Is It Time for a Chief Brand Storyteller?

Gavin Heaton

Founder
Disruptors Co

Gavin is the Founder of Disruptors Co, one of Australia’s leading independent strategy and innovation companies. Gavin advises firms on strategy, marketing, product development and innovation. He is also a member of the Orbits program, the influencer network of award winning analyst and advisory firm, Constellation Research. Gavin advises boards and leadership on innovation strategy, marketing, data-driven product development and corporate venturing. Gavin is on the board of Vibewire, a youth-led social enterprise based in Sydney, Australia and on the Technology Advisory Group for Good2Give – the workplace giving platform. ...

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This great presentation on content marketing and storytelling by Jonathan Crossfield got me thinking. What is it about brands, storytelling and technology that we continue to struggle with – and why is this struggle so pervasive?

Now, I see a lot of content marketing every day. There are newsletters, infographics and blog posts. Sometimes there are videos. Podcasts. Quizzes. Surveys. The variety is rich … but the quality? Well, often the quality leaves much to be desired.

Who can we blame?

Content marketing – like all marketing – has many masters. There are the internal subject matter experts to please. The brand and reputation folks to appease. And let’s not even bring up compliance/corporate affairs. Or Legal. Imagine having to include them!? Then there are the representatives from sales, product, engineering and finance – after all, someone has to pay for this.

Eventually, someone will create the brief and the creative process will kick in. It could be internally created or pushed out to an agency. There will be drafts, revisions and feedback. There will be interpretation.

And then one day there will be an approval … and your content marketing baby will be pushed out into the world. Will it work? Will it deliver a bounty?

Too often our marketing efforts end up a pale imitation of the original idea. After review upon review, interpretation upon interpretation, much of the spark and energy is lost.

It makes me think that we need a new custodian. A Chief Brand Storyteller (CBS). Someone who ensures that the story we want, need and should tell, remains intact. The CBS would:

• Prioritise our audiences over our processes
• Reclaim our business narratives from the tyrannies of product form and function
• Remind us that our purpose is to serve customers, guide them, delight and surprise them.

And the CBS would also have an important technology role. So many of our brand and business narratives are generated, delivered and amplified through technology – and this impacts the story and the storytelling. The CBS needs to help brands re-imagine storytelling for our times. And this may, perhaps, be the most important aspect.

Technology and Business Intelligence – Not Always Good Partners

Partner, Sensei Marketing
Partner, Sensei Marketing

Sales & marketing veteran with almost 30 years’ experience and now 1800 digital projects to his credit for clients including Morgan Stanley, AOL, Hyatt Gaming Management, Snyder's of Hanover, Hitachi, the Home Depot, Kraft Foods, Drees Homes, American Idol, and hundreds more, including leading agencies around the North America.     ...

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There’s no question that the Internet, social media, and digital technologies have changed the business landscape and the manner in which it operates. From the way business communicates with – and advertises to – consumers to how it conducts market research, and from the manner in which it hires new employees to how those employees are managed, today’s business blueprint is significantly different that it was just 15 years ago.

But is change always a good thing?  The Internet has provided smaller businesses the opportunity to compete with larger brands and has certainly provided a more direct and meaningful exchange with a business’s audience. But are we becoming too focused on the technology of the day? Are we forgetting the basics of marketing?

Creativity Often Hindered by Technology

Gannon Jones, the head of brand marketing at MillerCoors, offered this warning: “Technology can act as a barrier to creativity and will never replace great ideas.  As reported by Marketing Magazine, Jones, in speaking to a group of business executives, stated that, “Technology is actually starting to get in the way of creativity. It’s causing us as marketers to fixate on the technology and the data.”

Here at Sensei, we’ve seen customers follow either Big Data or social media viral trends only to be questioned by their CFOs when the results have to be justified. Be it amassing vast amounts of consumer data or attempting to repurpose the Ice Bucket Challenge model, too many marketing teams are fixated on technology and social media trends and forgetting what makes marketing truly work.

We know that online reviews on sites like Yelp and Google can have a positive effect on sales but businesses are resorting to buying positive reviews instead of earning them. Marketers are keen to surf the Internet for clues on optimizing their search engine results and forget that greater organic traffic can be earned by simply delivering creative, informative, and useful content to consumers. Marketers are quick to push us to build Facebook pages for their businesses without first understanding if their consumers want to engage with them on the social media network or if their purchase decisions may be influenced by their presence on that site.

Recently, we encountered a business whose head of social media was a statistician, not a marketer. Not that we have anything against statisticians; they’re an important part of the marketing team. However, ideas driven by numbers and stats often fail to inspire long-term attention from consumers and less often drive any form of real innovation.

Mr. Jones suggested that the basis of effective marketing is content, not technology, but I think that’s an oversimplification. Content can be driven by technology and consumer data as much as it can from innovative ideas crafted by artistic directors. Marketing success is not found in content but in knowing what type of content sways the purchase decision of consumers.

Consumer Data vs. Consumer Engagement

“What tends to happen and what we have seen in recent years, is that there’s a fundamental disconnect in the way business leaders think about data, and how technology leaders think about it,” suggests business analyst Fatemah Khatibloo in an interview with CMO.  “We see lots of lost opportunities. There has been a focus on big data projects and platforms and solutions by technology teams, or vendors are wooing marketing leaders, but they’re not so good at solving business problems. Business and technology are not working together towards a common purpose, which is using that data for customer engagement. We see lots of lost opportunities. There has been a focus on big data projects and platforms and solutions by technology teams, or vendors are wooing marketing leaders, but they’re not so good at solving business problems. Business and technology are not working together towards a common purpose, which is using that data for customer engagement.”

In our push to use technology to gain a larger market share and lower costs, we’ve begun to rely too heavily on technology and marketing automation.  Sharing a story from his past experience while employed by Kraft Foods, Mr. Jones referenced the “reams of [consumer] data” that Kraft had collected, which it failed to convert into true business opportunities.

What Kraft needed to know was simple: Did its consumers have children and was the process of cooking an enjoyable experience or not? Knowing the answer to these two questions was central to understanding what motivated purchase decisions but the data scientists collected so much information that answering these simple questions was nearly impossible.

Sensei Debates

Is the growing reliance on technology creating a generation of ineffective or less creative marketers?

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

The post Technology and Business Intelligence – Not Always Good Partners appeared first on Sensei Marketing.

Lifesciences IoT opportunity – will privacy issues slow it down?

pending

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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This week I met with an executive from Biogen. We spent time discussing their business, the usual areas where covered: how they were dealing with the patent cliff, their diversification of offerings, how they were working internationally to name a few. But the one area I found intriguing was how IoT impacts the pharmaceutical space. IoT presents two interesting opportunities for pharmaceuticals.

The first opportunity for pharmaceuticals with IoT is in the supply chain. ?From manufacturing, to storage and distribution, IoT holds great promise. No surprise as we see a large majority of manufacturers leaning on IoT to provide data that leads to greater efficiencies within their supply chains. For heavily regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals, IoT promises greater visibility and enhanced track and trace, key operating issues facing companies with sensitive inventory. ?

Unlike a clothing manufacturer where a defect lot can lead to lost sales or a public relations nightmare (think Lululemon’s recall with transparent yoga pants), the fallout from pharmaceutical defects is potentially much more serious. Patients may suffer serious medical consequences, and manufacturers or distributors may face heavy fines and even arrest. Pharmaceutical companies, if they aren’t already, should evaluate IoT solutions that enable secure handling of their products. For example, sensors that monitor how a product is handled through the transportation nodes. These sensors can relay back to the manufacturer if the product was transported at the proper temperature and if the container properly handled. Pharmaceutical companies may also leverage sensors to detect and reduce product tampering. Of course sensors can also be used in the manufacturing process to measure and optimize the factory process.

The second opportunity for pharmaceuticals with IoT is baking IoT capabilities directly into pharma products. This is an area where there is enormous potential for insights, but also presents an ethics and privacy red flag. Companies like Merck are already talking about and exploring the development of “digestables.” That is right, IoT enabled drugs or devices that consumers would eat. The hope is that the data that we can extract from these products revolves around how the drugs interact with our bodies, how are they truly interacting and simply if they are being taken properly (read as doctors tell us to!). From a medical devices perspective we already see companies like Boston Scientific who make pace makers that are IoT enabled. Anyone who is a fan of the HBO show, Homeland, knows the potential risk that poses!

Much of this is only being tested in the labs or thought about in development meetings, but it does bring up the question about privacy. An enormity that might hold back IoT is how is the data going to be handled and protected? There are already rumblings around simple data that our iPhones or Fitbits collect about how many steps we took today, our heart rates or how many calories we burned. What happens when there are devices that are throwing off data about the health of our intestines, how often we go to the bathroom or if we are showing early signs of diabetes? Richie Etwaru has a wonderful model for IoT where as the IoT enabled product gets physically closer to a person’s heart, the greater the possible issues, especially around privacy. Digestables might be just a few inches away from the heart…from the inside.

Pharmaceutical companies should absolutely explore IoT. When it comes to managing their supply chains, they are a prime candidate to take advantage of the visibility and monitoring IoT offers. The more contentious issue is when pharmaceuticals start to productize IoT, how will they handle personal information collected from these IoT medical devices? We may see regulations akin to HIPAA emerge to protect personal information collected via biomedical IoT devices. Pharmaceutical companies should start preparing for these issues today.

55% of Enterprises Predict Cloud Computing Will Enable New Business Models In Three Years

• 69% of enterprises expect to make moderate-to-heavy cloud investments over the next three years as they migrate core business functions to the cloud.
• 44% of enterprises are relying on cloud computing to launch new business models today, predicting this will increase to 55% in three years.
• 32% are using cloud computing to streamline their supply chains today. Senior executives predict this figure will increase to 56% in three years, a 24% increase.
• 59% say they use cloud-based applications and platforms to better manage and analyze data today, reflecting the increasing importance of analytics and big data enterprise-wide.

These and other insights are from a recent Oxford Economics and SAP study of cloud computing adoption, The Cloud Grows Up. You can find the study here (no opt-in). In late 2014, Oxford Economics and SAP collaborated on a survey of 200 senior business and IT executives globally regarding the adoption and use of cloud technology. Oxford Economics’ analysts compared the latest survey with one completed in 2012 looking for leading indicators of cloud adoption in enterprises. They found many C- and VP-level executives are taking a more pragmatic, realistic view of what cloud technologies can contribute. Enterprises are moving beyond the hype of cloud computing, putting in the hard work of launching new business models while driving top-line revenue growth.

Oxford Economics has made two interactive infographics available from the study here. The first details cloud adoption, and the second, on how enterprises see cloud computing changing their business models over the next three years.  As cloud platforms and applications become a scalable, secure and for the most part reliable, once-elusive enterprise goals and new business models become attainable.

Key take-aways from the study include the following:

• Top–line growth (58%), collaboration among employees (58%), and supply chain (56%) are the three areas enterprises expect cloud computing to impact most in three years. The greatest gains will be in the areas of supply chain (a 24% jump), collaboration among employees (20%) and increased agility and responsiveness to customers (17%). The following graphic compares where enterprises are seeing cloud computing’s impact today and a prediction of each areas’ impact in three years.

• Developing new products & services (61%), new lines of business (51%) and entering new markets (40%) are three key areas cloud computing is transforming enterprises.  With a 35% increase, developing new products and services is the most dominant strategy enterprises are relying on to grow their businesses. See the comparison below for further details.       

• 58% of enterprises predict their use of cloud computing will increase top-line revenue growth in three years. 67% see the cloud changing skill sets and transforming the role of HR. The following graphic illustrates the first of two interactive infographics Oxford Economics and SAP are providing with the report. You can access the infographic here.

• 74% of enterprises say innovation and R&D is somewhat or mostly cloud-based. 61% say they will have developed new products and services in three years as a result of adopting cloud technologies.  The following graphic illustrates the second of two interactive infographics Oxford Economics and SAP are providing with the report. You can access the infographic here.

• Enterprise cloud security strategies are maturing rapidly. From 2012 to 2014, strategies for ensuring the security of API and interfaces increased 24%, from 20% to 44%. Additional concerns that increased include virus attacks (up 19%), and identity theft (up 16%).  The following figure compares the top concerns enterprises have in the area of cloud security.

• 31% of respondents say the cloud computing has had a transformative impact on their business.  48%, nearly half, state that cloud computing has had a moderate impact on business performance. The majority believe cloud computing will have a significant impact on top-line revenue growth in three years.

• 67% of enterprises say that marketing, purchasing, and supply chain are somewhat and mostly cloud-based as of today. Cloud-based adoption has reached an inflection point in enterprises, with functional areas having the largest percentage of workloads running on cloud-based apps. Enterprise senior executives see the potential to improve innovation, R&D, and time-to-market via greater collaboration using cloud technologies.

Filed under: Cloud Computing, Enterprise Cloud Computing, Louis Columbus' blog, SaaS, SaaS Economics, SaaS Forecasts Tagged: Cloud Computing, cloud computing landscape, Louis Columbus' blog, SaaS, Software-as-a-Service

6 Pillars of Ecommerce Customer Experience - Video

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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Did you know that most brands are not achieving their ecommerce goals? In fact, only 37% of ecommerce professionals surveyed by Constellation Research evaluated their brands as 'effective' at reaching their ecommerce goals. 

Brands that do not effectively engage customers face dissolution as customers migrate to more engaging alternatives. 

Ensure your brand effectively engages customers and builds loyalty by following these six best practices.  

Continuity of Customer Experiences Drives The Future of Commerce

Future of Work: What Does The IBM and Box Partnership Mean?

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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This Does Not Impact IBM Connections Files: The primary focus of this partnership is not related to IBM’s collaboration portfolio: IBM Connections, IBM Verse, Notes/Domino, Sametime, etc. Yes, there is some integration between the two companies today, such as Box integration in Connections Communities, but this announcement is more about IBM’s Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Analytics capabilities. (see below) In January, IBM announced IBM Connections Files, which is essentially a Box like tool, but to be clear, IBM is not replacing that product with Box.

Insights Into Business Content: Over the last few months, IBM has made several announcements regarding integration of 3rd party content with IBM’s tools. For example, the partnerships with Twitter and Weather Channel. Box represents another large repository of content that several IBM customers rely on. Therefore, combining Box’s content-centric workflows with IBM’s analytics (IBM Watson) and governance (StoredIQ) capabilities, makes a lot of sense. This gives Box a great additional set of capabilities while IBM gets to deploy their tools against a large new source of (customer) content. Questions still remain as to what the combined solutions will cost, and what hosting options will be supported.

Let’s Get Vertical: Both IBM and Box have successful go to market strategies around vertical solutions such as healthcare, finance and manufacturing. This partnership will allow both vendors to tap into the customer base of the other. For example, a healthcare customer currently using Box to store medical records (or Xrays) will now be able to leverage IBM’s Analytics and Case Management capabilities to derive insights from that data.

Mobile Computing: Both IBM and Box are investing heavily in mobile access. IBM has recently partnered with Apple to create several applications which they call MobileFirst for iOS. As mentioned above, Box has a strong customer presence in those same verticals, so if Box integration is added to those iOS applications, Box customers will get a seamless file-centric experienced embedded in this applications.

That raises the question as to why IBM is using Box for file-sharing features of these applications instead of IBM Connections Files? The answer is most likely that Box, available for many years, has a significant head-start obtaining customers in these industries verses IBM Connections Files which has just recently launched. IBM is doing what works best for customers, realizing that if they don't, those customers will look elsewhere. As the Box/IBM announcement is not exclusive, I predict IBM will announce additional file sharing integrations/partnerships, including better integration with their own collaboration tools.

Developers In The Mix: One of the most interesting parts of this partnership is that Box’s APIs will be added to IBM BlueMix, their cloud based application development platform, or PaaS. That means developers building applications on BlueMix will be able to easily add Box’s features to their applications. This is a big win for Box, as it dramatically extends their reach to a large partner ecosystem. Here is example code from IBM developerWorks, Integrate Cloud File Storage and Sharing into your Bluemix App with Box

Keeping Things Secure: In 2013 IBM acquired Fiberlink, developer of the MaaS360 mobile management and security suite. Today MaaS360 supports secure file sharing for Box, so this is another synergy point between IBM and Box which they will continue to build upon.

Files. Files. Wherefore Art Thou Files? What about future hosting implications? Today Box’s infrastructure is hosted by Equinix. Perhaps a move to Softlayer could happen, but that is not part of the current announcement.

Summary

It’s certainly an interesting time in the enterprise file market.

A few years ago large enterprise software vendors such as IBM, Microsoft and Google did not really offer their own enterprise file storage solutions. To fill that gap, stand-alone vendors such as Box and DropBox stepped in and secured large customer bases that the enterprise software vendors are certainly envious of. But as file-sharing become a key part of organization's collaboration strategies those companies realized they required enterprise grade solutions. Fast forward to today and the large vendors now offer solutions such as IBM Connections Files, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, Citrix Sharefile and Salesforce Files as integrated parts of their collaboration platforms; while Box, DropBox, Egnyte, Intralinks, Huddle and other stand-alone file sharing vendors continue to enhance the file-sharing specific elements of their solutions.

The trend now is to combine the best of both worlds. It seems like almost weekly there is a press release about a new integration or partnership between one of the enterprise software platform vendors and one of the stand-alone file-storage vendors. The key is that these partnerships need to go beyond the basic “you can open file X from inside platform Y”. Today’s Box and IBM announcement provides a foundation for more advanced integrations built to solve specific industry solutions leveraging the best of both IBM and Box. However, it’s important to move beyond the press release stage and deliver real code soon or customers (and analysts) will quickly look for alternative approaches. I look forward to seeing demos of the IBM + Box solutions soon.

BTW, I'd be negligent as an analyst if I didn't notice that both companies have 3 letter names and blue logos, so the partnership is a natural fit. (don't quote me on that one!)

Microsoft Dynamic’s Strategic Alliance with Lithium

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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It’s true – to deliver on a brand promise of excellent customer experience, it takes a village.  And it makes perfect sense that Microsoft Dynamics has created a strategic alliance with Lithium, a community platform vendor. What does this mean? Microsoft Dynamics will integrate Lithium’s social interactions and community data into Microsoft Dynamics CRM. This partnership will allow Microsoft Dynamic’s customers to nurture better relationships with their customers, especially because and peer-to-peer communities are critical to building customer loyalty. With this additional visibility into what’s happening through their CRM application, businesses have a more complete, 360 degree view of the customer.

What’s interesting is that in the old days, product development used to be done by a vendor themselves. Today, the market is moving so fast, smart vendors are realizing that product development is really more about partnering with partners who specialize in a particular aspect of technology vs build it themselves. These specialized capabilities can complement what a vendor is already offering without the headaches of building from scratch.

Looking forward to some case studies and the successes from this strategic alliance!

@drnatalie, Covering Marketing, Commerce, Customer Service, Communities, Digital and Social Media to Create Better Customer Experiences

Delivering Superb Customer Experience Management Across the Web, Mobile and Commerce

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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In my latest piece of research, I look at trends to take ordinary experiences and deliver superb experiences that keep brand promises by delivering superb customer experience management across the web, mobile and commerce. Clients should use this document as a source for planning and work closely with both the business and technical teams to ensure success to deliver on the brand’s promise. This report offers insights into four of Constellation’s primary business research themes, Next-Generation Customer Experience, Digital Marketing Transformation, Matrix Commerce and Data to Decisions.

Experience Management: How to Deliver Integrated Customer Experiences

Digital Disruption Changes How Brands Engage Customers

The shift to digital marketing and commerce as well as mobile interactions brings a massive transformation to how brands and organizations engage prospects and customers. Customer experience management is a major pillar in many organization’s efforts to engage and retain their customers and partners. Customers, depending on the vertical market, might be patients (healthcare industry), members (financial services industry) or students (higher education).

Organizations are realizing there is more to the job of engaging and retaining these customers because there are so many opportunities along the customer experience journey to have something “fall through the cracks” and not meet expectations. Market leaders realize the future requires proactive digital enablement of the business to support the future strategy of their organizations. Constellation has identified key attributes required for success at experience management and using them, leaders can expect to have a basic blueprint to embark on this key strategic initiative.

Six Approaches Brands Must Adopt to Drive Customer Experience Management

For more information on this report, you can find an excerpt here.

Unfortunately, in almost every segment, Constellation estimates that the top three competitors control from 43 percent to 71 percent of market share and 53 percent to 77 percent of the profits. In the technology space, only 80 companies since 2000 have made the billionaire’s club in annual revenue. Meanwhile, intense competition, short-term shareholder and management thinking, and minimal investment hamper the pace of investment and innovation required by business leaders to survive today’s competitive landscape.

While many brands have not been complacent about addressing change, the past five years have shown the difference between those who invested in digital transformation and those who have not. The corporate digital chasm is massive among market leaders/fast followers and everyone else. Astute brands realize they must invest in transformational change or face a vicious Digital Darwinism.

Is your brand ready for digital disruption or are they a “wait and see” brand”?

@drnatalie, VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research, Covering Marketing, Sales and Customer Service to Deliver Amazing Customer Experiences

Oracle PaaS: 6 Important Developments For Data

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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Oracle steps up data and analytic services as part of its platform-as-a-service push. New Exadata, Big Data and Analytic cloud services are all in the mix, but the strongest appeal is to all-red-stack Oracle shops.

Are you ready to run in an all-red-stack cloud? Oracle CTO and Executive Chairman Larry Ellison did a masterful job on Monday, during an hours-long Oracle Platform-as-a-Service event, of making that sound like the only sensible choice an enterprise can make.

Ellison stuck to familiar themes and messages that have been very consistent for Oracle over last two years. He and fellow Oracle executives presented at least 24 new services said to complete what they described as the most complete cloud platform available, encompassing infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). As my colleague Holger Mueller points out, Oracle is still catching up in the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) arena, where one of the new services it announced was the Oracle Archive Storage Cloud. But the bulk of yesterday’s announcements were about Oracle’s PaaS.

It’s here at the platform level that Oracle is bringing all of its middleware to bear, supporting services for analytics, application development, content and collaboration, data management, integration and mobility all around a common core of management capabilities.

Given my focus on Data to Decisions research, I’ll focus here on Oracle’s Business Analytics and Data Management announcements. You have to manage data before you can analyze it, so let’s start with the new data-management services, which include the Oracle Database Cloud Exadata Service and the Oracle Big Data Cloud Service. As the names suggest, these services are based on the Engineered Systems of the same name, providing another example of Oracle’s oft-repeated message that what you run in the cloud is identical to what you run on-premises, making it easy to move workloads into the cloud and vice-versa.

Oracle Database Cloud Exadata Service

Oracle Database services have been available for several years, but now in addition to Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition in the cloud, you can now get the Exadata Service level. This is the Extreme Performance Edition on Exadata steroids, with every database feature available, including Exadata and RAC scalability, high-availability, Data Guard, and the In-Memory Database option. Use cases include mission-critical OLTP, data warehousing, in-memory analytics or all of the above, with multiple database instances supported though the same service. You also can use the Exadata Service as a disaster-recovery backup for an on-premises Exadata deployment.

MyPOV: You better have serious database needs, as this service demands a big commitment. Subscriptions are handled on a monthly or annual, not hourly, basis. You can scale up or down elastically, but the meter reading is on a month-to-month basis. There’s also a minimum subscription starting point of a quarter rack, with 28 cores and 42 terabytes of storage capacity. That’s big, though clearly less daunting than buying an Engineered System and running it yourself. If you want a heavy-duty option but aren’t ready for this level of commitment, there’s always Oracle Database Enterprise Edition Extreme Performance, the highest-level DBaaS cloud option short of the Exadata Service.

This analysis focuses in on data-management and analytics developments tied to Oracle’s June 2015 PaaS announcements.

Oracle Big Data Cloud Service

Here’s another cloud-based way to try out (or avoid buying) an Oracle Engineered System. The Oracle Big Data Cloud Service gives you access to the same software delivered through the appliance, including Cloudera’s flavor of Hadoop, the Oracle NoSQL database, and Oracle R and open source Spark software for big data analytics. There are three ways to get data into this service: a high-speed connection to the Oracle Storage Cloud, an Infiniband connection to the Oracle Database Cloud Exadata Service, or a direct connection (option) to your data center.

Once the data is in the cloud, you can access data through secure shell (SSH), site-to-site VPN or optional high-bandwidth connections to your data center. Clusters are provisioned through the Oracle MyServices Web-based management interface and they’re managed through Cloudera Manager.

MyPOV: As with Exadata in the cloud, the Oracle Big Data Cloud Service entails a monthly subscription, so don’t expect hourly or per-day rates. I scoured the documentation in search of minimum subscription levels, but I didn’t find and restrictions. I would not be surprised to discover that there’s a minimum number of nodes.

Oracle executives talked up the Oracle Big Data SQL Service as a complement to the Oracle Big Data Cloud Service, but the data sheet specifically says it lets you query across Hadoop, NoSQL and the Oracle Database Service Exadata Edition.”  That suggests it’s not available with plain old (non-Exadata) Oracle database services. I’m not sure whether this dependency is tied to Exadata Infiniband connectivity or Exadata processing power, but that’s a big commitment to make to gain cross-platform Big Data SQL querying.

Business Analytics Cloud Services

On this front, Oracle has introduced (or at least announced) five important new services:

• Visual Analyzer. A browser-based data-visualization option for fast, intuitive data analysis. Oracle says this service offers a rich library of visualizations, self-service data-mashup capabilities, and authoring on desktops, tablets and phones. MyPOV: Lots of companies are trying to outdo Tableau, but the test is just how visually capable and scalable this new tool might be. I’ll reserve judgement until I see it.
• Big Data Preparation. Here Oracle is following the self-service data-prep trend, which has given rise to vendors including Trifacta and Paxata. The tool is said to import, cleanse and prepare structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. MyPOV: Is this just as good as the tools offered by trendsetters, or is it a pale imitation? I can’t say until I see more.
• Big Data Discovery. I was disappointed to discover that the Oracle Big Data Discovery cloud service is not yet available. MyPOV: This is Oracle’s best and most accessible options for genuine big data exploration and analysis — as opposed to just pointing SQL at Hadoop with Big Data SQL.
• Internet of Things. Oracle, too, is checking the IoT box, offering this service to connect to edge sensors (through a variety of protocols) and to send data up to the IoT cloud service. MyPOV: I’ll hold judgement until we see the filtering, streaming and analysis capabilities – not to mention real-world deployments – running up in the cloud.

The Big-Picture POV

The data- and analytics-related services discussed here represent roughly one third of the total Oracle PaaS landscape discussed this week. Nonetheless it’s the important stuff for data-management and big data professionals.

As I said up front, Oracle has been nothing if not consistent about its cloud plans in recent years, and it certainly has put together a comprehensive platform. The message that “what you run on premises also runs in the cloud” is also compelling, particularly if most of what you run is from Oracle.

Ellison and Thomas Kurian also stressed that you can bring any app, not just Oracle apps, into the company’s cloud. But if you run a heterogeneous data center with lots of third-party middleware and perhaps even third-party databases, I suspect Oracle’s IaaS is not nearly as inviting. Oracle likes its all-red stack, and it’s bent on making it the most compelling choice it can offer in the cloud.

We also heard repeatedly about the ability to move from on-premises to the cloud and back again. That’s a comfort to those who are sticking to development, testing and disaster recovery in the cloud. But for companies that moving into the cloud in a big way, it’s more of a one-way street. In that context, the question is, do I want to start fresh rather than migrating everything I have on-premises into the cloud? That changes the equation and brings many more non-Oracle options into consideration.