Social Selling for Ticket Sales Staff

Russell Scibetti

Founding Editor, The Business of Sports
The Business of Sports

My name is Russell Scibetti and I have an extensive background in sports business, including CRM and database marketing, interactive and digital marketing, social media, corporate sponsorships and activation, and applied market research. From 2007 to 2014, I worked for Arizona State Athletics, Comcast-Spectacor (Philadelphia Flyers) and the New York Jets to manage and implement CRM, database marketing, market research and other technology-based sales and marketing initiatives. In 2014, I joined KORE Software as their VP of Product Strategy, where I am responsible for the strategic vision, planning and development of the KORE ProSports Ticketing, Sponsorship and Suites/Premium software products. I earned my MBA in Sports Business from the W.P. Carey…...

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In the course of my Twitter usage, I discovered Ted Glick (@ted_glick), an Account Executive for the Philadelphia 76ers. If you just look at his Tweets feed, you’ll see a lot of positive 76ers content, everything from RTs of the team’s content to asking fans what they think about the new logos and potential draft picks.

However, if you click over to his “Tweets & replies” feed, what you’ll see is someone who understand the power of Twitter as a sales channel. From the looks of the tweets that he has replied to, it seems like he searches for relevant combinations of the team name and tickets. The result? A social feed of self-identified potential ticket buyers. Take a look at a couple of these conversation threads:

There are many more examples in his thread, but the consistent theme is:

• Identifying a fan of the team that’s also mentioned tickets
• Proactively starting a conversation via social media
• Offering to take that conversation from online to offline where a sale could take place

I spoke to Ted via email, and he shared some other tips to keep in mind when using Twitter this way:

• Use your CRM – With a bit of searching, you can probably figure out if a particular Twitter user already exists in your database, which will reveal additional information on past ticket purchases and recent conversations.
• A younger demographic – Twitter users tend to skew younger, so start with more affordable products and try to work them up the ladder over time.
• Comfort on Twitter – Fans that tweet about the team are usually quite passionate and may just feel more comfortable having a conversation on Twitter than on the phone

I know many teams are scared of having their staff use social media to sell, but the potential is huge. Your ticket sales staff are often the best team ambassadors, so let them use the tools available to them. Yes, if they say the wrong thing on social, they could get fired, but that risk is also there on the phone, and many newer fans simply will not engage with sales staff on the phone anymore.

Let your staff be a part of the conversation where the conversation is taking place. I bet Ted’s efforts have generate a nice bit of sales for him and I applaud his initiative.

 

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Oracle PaaS - 6 PaaS services launched, many more announced

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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Earlier this week Oracle put the world through a ‘monster’ 5 hour online event updating on its cloud strategy – with a focus on the IaaS, PaaS and DaaS aspects, SaaS was quickly presented by Ellison, but I guess more will come at a later time in the year (OpenWorld?). The event was planned since a long time, so any speculation that it was a reaction to Oracle recent Q4 / FY 2015 earnings does not bear much substance. But it was overdue for Oracle to clarify what is has done, plans to do and will do for the ‘lower’ layers of its cloud strategy. 

 

 

 

So here are my Top3 takeaways (the press release can be found here):

Simplification – in the past Oracle pegged its products to IaaS / PaaS etc. – now we have the Oracle Cloud Platform (for PaaS) and the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Services (for IaaS). A good top level naming convention, but then the same, massive offering lies underneath. But it is good to see that the official Strategy for Oracle Cloud Platform is to bring Oracle’s Database and Middleware offerings together for the ‘customers and partners anywhere in the world through the Internet’. Note the internet – more below. It is somewhat simpler for the Oracle Infrastructure Services portfolio – that offers infrastructure services for workloads is an ‘enterprise grade cloud managed, hosted and supported by Oracle’. And these are the 3 basic computing services, compute, storage and networking. As mentioned in the progress report of the cloud analyst summit in spring (see here) that is the area where Oracle is relatively most behind, compared to PaaS and SaaS. 

 

 

Oracle PaaS Customers

The interesting aspect on Oracle Cloud Platform is the ‘through the internet’ addition in the strategy charter above. Oracle delivers one of the few offerings that can be deployed both in Oracle’s cloud infrastructure as well as on premises. In the latter the support, upgrades and maintenance is delivered through the internet. Oracle keeps stressing that the same code runs on both sides, workloads can be moved transparently as customers wish. This remains a key differentiator of Oracle towards most cloud offerings in the market. It will be good to see some proof points of customers taking advantage of this capability, especially for the hybrid usage of the offering. What we see right now that it is more of a binary (on premises vs cloud) decision in sales conversations and deployment decisions.
 

Oracle PaaS Momentum

GA of 6 cloud Services – The main message from product side was that 6 Oracle cloud services are now available. These are Oracle Database Cloud – Exadata Service, Oracle Archive Storage Cloud Service, Oracle Big Data Cloud Service and Big Data SQL Cloud Service, Oracle Integration Cloud Service, Oracle Mobile Cloud Service and Oracle Process Cloud Service. All six are major achievements for Oracle, with making the Oracle database available on Exadata machines in the Oracle cloud being a potential cannibalization of Exadata hardware sales, so quite remarkable. And Oracle introduced its competitor to Amazon AWS Glacier with Oracle Archive Storage Cloud Service, not surprisingly at a lower price point, but it wasn’t clear if services were 100% identical. The two BigData Services are interesting as they move BigData usage closer to business users, which overall is the right strategy direction for all enterprise services. The same is valid for Oracle Mobile Cloud Services that allows business users to build (simple) cross platform mobile applications, a product that once fully working and adopted, will change the way how mobile applications are built. And Oracle Integration Cloud Service is interesting for the same approach, bringing the tools of enterprise software integration to business end users. An ambitious goal, but Oracle has made steps close to achieve that goal. 

 

All PaaS Announcements

But there was more – in total Oracle announced 23 PaaS Services, some key networking services to make the Oracle vision a reality (Site to Site VPN, Direct Connect), a lot around polyglot / multi language capabilities of the Oracle cloud (next to Java, Node.js and Ruby), but the most interesting ones to me remain the business end user enablement services, around Application Builder, Data Visualization, Big Data Preparation and Discovery and a ‘make sense of IoT data’ service. While a number of the announced services are basic enablers, some even table stakes and others are bringing Oracle products to the cloud, the real differentiators going forward lie in the business end user enablement services.

 

Oracle comparison on GB / month

It’s all about TCO – We have written before that at the core of Oracle’s organization DNA is TCO savings, starting with the first product reducing database costs with the relational database. For Oracle in 2015 it means engineering the whole technology stack together, in order to achieve lower cost for performance. And while Oracle did not offer any specific savings beyond storage (Oracle claims to be cheaper than Amazon AWS, EMC and IBM) at the event, the recent announcements of Oracle getting into the two socket server market, shows the power of the approach (we covered it here). What was remarkable there is, that Oracle did not want to be in ‘commodity hardware’ – but changed its strategy (still wondering and speculating why) and then applied the integrated technology stack strategy and approach to the problem. The result is a significantly lower TCO for the Oracle two socket server systems (compared to other market leaders), so the strategy even delivers in areas that were not original targets. A good capability to have for any technology vendor in the fast shifting technology markets.
 

Overall MyPOV

Another Oracle cloud event with a lot of announcements, but also 6 PaaS cloud services in GA. Oracle did not mention when all of them would be GA (or I missed it in the 5 hours, sorry) , so that is good progress – but can’t hide over the fact that Oracle is ‘still getting there’. What is impressive is to see what kind of revenue Oracle can generate already based on this early offering, the vendor claims to have had the most record ‘cloud’ quarter in the industry with its Q4, with 400+M in new subscription revenue. Which makes clear that the game for Oracle is execution both on the product and on the sales side.

On the concern side, Oracle has to build and deliver a lot. One of the largest engineering projects on the planet, if not the largest. And due to the integrated nature of the offering, more bits and pieces have to work flawlessly together. Anyone with experience in enterprise software knows that harmonizing the release of two products is more often a challenge than not. Oracle is releasing multiple 100s that need to work together. And Oracle is building its cloud ‘top down’ – having more mature SaaS than PaaS, more mature PaaS than IaaS products (or replace mature with available). In the ideal world you would go IaaS to PaaS to SaaS. But that’s a place where Oracle finds itself for historic reasons, now it needs to retrofit its SaaS offerings to take advantage of its new PaaS and IaaS capabilities. Take the very promising Oracle Integration Cloud Service, which will have out of the box integrations, built by the SaaS teams. So interfaces are being rebuilt, re-tested etc. Ultimately Oracle has the experience and resources to get all done, and in the long run it is cutting no corners and doing the right thing, but it takes time, investment and stamina. For now it looks Oracle has all of them.

On the differentiation side, Oracle is probably the cloud vendor that focusses the most on business end user enablement, a new era of self-service that is enabled by the cloud. With that it changes the way how enterprise software is created, implemented and supported. Less partners and Sis, more business users that build what they need and want quickly. In a world that is accelerating every day, a key capability for business users, who dread nothing else more than going to IT, paying a partner and increasingly cannot afford to wait for days to go live because some software had to be changed somewhere.

The other differentiator for Oracle is the completely integrated technology stack, where it has a quite unique position in the market. Oracle needs to show the advantages of this to decision makers, who traditionally are concerned about too much tie in, but on the flip side want to avoid too many integration worries. TCO is where decision makers and Oracle can come together on this, and given Oracle’s TCO driven corporate DNA, Oracle is well positioned for that conversation. We saw glimpses of that at the event when it came to storage costs and number of steps it takes to get a product up and running. These stats are interesting but need customer backup sooner than later.

A compelling vision and some good early proof points for Oracle, but it is early, key capabilities need to be made available not only announced, so it is execution and then customer adoption time for Oracle. We will be analyzing.

 

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Salesforce Sales Wave Analytics: Full Menu or À La Carte?

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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News Analysis: Salesforce offers the Salesforce Wave, the platform, and Sales Wave Analytics, the first of multiple apps to come. Should you choose focused apps, the all-purpose platform, or both? As always, cost and functionality should be your guide.

Salesforce last week announced Sales Wave Analytics, the first of several Wave Analytics Apps the vendor plans to roll out, each offering “role-specific templates designed to empower business users to uncover insights and take instant action.”

As the name suggests, Sales Wave runs on the Wave Platform the company introduced last year at Dreamforce. For now, Sales Wave is in pilot, but it’s expected to be released later this year (I'm guessing by Dreamforce in September). Pricing wasn’t disclosed, but one pundit guessed it will priced in the ballpark of $85 per user, per month.

There’s no word on when or how many other analytic apps might be introduced, but it’s obvious that apps for the Service, Marketing, and Community clouds will be on the list. And as with Sales Wave, each app would offer pre-built KPIs and dashboards.

The question is, how many apps will the typical Salesforce customer end up wanting? Another choice you can make is implementing the Wave Platform, the general-purpose platform, which gives tools to build almost any KPI, dashboard or report you could want against data in any of the Salesforce clouds. Salesforce Wave is currently priced at $125 per user, per month for a Wave “Explorer” business-user subscription and $250 per user, per month for a “Builder” admin/power user. The downside of using the general-purpose BI platform is that you would have to build out the apps.

A third option – and likely something companies with all-you-can-eat Enterprise subscription plans will choose – is using the Wave Platform as well as the individual apps. The apps give you all sorts of prebuilt content that you’ll want to avoid building from scratch. Sales Wave, for example, gives you:

• Sales Wave Accelerator Templates: This is pre-configured content for building out sales data pipelines as well as analyses of sales levels, team performance, pipelines, sales by product, and triggers for recommended actions, such as resetting sales forecasts or identifying which deals to accelerate to hit sales targets.
• Sales Wave Historical Analysis: The app offers prebuilt historical KPIs and views of sales revenue by quarter, year-over-year sales rep productivity, opportunity conversion rates at various funnel stages, and the length of sales cycles based on deal size.
• Sales Wave Actions: Sales insights don’t just sit there; Sales Wave surfaces related tasks, such as changing close dates or engaging with stakeholders. Sales managers, for example, can move from early-warning indicators to best practices or coaching of salespeople who are falling short of goals.

Also included with the apps are wizards that help you set up data pipelines from Salesforce into the Wave platform. The Wizards will suggest data of interest for each app, but you can also customize the sources and fields of interest, according to Salesforce.

The bottom line is that Salesforce customers will want the head start offered by these apps, but will you want the platform capabilities as well, and which users should get specific app licenses versus general-purpose Explorer licenses? If that $85 per-user, per-month estimate is anywhere close to right, customers who balked at the $125 per Explorer per month/$250 per Builder per month pricing may well be enticed into giving Sales Wave a try.

Let’s not forget that the whole reason Salesforce Wave came about was that core Salesforce reporting capabilities are inadequate for many companies. For years, AppExchange partners such as Birst and GoodData have plugged this gap with their own analytic apps for sales, service and so on.

Salesforce says the Wave Platform and Wave apps are differentiated from AppExchange apps in that they’re a “native” part of Salesforce. The assertion is that this seamless functionality build into the app makes it easier to access data (than alternatives where you export data) and to “make insights actionable” as part of the same application environment. Simplicity is also a Wave calling card, as visualizations and drill-down analyses were developed to be clean, clear and simple. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Wave app and Wave platform capabilities instantly become part of the Salesforce1 mobile experience, an area where Salesforce is clearly raising the bar.

MyPOV on Reporting Choices Ahead

Your choice of Wave platform vs. Wave Apps vs. AppExchange partner apps boils down to, as usual, functionality vs. cost. Unfortunately, the Salesforce roadmap isn’t fleshed out at this point. There’s not GA date (or even a month or quarter) for Sales Wave, and there’s no listing, let alone roadmap, for other apps to come. As for pricing, that, too, is yet to be determined.

Will Wave Platform users get discounts or free bundling of apps? It would make sense to offer combined pricing discounts. After all, Salesforce has made a big point of saying it has graduated from being a single-cloud company (“we’re not just about CRM”). Many customers will inevitably want multiple apps and general-purpose platform capabilities.

Existing users of Birst, GoodData or other AppExchange partner apps will likely want to see the complete app lineup, feature-to-feature comparisons and pricing before making any changes. Salesforce customers who have yet to upgrade from standard reporting features will also want consider pricing and options (including AppExchange partners) before committing, but it makes sense for these customers to at least give Sales Wave a try.

As for the greenfield CRM buyer, BI is down the list of buying criteria, but I’d want to see more of the Wave App roadmap and pricing scheme in combination with the Wave platform. Rival Microsoft, by comparison, has aggressively priced the bundle of Dynamics CRM with Office 365 and PowerBI (partly in response, no doubt, to the introduction of the Wave platform). The bottom line is that Wave Apps look attractive, but we have yet to hear the full story on app plans and pricing.

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Lesson 8 From Disrupting Digital Business: Democratize Distribution with P2P Networks

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

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

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Get All 10 Lessons Learned From Disrupting Digital Business

As with the beginning of every revolution, those in the midst of it can feel it, sense it, and realize that something big is happening. Yet it’s hard to quantify the shift. The data isn’t clear. It’s hard to measure. Pace of change is accelerating. Old rules seem not to apply.

Sometimes when you are in the thick of it, it’s hard to describe what’s happening.  In the case of digital business, these models have progressed over the past 20 years.  However, non-traditional competitors have each exploited a few patterns with massive success. However, as the models evolved, winners realize there are more than a handful of patterns.

Lesson 1 – Transform Business Models And Engagement

Lesson 2 – Keep The Brand Promise

Lesson 3 – Sell The Smallest Unit You Can

Lesson 4 – Know That Data Is The Foundation Of Digital Business

Lesson 5 – Build For Insight Streams

Lesson 6 – Win With Network Economies

Lesson 7 – Humanize Digital With Digital Artisans

Lesson 8 – Democratize Distribution With P2P Networks

In fact, the impact is significant and now quantifiable with 52% of the Fortune 500 gone since 2000 and the average age of the S&P 500 company in 1960 is down from 60 years to a little more than 12 projected in 2020.  That is a 500% compression that has changed the market landscape forever in almost every industry.

Over the course of the next 10 weeks, I’ll be sharing one lesson per week.  For traditional businesses to succeed, they will have to apply all 10 lessons from Disrupting Digital Business in order to not only survive, but also relearn how to thrive.

Democratize Distribution With P2P Networks

Digital scale comes from two areas that focus on stripping out friction and transaction costs.   Any situation where you can strip out the middleman and go direct, you win.  However, where there are networks to participate in, there must be a good exchange of value.

1. Participate in P2P Networks – So when we talked about network economies in Lesson 6, the goal is to cultivate P2P networks as part of the network economy strategy.  Organizations who build their network economy of P2P can create a situation where selfish value exchange creates trust and transparency in the network.
2. Develop co-innovation and co-creation platforms – In some cases the solution to stripping out friction and transaction costs is to create your own platform.  Organizations who open up their platform to spur innovation can find themselves gaining digital scale adoption .

Homework

Easier said then done, but the best way to strip out transaction costs is to reexamine the customer journey.  Try this tried and true approach:

• Start with a journey map;
• Begin with your key personas;
• From there, list out your brand promises;
• Then list out your outcomes expected;
• Tie each outcome to a journey map;
• From the journey map tie each journey to a channel and then to an organization or person.
• Determine the internal and external organizations or person.

Take a hard look at that journey map.  In any case where you are tied to an organization or person, ask yourself why they are there. Can the journey be accomplished with less people or organizations?  Then take a look to see how many internal vs external organizations or people are in the journey.  For all the external organizations or people, find out if they are adding value on your platform or on theirs.  Once you’ve gone through this process, you can either strip out the transaction costs by eliminating organizations or people; and/or add value added nodes to your network, not someone else’s.

The Complete 10 Lessons Learned From Disrupting Digital Business

For those attending the full keynotes and book tours, you’ll get the complete session and in many cases a copied of a signed booked.   For those following virtually, I’ve provided the slimmed down slide share deck for your use.

You now have the 10 lessons learned to disrupt digital business in your hands. You can take this information and change the world in front of you or choose to sit on the knowledge as the world passes you by and digital darwinism consumes your organization.

I trust you will do the right thing. And when you want some company, come join us as a client at Constellation Research where we’re not afraid of the future and the art of the possible.

Get The Book Now Before Digital Darwinism Impacts You

Purchase on Amazon
Bulk Orders: contact [email protected]
About Disrupting Digital Business

Your POV.

Are you ready to disrupt digital business?  Have you ordered the book?

Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationR (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) org.

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Summer Reading List on the Future of Work

Terri Griffith

Professor/Author/Speaker
Simon Fraser University

Terri Griffith holds the Keith Beedie Chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business. She spent two decades in the Silicon Valley and, in 2012 was honored as a Woman of Influence by the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Terri helps her students and their organizations accelerate performance and prepare for the futures of work. Through her speaking, writing, teaching, and research, she brings evidence-based leadership and innovation to high-tech, education, and global agribusiness organizations. She inspires and coaches groups on negotiating change and uniquely mixing existing and new capabilities. Her most recent work uses a “bottom-up” approach to automation, including artificial intelligence. Her award-winning book, The Plugged-In Manager:…...

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This mind map shows my reading list for the futures of work. (Here is a link to an Amazon page including all the entries -- and I will update it as new books are added). This has been my homework as I develop the ideas for my next project. I see these contributions as providing a great foundation for how we think about what the future may bring, but I think we’re just at the beginning in terms of making these ideas reality for most of us.

Work

We don't have a guide for work in the modern age -- something that acknowledges the forces for change but also acknowledges that our experience and education haven't prepared most of us to work in a world of increasing transparency, mobility, and jobs shared with automation of increasing intelligence.

I'm writing the book I hope will fill this gap and I need your help to be sure I'm on the right track.

For organizational leaders there are books on the forces for change (e.g., Brynjolffsson & McAfee’s Second Machine Age), predictions around the future (e.g., Malone’s The Future of Work), strategies that companies can and are taking (e.g., Wang’s Disrupting Digital Business), and examples of what some of the most forward looking companies are doing (e.g., Bock’s Work Rules! -- Google).

There are also books to help with specific techniques like creating a results only work environment (e.g., Ressler & Thompson’s Why Work Sucks and What To Do About It ) and possible actions for individuals inside and outside of organizations (e.g., Simon’s Message Not Received, and my own, The Plugged-In Manager).

What I have yet to find is a book that acknowledges the full reality of the futures of our work. All of us will be playing all of these roles simultaneously: Leading, strategizing, shifting work methods, and planning our own professional development -- while moving between traditional employment and freelancing.

Design and Redesign Throughout Our Careers

We will design and redesign our jobs and organizations. The organizational rate of change, reorganization, new initiatives, product development life cycle is all increasing. Additionally, many of us will be freelancing, at least part time, so we become the designers of our personal organization.

This last is a reality acknowledged in Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha’s book, The Start-Up of You (p. 8 ): where they talk about the "...challenges of today's fractured career landscape." You and your career, they argue, needs to function as an entrepreneurial startup.

Even if you aren't part of the growing ranks of freelancers (see the forthcoming book, Lead the Work: Navigating a World Beyond Employment, by Boudreau, Jesuthasan, and Creelman for more), whatever your span of control, take on the responsibility as if you were the CEO. That's part of the advice Maynard Webb (past COO of eBay and CEO of LiveOps) offers in his book with Carlye Adler, Rebooting Work: You have to be CEO of your own destiny.

Valuable advice, but most of us have never been a CEO nor do we have the broad organizational skills set necessary to be a good one.

What’s Missing?

What seems to be missing in this reading list is an overview -- and a project that acknowledges that a book is not enough. Like this mind map, we need an overview with options for deeper dives. More than a book; a book as an introduction and then connections to a living outline and community for future learning. Do you think there a place for a book, and more, on how to lead, strategize, shift work methods, and plan for our own futures of work?

Am I on the right track? What else should I be considering?

I've been hinting at this project for a while. Some of these older posts were trial balloons, others are sneak peeks. Please let me know here, on Twitter, or Facebook, which seem the most valuable and where you'd like to know more. I'll be working on a full outline to share as I hear back.

• Lead By Letting Go (post on MarketWatch)
• Lead Like a Pro (with a lighter touch)
• LinkedIn & Lynda.com (shifts in professional development)
• 21st Century Management (part of a workshop)
• Complements to leadership (focus on data, big data)
• Artificial intelligence and datamining in recruiting (focus on Gild) 
• Analytics to guide our careers
• Work design for all of us

If you are not reading this on TerriGriffith.com, please click here to provide your comments. I would love to hear about your own futures of work.

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Digital Disruption demands a new approach to ERP

Andy Mulholland

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

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

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ERP is back on the agenda, but not as Enterprise ‘Resource’ Planning, to run a successful Digital Business you need a different approach to ERP. Better to think of it as Enterprise ‘Response’ Planning, the ability to support a dynamic Digital Business where the very business activities are constantly changing.

It seems a little late, perhaps by even a decade or more, to be thinking about ERP. Surely any competitive enterprise has been there, done that and got the benefits as part of the last wave of Business and Technology disruption starting in the early 90s? More importantly that means the choice of an ERP package has been made, and a big investment carried out. Making changes? Keep them to a minimum as its not just expensive, but this is tinkering with the very foundations of how the enterprise operates.

And there is the problem, for any established Enterprise their ERP installation defines their very operating model and capabilities’. A business model where optimization is defined by choosing optimized processes and reducing, even eliminating, variation and change on the basis of inefficiently and cost.

ERP, as it is generally understood today, defines the business model created by Business Process Re-Engineering that was built on the new disruptive capabilities of PCs and Networks. This was previous business model disruption to take advantage of the competitive benefits of the then new wave of technologies/capabilities.

Right now Enterprises are facing up to their new business model disruption and competitive opportunity with the challenge of moving beyond the first generation of Digital Business. (The addition of an online capability in front of their existing business model to increase sales exposure and direct revenues without changing any other aspects of their business – see links at the end of this blog for more detail).

For the last couple of years there has been no shortage of Business School detail on defining the new business model to survive, and prosper, in a fully Digital economy, where the competitive rules are different. If you change your business model it should come as no surprise that you should examine changing your ERP operational supporting model! So the topic of what form of ‘ERP’ solution has the capability to manage a new and entirely different business model needs to be back on the table.

If you had the luxury of starting a new business built around the generally accepted principles of the new Digital Business; a de centralized market and customer reactive business based on using services to minimize overheads and increase flexibility, etc. would you choose to re install your current ERP system?

Note the word re install, not necessary choose a different supplier, but how would you implement one? Maybe there are a few enterprises that could come up with a reason for investing in owning, and operating, the existing model in this environment. However the answer from everyone else, and certainly true for the new startup Digital Business players, is that you would use ‘Services’ on a pay as you go basis, plus, and it’s the big point, gain huge flexibility to adjust your ERP processes frequently in line with how your market, business and activities are changing with circumstances and opportunities.

The big ERP providers are equally aware of this too, and the existing leaders from the last decade are all offering their capabilities as Services, accepting smaller customers, and facing up to their own competitive wave of startups offering ‘Digital Business’ supportive ERP.

Digital Business, whether a new startup, or a new operating group in an existing Enterprise, is all about a new business model based on frequent change to make the most of opportunistic circumstance. Delivered by using Services that are directly cost attributed to the outcome, allowing flexibility in ‘process’, or actions, achieved by minimizing all overheads. That is not a business model to fit existing Enterprise ERP systems and implementations! New business model = new ERP model!

Actually the case for better management in these ultra dynamic Digital Business operations is higher than in the optimized process business model of existing business, but its role is subtly different. Lets call it Digital-ERP to differentiate because the R now stands for “Enterprise Response Management’, and it has to provide managed ‘responses’ to frequently changing business outcomes. It also has to tie with a new set of management financial controls that reflect an overhead light, low investment, direct cost allocated Digital Business model, (for more information on the new financial controls see links at the end of this blog).

A Digital Business unit needs new management and financial operational controls that suit and match with its basic business ethos; the case for introducing a new approach using Digital-ERP and a new set of Financial controls at the outset is a strong one. It doesn’t necessarily mean changing ERP supplier, though it is an opportunity to re examine what is available in the market, but it does mean changing ERP implementation and use!

This topic, and the conclusions above, formed part of the discussions at the London event of the Constellation Digital Disruption tour. The discussions where helped by the London event being sponsored by FinancialForce.com who has grown rapidly over the last five years as a new wave ERP, or Digital-ERP, market player. More information on the following topics on the above, and aligned topics, can be found in the following Constellation blogs;

Its Smart Business now and not Digital Business; https://www.constellationr.com/content/sell-more-today-then-its-digital-business-survival-smart-business

Mastering new financial controls for Digital Business; https://www.constellationr.com/content/digital-business-mastering-new-financial-controls 

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5 Ways Retailers Can Take Advantage of IoT Today - Video

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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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The Internet of Things (IoT) is viewed as a major driver of the third Industrial Revolution. There is no question that the connectivity of "things" will only continue to affect how businesses run in the future.

Retail and CPG companies do not have to wait until IoT matures before making investments in IoT. Investment in IoT in the near-term will improve customer experience, demonstrate positive returns on investment in IoT, and lay down the ground work for the eventual maturity of IoT.

Here are five ways retailers can take advantage of IoT today. This video concludes with advice for CXOs making near and long-term investments in IoT. 

Research report - Retail: Prepare for the IoT Revolution

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Advanced Analytics Now Within Reach

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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Business leaders want to see what’s coming, not just read reports on what happened last week or last quarter. Advanced analytics represents a class of software that helps companies go beyond historical reporting to predict future opportunities and risks. (For more information read my self-service analytics market overview of IBM Watson Analytics, SAP Lumira, and SAS Visual Analytics.) Predictive analyses help identify best customers, develop better up-sell and cross-sell offers, understand financial risks, choose new products, and anticipate equipment failures.

Until recently, advanced analytics were the province of statisticians and data scientists, but that’s changing with the emergence of self-service options for analytics. Vendors are pursuing two broad approaches: 

BI meets prediction: Products focused primarily on self-service BI (e.g., data exploration, data visualization, dashboarding and reporting) are being enhanced with predictive features. Products taking this general approach include Microsoft Power BI, Qlik Sense, SAP Lumira, and Tableau, among others.

Analytics simplified: Products include the basics of BI but are focused primarily on advanced analytics have simple, drag-and-drop or point-and-click interfaces and built-in automation features. In most cases, these tools are aimed at data-savvy analyst types. Products falling into this category include Alteryx, Alpine Data Labs’ Enterprise Platform, SAP Predictive Analytics, SAS Visual Analytics/Visual Statistics, and TIBCO Spotfire. 

Selecting the right advanced analytics solution for your organization will depend on the breadth of your deployment, the skill level of your users, and the nature of the decisions users are trying to support. Use the guide below to evaluate analytics solutions for your organization. 

Resources

IBM Watson Analytics: Self-Service Analytics Market Overview

SAS Visual Analytics: Self-Service Analytics Market Overview

SAP Lumira with Predictive Analytics 2.0: Self-Service Analytics Market Overview

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Spark On Fire: Why All The Hype?

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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Spark Summit event report: IBM unveiled big plans for Apache Spark this week, but it’s not alone in banking on this open source analytics platform. Here’s why this still-green technology is quickly gaining adoption.

Why is Apache Spark, an open-source project that only reached its 1.0 release a little more than a year ago, getting so much attention?

IBM, for one, announced a big commitment to the platform at this week’s Spark Summit in San Francisco. And as IBM execs told analysts at the company’s new Spark Technology Center here, it’s an all-in bet to integrate nearly everything in the analytics portfolio with Spark. Other tech vendors betting on Spark range from Amazon to Zoomdata, even as real-world deployments number in the hundreds and are mostly experiments and proof-of-concept projects.

Describing Spark as “an operating system for analytics,” IBM execs cited Spark strengths including:

• Abstracted data management. Spark lets data scientists focus on the analysis, not data movement, as data pipelines can access data where it lies, whether that’s in Hadoop, in a database, or on Spark’s own cluster.
• Rich data-processing functionality. The Spark Core provides a flexible data-processing platform supporting distributed task management, scheduling, and basic I/O functionality as well as transformations such as map, filter, reduce and join.
• In-memory performance. The Spark Core delivers up to 100 times faster performance than Hadoop MapReduce. In iterative machine learning and other predictive analyses, you can squeeze in that many more processing cycles against all of the data, not just samples of data.
• Plentiful analytics options. IBM execs didn’t dwell on this strength, but Spark offers multiple analytic libraries than run on top of the core, including MLLib (machine learning), Spark SQL, Graph X, Spark Streaming and, released last week, Spark R. IBM plans to run its own software on top of the platform, including SPSS, IBM Streams, and (soon to be open sourced) SystemML, all of which are being ported to run on Spark.

In contrast to IBM, analytics rival SAS views Spark as a competitor. For more than three years, SAS has been working on its own big-data-capable, in-memory analytics platform, the SAS LASR Analytics Server, which runs SAS Visual Analytics (VA) and SAS Visual Statistics (VS) as well as SAS analytics libraries. The SAS LASR Analytic Server can be deployed on a single server, on a dedicated cluster, or on top of Hadoop (see my just-published report, “The Era of Self-Service Analytics Emerges: Inside SAS Visual Analytics and Visual Statistics”).

When I asked SAS about its views on Spark earlier this week, product manager Mike Ames offered the following (lukewarm) statement: “While Spark is currently an immature technology, it shows promise with rapid adoption as a result of its data processing capabilities. SAS and Spark are very capable of coexisting, with products such as SAS Data Loader for Hadoop, which can push transform logic to Spark.”

SAS is right about Spark’s immaturity. I’ve talked to practitioners and integrators who acknowledge that the technology is still green. Like a lot of 1.X open-source software projects, Spark is still buggy and it doesn’t have all the table-stakes systems-management, security and high-availability features that many enterprises would insist upon before running mission-critical workloads.

That’s not to say that Spark is incapable of running production workloads reliably or at scale. Hundreds of companies are doing just that, but they tend to be pioneers with an appetite for innovation and strong engineering teams that are willing to fix bugs and develop best practices where none exist.

Plenty of early adopters presented at Spark Summit, including Airbnb, Baidu, Edmunds.com, NASA, NBC Universal, Netflix, Shopify, Toyota Motor Sales, and Under Armour. Keynoter James Peng, principal architect at Baidu, the Google of China, described that company’s 1,000-plus-node, petabyte-scale Spark deployment, which is delivering 50 times faster performance than the conventional MapReduce processing it previously relied upon. Baidu is also pioneering the use of Spark SQL and the Tachyon caching layer.

MyPOV on Spark

Yes, it’s early days for Spark, but there’s good reason why IBM described it as “potentially the most significant open-source project of the next decade.” SAS acknowledged Spark’s data-processing capabilities, but that’s just the starting point. Even IBM’s characterization of Spark as “an operating system for analytics” seems like a left-handed compliment.

With all those libraries on top of the Spark Core – machine learning, SQL, graph, streaming and R — Databricks and the Spark community are trying to build out an all-purpose analytics platform capable of supporting many forms of analysis and blended analyses. By blending machine learning and streaming, for example, you could create a real-time risk-management app. What’s more, Spark supports development in Scala, Java, Phython and R, which is another reason the community is growing so quickly.

At Spark Summit, Amazon Web Services announced a free Spark service running on Amazon Elastic Map Reduce, and IBM announced plans for Spark services on BlueMix (currently in private beta) and SoftLayer. These cloud services will open the floodgates to developers, and IBM’s contributions will surely help to harden the Spark Core for enterprise adoption.

In short, it’s hard to see any open-source project matching Spark on depth and breadth of analysis and development flexibility (despite a prominent tout of Apache Flink at last week’s Hadoop Summit). And that’s why you’re hearing so much about Spark.

Data to Decisions IBM Chief Information Officer