Their machine learning powered platform has effectively identified attack patterns and identified appropriate countermeasures…but their AI is learning what will likely come next for more proactive threat prediction making it a very interesting offer in the ever-evolving threat landscape. For me THIS is the exciting part of the acquisition, integrating the AI/ML model across the F5 platform, to apply some cognitive fire power.

Last Thoughts:

• This sits in-line with industry trend of protect & detect from boot to edge as organizations like Palo Alto and now F5 are expanding their portfolio to provide enterprise customers with a far more comprehensive solution across all attack surfaces
• While this conversation starts in security and fraud, the real gold here could be in advancing identity and a login-less user experience purpose built for both experience and security that drives revenue. BUT…it will require a mindset shift for organizations to understand that security and experience by design is a revenue driver.
• Look for a feeding frenzy on AI powered security platforms in 2020. This isn’t the last unicorn we see race to the top carrying big bags of cash.

The Sales Party is Just Beginning: the 2020s are Here

Sherrie King

Vice President, Business Development and Sales
Constellation Research

Sherrie is responsible for acting as a liaison between clients and analysts while growing Constellation's footprint across North America. Prior to her career at Constellation, Sherrie worked with major technology suppliers of auto identification technologies as an account director at VDC Research.   Contact Sherrie at [email protected].   ...

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By all measures, 2019 will likely be remembered as a very strange year that capped a very strange decade. The Great Economic Recession that kicked off the ‘10s displaced millions of global workers, leading to a tech boom as AI, ML, and RPA rushed in to fill the knowledge worker vacuum. It was a decade that was great to us in tech, and perhaps not so great to finance, legal, and heavy manufacturing. 

From a sales perspective, the 20s will be a boon for reps in forward-thinking organizations who are able to innovate faster than their closest competitors while creating value for their customers, partners, and employees. Acquisitions will continue as IPO’s sputter; this means that front line sales reps will need to continuously expand their networks to avoid being labeled as redundant. 

We’re in for an amazing ride this decade as technology finally races beyond the pace car of hype. Sales will continue to evolve as early adopters set the bar on customer expectations, forcing laggards to keep up, change, or go out of business. I’ll be writing a series of blogs over the coming months on how front-line sales reps can adapt in the ever-changing environment.

First up: Selling in the Age Where Everyone Is Up in your Business

A few weeks ago my hometown newspaper, The Boston Globe, breathlessly headlined “No trick: Wayfair creeps customers out with new service calls” (Nov 1, 2019). I don’t think it’s headline news at this point that every time we click a mouse or glance at a Facebook ad for more than one second, we are being tracked and that interaction sold. For the most part that data has been sitting on a cloud, being leveraged to serve us up targeted ads. It’s why when we Google “best reusable water bottles” we are subjected to nothing but Hydroflask ads for the next two weeks.

This is Kindergarten Marketing 101. Top of the funnel Google searches at some point lead to revenue. Sure, you could ask the person riding next to you on the subway why they like their Yeti. Additionally, one could also spend a leisurely afternoon at the library pouring through Consumer Reports searching for the Holy Grail among Holy Grails: a well-designed metal flask that keeps water cold and tea hot. 

However, that would require actually talking to people or leaving the house. Why do that when Google can get you an answer in 0.74 seconds? We are in an age where we are trading convenience for privacy and by and large, most of us are a-ok with that.

Wayfair took that one step further by pairing their Big Brother tracking software with information they already have in their CRM to identify individual customers who visited their website. Rather than serve them up ads or issuing endless “Did you want to purchase that couch?” spam e-mails, they had reps pick up the phone and call these potential customers in an attempt to close the sale.

Like all Boston Globe articles, the gold in this report was in the comments, which were as harsh as they were unanimous. In perhaps a Globe first, almost every commenter felt the same way: cold calling a prospect based on browsing behavior is Creepy AF.

This was an exercise, no doubt, dreamed up by some executive in marketing with zero B2C sales experience. Wayfair didn’t reveal if having reps cold call was successful, or how much additional revenue was created by this campaign. We are living in an era where front line sales reps have access to enormous amounts of information that they need to qualify a prospect and gauge their buying behavior before an outbound interaction even takes place. However, just because you have the ability to do something doesn’t necessarily mean that you should. I honestly feel bad for those reps who were told to make calls and were likely on the receiving end of some very awkward conversations with some very upset prospects.

Customer data that used to cost time and money is now widely available and often for free. Rather than pick up the phone and asking to speak to the person who was in charge of buying office equipment, we ask for a specific person. We also know what that person looks like, roughly how old they are, where they live, where they went to school, and which common connections we have that I could perhaps leverage. They say in the courtroom a lawyer never asks a question that they don’t already know the answer to. Having information about a prospect is useful, but it isn’t a substitute for creating a human connection. However, that connection will not happen if you blurt out that you know they’ve visited your company’s website 12 times in the past 2 days.

This type of in-depth customer information has always been the missing link to what every sales organization is really after: mass personalization at scale. Identifying the right buyer with the right offer at the right time. Imagine knowing with absolute certainty that the only people you called on were pre-qualified executives who were looking specifically at the solution you were selling. We could spend all day every day talking to real buyers instead of wasting cycles with un-qualified prospects who have no need, budget, or authority to engage with you.

Like everything else in life, it’s all fun and games until the government gets involved. Not to be out-regulated by the European Union’s GDPR, California’s roll-out of CCPA next month will be a game changer, impacting how every outbound sales rep across North America prospects. For the time being we’re right back to where most of us never left: being a knowledgeable, polite, non-creepy professional who is there to partner if and when needed. The backlash over how this type of data is collected and monetized is real and if you don’t believe that I’m almost certain that one of Wayfair’s friendly reps can sell you a bridge in Brooklyn.

#AskingFor Liz

Liz Miller

Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

About Liz Miller: Liz Miller is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation, focused on the org-wide team sport known as customer experience. While covering CX as an enterprise strategy, Miller spends time zeroing in on the functional demands of Marketing and Service and the evolving role of the Chief Marketing Officer, the rise of the Chief Experience Officer, the evolution of customer engagement, and the rising requirement for a new security posture that accounts for the threat to brand trust in this age of AI. With over 30 years of marketing experience, Miller offers strategic guidance on the leadership, business transformation, and technology requirements to deliver on today’s CX strategies. She has worked with global marketing organizations to transform everything from…...

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If you weren’t able to be at CCE2019, you missed it. Here “it” is…at minute 26 and 37 seconds in the exceptional fireside chat with Vint Cerf. “It” is the moment you hear Ritchie Etwaru, Founder and CEO of Hu-manity.co, utter words that would later go viral: ”I’m asking for Vala…”

For those in the room, it became the ultimate inside joke. Vala Afshar, Chief Digital Evangelist at Salesforce and co-host of DisrupTV, is not exactly a shy wallflower terrified of asking his own questions. For me, what this moment revealed was the camaraderie and connection that the Constellation Community has spawned.

In that spirit, we introduce the #Asking4__________ blog, where we ask big questions of this broad network of thinkers, innovators and friends to capture and share their insights. To kick us off, we went to one of our brightest stars in the community Andrew Nebus. I’m pretty sure that if you looked up transformation leader, you’d see a picture of Andrew. This time around, I’m asking some questions for myself…mainly because I am greedy and because I can. That and Vala was super busy…so…you know…

Liz Miller (LM) Q: What is the next big thing – that “thing” in 2020 that could disrupt it all?

Andrew Nebus (NB) A: I see infinite ambient orchestration of experiences taking off in 2020. This has been in the works for some time, but a nexus of technology improvements is hitting now. One of the keys is the growth of AI services general availability. Another is serverless, opening up experience-based designs orchestrating underlying tech. Serverless is at a critical tipping point.

LM Q: What was the big lesson learned in 2019 that will change how you approach things in 2020?

AN A: I learn something almost every day. Staying teachable is one of the most important things each of us can do. It is also important that we re-learn lessons.

Something I learned again: I love vacationing with my father. He used to join me at tech conferences in the early 2000s and have a blast hanging out exploring cities. This year, we took a great trip to Iceland. I re-learned how fun it is to explore with him. In 2020, I am booking more father-son trips. (Note to Andrew: I hear Half Moon Bay is AMAZING in October…)

LM Q: Three technologies you are keeping an eye on moving into the next decade – for either personal, professional or profoundly peculiar reasons and why?

AN A: Green Tech: In this decade we are going to have much bigger disruptions in battery development, energy supply chains, and plant-based meat. I am looking for profound improvements to tackle decarbonization challenges at scale. We cannot expect individuals to take all the actions to solve the problems of giant industries and nations.

Next, with exponential growth of AI, automations, and algorithmic managers, I am watching the bias and harm of automated tech. As Chris Salles said at CCE2019, even innocuous sounding automations & human augmentation has impacts on the other side. We need leaders to step up. "Discrimination blind" tech and policies will continue to harm disadvantaged communities.

And I am going to take a mulligan. Like everyone, I am keeping an eye on autonomous vehicles. They are chock full of enough tech for any geek to enjoy, and I love platforms. Personally, I want safer driving technology and increased mobility for folks. There will be huge impacts on employment and even how roads work, a lot to watch.

LM Q: Technologies from the last decade you are saying goodbye to as we move into this new decade?

AN A: This is a hard one, as I hang on to things for quite some time… I just recycled a Laserdisc player.

First, I have bought my last internal combustion vehicle. The major range anxiety, charging time, and so forth have been mostly solved and electric works for me. It will take a while for the industry to change, but it will get there, and we will see a lot in the next decade. I am excited to see what my second* electric vehicle will be by 2030! (*Third if we count an electric Ford Ranger I used sometimes back in my Edison days.)

Next, goodbye Python 2.7! It is hard to believe this version came out in 2010, but it has been a rock star for a decade. It and its libraries changed so much about so much, including data science. In January it goes end-of-life. Of course, I won't say goodbye to Python, only version 2!

Finally, all the failed video/augmented reality headsets of the 2010s. I’ve had versions of this tech for so long, and the hit is not released yet. Goodbye Google Glass, Microsoft HoloLens, even Oculus Rift/Quest/Go. I’m looking forward to new mixed reality in the next decade.

About Andrew Nebus:

Andrew's extensive background includes building high performing teams, rethinking organizations, and executive strategy. Expertise includes architecture, data science, information security and compliance, and organizational transformation. He advises on the impact of digital transformation, evidence-based decision making, AI, data privacy, Blockchain, chatbots, and how digital disruption overcomes legacy organizational culture. He has a reputation for perceptual acuity and building trusted versions of organizations.

Andrew is currently at ASRC Federal. ASRC Federal companies deliver a wide range of services to help United States Federal government customers execute their critical missions. He has served as Command Staff and CIO at the Baltimore City Police Department, TAC Officer at the NJ Transit Police, and CIO of Edison, New Jersey.

Follow him on Twitter at @AndrewNebus