The General Mills Cheerios Recall and Your Supply Chain

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Guy Courtin was formerly Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research covering Matrix Commerce and how the Internet of Things drives the evolution of commerce.  Guy has over 15 years experience in the technology space and specifically in the supply chain space. Most recently he was the Vice President of Research at SCM World. Where he focused on the service providers that empowered supply chains. Prior to SCM World, Guy held numerous senior positions. He was responsible for product marketing at RSi, a retail supply chain solution provider. There managed RSi’s go to market strategy around their leading cloud based supply chain solutions. He also spear headed Progress Software’s supply chain group. Where he was responsible for driving revenue and market share as well…...

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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. ...

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Supply chain professionals everywhere are no doubt wincing about the recent recall of nearly two million boxes of Cheerios by General Mills—turns out they weren’t gluten-free after all. From the Washington Post:

Jim Murphy, senior vice president of the company's cereal division, said he was "embarrassed and truly sorry" by an incident that allowed wheat flour to get introduced into the gluten-free oat flour system at a production facility in Lodi, Calif.

The "undeclared allergen" could cause adverse health effects for those with wheat allergies, celiac disease or gluten intolerance.

The Lodi facility lost rail access for a time, forcing General Mills to load the flour onto trucks for delivery. As a result of “purely human error,” wheat flour ended up getting intermingled with the oat flour, according to the Post.

Could It Have Been Avoided?

"One of the big things in supply chain that vendors and service providers are trying to figure out is how to do better track and trace," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Guy Courtin.

"That might not necessarily have avoided what happened at General Mills, but what it would have done is warned them sooner and help them rectify the problem sooner," he adds. "All it takes is a missed order on one truck and all of a sudden you've ruined everything you thought you had set up."

The Bottom Line

General Mills' Cheerios mishap provides a call to action for supply-chain pros. Examine your track-and-trace systems for weaknesses and look for ways to improve them, whether through IoT initiatives or better inspections checking processes, Courtin says. 

Incidents like it "just go to show that our supply chains are getting increasingly complex, increasingly strained by time constraints—people want things faster—you just need better checks and balances along the way to make sure these things don't happen," Courtin says.

Another tip for supply-chain pros: "Make sure your mindset is to be more cognizant of this stuff. Make it more of a priority."

The stakes vary according to different industries, Courtin notes. "If you're a food supplier and you screw something up, you might go out of business." But in pharmaceuticals, "if you screw up some of the supply chain there, you go to jail." 

Customer Experience Leadership: 5 Pitfalls to Avoid

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

Role: Vice President and Principal Analyst focusing on the IOT of Customer Experience and how the cloud is driving more flexible, agile, and robust customer service and customer experiences. In-app or in device customer service is the future. Coverage Areas: Next Generation Customer, Digital Marketing Transformation Bio: As a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, Inc, Petouhoff works with Fortune 100 and 500’s Senior Leadership teams to create strategic customer experience (marketing, sales and service) solutions which engage customers, build brands and grow businesses. Combining her experience as a former Forrester software analyst, PWC systems integrator and change management consultant, Petouhoff leads executive workshops to discuss to not only…...

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The importance of leading the customer experience cannot be understated. However, if the CMO steps into this role, there are risks that come along with the rewards. It may mean, in some organizations, that you’ll have to start by wearing a flak jacket to repel those who want to do you in. While that sounds harsh, those who have tried to lead new initiatives and were some of the first people who ventured out and did it, like social media, have been seen in the organization as early adopters. Most people in corporate America, though, are members of the early majority and late majority in terms of adoption of new ideas.

As a result, if you are an innovator or early adopter, be prepared that others may not see what you see. They may require a business case and more details on why you want to change the organization. If you know this in advance, it will save you a lot of heartache and make you much more successful.

The five “gotchas” our research uncovered for CMO’s (or whomever is leading customer experience) to watch out for include:

7 Ways for CMOs to Thrive When Leading Customer Experience

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

Role: Vice President and Principal Analyst focusing on the IOT of Customer Experience and how the cloud is driving more flexible, agile, and robust customer service and customer experiences. In-app or in device customer service is the future. Coverage Areas: Next Generation Customer, Digital Marketing Transformation Bio: As a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, Inc, Petouhoff works with Fortune 100 and 500’s Senior Leadership teams to create strategic customer experience (marketing, sales and service) solutions which engage customers, build brands and grow businesses. Combining her experience as a former Forrester software analyst, PWC systems integrator and change management consultant, Petouhoff leads executive workshops to discuss to not only…...

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As brands realize Customer Experience Management is key to their overall strategy and long-term growth, our research at Constellation found CMOs should consider the following 7 principles when leading customer experience initiatives:

1. Bring passion about the brand you work for and drive cross-functional collaboration and lead organizational change
2. Focus on both communications and brand guardianship as well as innovation, product and business responsibilities
3. Balance the brand view and the business view so the CEO takes you seriously
4. Gain mastery of technical and non-technical skills: it’s critical
5. Use data and predictive insights to deliver real-time, optimized customer experiences
6. Evolve into a strong, well-balanced leader of cross-functional teams and groom successors and
7. Gain design-thinking experience.

Leaders of Customer Experience Management must have an emotional tie to the brand, identify with it and want to share the value it brings to customers. The CMO must be passionate about championing the customer experience and leading the development of the strategies, activities and tactics to create and sustain demand. Marketing must become the cross-functional voice of the customer. Having some organizational change management skills is very helpful to be able to lead the change, and is an inherent part of the changing role of the CMO, especially if they take on an end-to-end customer experience position.

AWS re-Invent Report - AWS lobbies for the enterprise - DB and IoT are the cheese

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 Amazon's AWS unit user conference in Las Vegas, the event is seeing record attendance with over 19k attendees.

 

So take a peek for the Day 2 keynote and overall event takeaways:

 

 

If you don't have a chance to watch - here are my top three takeaways from the event:

 

• AWS wants a piece of IoT - One of the area seeing the most interest with our clients as a next generation apps scenario is IoT. And AWS has been already shortlisted for most IoT platform selections due to the breadth of capabilities and capacity (namely S3). So now with a more packaged offering we expect AWS to be even better positioned. What stands out on the architecture side is the creation of a 'shadow' object to the thing, which allow 'doing stuff to the thing' indirectly. And then pricing is purely based on messaging, so scaling the platform from a gateway, rules engine, registry and shadow perspectives is driven through the message pricing, interesting as a truly elastic architecture.
• AWS pushes for the enterprise - AWS understands what enterprises care about and announced a number of interesting services around DB data migration and product conversion (more here). On the  more disruptive side the new BI offering, Amazon QuickSight is the first AWS product that caters to a business user and is very competitive V1 version of a product, with substantial partner uptake. With partnership agreements like with e.g. Accenture, AWS know how will be more available with traditional trusted sources used by enterprise decision makers.
• AWS time is now - It cannot get much better for any cloud vendor than things got for AWS during this conference: There is very few enterprises that can top a commitment to move to AWS as an 'all in' move, like GE. And that's what the CIO of GE pretty much said...  apart from IP relevant apps (details are missing) over 9000 corporate IT functions are moving to AWS. And then a banking (!) CIO - the one of CapitalOne - is on stage and says that AWS data centers are more secure than his. Can't get much better either. So AWS can't make a much better case and can't have much better showcases, if the light bulbs in regards of public cloud adoption in the enterprise don't go on now, one can only be sceptical when the go on.

 

MyPOV

A very good event for AWS, with record attendance, interest and  announcements. For enterprises looking at public cloud use cases, it reconfirms AWS as a prime contender to be on the shortlist, as the vendor has become even more attractive for the enterprise buyer. 

 

On the concern side we see that AWS needs to find new ways to distribute knowledge, partnership with SIs are only one path, It's tough for anyone to stay on top of the innovation and the Venetian / Sands is bursting at the seams. And AWS needs to reach more of a enterprise audience - beyond the traditional developer audience of  re-Invent conferences. But then AWS CTO Vogels talked for over 15 minutes about IoT use cases, which was kind of odd, as traditionally he delivers a technology talk. It maybe a sign of AWS starting to cater more to the enterprise executive, but we would have to see more of that to call it a trend and with a different audience in attendance. AWS does this usually with AWS Summits, but once a vendor has a certain size, audiences can no longer be segregated and messaging needs to be consistent along the entire year. And lastly AWS needs to tune its platform message and move away from the a collection of technologies that get pieced together. Developer love that, executives dread that. The AWS IoT is an approach in that direction, AWS will need to do more and be firmer on the messaging. 

 

But overall a very good event for AWS and its customers. There can't be better references for the move to public cloud than AWS had on stage this week. Now it is for enterprises to chart their course.

 

 

AWS re:Invent: Five Takeaways On New Services

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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Amazon challenges ‘old-guard’ IBM, Microsoft and Oracle with QuickSight, Kinesis Firehose, Snowball, and new database services. Here’s a quick rundown with cautions for would-be adopters.

Make no mistake: Amazon Web Services (AWS) is doing everything it can to make it easy for enterprises large and small to bring all, or at least part, of their data into its cloud.

At the AWS re:Invent event in Las Vegas on Wednesday, AWS announced a battery of new services designed to lower the cost and simplify the tasks of analyzing data, streaming data, moving data, migrating databases and switching to different database management systems in the cloud. Here’s a quick rundown on five new services with my take on implications for would-be customers.

QuickInsight is a data-analysis, visualization and dashboarding suite introduced at AWS Reinvent. It promises ease of use and costs start at $9 per user, per month.

QuickSight Offers BI in the Cloud

Fast to deploy, easy to use, low cost: these are the three promises of QuickSight, which Amazon says will start at $9 per user, per month, “one tenth the cost of traditional BI options,” according to Amazon.

Currently in preview, QuickSight is described by Amazon as follows:

• QuickSight automatically discovers all customer data available in AWS data stores – S3, RDS, Redshift, EMR, DynamoDB, etc. – and then “infers data types and relationships, issues optimal queries to extract relevant data [and] aggregates the results,” according to Amazon.
• This data is then automatically formatted, “without complicated ETL,” and made accessible for analysis through a parallel, columnar, in-memory calculation engine called “Spice.”
• Spice serves up analyses “within seconds… without writing code or using SQL.” Data can also be consumed through a “SQL-like” API by partner tools running on Amazon including Domo, Qlik, Tableau and Tibco-Jaspersoft.
• A tool called “Autograph” automatically suggests best-fit visualizations, with options including pie charts, histograms, scatter plots, bar graphs, line charts and storyboards. You can also build live dashboards that will change in real-time along with the data. QuickInsight will also be supported with iOS and Android mobile apps.
• Sharing options will include “single-click” capture and bundling data and visualizations (not just screen shots) so collaborators can interact with, drill down on, and change visualizations. These can be shared on intranets, embedded in applications or embedded on public-facing Web sites.

MyPOV on QuickSight: Amazon is clearly taking on what it called “old-guard” BI solutions such as IBM Cognos, Oracle OBIEE and SAP BusinessObjects. We’ve already seen more modern, cloud-based alternatives from these vendors, including IBM Watson Analytics, Oracle BI Cloud Service and SAP Lumira Cloud. I expect to see yet more cloud BI and analytics options announced by these three vendors within the next few weeks. Amazon is smart to be moving into BI, analysis and visualization now as incumbents are starting to put all their chips on cloud-based BI and analysis offerings.

If the no-coding, automated visualization capabilities live up to their billing, QuickSight just may compete a bit with the likes of Qlik and Tableau as well as Cognos and BusinessObjects. We’ll also have to see just what you’ll get for $9 per user, per month and just how easy and broad the collaboration options will be. The pricing is in the freemium range where IBM Watson Analytics, Microsoft PowerBI and SAP Lumira Cloud have been establishing cloud beachheads.

If QuickSight has a weakness it’s that it appears to be entirely geared to consuming data that’s in Amazon’s cloud. Amazon said nothing about connecting to on-premises data sources. In fact, the keynote went on to describe many new services (described below) designed to bring yet more data into Amazon’s cloud. In short, QuickSight is not about hybrid scenarios, it’s about analyzing data that lives in the cloud, which will be fine for many, but not all companies.

Kinesis Firehose Handles Streaming Scenarios

Amazon already offered Kinesis Streams, a real-time streaming data option, but that service is aimed at technical users. Kinesis Firehose, available immediately, is intended to make it easier to support streaming scenarios such as mobile apps, Web apps or the collection of telemetry or sensor data (read, IoT).

Instead of writing code, “builders” create an Amazon Kinesis Firehose Delivery Stream in the AWS Management Console.” These streams can then be targeted at S3 buckets or Amazon Redshift tables (with more Amazon storage options to come). Users can specify refresh intervals, chunk sizes and compression and encryption settings.

MyPOV on Kinesis Firehose: This is a welcome refresh and addition to the Kinesis family. Kinesis Firehose seems to add some of the same visual, point-and-click/drag-and-drop, API-based approaches seen in recently introduced IoT suites, such as Microsoft’s Azure IoT suite. Ease-of-use and self-service seem to be the guiding principles for all data and analysis services these days, and Kinesis Firehose brings streaming capabilities closer to business users.

AWS Snowball: Chuck Bulk Data At AWS

Even if you have fat, dedicated pipes (at great cost), it takes a long time to move big data. Amazon has an existing Import/Export service that lets you ship data overnight to AWS on one-terabyte disks, but even that’s a time-consuming can error-prone approach when moving tens of terabytes or more.

AWS Snowball is a shippable appliance designed to move 50 TB at a time.

Amazon Snowball, available immediately, is a PC-Tower-sized appliance in a shipping box that stores up to 50 terabytes at a time. A digital-ink (Kindle-based) shipping label displays your address on the outbound trip and then automatically resets to Amazon’s address once you load data and are ready to send it back via FedEx or UPS.

Data is encrypted as it’s stored in a Snowball, and you can run several Snowballs in parallel if you need to move hundreds of terabytes or more. The service also validates that all data that’s stored on the device is uploaded and readable on AWS storage. The cost per shipment is $200, and Amazon says it’s the fastest and most cost-effective option available for bulk data loading to the cloud.

MyPOV on Snowball: Not much to quibble with here. Amazon has thought through a tough problem and has come up with an easier way to ship bulk data with provisions for security, damage- and tamper-resistant shipping, and fool-proof labeling.

AWS Database Migration Service: The Last Mile

Amazon launched two new services promising “freedom from bad database relationships.” The “old guard has treated you poorly,” said Amazon executive Andy Jassy, who cited lock-in, software audits and fines. So it’s “only natural” that companies are “fleeing expensive, proprietary databases,” he said.

The challenge, admitted Jassy, is that migrations are fraught with risks. Do you try to keep services running and hope you can pull off a seamless transition? Or do you shut down one service and then start another, hoping that you can minimize downtime? Another challenge is migrating from a commercial database, like IBM DB2 or Oracle, and switching to lower-cost, cloud alternative, like Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL or (just added to AWS as a MySQL-replacement) MariaDB.

The Amazon Database Migration Service will “easily migrate production databases with minimal downtime,” according to Amazon. It’s said ensure continuous replication from target to source for any size database, with tracking and real-time monitoring. The tool takes 10 to 15 minutes to set up, says Amazon, and the cost of the service is about $3 per terabyte.

MyPOV on Database Migration: This is another well-intended service where any improvement offered will be welcome, but Amazon anticipated the major concerns (mine and yours) by also introducing the Amazon Schema Conversion Tool described below. Amazon threw the term “open” around quite a bit, but keep in mind that Amazon RDS, Aurora and RedShift are no less proprietary than DB2 or Oracle. Lower cost, certainly, but lock-in is a factor to consider here, too.

AWS Schema Conversion Tool: The First Mile

Migrating an on-premises database to the cloud (say, MySQL on-premises to MySQL running in the cloud) is hard enough. Migrating from on database management system on-premises (say, Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle) to an alternative DBMS running in the cloud (say, MariaDB replacing SQL Server or Aurora replacing Oracle) is harder still. Amazon acknowledged as much by introducing AWS Schema Conversion Tool.

New AWS Database Migration and Schema Conversion services are both intended to ease database moves, but schema conversion is the tougher task.

Migrating data from one database to another is really the easy last mile. The trickier part is all the preparation work you have to do before the big move. The Schema Conversion Tool is said to “reliably and easily” transform the data from one database type to another, swapping like-for-like tables, partitions, store procedures and more, according to Amazon. “We think we’ll be able to address 80% of changes automatically,” said Jassy. “This will radically change the cost structure and speed of moving from the old world to the cloud world.”

MyPOV on Schema Conversion Tool. Good for Amazon for taking its assistance a level deeper than the Database Migration Service. But practitioners should keep in mind that there will still be plenty of testing and quality-assurance work to do even if the Schema Conversion Tool manages to handle 80% of changes automatically.

Here again we’re talking about a well-intended service wherein any improvement over the status quo will be welcome. Just don’t expect this optimistically named tool to automagically move or swap your DBMS without breaking things in the process. That will certainly be the case when switching from one DBMS to another. Apply the rule of thumb often used in home-improvement projects: Count on it taking twice as long and costing twice as much as your initial estimates.

MyPOV on the Big Picture From re:Ieinvent

Amazon offered an impressive collection of announcements at re:Invent. It also didn’t hurt to have executives from the likes of CapitalOne and GE talking about how they’re consolidating data centers and moving huge chunks of their workloads to AWS – 60% in GE’s case. Keeping things real, it was refreshing to see Amazon acknowledge that many large enterprises (I believe most) will ultimately stick with hybrid cloud approaches. GE, for example, said it’s moving all non-differentiating workloads to AWS while anything related to “company crown jewels” will remain in company-owned data centers.

Where all these new data services are concerned, I think it’s also important for companies to think hybrid rather than putting everything in the cloud. QuickInsight might satisfy many self-service data-analysis scenarios, but that won’t eliminate the need for carefully curated data and analyses, high-value decision-support scenarios and mission-critical business-monitoring tasks. As for putting 100% of your data in the cloud, apply the standard advice to investors and diversify. So maybe you go cloud, but you mix public and private cloud.

The point is to not put all of your eggs in one basket. The Weather Company, for one, has split its B2C and B2B clouds between the AWS and IBM clouds, respectively. Keep competition and the threat of lock-in in mind when crafting a new data-management strategy and making long-term plans for how and where you support BI and advanced analytics for routine versus “company crown jewel” needs.

Should the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Oversee the Whole Customer Experience?

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

Role: Vice President and Principal Analyst focusing on the IOT of Customer Experience and how the cloud is driving more flexible, agile, and robust customer service and customer experiences. In-app or in device customer service is the future. Coverage Areas: Next Generation Customer, Digital Marketing Transformation Bio: As a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, Inc, Petouhoff works with Fortune 100 and 500’s Senior Leadership teams to create strategic customer experience (marketing, sales and service) solutions which engage customers, build brands and grow businesses. Combining her experience as a former Forrester software analyst, PWC systems integrator and change management consultant, Petouhoff leads executive workshops to discuss to not only…...

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Customers, Value Chain and The Customer Experience Imperative Should the CMO oversee the whole customer experience? Today, the value chain in business has gone from products that became commodities to services that fuel anticipation of superb customer experiences that go beyond anything customers have expected previously. These new customer expectations have put pressure on companies to deliver on these experiences, which affect the revenue, margin and profits of a company. Brands are under a new type of pressure to keep the right customers and ensure that each of those customer’s experiences live up to their customer’s expectations. In order to make that happen, especially in large organizations, someone has to have customer experience as their primary responsibility and also have the clout to improve it. This is not your grandpa’s CRM. It’s starts with strategy and difficult leadership questions.

The big question? Who should lead the entire customer experience? With the shift to digital marketing, electronic commerce, social media and mobile interactions, brings a massive transformation to how brands and organizations engage prospects and customers. Customer Experience Management is a major pillar in many B2C and B2B organizations’ efforts to engage and retain customers. As it gets more complicated to engage and retain customers, organizations are realizing there is more to the job of customer experience than many first realized. This is in part because providing superb customer experiences often means getting many different departments or functional areas to collaborate, especially when they had not been in the habit of doing so before. Many times the reason for the lack of collaboration and why it has not happened before is because it’s not easy. Again, it’s not your grandpa’s CRM – it’s not about technology really. It’s really starts with a cultural mindset.

Falling Through The Cracks? There are many points along the customer experience journey where an organization can miss the mark and not even come close to meeting customer expectations. However, market leaders realize the future requires proactive, digital online engagement, integrated with in-person and/or in-store experiences to support the strategy. In this research we spoke to many leaders to find out how they are tackling the issues around customer experience and leadership and how best to lead this key strategic initiative in their organization.

The Research Found: The Role of Chief Marketing Officer Is Undergoing Fundamental Transformation, Yet Few Are Ready  As we explored the readiness, rewards, risks and gotcha’s for a CMO to step into an all-encompassing role to deliver the end-to-end customer experience, Constellation identified what CMOs are going through as they are being asked to add more to their “already” full plate. As they lead their organizations to become more customer-centric by creating and maintaining top-notch customer experiences, they helped us identify issues that can inhibit a CMO’s success –if how the business is run and the role of the CMO itself –doesn’t change. Here is a condensed version of the challenges we learned CMOs are facing:

1. Confusion abounds on who should lead (own) the customer experience.

2. Agile, design-thinking is required to lead changes needed for successful customer experience.

3. Marketing is often focused on communications rather than innovation, product development and business innovation. 

4. Marketing only recently became more accustomed to being highly measured, so building the business case for the additional responsibilities of the “new” CMO role may be difficult.

5. The Consumerization of IT has created often unfulfilled customer experiences.

6. The abundance of data requires immediate analysis and action to provide meaningful mass personalization at scale.

7. The plethora of data requires a data management and utilization strategy

8. Marketing can be isolated from other departments that affect customer experience and that isolation hurts the ability to lead change.

9. Marketing can be isolated from other departments that affect customer experience and that isolation hurts the ability to lead change.

10. Customer experience requires a highly collaborative individual to lead cross- functional collaboration.

The truth is there is not any “right” way to lead and deliver customer experience. Every single company has to think about their brand, the type of customer experience they want to deliver and their ability to do that consistently. As products and services have become commoditized, the last frontier to compete on is differentiation of the customer experience, so it is something that is more important than ever. What’s your take on who should lead the customer experience in your organization and why?

Resource

Read my latest research report, Should the CMO Lead the Customer Experience?  Download the table of contents and an excerpt of the report here: http://info.constellationr.com/report-download-cmo-oversee-customer-experience

@DrNatalie, VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research

Covering IOT of Customer Facing Initiatives in Marketing, Sales and Customer Service that Create Great Customer Experiences

AWS #reInvent Wednesday Keynote - AWS aims for the enterprise

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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I'm analyzing live from Amazon's AWS reInvent conference in Las Vegas. The conference is seeing record attendance, with over 19k attendees, more than doubling compared to the 2014 edition. 
 

Here's my analysis of the announcements made in the keynote:

 

If you don't have a chance to watch - here are my key takeaways:

 

• Database remains core - Not only is Aurora doing well, but AWS announced MariaDB as their 6th database offering. Continuous migration services were announced, as well as  a schema conversion tool across all 6 supported AWS relational databases. Jassy shared that 80% could be migrated automatically.
   
• Amazon QuickSight - Probably the most powerful product announcement, with a strong appeal for business users. Making sense of data automatically, then visualize it for further analysis and put it into storytelling capabilities is very attractive to business users. It needs better visualization, but impressive scope for a V1.
   
• Enterprise Focus - AWS is addressing again the security concerns enterprises have with cloud. With Inspector and Config Rules there are now software based offerings to make sure information and processes in AWS Cloud are safe and compliant. So when enterprises move they need to get their data their, and AWS announced Snowball, a secure way to ship a 50 TB box (or more of them) from on premisses to AWS. But with all software support, human skills are still in demand, and along these lines it is good to see Accenture announcing on stage to form a dedicated AWS consulting unit. 

MyPOV

A very good start for AWS reInvent, with a lot of announcements and new capabilities. Good to see AWS getting better at taking away the main inhibitors and concerns for enterprises starting with security, data migration and trusted advisors / people skills. 

 

On the concern side AWS is announcing a lot of things and innovating at rapid pace, to stay on top of that is a challenge for professionals and enterprises. Amazon will have to think about more innovative ways on know how distribution and certification at some point.

 

Stay tuned for more updates.

 

More on AWS

• Event Preview - AWS reInvent 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 (C) Holger Mueller - All Rights Reserved

GE, Capital One Give AWS the Rub at re:Invent

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. ...

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Amazon Web Services' opening keynote at re:Invent 2015 started in a familiar fashion, with SVP Andy Jassy providing an overview of AWS's rapidly expanding slew of services along with arguments why companies are moving, and should move, to its cloud. 

While Jassy's remarks were persuasive, the voice of the customer remains king—and AWS managed to convince no less than the CIOs of Capital One and General Electric to share their stories onstage.  

General Electric is using AWS as part of its transformation into a digital enterprise, said CIO Jim Fowler. By 2020, GE plans to generate $15 billion in revenue in software, according to Fowler.

All-In on AWS

In the meantime, GE is aggressively moving its IT environments to the cloud with AWS.

The journey began with a whopping 9,000 applications, 300 ERP systems "and too many physical data centers to talk about," Fowler said.

In recent times GE has hired more than 2,000 technical employees and invested $1 billion in a software center of excellence. 

"We're taking a build-versus-buy mentality for things that matter," he said. "The things we're going to choose to buy is where we don't differentiate. "I'm not going to sell another aircraft engine because I run a global data center operation really well. That's AWS's differentiator in the environment." 

All of those 9,000 workloads will move to AWS over the next three years, and GE's data center footprint will shrink from 34 locations to just four. Those will "only hold what we value most secretly," Fowler said. 

"AWS is our trusted partner who's going to run our company for the next 140 years," he added. "For us this is no longer an experiment, this is no longer a test. … It's inevitable." 

Betting the Bank on AWS

Meanwhile, many people know Capital One as a major credit card provider and top 10 bank, but "few of us know we're also a founder-led, 20-year old tech company," CIO Rob Alexander said. "Digital is truly the new bank branch. We really need to be great at building amazing digital experiences for our customers if we're going to win where banking is going." 

Customers prefer mobile apps twice as much as websites, and the trend to mobile "is moving away fast," he added. 

Capital One is investing massively in hiring new engineering talent, and takes an open-source first approach to technology, according to Alexander. 

AWS has become an increasingly more important part of its overall IT strategy. Capital One started with dev and test operations on AWS but today, "we can deploy some of our most critical workloads on Amazon." It has thousands of developers working with AWS, and is using or testing nearly every new service.

Leveraging AWS, Capital One is shrinking its data center footprint. It will be down to three by the end of 2018, compared to eight in 2014. 

Alexander closed with a couple other key rationales for choosing AWS. For one, it "enables us to operate even more securely in the public cloud than our own data centers," he said. 

AWS is also a great draw for the technical talent Capital One needs to attract: "The principal reason I'm standing here today is we have thousands of roles we need to fill." 

The Bottom Line

Alexander and Fowler's appearances and endorsements of AWS are telling indicators of its penetration with and trust among enterprise customers. 

"What better, bigger industrial company can you ask for to go onstage than GE?," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. "Two years ago they had to get a CIO from Australia. Nothing against Australia but this year they've got GE. It's really impressive to have them onstage doing this."

Overall, companies considering the cloud for IaaS and PaaS should place Amazon on their short list, although public-sector organizations may require an alternative, such as IBM, due to security requirements.

What Does IBM’s Cognitive Computing Era Mean For Collaboration?

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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One of the most common complaints from employees is that they can’t keep up with the vast amounts of information available to them. Many of you have heard me talk about the issue not being email overload, nor even information overload, but rather input overload. We have too many places to look for, or respond to people, content and conversations.

But what if computers could do that for you? What if they could eliminate having to know where content was, which was the most relevant, what needs your attention now or what you can avoid working on? Even better, what if computers could go beyond helping you prioritize and filter, and start to actually take actions on your behalf?

With ideas like these in mind, IBM has just announced their new strategic initiative, Cognitive Business.

You may have heard of IBM Watson, the computer that beat two Jeopardy grand champions. Well, that system was designed to do a lot more than just play trivia games!  Watson does not just know what it’s programmed to know, it learns and adapts, similar to the way humans do. This is called cognitive computing.

While IBM's marketing is currently focused on large industry initiates like healthcare and finance, cognitive computing could also one day help individuals and teams collaborate more effectively. IBM’s collaboration platform, IBM Connections and their new email client, IBM Verse could one day leverage the cognitive capabilities of IBM Watson to help people make sense of the vast amounts of information they are currently flooded with. In addition to helping people filter and prioritize information, one day the tools could recommend actions and even proactively respond.

Let’s call this next generation of personal productivity and teamwork, Cognitive Collaboration.

What Customers Should Consider

IBM is not the only company applying artificial intelligence to teamwork. While IBM will argue they are the only company with true "cognitive computing" (Watson), to the average person the technology behind the scenes does not matter as much as the end result. Other vendors are also adding digital assistant capabilities of their tools, such as Microsoft with Cortana and Google with Google Now. Salesforce also recently released Salesforce IQ which proactively helps sales professions organize their pipelines. Customers should speak with these vendors to get a list of current capabilities as well as future roadmaps in how their platforms will help employees get work done. It's important to note, most of these cognitive capabilities only work in cloud based deployments, as the computing power for these systems is not offered on-premises.

What Partners Should Consider

The success of any platform is determined by the strength of its ecosystem. For collaboration software, it's critical that tools integrate with other enterprise applications and expose their features so that 3rd party developers can create add-ons and additional features. IBM Watson has a very strong focus on developers, and has been rapidly expanding the set of cognitive capabilities that are available for use in other applications. I look forward to seeing if the IBM partner ecosystem comes up with interesting ways to use Watson to help people collaborate.

Moving in the Right Direction

I really like the new “Outthink” messaging. It bridges IBM’s long standing message of “Think", with this new cognitive era. I've not been a fan of the previous company wide mantra "Be Essential", but I think trying to get every employee to rally around cognitive computing is a good move. I look forward to seeing how IBM ties together their collaboration tools and the Watson platform.

Teradata Expands Market Opportunity for Industry-Leading Data Warehouse on Amazon Web Services

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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In what coud have been taken as an April Fool’s joke if the date was April 1st, Teradata today announced support for its data warehouse on Amazon’s AWS Cloud.
 

 

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

SAN DIEGO – October 7, 2015 – Teradata Corp. (NYSE: TDC), the big data analytics and marketing applications company, announced today it is making its Teradata Database, the market’s leading data warehousing and analytic solution, available for cloud deployment on AWS to support production workloads. The initial version of Teradata Database on AWS will be offered on a variety of individual multi-terabyte virtual servers--known as Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instances--in supported AWS regions via a listing in the AWS Marketplace. […] 

MyPOV – So that sums it up well: The prove veteran Teradata Database will be running on Amazon AWS EC2 instances, with support for production workloads. For the longest time customers had to buy hardware to run the Teradata Datawarehouse from Teradata – but these times are over now. Definitively a good move and another proofpoint of a new approach a Teradata (we noticed already at the analyst summit – see here), Teradata is not afraid to challenge revenue streams and traditions.

 

[…] AWS is the leading cloud service provider and has a global footprint with more than one million active customers in 190 countries. With Teradata Database on AWS, supported use cases include test and development, quality assurance, data marts, disaster recovery, and production analytics. The primary benefits to customers include:
• Wider accessibility to the market’s leading data warehouse and analytic solution
• Closer proximity of the database to data sources and partner software in the cloud
• Easier scalability with self-service provisioning and hourly pay-as-you-go convenience

MyPOV – Teradata is reaping all the benefits from running on AWS, supporting all possible deployments and use cases. Now Teradata is available for anyone with access to the web (and a credit card, we need to see what Teradata will charge for using its software).
 

“This is a significant announcement for Teradata because it illustrates a fundamentally new deployment option for what has long been the industry’s most respected engine for production analytics,” said Chris Twogood, Vice President of Product and Services Marketing at Teradata. “In terms of convenience, security, performance, and market adoption, cloud computing has proven its value. By incorporating AWS as the first public cloud offering for deploying a production Teradata Database, we will make it easier for companies of all sizes to become data-driven with best-in-class data warehousing and analytics.”

MyPOV – Good quote from Twogood – note the emphasis on ‘first’ – so there may be more and different cloud providers coming down the road.

 

Twogood said that a growing number of existing and prospective customers want a hybrid mixture of deployment options – with some resources maintained physically on-premises and other services delivered virtually via the cloud. Representing Teradata’s initial version of Teradata Database for public cloud deployment, Teradata Database on AWS will expand the range of choices for companies to extract the greatest analytical insights for their organizations:
• On-premises integrated data warehouse: Teradata Platforms and Appliances
• Purpose-built managed environment: Teradata Cloud
• Self-service public cloud: Teradata Database on AWS
• Hybrid approach using a combination of the above

MyPOV – This adds a third deployment option of Teradata. And typically public cloud based deployments (we still need to learn on pricing, reading along in the press release) – are cheaper for customers than on premise / private cloud deployments, due to less hardware utilization on premises. We will also have to see if Teradata will support bursting to the cloud, e.g. when on premises capacity is maxed out. This is tricky given the nature of data centric applications like Teradata's, but it can be achieved.
 

Additionally, Teradata Production and Advisory Services, delivered by a deep bench of industry and analytic experts within Teradata Professional Services, are available to assist new and existing customers with provisioning, integration, management, and fine tuning of Teradata Database across all deployment options.

MyPOV – Good to see Teradata is not missing the opportunity to sell services. Customer will initially need help to deploy these new capabilities. Over the longer run they should be automated though software though, as software scales better than humans.
 

More information about Teradata Database on AWS is available from company representatives exhibiting at the AWS re:Invent annual user conference from October 6-9 in Las Vegas and at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2015 event from October 4-8 in Orlando. Additional insight will also be shared during the upcoming Teradata 2015 PARTNERS Conference and Expo, the premier global data analytics conference taking place October 18-22 in Anaheim. Attendees are encouraged to visit Teradata’s Analytics in the Cloud station in the Expo Hall and participate in the cloud-focused PARTNERS breakout session titled, “The Rise of the Purpose-Built Analytics Cloud” on Tuesday, October 20 from 9:00 to 10:15 am.

MyPOV – Well good ;bang for buck’ hitting an own and two other major events. Currently attending AWS reinvent, the event has grown to 15k+ attendees, so lots of attention on new announcements.
 

Availability
The initial version of Teradata Database on AWS will be available in Q1 2016 for global deployment. It will be offered on a variety of individual multi-terabyte Amazon EC2 instance types via a listing in the AWS Marketplace. EC2 is a web-based service that allows business subscribers to run application programs in the Amazon computing environment and pay only for capacity that is actually used. Customers will have the ability to deploy standalone on AWS or can complement both on-premises and Teradata Cloud environments.

MyPOV – Good to see a near availability date, even more important to see that ‘pay as you use; principles will be followed. Key also to see that a AWS only deployment is supported, so the AWS deployment is a first class citizen next to the Teradata on premises and Teradata cloud deployment options. But we miss hearing what it will cost for customers to use Teradata on AWS.
 

Overall MyPOV

A good move by Teradata, that is not stopping at challenging the pastest, its engineered system business, optimized to run the Teradata Database. It’s a copy of the Microsoft post Ballmer strategy – analogous to an ‘Office everywhere’ there seems to be a ‘Teradata everywhere’ strategy in place. Customers should understand the full cost of running Teradata Warehouse on AWS, including license / usage payments to Teradata.

On the concern side we see uncertainty on pricing. Cost for moving to cloud is key planning and decision criteria for enterprise. We are certain that Teradata will not make this move without making AWS based Teradata Database reasonably attractive enough. But it would also not be good business acumen to make these too cheap, unless we may see a departure by Teradata from building its engineered systems in the future. That would be a serious blow to the overall engineered (or converged) system approach, but maybe data warehouses can be run cheaper on Linux based ‘plain vanilla’ systems. We will see.

Overall a good move to Teradata, that really only begs the question, what took so long to get there.


More on Teradata

• News Analysis - Teradata Launches First Enterprise Support for Presto read here
• Progress Report - Teradata is alive and kicking and shows some good 'paranoid' practices read here
• Check out my colleague Doug Henschen's view on Presto and the recent analyst event - read here
• Progress Report - Teradata is alive and kicking and shows some good 'paranoid' practices - 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 (C) Holger Mueller - All Rights Reserved