AWS Enterprise Summit 2016 Frankfurt - The Long Road to German Cloud Adoption

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…...

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We had the opportunity to attend AWS Enterprise Summit in Frankfurt, held on June 30th 2016. Always a welcome chance for a US based analyst – despite European roots, history and professional networks, to check in on the state of cloud on the ‘old’ continent. The conference was well attended with over 1200 participants, coming from customers, prospects and the ecosystem. 

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

Event report - AWS Enterprise Summit 2016 Frankfurt - The German Road to Cloud adoption is ... long from Holger Mueller

Want to read on? 

 

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

AWS focuses on best practices – It was clear that AWS thinks that the US view on best practices adoption due to cloud, was what the German IT audience wanted to hear about. Both in examples from Continental (surprise –another automotive customer!) and AWS itself (with Stephen Orban) talked at length about the changes that need to happen in order to make IT more agile, more in tune with the challenges of digital transformation. Nothing out of the ordinary, the audience took notes diligently.

Security remains focus – AWS has done a very good job since its early days to address and overcome the security concerns of enterprises in regards of moving to the public cloud. No exception in Frankfurt – with a dedicated security track. From conversation with attendees, the security concern has largely been addressed in Germany, at least for the enterprises actively working on cloud deployments. As already heard a year ago at AWS Summit in Berlin, the German region in Frankfurt has eliminated almost all concerns around data residency and statutory concerns.

Adoption remains a constant challenge – Despite the interest and good reception, AWS (like other public cloud vendors) in Germany struggles with adoption. While it was ok to have e.g. only pilots and early phases of projects in Berlin in 2015 (e.g. Audi), not having a German enterprises presenting in the keynote about their live experience with AWS (ideally in Germany) - was certainly a surprise. The ‘live’ customer aspect in the keynote came from UK based autonomous driving startup Here. Definitively a great showcase for cloud in general and AWS in specific – but nothing to relate to for the average attending enterprise. And while Continental qualifies in these regards, the presentation was around a playful uptake of AWS services with a ‘Hau Den Lukas’ implementation. Great demo, but exactly that – a demo. To be fair, more customer presentations and example were presented in the separate track session, but e.g. a major pharmaceutical company being live in the US with AWS Workspaces, certainly qualifies as a live customer, but in the US and not in Germany. 

 

MyPOV

A good event for AWS, the vendor has definitively the attention and interest of the German IT audience. I am sure AWS has good reasons for focusing more on IT transformation than showcases, but the ‘doer’ audience in Frankfurt definitively wanted to learn more on the showcase side. From my two dozen plus random attendee conversations, all were upbeat, interested but also wanted to learn more what other enterprises are doing with AWS. Even North American enterprise showcases would have been welcomed.

Having the Summit in walking distance from all major banks, next to the Frankfurt financial center, I would not have been surprised to see a more Finance / Banking focus at the event, but if the topic was addressed, I missed it. As in general, we saw again the lack of AWS ‘packaging’, basically bundling many of their services to something enterprises are demanding (e.g. an AWS IoT Platform). Enterprises will then know services work together for a specific purpose, enable e. g. a specific business goal and most importantly, all enterprises use, experience (and become references!) for that ‘bundle’ (others may call it product).

Overall a good reminder on how different the adoption stages of public cloud are between North America and Europe, in this case Germany. On the bright side for the cloud, definitively a change from ‘we have to do it (for IoT)’ (from AWS Summit in Berlin 2015) to ‘what are the best use cases’ (Frankfurt, June 2016), so a good progression in the ‘mental costume’ of European / German cloud evaluation / adoption. For European / German enterprises in the immediate adoption situation / decision, the recommendation is cearly to attend the North American events, most prominently reInvent in Las Vega this fall. 

 

Stay tuned for more.


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

More on AWS:
 

• News Analysis - Amazon Web Services Cloud now speaks… Hindi - Indian AWS Data Centers available - read here
• News Analysis - Salesforce selects AWS as preferred Public Cloud Infrastructure Provider - Good move - read here
• Event Report - AWS re-Invent - AWS lobbies for the enterprise - DB and IoT are the cheese - read here
• First Take - AWS reInvent Wednesday Keynote - Good start & AWS is going for the enterprise read here
• Event Preview - AWS re-Invent 2015 - watch / read here
• Event Report - AWS Summit Berlin - AWS spricht Deutsch - but when will the Germans speak cloud? Read here
• News Analysis - AWS learns Hindi - Amazon Web Services announces 2016 India Expansion - read here
• Event Report - AWS Summit San Francisco - AWS pushes the platform with Analytics and Storage [From the Fences] read here
• Event Report - AWS re:invent - AWS becomes more about PaaS on inhouse IP - read here
• AWS gives infrastructure insights - and it is very passionate about it - read here
• News Analysis - AWS spricht Deutsch - the cloud wars reach Germany - read here
• Market Move - Infor runs CloudSuite on AWS - Inflection Point or hot air balloon? Read here
• Event Report - AWS Summit in SFO - AWS keeps doing what has been working in the last 8 years - read here
• AWS  moves the yardstick - Day 2 reinvent takeaways - read here.
• AWS powers on, into new markets - Day 1 reinvent takeaways - read here.
• The Cloud is growing up - three signs in the News - read here.
• Amazon AWS powers on - read here.

Lastly: Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here.

 

 

2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 & 2016 (C) Holger Mueller - All Rights Reserved

Gnerc - The Ultimate Enterprise Software Solution (Parody)

Alan Lepofsky

Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Alan Lepofsky - VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research. With almost two decades of experience in the collaboration software industry, Lepofsky helps organizations improve the way their employees work together to get their jobs done. Lepofsky’s primary research area The Future of Work, focuses on: integrating collaboration and business processes (Purposeful Collaboration), structuring work via Social Task Management, leveraging analytics and digital assistants to work more productively, the strategic impact of mobile computing on business transformation, and measuring workforce culture based on Digital Proficiency instead of age. Twitter: @alanlepoLinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/alanlepo     , Title: Big IdeasIntelligent Collaboration: The Intersection of…...

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Often during product briefings, this is where my mind wonders to...

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IoT for Building Management, or Workplaces created from managed IoT tagged Assets?

Andy Mulholland

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

Andy Mulholland is Vice President and Principal Analyst focusing on cloud business models. Formerly the Global Chief Technology Officer for the Capgemini Group from 2001 to 2011, Mulholland successfully led the organization through a period of mass disruption. Mulholland brings this experience to Constellation’s clients seeking to understand how Digital Business models will be built and deployed in conjunction with existing IT systems. Coverage Areas Consumerization of IT & The New C-Suite: BYOD, Internet of Things, IoT, technology and business use Previous experience: Mulholland co authored four major books that chronicled the change and its impact on Enterprises starting in 2006 with the well-recognised book ‘Mashup Corporations’ with Chris Thomas of Intel. This was followed in…...

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Upgrading to substantially improve operating costs and efficiency of Building Management Systems, BMS, is a recognized ‘hot’ market for IoT. However the tasks, and capabilities, that define the term ‘Building Management’ are being transformed by the increasing numbers and types of Devices already making their presence in a Building known. A ‘managed workplace’ is the target, not a managed Building!

Any Enterprise building is experiencing a quarter-by-quarter growth in the number of ‘manageable’ devices that it contains. A combination of ever-decreasing processors costs, ubiquitous network connectivity, and suppliers seeking to add ‘Services’ to their products, is transforming the previous definition of ‘Building Management Systems’ into the wider goal of ‘Managing Enterprise Assets in the Workplace’.

Whilst many accept the impact of a connected environment, few realize the connectivity, and interactivity, implications beyond their own area of specialization. A Building Services manager using BMS will recognize the benefits to the existing requirements, but is unlikely to consider Photocopies, Printers, even coffee machines that are all connected to how a workplace functions as a whole.

Add individual workers devices, use of external Services/Partners, and new ‘agile’ Digital Business models to understand there is a need to grasp a bigger requirement definition. The ERP years taught the need to grasp the end game of ubiquitous common connected business environments, and the mistake of implementing custom ERP piecemeal!

For some years the terms Smart Building, Smart Workplace, Smart City, have all had their own definitions that have resulted in separation of their capabilities. In reality they are all linked through various aspects of providing ‘infrastructural’ support to an enterprise workforce. A Workplace has a relationship to a Building, even if only through shared technology, and utilities, both are located within a City providing utilities and connections. Its time to recognize the gain in consolidated operation that the IoT generation of connected ‘Things’ or Assets will provide.

Upgrading a Building Management System, or BMS, by using increased IoT sensing has gained market acceptance for the manner in which it addresses a well-understood topic with clear benefits and known buyers. In a modern office there are a huge number of powered, heat producing devices so extending BMS with increased IoT sensing to include Energy Management makes sense. As more and more powered, connected, and intelligent devices of all types make up an office, (or any other building), the whole concept of ‘Managing a Building’ will change to managing the ALL Assets to focus on market place requirements.

Effective Building Management in the age of IoT is not limited to predicting failures with improved responses in the Building Infrastructure; Managing better implies the ability to read and react to dynamic and variables with optimized actions. Twenty-five years ago this very point led to the adoption of Enterprise Resource Planning, ERP, to integrate and operate all Enterprise ‘resources’ in optimal processes.

IoT is a core enabler of the market reactive de centralized granular Business model so often described under the heading of ‘Transformation’ of Digital Business. The ability to integrate and orchestrate at the level of Enterprise ‘Assets’* provides the flexibility missing in ERP managing resources through processes.

*In IoT terminology an Asset is defined as any functional capability that can provide business valuable inputs, (data), or be controlled/orchestrated to optimize its output capability, (usually in the form of goods or services).

Examining the factors that drove the creation and deployment of ERP provides some interesting lessons on how IoT should be deployed. ERP started life as Manufacturing Resource Management, just as Industrial Sensing has developed from manufacturing use into IoT. Industrial Sensing, or Automation, created ‘Operational Technology’, optimizing near real-time data on events, and outcomes, to supplement planned schedules. (see- the challenge of incorporating IT with OT, Operational Technology). So its little surprise that the concept of ‘Assets’ based management as in the following ERP centric definition comes from Manufacturing Operational Technology.

Enterprise asset management (EAM) is a broad term vendors use to describe software that provides managers with a way to view company-owned assets holistically. The goal is to enable managers to control and pro-actively optimize operations for quality and efficiency. ….. Additionally from the same source; In earlier years, EAM was simply called maintenance scheduling software. EAMs facilitate operations by automating requests for upgrades, regular maintenance and decommissioning or replacement. 

Source http://searchmanufacturingerp.techtarget.com/definition/enterprise-asset-management-EAM

There are surprising similarities around Enterprise adoption in the early period of ERP, both in the business ambitions and in the deployment challenges to those driving IoT adoption today. Both are based on sharing data, and neither can work if there are gaps and differences in deployments. Successful insightful outcome can only be arrived at with a complete data set; missing data results in dangerous assumptive outcomes.

ERP started with a focus on the technology of Client- Server applications whereas;

IoT started with a focus on the technology of networked sensing, but has recently refocused on Data driven Business benefits, often referred to as the Analytics of Things, AOT. It is arguable that in the same way as Business Intelligence became the ultimate value from ERP optimization of processes, so will Artificial Intelligence, AI, will become the ultimate value from the Internet of Things. The result will be the ability to orchestrate all of an Enterprise’s Assets into competitive responses to opportunities. Individual IoT projects must not create implementation barriers to becoming part of an enterprise wide environment.

Can a quarter of a century of ERP projects designed to create fully cohesive enterprise business based on common data with optimized shared processes teach anything useful to IoT deployment?  The following are common principles that were often not followed.

1) Initial projects lacked the understanding of the true scope of ERP (IoT) as an Enterprise wide transformation with the need for common approaches to deployment.

2) Initial projects and business justifications were frequently piecemeal in their approach, and soon become barriers to the Enterprise transformation needing expensive reworking.

3) The competitive balance rapidly tipped in favor of the Enterprises that adopted full Enterprise wide ERP (IoT) integration to transform their Business capabilities forcing the pace onto late adopters who lacked experience to implement rapid ‘catch up’ deployments.

4) Enterprises with ubiquitous common ERP (IoT) deployments quickly discovered new insights to drive a further round of new best ‘practices’ that created Industry sector transformation in addition to Enterprise transformation.

5) The Enterprises that attempted to customized ERP (IoT) to make it fit their existing Enterprise processes rather than adjust to the new Business models, and/or, failed to use uniform deployments, became uncompetitive. To recover their competitive capabilities required substantial investment at the very moment when their revenues and profits were falling.

Keeping the above comments in mind, and returning to the topic of using IoT for Building Management. The obvious approach for such a separately managed entity in the fixed overheads infrastructure budget is to make the moves that reduce the costs as currently defined in Budgets. There is an immediate Business case for lower costs around maintenance, and energy costs alone.

But is that really addressing the reality of what is in Buildings and the changes in how an Enterprise is using not just the building but its internal services as well? With ‘hot desking’, intelligent office machines, and every worker using multiple devices, the term a ‘Managed’ Building should refer to a dynamic set of workplace Assets that need to be optimized in ever changing groups to match new Business Models.

In addition the Budget model for overheads needs to be considered too. The growth in the Digital Services economy requires a shift in business model cost allocations from Capital Expenditure, CapEx, with its unallocated overheads to the flexibility of directly allocated costs for each Asset utilized. To achieve Operational Expenditure, OpEx, costing it will be necessary to be able to monitor and manage each Asset individually.

The reactive Smart Services Digital Business models require OpEx based costing allocation to activities. IoT based Asset Registers take on a new meaning when each Asset is a dynamically monitored and managed entity as does the management of workplace resources to align to Business activities and support workers.

An IoT Building Management solution is the crucial first step towards these changes, but equally it could create a self contained and isolated IoT management domain that is incapable of scaling to support the real Enterprise requirement.

It’s not only Building Management that is at risk of course; the same challenges apply to IoT pilots and projects across the enterprise. The benefits of well-managed, standardized, ERP rollouts have transformed Enterprises and the competitive expectation of any number of commercial sectors. Unfortunately, the cost and difficulties of correcting poor ERP rollouts are all too recognizable as well.

In the same manner that Web Servers, Internet Access, Mobility and Workplace collaboration all entered the Enterprise; someone, somewhere in your Enterprise is putting in place a good commercial solution for their requirements, and in do doing creating a potential future problem for the Enterprise. In all these cases waiting to see overall demand proved to be a poor strategy!

Hadoop Summit 2016 Spotlights Enterprise Innovation, IoT Use Cases

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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Hortonworks customers Ford, Macy’s and Progressive Insurance highlight breakthrough applications. Streaming looms as next big thing in big data.

Plenty of companies have mastered their first-generation uses of Hadoop. Now they’re scaling up and going after more sophisticated applications.

That’s the state of big data that emerged at the June 28-30 Hadoop Summit in San Jose, CA. Hosted by Hortonworks and Yahoo, the 4,000-attendee event was peppered with presentations by customers including Progressive Insurance, Macy’s, Ford, BlueCross BlueShield of Michigan and ConocoPhillips. The event also highlighted announcements by Hortonworks, the company’s cloud partnership with Microsoft on Azure HDInsight, and a rich track on emerging streaming data applications.

Ford detailed its Hadoop-based connected car data platform at Hadoop Summit and explained
how it works with the FordPass mobile app.

Most Hadoop Summit attendees seem intent on learning from peers. Here’s a quick sampling of the real-world use cases presented.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan is building out what Beata Puncevic described as the company’s “next-generation data platform with Hadoop at the center. Puncevic, director of analytics, data engineering and data management, said the effort is bringing together disparate data silos spanning multiple generations of technology including mainframe apps. Schema-on-read flexibility is improving cost efficiencies and time to data delivery, she said, and an early analytical win has been faster and deeper insight into drug prescription trends.

ConocoPhillips has been using Hadoop for about a year and the first win was cost avoidance on the company’s conventional data warehousing platform, said Kelly Cook, the company’s director of analytic platforms. By moving ETL workloads, archival data and high-scale sensor data from oil and gas wells to Hadoop, the company has avoided what Cook called “hugely expensive” investments in data warehouse capacity in favor of “a lot less expensive” Hadoop capacity. Given low energy prices over the year or more, ConocoPhillips is under pressure to keep costs down.

Progressive Insurance built its well-known Snapshot usage-based auto-insurance offering on top of Hadoop. The company has compiled more than 15 billion miles worth of driving data from Snapshot devices that plug into auto diagnostic ports and relay data from insured vehicles. By assessing factors such as miles driven, nighttime driving, speed and breaking events, Progressive can offer discounts to drivers who demonstrate safe driving habits. In a keynote presentation, Progressive’s Brian Durkin, innovation strategist, and Pawan Divakarla, business leader, data and analytics, described how the company can drill down through petabytes of data to get to policy-specific pricing decisions.

Macy’s started using Hadoop some five years ago to understand online purchasing habits on Macys.com. That entailed analyzing Web and mobile clickstreams and overlaying product, customer and preference data. Macy’s is now doing more sophisticated analyses of customer journeys from Macy.com to store visits and vice versa. That has helped the company target messages to online customers to encourage them to buy in stores and it encourages in-store customers to try shopping online. Macy’s is now piloting Beacon mobile sensor technology to drive near-real-time insight. The company is testing detecting the presence and location of Macy’s mobile app users within stores and then deliver offers instantly based on recent online and in-store browsing and buying activity. If you were browsing swimsuits in recent days, a message delivered when you arrive at the store might direct you to sportswear and offer a discount.

Ford runs its FordPass connected car app on the Hortonworks Hadoop stack. It’s an early example of an IoT-style application where data is used in different ways at different locations on the network. A Ford Fusion hybrid vehicle generates as much as 25 gigabytes of sensor data per hour, so Ford does plenty of filtering at the edge of the network (meaning in the car) so that only the data that’s needed is sent back to centralized systems. For example, FordPass users can remotely check their car’s fuel level and see diagnostic error codes, but the detailed diagnostic data used by service technicians stays in the car.

The level of insight varies by application, and owners have to opt in to share their data. In commercial fleet applications, owners typically want continuous geolocation information so they can see where their vehicles are at all times. In the case of individual consumers, Ford captures location data only the key is turned on and off. The latter enables FordPass users to find their parked car in massive parking lots.

In internal uses of data, Ford analyses aggregated diagnostic codes by model and year to spot possible defects and improve warranty support. Ford is also correlating vehicle data with social data to help product development team understand what people are saying about features and performance characteristics.

Hortonworks Talks Cloud, Streaming

Hortonworks announced the latest release of the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) at Hadoop Summit, and it also put a spotlight on its longstanding cloud partnership with Microsoft on Azure HDInsight. HDP 2.5, due out in the third quarter, will include Apache Atlas upgrades including data-classification and metadata tagging, for fine-grained governance and security control. The distribution will also include Apache Zeppelin software for notebook-style data analysis and visualization integrated with Apache Spark.

Microsoft executive Joseph Sirosh talked about the “unreasonable effectiveness” of the new
ACID — algorithms, cloud, IoT and data — to tackle big problems.

Growing interest in cloud and hybrid deployment has been the buzz at most big-data-related events this year. It was a central theme at Cloudera Analyst Day, the Teradata Influencer Summit, and at MongoDB World, June 27-28, where the company announced its MongoDB Atlas cloud service.

Hortonworks reminded Hadoop Summit attendees that it was very early to the cloud through its partnership with Microsoft to develop the HDInsight Service on Azure, which dates to 2012. Based on HDP, HDInsight is a managed, public cloud service (much like Amazon Elastic MapReduce), so all administration is handled by Microsoft. This is attractive to the many customers, particularly newcomers, who don’t want to deal with deploying and managing a Hadoop distribution on public cloud infrastructure services.

Hortonworks also talked up the growing interest in streaming data use cases at Hadoop Summit. That naturally led to descriptions of the Hortonworks Data Flow (HDF) platform, which is based on Apache NiFi. There were plenty of sessions on streaming data at Hadoop Summit, but the vast majority were given by vendors. Streaming data analysis is commonplace in financial trading, national security and certain advertising and e-commerce circles, but it’s early days for mainstream use cases.

MyPOV on Hadoop Summit

Hortonworks’ announcements at Hadoop Summit were incremental. The Atlas upgrades are certainly welcome and necessary, but I don’t get too excited about basics of security and access control that enterprises just expect to be there. The Zeppelin Web-based notebook interface is more interesting, as it promises to open up access to business users, simplifying analysis and data visualization in conjunction with Spark.

Hortonwork’s HDInsight plug was more or less a reminder that it has the public cloud option covered through its Microsoft partnership. But Azure isn’t the only cloud out there. Hortonworks last year introduced CloudBreak, its cloud-deployment tool, in the HDP 2.3 release. I didn’t hear anything about new CloudBreak capabilities or cloud deployment uptake, so my guess is that Hortonworks is preoccupied with other priorities.

Finally, I agree that streaming is shaping up as a next big thing in data management and analytics, but I’d advise newbies to start experiments with streaming-capable tools that may already be at their disposal, like HBase, Kafka and Spark. I’d get a taste of streaming challenges and consider the breadth of opportunities before adding a system like HDF. I like HDF’s drag-and-drop approach to developing dataflows, but it’s akin to adding a factory for streaming data use cases. If you have just a few, it might be overkill.

I was most impressed by the list of companies presenting at Hadoop Summit. It was also good to that the number of traditional enterprises (BlueCross BlueShield of Michican, CapitalOne, ConocoPhillips, Ford, Macy’s, Merck, Progressive Insurance, Schlumberger) was on par with the number of Internet companies (eBay, Facebook, LinkedIN, Netflix, PayPal, Uber, Yahoo). That tells me that Hadoop is settling in as the next-generation enterprise data-management platform.

IBM and Cisco Announce Integrations To Help People Communicate and Collaborate

Alan Lepofsky

Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Alan Lepofsky - VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research. With almost two decades of experience in the collaboration software industry, Lepofsky helps organizations improve the way their employees work together to get their jobs done. Lepofsky’s primary research area The Future of Work, focuses on: integrating collaboration and business processes (Purposeful Collaboration), structuring work via Social Task Management, leveraging analytics and digital assistants to work more productively, the strategic impact of mobile computing on business transformation, and measuring workforce culture based on Digital Proficiency instead of age. Twitter: @alanlepoLinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/alanlepo     , Title: Big IdeasIntelligent Collaboration: The Intersection of…...

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Today IBM and Cisco announced a new partnership that brings together parts of each vendor’s collaboration platform: IBM and Cisco Tap the Power of IBM Watson and Cisco Spark to Transform the Way People Work

"As part of the transformation, the highly secure Cisco Spark and WebEx collaborative workspace platforms will be integrated with IBM’s leading cloud collaboration solutions, including Verse and Connections, and underpinned by IBM’s cognitive computing capabilities."

On the surface, this sounds like a good opportunity for both companies.

• IBM has been successful in the email and social networking markets (with Notes/Domino and Connections, and is now offering customers IBM Verse), but their Sametime product is not as well known as Cisco WebEx for web conferencing or Cisco Jabber for voice/video calls.
• Cisco has been successful with WebEx and Jabber, but has a poor track record (see below) in collaboration software and does not have their own email platform.

So working together could provide each vendor a way to expand their market presence by leveraging the other to fill their gaps. But questions remain:

• Will Cisco WebEx customers buy IBM Verse and IBM Connections based on this new integration?  
• Will IBM Verse and Connections customers buy WebEx (vs IBM Sametime) and more importantly to Cisco, will they use Cisco Spark instead of or in combination with IBM Connections? What about IBM’s upcoming project Toscana software?

Collaboration Portfolios At A Glance

Cisco Benefits From IBM's Cognitive Computing

One of the most important aspects of today’s announcements is that Cisco plans to leverage the cognitive capabilities of the IBM Watson platform to help improve the way people work. Meetings, chat, voice calls all contain large amounts of unstructured data, making it difficult for people to easily glean insights from the content and interactions they have with their colleagues and customers. If Cisco can bring a layer of intelligence to WebEx, Jabber and Spark it will not only help their customers, but also provide an excellent reference for the power of the IBM Watson platform.


IBM and Cisco Have Been Down This Road Before

This is not the first time IBM and Cisco have partnered on integrating their collaboration offerings. In 2009 the two vendors made a very similar announcement: Cisco and IBM: Enhancing the Way People Work Through Unified Communications 

2009: "Together, the two companies are enabling a new way of  communicating and collaborating—one that’s open, timely, and effective. Using best in class unified communications capabilities from both Cisco and IBM, organizations can transform their business processes and reach new levels of productivity. Collaboration will be made easier and communications will be enhanced. Individuals and teams will work more effectively—when, where and how they choose—without sacrificing security or productivity. The integrated product offerings combine IBM Lotus® Sametime®, IBM Lotus Notes® and multiple Cisco Unified Communications products to deliver a complete unified communications solution that unify voice, data, video, messaging, and mobility technologies into a single, flexible solution."

While I do not have statistics around the number of new customers or amount of revenue this previous partnership generated, it’s safe to say it did not have substantial impact on either company. However, things are a bit different today. In theory, today’s software is easier to integrate in the cloud than older on-premises offerings were. IBM says that we’ll start to see the newly announced integrations this year, with the cognitive capabilities of Watson working their way into the Cisco portfolio in 2017.

Cisco’s Rocky Road To Collaboration

Cisco new collabroation platform Spark is being well received by customers and partners, but Cisco has had a tough time getting to this stage. Here is a timeline of Cisco’s collaboration software portfolio. As you’ll see they have tried twice to create their own offering first with Quad then WebEx Social, then tried partnering with Jive (which sounds a lot like today’s IBM announcement) and are now back in the market with Cisco Spark. 

• Mar 2007 - Cisco acquired WebEx
• Sep 2008 - Cisco acquired Jabber
• 2010 - Cisco announces their social networking for the enterprise platform, Cisco Quad
• Aug 2011 - Cisco acquires Versly: integrates collaboration capabilities via a plug-in into Microsoft Office applications 
• Jun 2012 - Quad is rebranded as WebEx Social
• Dec 2013 - Cisco acquires Collaborate: provides unified document sharing, task management and team communication
• May 2014 - Cisco ends WebEx Social and announces partnership with Jive - "Today I am happy to announce that we are entering a relationship with Jive Software to deliver the best in enterprise social collaboration to our customers. By combining Jive’s enterprise collaboration platform with WebEx and Jabber, we can bring together the elements that help organizations deploy an integrated, seamless experience for their employees, customers, and partners. What really gets me excited about the Jive and Cisco integration is that we are bringing two leading collaboration and communications technology solutions together and delivering them in a single experience for our customers"
• Jun 2014 - Cisco acquires Assemblage: real-time collaboration apps for shared whiteboarding, presentation broadcasting and screensharing.
• Nov 2015 - Cisco acquires Acano: video and audio bridging technology that allows customers to connect video systems from multiple vendors across both cloud and hybrid environments.
• Dec 2015 - Cisco announces Spark, cloud based messaging, meetings and voice calls
• Jun 2016 - IBM and Cisco Combine the Power of Watson Internet of Things with Edge Analytics
• Jun 2016 - IBM and Cisco Tap the Power of IBM Watson and Cisco Spark to Transform the Way People Work

After several different strategies around collaboration, Cisco now seems to focused on making Spark a success. They have even created $150M developer fund to entice business partners to build solutions on the new platform. It remains to be seen how Spark will compliment or compete with IBM Connections and later IBM Toscana.


Summary

• Both vendors have held leadership positions in their respective markets, but are now facing tough competition that is stalling growth or even reducing their base. Both companies are looking for new routes to market as they compete against the likes of Microsoft, Google, SAP, Salesforce, Facebook, Slack and others, and partnering with each other could open up additional opportunities. 
• For IBM, the more places they can have IBM Verse and IBM Connections (ex: the file sharing component) integrated with business applications that people use everyday (such as WebEx) the better.
• For Cisco, having access to IBM Watson’s cognitive capabilities will help them compete with Microsoft and Google, each of which has their own cognitive platforms that they are leveraging in their own collaboration products.
• I’m pleased to see the IBM Collaboration Solutions division making partnerships. This follows the modus operandi of General Manager Inhi Cho Suh, and shows she’s already having an impact in her new position. 
• My biggest concern is IBM’s ability to deliver on this functionality. Over the last few years IBM has been heavily criticized by customers, partners and industry analysts such as myself for over-promising and under-delivering. As I’ve frequently said, code talks… not slides. IBM has struggled in delivering new features to their Notes/Domino platform, meeting customer expectations with their new IBM Verse email client, and is now talking about a new product in Project Toscana. Will they have the resources to develop all of those things, as well as this new Cisco integration, and other integrations/partnerships such as Box. Time will tell, but IBM is saying we will see the first phases of this Cisco/IBM integration before the end of this year.

I will be attending Cisco Live on July 10th, and I expect to learn a lot more about this there.

If you are a customer of both IBM Collaboration Solutions and Cisco Collaboration, I’d love to speak with you about the ways you see this partnership impacting your organization.
 

Post Brexit Analysis Webinar Recording

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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All the uncertainty surrounding Britain's decision to leave the EU makes it difficult to decide upon how to best address Brexit risks. In this webcast, the Constellation research team uses the PESTEL framework to help you evaluate Brexit-driven risk so you may plan strategically for a post-Brexit EU. PESTEL assesses the political, economic, societal, technological, environmental and legislative trends influencing the business environment. 

Post Brexit Analysis with Constellation Research 062916 from Constellation Research on Vimeo.

Download the slides

Highlights from the webcast: 

• Britain will likely remain in the EU for two more years. Britain will remain in the EU until Article 50, which begins the formal withdrawal process, is passed. Article 50 states, "Any Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements". Current British Prime Minister, David Cameron, says he will not invoke Article 50, stating he will wait for his successor to implement the action. Once Article 50 is passed, political analysts estimate at least two years for the withdrawal process to conclude.  
• Macro Planning Assumptions: Expect a weakened pound and overall economic slowdown for the next year. Finance, pharma, VC, tech may look to relocate to other locations within the EU. 
• Use the PESTEL framework to assess global risks and opportunities
• Future of Work:
  • Labor Market - Expect a rise in secondary labor costs in Britain and EU
  • Compliance - Uncertainty surrounding compliance until Britain formalizes sovereign compliance regulations
  • HCM Vendor Strategy -  HCM vendors will likely scale back investment in Britain
• Tech Optimization/ Next Gen Apps:
  • Data Center 
    • Expect a halt in data center investment
    • Data centers will "follow the money" - As finance industry filters out of Britain, expect data centers to follow
    • Britain will likely lose its title as the data center hub of Europe
  • Technology labor cost will rise in Britain. Expect outsourcing to follow. 
  • Internet Autobahns
    • Direct connections between US/EU now more likely
    • Connection costs will rise as UK data privacy laws are renegotiated
  • Data Privacy
    • British privacy laws no longer covered by EU policies
    • British businesses need to examine Safe Harbor challenges

Questions & Answers:

Question 1: Should EU brands evaluate their providers for data and marketing automation?
Answer - thanks to Cindy Zhou, VP & Principal Analyst: 

I don’t see any need to re-evaluate marketing automation due to Brexit.  We'll need to wait and see if there are any changes in data management/privacy rules/regulation then configure their Marketing Automation accordingly.  That can be done independent of vendor. 

Question 2: When you say direct connections between US and EU seems smart, do you mean Ireland too?
Answer - thanks to Holger Mueller, VP & Principal Analyst: 

Yes, this includes Ireland, too. While Ireland is and will remain part of the EU, latency from Ireland to the EU mainland is an area to watch. If data security and privacy is not handled right, we may also see Ireland to EU under water cable connections. 

SAP Insider Vienna - HCP, BI and SuccessFactors

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…...

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We had the opportunity to attend the SAP Insider conference held in Vienna, from June 19th till 24th 2016. The event isn’t organized by SAP but an events organizer that combined BI, GRC, HANA, HCM and more topics with the xxx2016 moniker. The conference was well attended with over 1800 participants, coming from customers, prospects, the ecosystem and SAP… defacto this makes it like the European Sapphire, an event SAP no longer has on its event calendar.

 

My musings on the event:
 

 

No time to watch – here is the 1-2 slide condensation:
 

Event Report - SAP Insider Vienna - HCP, BI and SuccessFactors are the takeaways from Holger Mueller

Want to read on? 

 

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

HANA Cloud Platform (HCP) doing well – After HCP had been in a ‘Sleeping Beauty’ stage at SAP – only to be ‘kissed’ (aka mentioned in and getting keynote time) at Sapphire this year, it is making fast progress. The need for a PaaS platform for SAP customers is at hand – not only for the Integrate and Extend scenarios, but also for the Build Scenario. I had the opportunity to be on a panel with SAP customer Owens-Illinois, who use HCP as an extension tool enabling local compliance, a good use case. Generally the experienced European audience knows what to do and what to ask around integration and extension scenarios, as they have lived and worked through them for the past decades. At the same time basic questions on cloud, PaaS and security are still very common, underling the basic evangelism work SAP (and other vendors) have to do in order to get the average European enterprise comofortable on running in the cloud and using development tools that operate in and from the cloud.

Business Objects is back – As communicated at SapphireNow in Orlando (read here), SAP has brought back the venerable Business Object brand, as an umbrella brand for the many SAP BI offerings. And BI products were obviously top of mind in regards of a sales push in Europe in 2016, as most of the technology keynote was dedicated to business intelligence, and there mostly dashboards. The idea of the keynote to have a conversation of a CEO with its respective LOB leaders was a good idea, but was at times challenged as the LOB ‘leaders’ had to jump back between doing LoB work and doing the marketing / sales pitch. What I left with was that SAP has a lot of BI products, has created a lot of dashboards and now needs to harmonize the user experience across them. While it is fair to point out that many users will only work with the respective BI offering of their functional silo, the cross function insight and oversight is one of the key value propositions that SAP (as a suite vendor) brings to the table. It is going to be key for SAP to harmonize the user experience soon, but to be fair the umbrella brand “Business Objects” was only launched a few weeks ago.

SuccessFactors with local expertise – Not many news from SuccessFactors from my side, as we come back from an in depth 2 day analyst day (takeaways and more are here). SAP played though the local expertise and content card with the launch of Apprentice Management. The European apprentice system is something unique to a number of European countries and is a key HR activity that is under automated. Good to see that SAP realized the opportunity and has now the first offering of Apprentice Management, natively integrated into a HR Core product (here of course EmployeeCentral). It’s a good start for SuccessFactors and if SAP can provide a handful more of these local, region relevant offerings, while the competition may blink on providing them, it could create a solid differentiator for the product, thus creating more of a ‘HCM Fortress Europe’ vs. the usual North American based competitors.

 

MyPOV

A good event for SAP that has used an event organizer to handle an independent agenda, that nonetheless is very SAP dominated in both message and delivery. It is a good event for customers to check out and understand the new SAP offerings, with a decent size expo, so the ecosystem is present and attending, too. Given Vienna as the location, the attendees were not surprisingly Central / Eastern European.

On the concern side it is also clear that SAP has a long way to go in regards of getting its experienced customer base to adopt new products. Customers are highly skeptical, ask tough questions and have the average European concern towards cloud. On the flipside it is a healthy reality check for a US based analyst (like yours truly) to see and learn why European customers are still ‘clinging to their data centers’, thus having SAP do the split between cloud and on premises offerings.

But overall a good, informative event, SAP customers and prospects should use these events to come up to speed on the latest SAP offerings. With a Sapphire like presence of SAP executives and employees, it is also a good opportunity for SAP customers (and prospects) to build the relationships that often are the key success factor for a successful enterprise application implementation…

Also checkout this video on Facebook when Emily Mui of SAP, Eric Kavangh of The Bloor Group and me chatted about SAP HCP, use cases, cloud adoption and more here. 

Find more coverage on Holger Mueller's website here, checkout his magazine on Flipboard here, his Storify collections here, his Slideshare account here and his YouTube channel here.

 

2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 & 2016 (C) Holger Mueller - All Rights Reserved

Why Should You Attend Connected Enterprise This Year?

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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Constellation's Connected Enterprise is going into its sixth year in just a few short months! We are excited to welcome back many of our guests who continue to join us year after year and have become part of our network and close friends. I’m personally looking forward to also meeting all the new faces joining the conference.

Are you stuck on the fence on whether or not you should attend this year? I know what you’re thinking… “not another conference!” One of our guests from a previous year described the event as: “It’s like Hogwarts for grownups!” If that’s the case, how could you not want to attend?

In all seriousness, we formed the event to be different with a unique set of executives that come together for not just attending our exciting panels and keynotes - including Whitney Johnson and Dan Heath, but for the hallway conversations and exclusive networking opportunities. As many of our guests say, our conference is really like no other. They described it as:

1. Very different, contemporary content that you won’t see at other conferences.
2. No jargon.
3. Low-key, casual environment with executives well seasoned in their careers.
4. Passionate group of thought leaders who are motivated about innovation and changing the world.
5. Form relationships that will pay dividends in the future.

Need to make the ask? Here’s a helpful letter to get you started! Also, you’re in luck; we extended our Super Saver pricing to July 31.

We are continually updating our list of speakers. Be sure to check back and see who will be at the event! See you at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay on October 26-28, 2016.

Powered by the Constellation Executive Network, which helps innovative leaders stay ahead of the curve. 

Amazon Web Services Cloud Speaks Hindi - Indian AWS Data Centers Available

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…...

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Yesterday AWS announced the availability of its new datacenter locations in Mumbai, India. The original announcement was made at the AWS Summit about a year ago in Berlin (read here).

 

 

So let’s dissect the press release in our customary way, it can be found here:

MUMBAI, India--(BUSINESS WIRE)--(NASDAQ:AMZN) — Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), the world’s leading cloud computing platform, today announced the launch of the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region, its sixth in Asia Pacific (APAC). With this launch, AWS now provides 35 Availability Zones (AZs) across 13 technology infrastructure regions globally. More than 75,000 India-based customers are already using other AWS Regions to save costs, accelerate innovation, speed time-to-market, and expand their geographic reach in minutes. Starting today, global and India-based developers, start-ups, enterprises, government organizations, and non-profits can leverage the AWS Cloud to run their technology applications from infrastructure in India, and provide even lower latency to India-based end users. Developers can sign up to start using the AWS Mumbai Region at: http://aws.amazon.com.

MyPOV – Good intro paragraph… AWS has already business with an Indian DNA, so taking advantage of an in country instance is a significant step. As we pointed out a year ago, latency and data sovereignty implications are a key factor to consider in global data center rollouts, and with India sitting more or less half way between Frankfurt and Singapore, in one of the largest countries from a population perspective are all good reasons for AWS to be present in India.
  

[…] The new AWS Mumbai Region consists of two separate Availability Zones at launch. Availability Zones refer to datacenters in separate, distinct locations within a single region that are engineered to be operationally independent of other Availability Zones, with independent power, cooling, and physical security, and are connected via a low latency network. AWS customers focused on high availability can architect their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even higher fault-tolerance.

MyPOV – Good to see that AWS stuck to the proven concept of only launching with two separate availability zones from the start / get go of a region… which allows for HA qualities right from the start. That is key especially in new markets, as traditional skepticism towards moving to IaaS are always present and can be reduced with the availability zone concept. Only the most prosperous Indian companies will have a similar setup to achieve business continuity for their operations.
 

“Indian start-ups and enterprises have been using AWS for many years – with most Indian technology start-ups building their entire businesses on AWS, and numerous enterprises running mission-critical, core applications on AWS,” said Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS. “These same 75,000 Indian customers, along with others anxious to start using AWS, have asked for an AWS India Region so they can move their applications that require low latency and data sovereignty. We're excited to make this available today, with the same pay-as-you-go pricing, ability to get started immediately without having to negotiate enterprise agreements or wait days for access, and unmatched functionality that customers enjoy in AWS Regions worldwide – all of which allows customers to go from idea to launch faster than ever before was possible.”

MyPOV – Good quote from Jassy, hitting the key aspect of quick start, low hassle sign up and now – with the Indian data centers - low latency and addressed data sovereignty aspects.
 

Since its founding in 2006, AWS has changed the way organizations acquire and manage technology infrastructure. With more than a million active customers worldwide, and more than 70 services across compute, storage, databases, analytics, networking, messaging, machine learning, mobile, IoT, and application services, AWS has become the new normal for companies of all sizes and across all industries to deploy their business-critical applications. All AWS Regions around the world undergo regular audits by independent third-parties that validate that each region is designed and built to meet rigorous compliance standards, including ISO 27001, SOC 1 (Formerly SAS 70), SOC 2 Security & Availability, PCI-DSS Level 1 and many more, providing high levels of security for all AWS customers. As with every AWS Region, customers have the assurance that AWS will not move their content from the region they choose. More information on how customers using AWS can meet their security, data privacy, and compliance requirements can be found at https://aws.amazon.com/security.

MyPOV – It would not be an AWS press release if not on the heels of the announcement itself, security concerns and standards would be addressed. No difference here… and as usual AWS does a big services to the industry at supporting and addressing security concern right from the get go and heads on.
 

India-based Customers Welcome AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region
“We have been working with AWS since 2012, steadily moving workloads to the cloud, such as test and development environments for our core enterprise systems – we run one of the largest CRM based Dealer Management implementations in the world – more than 90 Tata digital properties in production on AWS, and many other applications,” said Jagdish Belwal, CIO of Tata Motors Limited, India’s largest automotive manufacturer. “Tata Motors obtained 40 percent savings by running our digital properties at scale, benefitting from the tremendous agility made possible by AWS. One of the key priorities we had was around how AWS could save us costs on traditional workloads, those without much variability or demand spikes, and we are expecting to save similar amounts on traditional workloads by running them on AWS.”
Belwal continued, “We are so happy to have an AWS Region in India. AWS has allowed our IT teams to focus on innovation and become more nimble to the business demands. Environments that used to take weeks to setup can now be done in days or hours. AWS also makes it extremely straightforward for us to progress on our cloud journey utilizing a hybrid architecture, since it is important to us to leverage the past investments we’ve made in equipment and technology on-premises for a period of time; as we work to modernize and streamline our operations on the AWS Cloud. Rather than decide on ‘what workloads can move to the AWS cloud,’ we have moved to asking ‘how fast and which ones will be next in line.’”

MyPOV – Good reference statement for AWS, with one of the most recognized brands in India, Tata. What is remarkable is the mention of hybrid cloud here, something that traditionally all public cloud providers have shied away from, it is no coincidence that this is part of the quote though. If AWS can position itself as the ‘new’ data center in India, this will be a huge win for the vendor. From our conversations with Indian businesses and professionals we know though, this is a long way to go.
 

Ola, India’s leading cab aggregator and an Indian online transportation network company, is building their business on AWS. “We are using technology to create mobility for a billion Indians, by giving them convenience and access to transportation of their choice,” said Ankit Bhati, Co-founder and CTO, Ola. “Technology is a key enabler, where we use AWS Cloud to drive a superior customer experience, and innovate faster on new features and services for our customers. This has helped us reach more than 100 cities and 550,000 driver partners across India. We do petabyte scale analytics using various AWS big data services and AWS deep learning techniques, allowing us to bring our driver-partners closer to our customers when they need them. AWS allows us to make more than 30 changes a day to our highly scalable micro services-based platform consisting of 100s of low latency APIs, serving millions of requests a day. We have tried the AWS India Region. It’s world-class and should help us continue to enhance the experience for our customers.”

MyPOV – After a B2B brand use case, off to a B2C one with Ola, great quote, great use case for both Ola and AWS.
 

Shaadi.com is the world’s no. 1 matchmaking service providing a superior matchmaking experience to Indians all over the world. “As one of the key initiatives of becoming a world class tech organization, we decided to migrate to the AWS Cloud. We have many interdependent applications built over the last 15 years having unique High IOPS requirements,” said Ketan Doshi, CTO and Sr. VP, Engineering at People Interactive. “We worked closely with AWS teams and migrated ‘all-in’ to AWS successfully. We leveraged AWS Database Migration Service to reduce the time required to migrate our databases by 40 percent and also realized 55 percent cost savings by moving some of them to Amazon Aurora. We are planning to move our other databases to Amazon Aurora. We are now able to efficiently manage spiky workloads by using AWS for Auto Scaling our compute resources and improving our site’s performance by 50 percent. AWS has allowed us to exploit the potential of serverless architectures (AWS Lambda + DynamoDB) that has delivered more than 80 percent cost savings. Our Redshift data warehouse solution analyses 67 billion records to derive key business trends. Being an ‘all-in’ customer of AWS, it is exciting to see AWS launch their region in India. We will continue to adopt the latest AWS services to accelerate innovation and continue to redefine the way Indians find a companion for life.”

MyPOV – Next up – match making service shaadi.com – an example for a software based business going ‘all in’ on the AWS technology stack. Already mentioned in Jassy’s quote – AWS will cater to the readiness of Indian businesses to save investment dollars by moving from traditional on premise technology stack vendors to AWS. To get the comfort level right, AWS needs to provide references and showcases of both feasibility and differentiation of the AWS technology stack in India, and this is a good start.
 

Novi Digital, a wholly owned subsidiary of STAR India, is one of the largest media and entertainment companies in India. The company uses AWS to run Hotstar, a flagship over-the-top (OTT) broadcasting platform for delivering movies and live sporting events via the internet. “Hotstar is India’s largest premium streaming platform with more than 85,000 hours of drama and movies in eight languages, with coverage of every major global sporting event. Launched in February 2015, Hotstar quickly became one of the fastest adopted new media and entertainment apps anywhere in the world,” said Ajit Mohan, CEO, Hotstar. “It has now been downloaded by more than 68 million users throughout the world and has attracted followers on the back of a highly evolved video streaming technology, with high praise from customers on the quality of experience across devices and platforms. The reliability of the highly scalable AWS Cloud infrastructure has been a contributor to Hotstar’s ability to build and deliver a compelling streaming service for our global customers.”

MyPOV – Streaming video of ‘spiky’ events like sports and entertainment events are key cloud elasticity showcases… and Novi Digital / STAR India are a great reference for this.
 

Investing in India’s Cloud Future
The rapidly expanding AWS Partner Network (APN) is made up of tens of thousands of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Systems Integrators (SIs) around the world who are building innovative solutions and services for the AWS Cloud. The APN program helps partners build successful AWS-based businesses by providing business, technical, marketing, and go-to-market (GTM) support. In India, the number of partners joining the APN program has grown over 80 percent in the past 12 months. AWS SIs such as Infosys, TCS, Wipro, HCL, Accenture, PwC, Blazeclan, Minjar, Frontier, Intelligrape, Progressive, Cognizant, and Team Computers are helping enterprises migrate to AWS, deploy mission-critical applications on AWS, and are providing a full range of monitoring, automation, and management services for customers’ AWS environments. AWS ISVs in India include SAP, Microsoft, Adobe, Druva, Freshdesk, Manthan, Indusface, Newgen, RAMCO, Seclore, Mediology, Mithi Software, Vinculum, Infor, Splunk, and many others who are providing software solutions that are either hosted on, or integrated with AWS. Customers can easily find, trial, deploy, and buy software solutions for the AWS Cloud on the AWS Marketplace.

MyPOV – And there are of course SI and ISV opportunities in India, already before the AWS region was available, there was interest and sign ups on the AWS side. The ISV opportunity is twofold: For India based ISVs to go abroad, but also for foreign ISVs to get started in the Indian Market.
 

AWS offers a full range of training and certification programs to help Indian professionals who are interested in the latest cloud computing technologies, best practices, and architectures, advance their technical skills. More than 16,000 attendees have participated in various AWS training events since January 2016 to learn about the latest in cloud technologies, AWS best practices, and get hands-on instruction with the AWS Cloud. The AWS Educate Program promotes cloud learning in the classroom and has been adopted by more than 500 universities worldwide. The program helps to provide an academic gateway for the next generation of IT and cloud professionals.

MyPOV – Good to also mention training and certification, given the Indian thirst for learning technology, key to catch and be present at the right universities. This does not only matter for AWS in India, but beyond India, as many Indian IT professional will attempt to use AWS certification and skills to launch a career abroad (as they have been for decades now).
 

The AWS Activate program provides India-based startups with the resources they need to quickly get started on AWS and scale their businesses. AWS has teamed with accelerators, incubators, Seed/VC Funds, and startup-enabling organizations such as Nascomm 10K, Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Nexus Venture Partners, Tlabs Accelerator, GSF Accelerator, and others that provide a range of services including training, AWS credits, in-person technical support, and other benefits.

MyPOV – What has been missing in the press release? Capital for startups to build on AWS, where AWS has the Activate program – something that could not be missing in the Indian Region announcement…
 

To further enable AWS customers to rapidly deliver their websites, applications, and content to India-based end users, AWS also recently opened a new AWS point of presence (PoP) in Delhi for its Content Delivery Network (Amazon CloudFront) and DNS service (Amazon Route 53). This is the third AWS PoP in India, joining Mumbai and Chennai, and is part of the global AWS network of 56 edge locations across the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America.

MyPOV – Good to see AWS expanding its point of presence location, it will need to add more for India, given the slow latency in the country, but three in country is a good place to start.
 

Teams of Account Managers, Solutions Architects, Technical Support Engineers, Professional Services Consultants, Technical Trainers and various other functions are available to support Indian customers from offices in Mumbai, New Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai, and Pune in their use of the AWS Cloud. Through Amazon’s local selling entity, Indian customers are provided local invoices and payment options, enabling payment in rupees via credit cards or bank transfers. Additionally, AWS recently established an AWS Technical Support center in Bangalore that leverages local engineering talent to help AWS customers around the world with everything from break-fix situations to advice on application development, architectures, and best practices. The new AWS Mumbai Region, along with the various other investments for assisting Indian customers who are building their businesses and running applications on the AWS Cloud, are part of the $5 billion overall investment that Amazon announced is part of its commitment to India.

MyPOV – Amazon the retailer has seen its challenges in India, which for the moment seem to be under control. Nothing works better than local investment and the overall (incl. AWS) commitment to invest 5B in Indian is always a good start, and it looks like AWS / Amazon has turned around the conversation for the better of the vendor.
 

Overall MyPOV

The ‘monopoly’ race between public cloud providers is in full swing only that more properties are allowed in each country. But being early always helps in IaaS, as long as enough load can justify the further build out that drives economies of scale. That matters even more in countries like India, where bandwidth into the country, energy supply, weather challenges are more pronounced than e.g. Western Europe. Securing access early and growing fast maters. AWS is in a good position here. Kudos also to AWS to deliver the region right at the time it was announced.

There is little to be concerned about in India, an expansion of PoP points will be important, but is a more minor investment. It’s key for AWS to accelerate the pace in the location game though, and the vendor has announced more region to come. Likewise AWS should have / could have proactively declared the separation of its retail IT load vs its IaaS load – something the vendor needs to re-confirm again and again, especially in new markets. If there was one thing missing on the press release it is this one.

But overall a good day for AWS customers and prospects, not only if they are India based or have already an Indian business, but also for enterprises and ISVs to get a foothold in the 2nd largest country from a population perspective. Stay tuned for the uptake, my guess is we will learn that Mumbai is the fastest growing region of AWS at reinvent in fall… outpacing its next older sibling in Frankfurt.

 

More on AWS

• News Analysis - Salesforce selects AWS as preferred Public Cloud Infrastructure Provider - Good move - read here
• Event Report - AWS re-Invent - AWS lobbies for the enterprise - DB and IoT are the cheese - read here
• First Take - AWS reInvent Wednesday Keynote - Good start & AWS is going for the enterprise read here
• Event Preview - AWS re-Invent 2015 - watch / read here
• Event Report - AWS Summit Berlin - AWS spricht Deutsch - but when will the Germans speak cloud? Read here
• News Analysis - AWS learns Hindi - Amazon Web Services announces 2016 India Expansion - read here
• Event Report - AWS Summit San Francisco - AWS pushes the platform with Analytics and Storage [From the Fences] read here
• Event Report - AWS re:invent - AWS becomes more about PaaS on inhouse IP - read here
• AWS gives infrastructure insights - and it is very passionate about it - read here
• News Analysis - AWS spricht Deutsch - the cloud wars reach Germany - read here
• Market Move - Infor runs CloudSuite on AWS - Inflection Point or hot air balloon? Read here
• Event Report - AWS Summit in SFO - AWS keeps doing what has been working in the last 8 years - read here
• AWS  moves the yardstick - Day 2 reinvent takeaways - read here.
• AWS powers on, into new markets - Day 1 reinvent takeaways - read here.
• The Cloud is growing up - three signs in the News - read here.
• Amazon AWS powers on - read here.\

Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here. 

2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 & 2016 (C) Holger Mueller - All Rights Reserved