| Constellation Research

What do we mean by blockchain?

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Steve Wilson is former VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, leading the business theme Digital Safety and Privacy. His coverage includes digital identity, data protection, data privacy, cryptography, and trust. His advisory services to CIOs, CISOs, CPOs and IT architects include identity product strategy, security practice benchmarking, Privacy by Design (PbD), privacy engineering and Privacy [or Data Protection] Impact Assessments (PIA, DPIA). Coverage Areas: -  Identity management, frameworks & governance-  Digital identity technologies-  Privacy by Design -  Big Data; “Big Privacy”-  Identity & privacy innovation Previous experience: Wilson has worked in ICT innovation, research, development and analysis for over 25 years. With double…...

The original public blockchain was devoted to cryptocurrency but it has inspired many families of solutions to more complex problems. As blockchain-based methods evolved, the language of practitioners also changed. There is much less talk now of “immutability” and “trust”, and more stress on coordination or orchestration, as well as integrity and resilience.

And yet the word “blockchain” has remained. Indeed, it seems to have become normalized despite the diversity of approaches, and that’s a bit of a problem.

For a while, many writers took care to broaden the idea as “blockchain technologies”. And then “Distributed Ledger Technologies” became popular for its generality and as a point of distinction.

Yet the awkward truth is that some of the latest ledger technologies are not terribly distributed or decentralized at all. IBM’s High Security Blockchain Network for instance can run on a single mainframe. Thus, the alternative Shared Ledger Technologies has been put forward by payments analyst David Birch, who likes to call out newer algorithms that do not actually involve chains of blocks.

Curiously, most of the leading ledger technology labs have returned to the safety of “blockchain”. Hyperledger, IBM, Microsoft and R3 all call their solutions “blockchain” with little or no qualification. They deny this usage is ambiguous, claiming that the world has come to recognize the term more broadly than the first generation algorithms of Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Of course I acknowledge that the meanings of words change over time. Some say “cloud” or “Big Data” are comparable terms to “blockchain” insofar as they span ranges of mechanisms and yet each represents a clear technology class.

But I say it’s too early to regard “blockchain” as settled in the same way as cloud or Big Data. Blockchain-based (or inspired) technologies are still emerging rapidly. There are very few commercially mature implementations, and still no consensus about what these technologies are good for, much less a common appreciation of what they do.

“Blockchain” speaks succinctly of a distinctive architecture and consensus algorithm. A huge body of work continues on the original public blockchains of Bitcoin and Ethereum, each supporting thousands of developers. These data structures are fundamentally different from the later generation technologies, so generalizing “blockchain” will be misleading to many.

Therefore I would like to find a new word for the whole category of advanced ledger technologies, a label that accurately captures what they are for and what makes them new.

Amidst all the innovation, there is one characteristic which blockchain’s descendants all share: each of them is concerned with orchestrating agreement on some defined state of a data set, across multiple stakeholders, without a leader or central administrator.

To synchronize consensus is the vitally disruptive aspect of this class of technologies. Synchronization is the one distinctive feature that all blockchains and ledger technologies share, from Bitcoin through Ethereum and Ripple, to Plenum and Hashgraph.

So I’d like to suggest we call all these things Synchronous Ledger Technologies.

Terminology is tricky. I have no illusions about coining a new term, so I merely offer Synchronous Ledger Technology (SLT) for discussion. It’s a neutral, plain-speaking phrase, and should not disenfranchise anyone’s approach.

What do you think?

Media Name: DOME tmqlwny72ru-zara-walker.jpg

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Google Proposes Broad Reforms to Regulations on Law Enforcement Requests for User Data

Chris Kanaracus

Managing Editor, Constellation Insights
Constellation

Chris Kanaracus is managing editor of Constellation Insights.  Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members.  Prior to joining Constellation, Kanaracus spent seven years covering the enterprise software industry for IDG News Service, where he frequently broke exclusive stories with a focus on end-customer issues. Kanaracus has also held various managerial and reporting roles at newspapers in New England since 1998. Twitter: @chriskanaracus , Title: Big IdeasConstellation Insights Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members. ...

Steve Wilson

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Google is getting a lot of attention lately over the $2.7 billion fine it received from the European Union over antitrust practices related to its search engine. The controversy stands to overshadow the company's recent effort to launch a policy debate around an important topic: The governance of cross-border law enforcement requests for information.

SVP and general counsel Kent Walker made the case in a speech last week to the Heritage Foundation, an influential Washington, D.C. think tank:

For as long as we’ve had legal systems, prosecutors and police have needed to gather evidence. ... With the advent of the post office, police got warrants to search letters and packages. With the arrival of telephones, police served subpoenas for the call logs of suspects. ... But the laws that govern evidence-gathering on the internet were written before the Information Revolution, and are now both hindering the flow of information to law enforcement and jeopardizing user privacy as a result.

These rules are due for a fundamental realignment in light of the rapid growth of technology that relies on the cloud, the very real security threats that face people and communities, and the expectations of privacy that internet users have in their communications.

Today, we’re proposing a new framework that allows countries that commit to baseline privacy, human rights, and due process principles to gather evidence more quickly and efficiently. We believe these reforms would not only help law enforcement conduct more effective investigations but also encourage countries to improve and align on privacy and due process standards. Further, reducing the amount of time countries have to wait to gather evidence means would reduce the pressure to pursue more problematic ways of trying to gather data.

Under the U.S. Electronic Communications Privacy Act, for the most part foreign law enforcement organizations are reliant on "diplomatic mechanisms" such as Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties when they want information held by a U.S. company. That process is far too bureaucratic and slow for most criminal proceedings, with an average wait of 10 months, Walker said.

Meanwhile, those same delays are prompting some countries to simply assert "that their own laws apply to companies and individuals outside of their borders." This places globalized U.S. companies in an "untenable situation," since they're at risk of violating U.S. law or that of the nation making the request, Walker added.

Google is proposing that the ECPA be updated to reflect that "law enforcement requests for digital evidence should be based on the location and nationality of users, not the location of data," as one measure.

A second would be for the U.S. and foreign nations that meet those "baseline" privacy, human rights and due process standards—which Google does not specifically define—to ink new pacts that would provide an alterative to MLATs.

Analysis: Unpacking Google's proposal

In principle, Google's proposal is most welcome, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Steve Wilson. "Clearly, something needs to be done to lubricate the necessary flow of information between cooperating law enforcement agencies," he says. "Equally, this sort of international challenge has been overcome many times in the past with extradition treaties, international shipping and aviation laws, as well as telecommunications and satellite regulations."

But the devil is in the details, and it's difficult to say how Google's view of the world and its problems align with most nations, he adds: "We live in awkward times where a great many developing nations are on edge, keen to assert their sovereignty in the global economy. A fresh complexity that didn't affect past treaty negotiations is that we have digital corporations now, with skin in the game, that are bigger than many countries."

Encryption: The elephant in the room

You can't have a discussion about law enforcement information access, whether domestic or international, without bringing up the difficult question of encryption. (Although in his speech, Google's Walker did not.)

Apple famously fought the FBI over access to an alleged terrorist's encrypted iPhone, arguing that providing the backdoor access desired by the Bureau would be able to unlock any iPhone, with no guarantee that its use could be limited to the device in question. (Ultimately, the FBI got outside help to crack the phone.)

Wilson recalls the "crypto-wars" policy battle of the 1990s, which ended in a consensus that while criminals can use and benefit from encryption, it was also necessary for community security and would in reality always be available in roll-your-own form.

"The arguments today revolve around whether encryption is so powerful that it gives terrorists and organized crime a crucial edge over law enforcement," he says.

"Police and politicians wish for an exceptional access mechanism that would let them undo encrypted messages," Wilson adds. The trouble with these debates is that lay people have come to view encryption like mechanical locks, which have master keys or other internal mechanisms known only to locksmiths, he says.

There's a major problem with that way of thinking. "Encryption backdoors create fundamental weaknesses that threaten all legitimate uses of the algorithms, for reasons that are difficult to present to non-specialists," Wilson says. "You hear politicians argue that all those clever folks out in Silicon Valley must surely be able to come up with a solution. It's just not that easy."

While the cryptowars have flamed up again, age-old issues remain the same, Wilson says:

Intercepts and decryption are just one tool of many used by law enforcement.
Messages don't stay encrypted forever and police can find many points in the communications line at which to intercept criminal activity.
Tampering with commercial cryptography will drive the most dedicated—and thereby most dangerous—criminals to build their own.
Criminal can also resort to steganography, the practice of hiding secret messages in normal files such as graphics. Stenganography is much harder to detect and decode.

Officials from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the U.S.—known as the "Five Eyes" for their historical willingness to share intelligence—are meeting in Ottowa this week to discuss encryption and related matters. It's an opportunity for substantive advancement, but also for wrongheaded ideas to take stronger hold.

"I agree this is a dilemma and I sympathise with law enforcement," Wilson says. "Yet I hope cool heads prevail."

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How do security pros understand privacy?

Steve Wilson

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

This is an edited extract from a chapter I contributed to Darek Kloza and Dan Svantesson's new book "Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Relations as a Challenge for Democracy?"

Privacy is contentious today. Some say the information age has brought real changes to privacy norms. With so much private data leaking through breaches, accidents and digital business practices, it’s often said that ‘the genie is out of the bottle’. Many think privacy has become hopeless. Yet in Europe and many jurisdictions, privacy rights have been strongly and freshly enforced, and for the very latest digital processes.

For security pros coming to grips with privacy, the place to start is the concept of Personally Identifiable Information (PII). The threshold for data counting as PII is low: any data about a person whose identity is readily apparent constitutes PII in most places, regardless of where it came from, or who might be said to ‘own’ it. This is not obvious to engineers without legal training, who may form a more casual understanding of what ‘private’ means. So it seems paradoxical to them that the words ‘public’ and ‘private’ don’t even figure at all in laws like Australia’s Privacy Act!

There is a cynical myth that ‘Technology outpaces the Law’. In practice, it is the law that challenges technology, not the other way around! The grandiose claim that the ‘law cannot keep up with technology’ is often a rhetorical device used to embolden developers and entrepreneurs. New technologies can make it easier to break old laws, but the legal principles in most cases still stand. If privacy is the fundamental right to be let alone, then there is nothing intrinsic to technology that supersedes that right. It turns out that technology neutral privacy laws framed over 30 years ago are powerful against very modern trespasses, like wi-fi snooping by Google, over-zealous use of biometrics by Facebook, and intrusive search results extracted from our deep dark pasts by the all-seeing Google. So technology really only outpaces policing.

One of the leading efforts to inculcate privacy into engineering practice has been the ‘Privacy by Design’ movement (PbD), started in the 1990s by Ontario privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian. PbD seeks to embed privacy ‘into the design specifications of technologies, business practices, and physical infrastructures’. As such it is basically the same good idea as building in security, or building in quality, because to retrofit these things too late leads to higher costs and disappointing outcomes.

In my view, the problem with the Privacy by Design manifesto is its idealism. Privacy is actually full of contradictions and competing interests, and we need to be more mature about this.

Just look at the cornerstone privacy principles. Collection Limitation for example can contradict the security instinct to retain as much data as possible, in case it proves useful one day. Disclosure Limitation can conflict with usability, because it means PII may be siloed and less freely available to other applications. And above all, Use Limitation can restrict revenue opportunities in all the raw material digital systems can gather. Businesses today accumulate masses of personal information (sometimes inadvertently, sometimes by design) as a by-product of online transactions; real privacy means resisting the temptation to exploit it (as Apple promises to). Privacy at its heart is about restraint. Privacy is less about what you do with personal information than what you don't do with it.

PbD naively asserts that privacy can be maximised along with security and other system objectives, as a “positive sum” game. But it is better that engineers be aware of the trade-offs that privacy can entail, and that they be equipped to deal with real world compromises entailed by privacy just as they do with other design requirements. Privacy can take its place in engineering along with all the other real world considerations that need to be carefully weighed, including cost, usability, efficiency, profitability, and security.

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Salesforce Unveils New Einstein AI Platform Services: What It Means

Chris Kanaracus

Managing Editor, Constellation Insights
Constellation

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,…...

Salesforce is continuing its steady stream of Einstein AI announcements, unveiling three new platform services that developers can inject into applications for sales, support, marketing and commerce.

The services include Einstein Sentiment, Einstein Intent and Einstein Object Recognition. They are derived from Einstein capabilities Salesforce gained through last year's acquisition of MetaMind.

Sentiment identifies positive, negative and neutral messages about a company or its products on social media, message boards and other sources, while Intent can classify and route cases or leads, or personalize responses in sales service and marketing scenarios.

Einstein Sentiment and Intent are pre-trained on words commonly used in front-office communications, including common B2B and B2C support scenarios, but they can also be custom-trained with as few as 50 to 100 examples, Salesforce says.

Salesforce had already introduced Einstein Vision, an image recognition service based on MetaMind capabilities in February, but Object Detection goes a level deeper, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen.

For example, a seller of solar panels could use the Vision Service to differentiate between images of flat-roofed homes and pitched-roof homes, but the Object Detection can differentiate multiple objects within a single image, he notes. Coca Cola did a pilot project with the service, whereby retailers could simply take a picture of their Coke coolers. The Object Detection Service was trained to count the number of bottles or cans of Coke versus Diet Coke versus Sprite and so on and then automatically trigger a restocking order, Henschen says.

Overall, it's important for Salesforce to continue adding not only depth but granularity into its AI services when it comes to developers. "Generic smart applications can only go so far," Henschen says. "I think companies and their developers are excited by the prospect of building custom smart apps."

However, as is often the case with Salesforce, the new platform services aren't yet generally available and no firm dates for that status were provided. Einstein Sentiment and Einstein Intent are now in beta, while Object Detection is in pilot.

The news comes as Salesforce holds its second annual developer conference, TrailheaDX, and seeks to dramatically expand its developer community through an expansive online training platform called Trailhead. Other news announced this week includes Trailhead partnerships with Atlassian and Github, as well as an open beta for Salesforce DX, the company's new developer experience which combines its core Force.com platform with Heroku.

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Digital Transformation Digest, 6/28/17: Salesforce Courts Developers, Cisco Revs Up IoT, Google and Nutanix Tie Up on Hybrid Cloud

Chris Kanaracus

Managing Editor, Constellation Insights
Constellation

Welcome to Digital Transformation Digest, Constellation's daily compendium of news and analysis covering forward-thinking enterprises, mega-vendors, startups and developers.

Salesforce adds AI platform services for developers, opens up DX in beta: The CRM giant has made a steady stream of announcements in recent months around its AI technology, Einstein, which is the product of a string of acquisitions and organic development. In the latest, Salesforce has unveiled new Einstein platform services for its developer base.

The services include Einstein Sentiment, for analyzing the tone of text generated by social media, web reviews and other mediums; Einstein Intent, which provides machine learning models that can classify the intent of inbound customer messages and route them appropriately; and Einstein Object Detection, for analyzing the content of images. Salesforce sees the last as ideal for retail, service and inventory management scenarios.

Go here for a deeper dive into the new services, with analysis from Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen.

Salesforce has also announced an open beta for DX, its new developer environment, which was first announced at last year's Dreamforce.

POV: Salesforce is betting big on expanding its already large developer base in a bid for growth. It has rolled out an extensive online training program called Trailhead, which is aimed at both those aspiring to be full-time Salesforce professionals, as well as "citizen" developers. The latter could be just as important for Salesforce's prospects given the potential for adding stickiness to its products within companies large and small.

The news is all happening in conjunction with TrailheaDX, Salesforce's second annual developer conference. Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller will be in attendance, so look for his coverage on his Twitter feed, Constellation's website and his blog this week.

Cisco ups its IoT ante post-Jasper acquisition: Last year's $1.4 billion purchase of IoT connectivity platform Jasper seemed like a shrewd move for Cisco, as it picked up one of the most mature and widely-used products of its kind.

Jasper was founded in 2004 and at the time of the acquisition, it already had 3,500 enterprise customers. (It now has 11,000, in a testament to Cisco's much larger channel and sales capability.) And on paper, the technical fit was sterling, with the combination of Cisco's networking gear and Jasper's software.

While there have been some incremental announcements since the deal, the big news arrived this week in the form of Control Center 7.0, which ties an array of Cisco technologies into Jasper's platform. You can go here for all the details, courtesy of Cisco.

POV: "It took some time from the acquisition of Jasper, but now we see the benefits in Cisco Control Center 7.0," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Andy Mulholland. "It's a combination of network topology types combined with the management experience of both Cisco and Jasper. As an example of the art of the possible in IoT connectivity spanning network types, it's well worth taking a close look."

Google teams with Nutanix for hybrid cloud: Google—technically, its parent company Alphabet—has inked a pact with hyperconvergence vendor Nutanix for hybrid cloud scenarios. Nutanix offers hardware and software for running mission-critical applications on private clouds, while providing connectivity to public cloud services for other workloads.

The integration is set to be complete in the first quarter of 2018. It will enable applications to be wrapped in Kubernetes-based containers and moved back and forth between Nutanix hardware and Google's cloud.

POV: This is certainly a big deal for Nutanix but also an acknowledgment by Google that hybrid cloud is what many enterprises want or require. Nutanix has strong credibility in its own right, with an enviable customer list using its products to build hybrid cloud datacenters.

Legacy Watch: Looming deadline for Office 2007 support: Companies and individuals still using Office 2007 have just three more months of support before Microsoft pulls the plug, as Computerworld reports. While they have the option of upgrading to a newer version of Office, such as 2013 or even 2016, Microsoft is pushing hard on the idea of jumping straight to the cloud-based Office365 or Office365 Plus, the fat-client version.

POV: It's not clear how many copies of Office 2007 are still chugging away out there, but we can be sure it's far more than one. Office365 has developed a rich feature set and is certainly worth a close look. For its part, Microsoft has a detailed end-of-life guide for Office 2007 at this link. (It also doubles as a passive but persistent product pitch for Office365).

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SugarCRM Unveils Hint, for 'Relationship Intelligence'

Chris Kanaracus

Managing Editor, Constellation Insights
Constellation

Cindy Zhou

CMO
Level Access

Cindy Zhou is a practicing CMO.  Prviously, she was Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research covering Digital Marketing Transformation and Sales Effectiveness. With over 18 years of practitioner experience in corporate marketing, product marketing, product management, and sales operations, Zhou has spearheaded marketing transformation at multiple technology companies. She advised Constellation’s clients on strategies to light-up demand generation, prove revenue contribution, and maximize sales productivity. Prior to joining Constellation, Zhou was Global Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales Operations at BackOffice Associates, a global provider of data quality and information governance solutions to the Fortune 1000 and SAP SolEx partner. Before…...

SugarCRM has firmed up its AI story with the launch of Hint, the first service from its new Relationship Intelligence product family. Hint is all about automating the task of collecting and organizing information about individual customers, as SugarCRM explains in a press release:

SugarCRM Hint reinvents enterprise applications by enabling end users to provide only a few contact details (e.g. email, name, company) for an individual and then automatically searches, tunes, and inputs the rest of the personal and corporate profile details for that contact. Hint does the work for Sugar users by gathering and analyzing customer intelligence from a broad range of social data sources so users can quickly and efficiently learn more about their prospects to establish a productive relationship.

Hint builds upon last year's acquisition of Contastic, a natural-language processing startup. It is compatible with Sugar versions 7.8 or higher and priced at $15 per user per month.

Hint represents a first step in a longer journey for SugarCRM, as the company notes in the release:

Future SugarCRM Relationship Intelligence products will rely on predictive analytics and machine learning techniques. These analysis techniques evaluate large data sets to reveal insightful patterns, prioritize opportunities, identify issues and make intelligent recommendations for next best actions in customer interactions and processes.

For what it is, Hint serves an increasingly important need, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Cindy Zhou. "Companies have been turning to third-party data solutions to append the missing information for both companies and their related contacts," he says. Having more complete information on the company, the decision-makers and contacts will help sellers improve their engagement with customers and prospects."

But Zhou advises clients to assess the fit and understand the depth and breadth of contacts Hint can provide. "Is there specialization in their particular target markets, industries or contact roles?"

POV: SugarCRM has chugged along over the years, despite remaining in the shadow of high-profile CRM vendors such as Salesforce and Oracle. It has differentiated itself with aggressive pricing-to-feature ratios, and the ability to run both in the cloud and on-premises.

With Hint and the upcoming Relationship Intelligence products, SugarCRM has made an initial entry into AI. While it doesn't have pockets as deep as larger competitors, SugarCRM is smartly focusing its initial AI efforts on core sales CRM capabilities—its sweet spot—compared to Salesforce's aggressive push to drive AI across every module.

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DNS Up-and-Comer Cloudflare Launches App Platform

Chris Kanaracus

Managing Editor, Constellation Insights
Constellation

DNS service provider Cloudflare is getting serious about apps. The company has announced the Cloudfare Apps Platform as well as a $100 million fund that will distribute venture capital to startups that build apps on the platform.

Founded in 2011, Cloudfare has now built out a network that spans 115 cities around the world, serving six million websites. Prominent customers include Uber and Fitbit. Cloudfare also offers CDN (content delivery network) services, firewalls and DDoS (distributed denial of service) protection.

Cloudflare App Platform is a natural evolution of the business, CEO Matthew Prince wrote in a blog post:

Prior to today, if you wanted to write code that took full advantage of Cloudflare's global network you needed to be a Cloudflare employee. Our team is able to run code on thousands of servers in hundreds of locations around the world and modify our customers' packets as they flow through our network in order to make their web site, application, or API faster and more secure. Today, we open that access to the rest of the world.

The Apps Platform allows third parties to develop applications that can be delivered across Cloudflare's edge to any of our millions of customers.

Cloudflare sits in a unique place. Our customers' packets flow through our network before reaching origin servers and in the way back to clients. That enables us to filter out bad actors, introduce new compression, change protocols, and modify and inject content. The Cloudflare Apps Platform enables developers to do the same, and produce applications that help build a better Internet.

Meanwhile, the developer fund is being backed by Venrock, Pelion and NEA, which were early investors in Cloudfare:

Building Cloudflare was a community effort. We can't wait to see what developers build now that we've opened Cloudflare's infrastructure and access to investors to a greater audience.

The App Platform stems from Cloudflare's purchase of Eager last year. Despite its name, the platform doesn't offer a full set of developer tools. Rather, it provides a way for third-party developers to wrap their JavaScript and CSS-based applications in an install.JSON file. Cloudflare's platform abstracts away complexity for website customers, allowing non-technical users to use a simple interface to configure and install apps on their sites.

Eager's technology replaces an earlier app platform Cloudflare had built on its own. The company's app marketplace has about 50 applications so far but clearly the goal is to have many, many more. Like other stores, Cloudflare will take a piece of developers' revenue, in this case 30 percent.

POV: Surprisingly rich applications can be built with JavaScript and CSS, but you can expect the variety of applications that populate Cloudflare's store to include a fair amount of widgets, too, albeit useful ones, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses or department-level websites who want to add features quickly without engaging IT. Like any, the marketplace and platform's success will depend on developer and customer awareness, but Cloudflare's overall momentum, along with the $100 million fund, should ensure a fair amount of both.

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Cisco Live 2017: Key Takeaways from CEO Chuck Robbins' Keynote

Chris Kanaracus

Managing Editor, Constellation Insights
Constellation

Cisco kicked off this year's Live conference with a keynote from its CEO Chuck Robbins, who walked attendees through recent and upcoming news announcements while laying out the company's vision for next-generation networks. Here's a look at the key takeaways from Robbins' talk.

The new networking realities: In 2016, the world hit an inflection point as the number of machine-to-machine network activations exceeded those of phones and tablets, Robbins said. Enterprises are already using billions of connected devices for new business models, preventive maintenance and other pursuits, and the pace by which more and more devices will be connected to the Internet is set to increase dramatically, he added.

Three things will define networks going forward: Scale, simplification and security, Robbins said. Of the last, he noted: "We all know what's in the press and as we add more and more things the threat surface expands. Once a month, something major happens. We have to ensure we're building security into everything we do."

Last week, announced major updates across its Digital Network Architecture product family. These include DNA Center, a management dashboard for all network functions; Software-Defined Access, which automatically segments network traffic through policy enforcement; and a machine learning platform for predictive analytics and business intelligence.

There's also new traffic analytics that can accurately detect threats in encrypted traffic more than 99 percent of the time, without needing to decrypt the data.

Robbins also discussed a new family of switches, the Catalyst 9000 line, which he called a "beautiful box." The switches include new custom-built ASICs and are fully programmable, allowing, for example, a hospital bringing on IoT devices carrying patient data to separate that traffic from desktop networks. It's also possible to run applications in containers or VMs directly on the boxes.

To that end, "what we believe is the network has to provide you the ability not only to connect but to deal with the data at the edge," Robbins said.

Seventy-five large companies are already conducting field trials with the new software and hardware, according to Robbins. The various aspects of the portfolio will become available over the next several months, Cisco said.

POV: Robbins kept the product pitches fairly short and free of bombast, which is always welcome. He also did a good job of speaking directly to the thousands of Cisco administrators and architects present at Mandalay Bay, highlighting the importance of their roles and responsibilites in the IoT age.

The multi-cloud reality: Cisco, like others, tried but failed to make inroads in the public cloud market and ultimately shuttered its Intercloud service in March. Thus it was not surprising that the cloud portion of Robbins' talk discussed Cisco's new strategy, where it will support multi-cloud management.

Cloud computing began as a quest for simplicity in enterprise IT but with companies buying into a proliferation of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings now has become a problem of data control and security.

"This is a major challenge we have to solve," he said. "It's not going to the cloud, it's going to many, many clouds. And the network has a unique ability to help you navigate that by preserving your policy and your security."

POV: Constellation believes multi-cloud is the right direction for most customers. Cisco, however, is far from the only vendor trying to pivot into multi-cloud management and will have to find the right place in the market.

Apple, Cisco cozy up a bit more: Robbins invited a surprise guest onstage in the form of Apple CEO Tim Cook. Their conversation consisted mostly of generalites about the companies' partnership, which big boost two years ago with the announcement of an enterprise-oriented "fast lane" service for validating iOS devices on Cisco networking gear.

Cisco and Apple didn't have anything nearly as big to announce during Robbins' talk, but Cisco did unveil Security Connector, which takes functionality from its Umbrella and Clarity security products and combines it in one app. It provides features for incident investigation, blocking malicious sites and encrypting DNS requests, and can be used to manage iOS devices in conjunction with an mobile device management platform.

POV: While the fireworks weren't really there this year news-announcement-wise, Cook's appearance is some evidence the Cisco-Apple partnership has been a success. (Cook said as much, but neither he or Robbins talked numbers.) In any case, the deal always made sense for both companies on paper, with Apple gaining an inroad to enterprises through Cisco's channel and Cisco able to pitch its networking products as superior for iOS devices.

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Sports Event - Lessons Learned for CxOs from America's Cup #5

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Holger Mueller is VP and Principal Analyst for Constellation Research for the fundamental enablers of the cloud, IaaS, PaaS and next generation Applications, with forays up the tech stack into BigData and Analytics, HR Tech, and sometimes SaaS. Holger provides strategy and counsel to key clients, including Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Product Officers, Chief HR Officers, investment analysts, venture capitalists, sell-side firms, and technology buyers.  Coverage Areas: Future of Work Tech Optimization & Innovation  Background: Before joining Constellation Research, Mueller was VP of Products for NorthgateArinso, a KKR company. There, he led the transformation of products to the cloud and laid the foundation for new Business Process as a…...

We had the opportunity to attend the America's Cup (AC), currently happening in Bermuda. For any sports (and sailing enthusiast) a once in a life time opportunity. And there is always something to be learned in life - with applicability to the enterprise... here I share my top 3 lessons learned from AC 35.

Take a look at the video that I recorded in Bermuda for a start:

And of course there is a one slide summary:

Sports Event - America's Cup Final - Lessons for the CxO from Holger Mueller

And here are the three lessons learned:

Challenge Best Practices

AC35 Development – For the first time AC teams have members of their team called ‘cyclist’, in this case Emirates Team New Zealand even has an Olympic medalist on board. It matters as the New Zealand team creates the vital pressure for maneuvers and adjusting with … spinning on stationary bikes. Four of the six team members… pedal. Unthinkable for sailing so far – the biggest forces in sailing were generated by arms, by the so-called grinders. And while all five other teams did not want / could not react to the New Zealand innovation. The power advantage is obvious, based on the team claims that the best Emirates Team New Zealand value is averaging 800W per race, the best grinder of Oracle Team USA does… 350W per race.

The CXO Lesson – Best practices are not there to be followed blindly but questioned regularly. Lateral thinking is crucial: Find what works in other areas and can solve the problem better. Everybody knows humans have more power in their legs than their arms – so why not use it … on a sailboat. What is the lateral thinking to disrupt and innovate on best practices for your enterprise?

Make the organization a living being

AC35 Development – AC teams have traditionally been very hierarchical organizations, the buck stops with the skipper, giving the commands and the ream receiving them. The tactician was an innovation introduced decades ago, to give the skipper a second opinion, another set of eyes. Tacticians would advise, skippers sometime follow. Compare to what Emirates Team New Zealand does: The helmsman drives, another team member is the foil trimmer and another one oversees sails (ironically the formal skipper, Ashby). Full delegation, no need to communicate / coordinate (listen into the live broadcast).

The CxO Lesson – Organizations need to be reviewed regularly. Too much communication and coordination can slow down an enterprise. Autonomy is powerful, empowers people to make the right decision, focus on the job and get It done. How many of you directs can / could do with more autonomy? Do they give them directs more economy?

Show up - late and ready works

AC35 Development – Emirates Team New Zealand only made it to Bermuda in May, races started in June. Oracle Team USA was their already almost two years earlier. As it turns out – the conditions the New Zealand team trained under at home, were more the ones that are now occurring in the Great Sound of Bermuda. Maybe lucky, maybe not. For sure the other teams saw less of the cycle setup.

The CxO Lesson – You don’t have to be first. Your enterprise must be there at the right time and ready. Every move will cause a reaction by the competition. The earlier your enterprise acts, the more time for the competition to react, adapt and maybe beat you. Late and ready is better than to be early and surprised and with no potential to adapt or react.

MyPOV

There are many lessons to be learned in life and it’s nowhere cast in stone that new strategies in business have to come from lessons learned in business. Lateral thinking, questioning the status quo, bending best practices, ignoring best practices and challenging them need to be part of the daily work of a CxO. Once implemented, they need to be executed, and we know flatter, more autonomous and more diverse teams do better. Empower the organization. And have a plan over time. Leave something in the tank to change the way the game is being played and playing out. If you are ready, coming later with impact is better than be early and exhausted.

The America’s Cup is not over. More lessons maybe able to be learned. When I recorded the video, the score was 4:1 for Emirates Team New Zealand. At the time of writing this, the score is 6:1. But in 2013, Oracle Team USA came back from a 1:8 deficit. Maybe that the last lesson for CxOs from the AC: Never say never, and it’s never over till it’s over. Watch Race #9 tomorrow – there may be more – or not – but there is definitively something to learn from AC35.

Tech Optimization New C-Suite Data to Decisions Future of Work Innovation & Product-led Growth Leadership Chief Experience Officer

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FinancialForce Community Live 2017 - All about Services

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

We had the opportunity to attend Financial Force’s 2nd user conference, Community Live – the first open for influencers, held in Las Vegas, from June 19th to 21st, at Cesar’s Place. Over 700 attendees, extraordinarily well attended by the influencer community (per MSR rule).

So, take a look at my musings on the event here: (if the video doesn’t show up, check here).

I also recorded my first impressions of the keynote with Den Howlett over at Diginomica – watch it here.

No time to watch – here is the 1-2 slide condensation (if the slide doesn’t show up, check here):

Want to read on?

Here you go: Always tough to pick the takeaways – but here are my Top 3:

FinancialForce doubles down on Services – Financial Force has always focused on service industries, in the keynote new CEO Tod Nielsen re-iterated the commitment, drawing a wider picture – that ‘everything’ is becoming a service. This was taken all the way to the (not so serious) example of “Puppy as a Service”. But a valid point the resonated well with the audience. Not so long ago we talked about outcomes are what matter for customers, and outcomes as a service (including services) would have been a bolder point. But that can still happen.

FinancialForce Community Live 2017 Holger Mueller Constellation Research Future of Work

Tod Nielsen opens FinancialForce Community Live 2017

Focus on Talent Management for Services Industries – It’s always with a grain of salt when vendors reduce their ambition – and that’s what FinancialForce has done in HCM. Instead of becoming a full-fledged HCM vendor, FinancialForce will focus on Talent Management for Services Industries (with white collar workers). It chose ADP as its part for HR Core and Payroll, certainly a good move to choose the most used payroll platform in North America. And payroll is crucial in the services industries: Professionals stop working to check their paycheck – often even at customer site – so getting this integration right is crucial. And FinancialForce and ADP plan to provide a vendor based integration, likely around the REST technology that ADP has championed with another ERP vendor recently (check my blog).

Studer with Imbrogno - Partnership of FinancialForce and ADP

Financials Roadmap – With all these changes, the core of FinancialForce, Financials, almost took a backseat. But there was room in the keynote to point out to a key road map

items, most prominently revenue recognition, renewal risk and revenue analysis.

FinancialForce uses Salesforce Wave

MyPOV

Always good to be at an early edition of a user conference, where the user community gets shaped, develops expectations and the vendor ecosystem goes through its first incarnations. The ‘tribal’ values of an ecosystem get established in these first conferences. It was especially interesting with the executives who shouldered the bulk of the first day keynote – Nielsen and Studer being with FinancialForce for respectively (only) six and three months. But both showed they are familiar with customers, their expectations and demands, a good sign.

On the concern side – it is always sensitive when vendors retrench in footprint plans and ambition. FinancialForce has done a respectable job at addressing these concerns and informing customers ahead of the changes in HCM and the partnership with ADP. At the end of the day it is better for vendors to realize what the can do with their R&D budgets, and better to stop too ambitious plans sooner than later What matters for FinancialForce customers is that the partnership with ADP will deliver – if and when it does – the potential FUD around this change - will all be history.

Overall a good Community Live conference for FinancialForce customers and partners, now it is time to deliver and what was announced. Stay tuned.

Want to learn more? Checkout the Storify collection below (if it doesn’t show up – check here).

Future of Work Revenue & Growth Effectiveness New C-Suite Data to Decisions Innovation & Product-led Growth Tech Optimization financialforce ADP business finance AI Analytics Automation CX EX Employee Experience HCM Machine Learning ML SaaS PaaS Cloud Digital Transformation Enterprise Software Enterprise IT Leadership HR IaaS Disruptive Technology Enterprise Acceleration Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP CCaaS UCaaS Collaboration Enterprise Service Chief Financial Officer Chief Experience Officer Chief Customer Officer Chief People Officer Chief Human Resources Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Executive Officer

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