Google and Indicio progress verifiable credentials in the cloud

Steve Wilson

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

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Breaking news

Verifiable credential innovator Indicio has joined the Google Cloud Partner Advantage program, a partnership that gives Google Cloud customers access to a proven family of open-source solutions and software components for authenticating and sharing high-value information.  This enhancement to the Google Cloud will make digital verifiable credentials easier to issue and easier to verify. 

By extending verifiable credentials as a service, Google and Indicio will make this critical technology more accessible to enterprises.  In particular, any organisation will be able to build verifiable credential solutions within existing technology and business infrastructure. 

Indico CEO Heather Dahl was recently awarded the 2022 Constellation Supernova Award for Digital Safety, Governance, and Privacy.  While the Google parrtnship was still under wraps, Heather spoke about decentralisation of identity information on a panel at Constellation’s Connected Enterprise #CCE2022 innovation summit on October 26. This blog picks up some of her points.

Taming the technology

Cryptographic containers will become the norm for conveying almost any important facts and figures about ourselves, from driver licences and passports through financial services and healthcare accounts, to loyalty programs and gym memberships.  But the technology seems daunting. It calls out for outsourcing. 

Businesses, governments, universities, libraries and clubs have for decades been ordering membership tokens (usually plastic cards) from specialist bureaus. In the digital economy, these physical tokens will pivot to verifiable credentials. And I believe the outsourced business model for procuring them will remain much the same as they have been for cards.

The key is to get verifiable credentials technology into the cloud.

Verifiable credentials are allabout context. To issue them without friction and to impart the greatest meaning, VCs need to be published direct from the source of truth. 

The best way to prove yourself digitally

Verifiable credentials are becoming a uniform way of proving important facts about people and also machines (i.e. non-human actors). In a huge range of applications, if you want the ability to prove something about users or about devices, then verifiable credentials provide an “authenticity layer”.

A verifiable credential is a digital statement about a specific fact about a subject, signed by a recognised issuer, and bound to the subject, usually through a key pair controlled by the subject. Verifiable credentials allow the subject to present the credential cryptographically whenever they need to prove the fact to another party.

The basic pattern is well established.  Chip-and-PIN cards are one of the earliest verifiable credentials. The international e-passport has similar functions and benefits.  But these examples operate within proprietary and rigid public key infrastructures. 

For broader adoption and wider accessibility of the verified information, new digital credentials standards are emerging from industry groups such as Hyperledger Indy and open standards bodies, especially right now the World Wide Web Consortium.  There has been enormous interest in this technology to convey COVID results and vaccination status. After a great many pilots, a few stable solutions have emerged, including Indicio’s Digital Travel Credential.

Beyond human subjects to the IoT

On the Internet of Things, autonomous agents are communicating with one another, making increasingly automatic decisions in real time. For security and reliability, precise information about devices is required; it must be machine readable, verifiable instantly, endorsed, and reliable.  Verifiable credentials are perfect for delivering these properties.

So verifiable credentials are not just for humans. Indeed, Heather Dahl told as at #CCE2022 that around fifty percent of Indicio’s verifiable credentials are issued to non-human subjects; that is, IoT devices. And she expects the share going to device credentials will keep increasing.

Beyond identity to data

Indicio is on a mission to extend verifiable credential patterns to verify data in general.  Heather describes the Indicio Proven platform as a technology for “managing devices and machines and accelerating digital transformation across every sector.”  The platform embodies a philosophy of machine readable governance, which I take to mean that the vital metadata about how a system has been designed, tested and audited is also in scope for cryptographic verification.

Heather reported that very few of Indicio’s customers ever call the company “asking for an identity solution”. Identity is not the way that they frame their authenticity and data quality objectives.  

Indicio in my opinion is on the leading edge of a movement to treat data as a critical utility and deliver it at scale with machine readable verifiable quality metrics.

Was it Magic or Was it Dreamforce?

Liz Miller

Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

About Liz Miller: Liz Miller is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation, focused on the org-wide team sport known as customer experience. While covering CX as an enterprise strategy, Miller spends time zeroing in on the functional demands of Marketing and Service and the evolving role of the Chief Marketing Officer, the rise of the Chief Experience Officer, the evolution of customer engagement, and the rising requirement for a new security posture that accounts for the threat to brand trust in this age of AI. With over 30 years of marketing experience, Miller offers strategic guidance on the leadership, business transformation, and technology requirements to deliver on today’s CX strategies. She has worked with global marketing organizations to transform everything from…...

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The campground for business reopened for the first time since the pandemic in September welcoming business leaders, MVPs, Trailblazers, developers and yes, even us analysts back to the familiar embrace of the forest. Truth be told I was expecting more of a “first day of camp” excitement vibe running through the crowd. Instead, what I felt was an intense desire to get back to the work of running a business on Salesforce.

That’s not to say the feeling wasn’t celebratory…it’s simply to say that the Salesforce community was ready to get back to it. As the theme of Dreamforce 2022 stated: it was a family reunion. And this family WORKS. The pared down footprint allowed the community to rally and gather, but also allowed for a more focused experience where live attendees could really dive into areas of interest, get knee deep into demos and have more time with subject matter experts in core solutions across the Salesforce portfolio. Thanks to the ongoing content being streamed on Salesforce+, virtual attendees were pulled into the campground with special features and behind the scenes views exclusive to the audience at home. (If you missed it, of course, you can still check out Dreamforce 2022 on Salesforce+.)

One thing that was exactly as expected was the opening keynote from the familiar Hawaiian blessing to the star-studded special guests (let’s just get this out of the way…Nobody but NOBODY will ever say no to a Lenny Kravitz moment to start the day.) What stood out was the dynamic between the co-CEOs, Marc Benioff with his larger-than-life exuberance and Bret Taylor with his pragmatic, steadying presence.

In 2020, I tweeted that I was exceedingly concerned that Marc Benioff needed a hug. He was there, standing alone in Salesforce Park looking glum and repeatedly saying “this isn’t the Dreamforce we wanted” with no audience and only Bret to keep him company. If he needed a hug, he got it in 2022, walking around the stage celebrating the growth of Salesforce while even taking a moment to deliver kudos to SAP on reaching their 50th anniversary.

The keynote exemplified the balance that the co-CEOs seem to bring to the overarching leadership of Salesforce itself: dreams of massive, unfettered innovation and the steady pragmatic knowledge that takes those dreams and turns them into reality. The ultimate display of this partnership was when Benioff playfully slapped bunny ears on himself to joyously herald the entry of Genie to the Salesforce fold. Without missing a beat, laughing and rolling with the fun, Taylor proceeded to interview the digital leader of Ford Motors about their capacity to transform their driver and customer experience with Salesforce. Nothing to see here folks…just another day at the office. Moments later, Taylor had his own bunny ears, willing to join the fun to the thrill of the MVPs sitting one section away. Yes, there is a playfulness. But through the entire keynote, you didn’t just see the co-respect of these co-CEOs, you could feel it.

Now to the meat of Dreamforce: the announcements. Genie was the big magical reveal. Salesforce more directly calls this data service a hyperscale real-time data platform. Genie extends the power of traditionally siloed Marketing CDP to the entirety of the customer experience (CX) front line. Intended as a shared service across all clouds, Genie, as one would expect from a CDP, unifies and harmonizes a broad and complex array of customer data into a persistent record of a customer, available to power personalization and focused, relevant engagement regardless of function.

This is, as I have often argued, the true value of a CDP. There is a reason the CDP is NOT called a Marketing Data Platform…its value will never be fully realized if relegated to being a marketing toy for marketing things.

Genie focuses on what can be learned about the customer and shares that with any user. Think of this as bi-directional context: based on the context of the Salesforce user (eg: Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud or Service Cloud user) Genie unearths and uplevels insights, automated actions and engagement optimization recommendations specific to the context of a customer or customer segment. It takes the context of the customer and binds that to the context of the business user to make…well…magic.

What elicited cheers from the Dreamforce audience was Genie’s capacity to help normalize and harmonize data…cleaning up the pathways that turn random stacks of data into individual, more comprehensive and complete customer records. The reality of customer records is that for every one customer, there are 900+ systems that collect data from or about that customer. So instead of Liz…you have Lizx900. Personalization occurs by accident in this scenario. Thanks to Genie’s capacity to reconcile data and identifiers, the haze and exhaust surrounding a persona turns crystal clear and becomes a person that can be engaged with regardless of where that person has engaged.

This is just the beginning of the Genie journey. Yes, Genie is battle-tested…both by Salesforce using Genie to run Dreamforce and as the CDP unleashed in the Marketing cloud use case since October 2020. Genie is generally available today, applied within the specific clouds (as in Service Genie, Sales Genie and Marketing Genie) but expect to see those use case applications start to evolve into cross cloud opportunities.

While Genie was Dreamforce’s big clap of thunder, I couldn’t help but lean in and take note of some of the “smaller” yet equally important announcements including the updates and upgrades coming to Slack. It would be hard to argue that the demand for collaboration tools has quieted in the last year. In fact, leaders are daring their teams and their tech to enable and empower collaboration in new and more visual ways. This is what makes Slack’s new features in Slack huddles a welcome addition. While huddles have always simulated that group meeting concept of popping into a conference room for a quick meeting at the office into the digital HQ by including groups to spontaneously huddle, react, send an Astley or 10, white board, take notes and share screens, now you can include video into that mix while staying in one familiar place where ever that physical place might be. Once that meeting is over, the newly launched canvas becomes the digital surface that captures all of the output and resulting actions and notes that came out of that huddle.

If canvas feels familiar…it should for Salesforce’s Quip faithful. Quip has been fully integrated with Slack giving you an interactive content repository and space for background, key information, content and notes.

It wouldn’t be a Dreamforce wrap up without making mention of Einstein. While the little fellow didn’t make too many virtual pop ins, you could sense that unlike previous years where Einstein was talked about almost like an application that turned on or off….2022 was the year that Einstein started being spoken about as a unifying shared service…a service that was now being unleashed into a massive new pool of data being harmonized thanks to Genie. This eclectic pair are poised to truly reshape how intelligence is gathered and served across the Salesforce ecosystem. Also watch for a LOT more with the combination of Genie, Einstein and flow. This won't just be a matter of more AI or even about AI having access to more data. This is about automating a broad array of possible actions (and reactions) based on the insights and understanding of that data.

Yes. It was nice to head back to camp. But it was even better to see just how energized and ready to work all the campers were. Dare I say it…everyone was ready for a little magic…and with products in GA and teams ready to run…Dreamforce delivered.

Verifiable credentials are coming as a service; it's a proven business model

Steve Wilson

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

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In the next few years, the soaring demand for customised verifiable credentials (VCs) means we’ll see the emergence of managed services to deliver them. How might these managed services work? There’s a solid precedent.

VCs are increasingly being used for everything from digitised vaccination certificates to records of educational achievements. As they come to be used for more applications at a variety of scales, economies of scale will make it inevitable that the management of the VCs themselves, and all the associated security measures, will be provided as a service.

There’s a clear precedent for this type of managed service: the magnetic stripe card industry.

All sorts of organisations use plastic card bureaus to produce a huge variety of customised licences, employee badges, membership cards, student cards, tickets, and so on.

All magnetic stripe cards work in a near-identical fashion, yet each one is distinct, clearly branded, and readily identified for its particular purpose without any special knowledge.

The plastic card could be the greatest user interface standard of all time. People all over the world are habituated to presenting plastic cards to other people to prove their bona fides, and to terminals for automatic recognition.

Plastic cards are most commonly read by terminals via the magnetic stripe, but several other electronic interfaces are available, including 1D and 2D bar codes, contactless radio frequency identification (RFID) and direct contact chip readers. Most customers have become comfortable with this range of interfaces, and they’ll switch between modes without much thought at all.

The card industry ecosystem is mature. The commercial bureaus can provide a wide variety of customised cards. They handle certified secure production and distribution of the cards. There are well-understood demarcations in liability between the bureaus and their customers, who are usually the sources of the credentials .

The plastic card paradigm has some powerful features which are instructive for the emerging VCs-as-a-service industry.

• A competitive market of card personalisation bureaus, providing custom production, magnetic stripe encoding, and card distribution and activation, all in commercial bundles which can be purchased by government agencies, banks, professional associations, universities, driver licence bureaus, and so on. On the rear of many plastic cards, the card manufacturer is indicated in fine print. It may well be that the same manufacturer produced your credit cards and government cards.
• The production process is highly technical but hidden entirely by the outsourcer. Consider for example the critical composition and quality of the ferrite powders that constitute the stripe. Those powders and the rolls of bulk stripes are provided by specialist upstream manufacturers. As with the secure printing of cheque books, prescription pads, and lottery tickets, the production of plastic cards entails strict controls over inventory, shipping, and personnel security. The facilities are generally audited and may even be subject to government licensing.
• Within the business model there was a built-in upgrade path for data carrier technology. Cards evolved over time, from mag stripe to microprocessor (i.e. smartcards) and to NFC (tap-and-go) with little or no change to the user experience, and no change at all to the user agreements.
• A highly uniform user experience. Most automatic teller machines, point of sale terminals, ticketing machines, and self-service kiosks work in nearly identical ways.
• Most importantly, plastic cards are not identities. Most cards are simply treated as evidence of specific memberships or other attributes.

While “digital identity” designers and policymakers often fret about “interoperability”, they usually mean equivalence. Yet that question just doesn’t come up with plastic card credentials. There is rarely any question of “equivalence” between the many different cards, even if they happen to be manufactured by the one bureau.

The possibility doesn’t even arise in one’s mind that a bank card could be equivalent to a student card, company ID badge, or sports club entry token.

Every issuer of the respective base credential is free to set its own membership rules. The gory details of those rules, including legal liabilities, are set out somewhere for verifiers to understand as they need. But it is no business of the card bureau. To a card bureau, a platinum card with a $100,000 limit is no different from the entry level credit card.  

So the plastic card market shows us how to keep things simple. 

Businesses use card bureau services in a mature and uncomplicated way. No one really thinks a plastic card is an “identity” (moreover the World Health Organisation has been clear that COVID certificates should not be treated as identities). Certain cards can be used as elements of identification in some scenarios but strict limits apply. 

And even when a special card does conform identity, no one thinks of the card printer as an “identity provider”.

Organisations don’t wrap themselves up in a tangle of philosophical or legal issues when engaging card printers to provide credit cards, Medicare cards, employee badges, or sports club memberships. They simply send files of their members’ names and details to a bureau, and the bureau manufactures cards in bulk and sends them back, or in many cases also handles the distribution to the end users.

It’s a nice clean supply chain and outsourced service model. The responsibilities and liabilities are clear every step of the way. The same principles need to be replicated for cryptographic verifiable credentials as a service.  The detailed custoization, production and distribution of these precise cryptographic bundles should be left to experts and the end-product procured in bulk.  

Twitter in the Musk Era: What’s In Store for Brands?

Liz Miller

Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

About Liz Miller: Liz Miller is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation, focused on the org-wide team sport known as customer experience. While covering CX as an enterprise strategy, Miller spends time zeroing in on the functional demands of Marketing and Service and the evolving role of the Chief Marketing Officer, the rise of the Chief Experience Officer, the evolution of customer engagement, and the rising requirement for a new security posture that accounts for the threat to brand trust in this age of AI. With over 30 years of marketing experience, Miller offers strategic guidance on the leadership, business transformation, and technology requirements to deliver on today’s CX strategies. She has worked with global marketing organizations to transform everything from…...

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On October 28, 2019, Elon Musk's tweet read: “I hate advertising.” On October 27, 2022, Elon Musk completed his much ballyhooed and debated acquisition of Twitter.

Musk’s loathing of advertising has been well documented. In May of 2019, he tweeted a clarification on Tesla’s advertising-free marketing strategy saying “Tesla does not advertise or pay for endorsements. Instead, we use that money to make the product great.”

For the purpose of this post, I’m going to set aside the pages I could write on the irony of the “great product” statement… we can talk about why the Tesla service department has repeatedly told me that our car’s AC system just naturally smells like feet, and we shouldn’t be so focused on how the car smells at a later date. Musk has been abundantly clear that in the balance between paid, earned and owned media, paid media is the value-less leg of the stool.

It is also worthwhile to take a step back and think about what Twitter actually IS to best determine what impact this Musk-era Twitter might mean.

Some say that Twitter is a media company that must subsidize its capacity to host a broad, global, democratized media destination that holds professional accounts (from journalists and their publications to marketers and their brands) in equal footing to citizen creators. In this construct, the value proposition of a “universal town square for all” could draw larger audiences willing to accept and consider new subscription models, especially those models where advertising and promoted content is removed.

If this new massive recurring revenue base became predictable and stable over time, Musk could easily show advertising the door and instead charge a heftier fee to allow brands permission to even HAVE accounts. This model has been batted around in the days prior to the acquisition and Musk himself has noted that this could be an attractive path forward.

Others believe Twitter is an advertising business that leverages citizen creators, brands and media accounts to attract more users hungry for quick snippets of information or engagement. This audience would, in turn, represent a massive potential audience for targeted promoted content and advertising.

In this construct, quantity should theoretically win out over quality, requiring a constant stream of new users and accounts to flood into the community to constantly keep the waters full of prospective customers for advertisers hungry for clicks and views. This becomes a model where advertising pays the whole tab. “Cherry on top” revenue like subscriptions and priority access options like Twitter blue become important for bigger numbers but are not the primary focus of revenue projections. The revenue possibilities in this model could be endless when you consider the data Twitter can aggregate and “share” across an advertising network made up of…I don’t know…a global car company perhaps? Does SpaceX join the party and leverage the systems behind Twitter Spaces for pay-per-journey virtual trips into space or even ad-supported free virtual views? An interstellar ad network could make the Metaverse feel small.

Basically, Musk should get over his hatred of advertising. Quickly.

Regardless of how Musk views the platform, the immediate risk to his bottom line lies squarely in his own hands…more specifically his own Twitter account. Alienating users OR advertisers in week one is quite literally risky business. Musk, while audacious and bombastic, has the business sense to understand this. In fact, by Thursday’s take-over, he had already tweeted an “open” message to advertisers noting that his altruistic intentions to create a safe, free and vast space for all conversations will benefit advertisers. By Friday, Musk was making public statements indicating that accounts that had once been banned will NOT return until a broad coalition committee is formed to review policies and accounts. Despite all this, misinformation exploded including lots of celebration that Kanye West's account had been reinstated despite it never being banned.

Ironically, Musk isn’t Twitter’s biggest problem when it comes to advertisers. Twitter’s faltering value proposition has been YEARS old dating back to Dorsey-era Twitter where everything from weak content moderation policies, questionable measurement and fraudulent reporting repeatedly haunted the brand. While Musk will have to clearly articulate a value proposition to users intent on using Twitter as a content-forward social platform, he will ALSO have to clearly articulate a business vision and proposition that goes beyond the current (and often politicized) hype cycles.

Musk acknowledges the risk, joking he doesn’t intend to allow Twitter to become a free-for-all hell-scape. Yet we all understand human behavior…slowing down on the digital highway to watch the spectacle of a free-for-all hell-scape is akin to rubbernecks and a multi-car pileup…sometimes you can’t help but slow down and let curiosity take over. The descent could be fascinating to watch…but it won’t create the stickiness any durable business plan will require.

At this stage of the game, brand advertisers are in let’s see how this plays out mode…and I’m right there with them. Top leaders have been shown the door, including the Head of Legal Policy…as of penning this, the CMO and Head of People are still in the building. People will continue to do what people do…self-select what information and signals they allow into their world. On a personal level, my own Twitter experience will remain the same as I’ve seen professional engagement lessen over the last several years and more robust conversations transition to other networks like LinkedIn. But when there is an earthquake, Twitter is my first stop to see if Dr. Lucy has confirmed (if you know...you know.) Increasingly, users like me have started to think of Twitter as a source of “infotainment” to check what one-liners Steak-Umms has churned out today.

In the end, we will all have to wait to see and hear Musk’s business vision and see how that vision is turned into action by the leaders he installs to run the day to day. But I’ll just say this now…if Twitter starts to smell like the odor that comes from my Tesla’s AC, we are gonna be in for a bumpy ride.

News Analysis: Big Tech Earnings Q3 2022

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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HOT TAKE: Can Era Software bring a new Era to ServiceNow that they are hoping for?

Andy Thurai

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

About Andy Thurai Andy Thurai is an accomplished IT executive, strategist, advisor, enterprise architect and evangelist with more than 25 years of experience in executive, technical, and architectural leadership positions at companies such as IBM, Intel, BMC, Nortel, and Oracle. Andy has written more than 100 articles on emerging technology topics for publications such as Forbes, The New Stack, AI World, VentureBeat, DevOps.com, GigaOm and Wired. Andy’s fields of interest and expertise include AIOps, ITOps, Observability, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Cloud, Edge, and other enterprise software. His strength is selling technology to the CxO audience with a value proposition rather than the usual technology sales pitch. Find more details and samples of Andy’s work on his…...

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What is in the news: ServiceNow acquires Era Software for undisclosed terms. ServiceNow acquired Lightstep last year in May (2021) and it’s strengthening its observability portfolio with this acquisition. I had a briefing from Ben Sigelman, GM, Lightstep division of ServiceNow, and Todd Persen, CEO of Era Software.

What does Era do: Era Software, which started as EraDB, is a centralized log management solution that was co-founded by Todd Persen in 2019 and based in Seattle. They connect with most open-source log collectors such as FluentBit, FluentD, and LogStash, which are predominant in cloud-native applications and offer a way to centralize logs to cheaper storage locations such as Amazon S3. They currently offer an on-premises, self-hosted solution or a SaaS version on the AWS cloud.

Why it matters: ServiceNow realized enterprises are moving to cloud-native at a much faster pace with pandemic-induced digital maturity.

When incidents happen, while metrics and tracing can help isolate the problem, logging generally is used to identify the cause of the incident quickly assuming the developers properly created logs. Especially in the cloud-native architecture, the applications are architected as microservice components. The smaller DevOps teams are responsible for smaller components and are expected to produce code velocity that can release many changes to a (micro)service on a daily basis. Given the lack of total visibility, logs become a critical component to understanding what happened inside a service if it is broken. However, cloud-native architectures also produce a ton of logs. Large enterprises can produce hundreds of terabytes of logs to even petabytes (PB) of logs per day, though PBs of logs are rare. With that volume of logs, searching, storing, analyzing, moving, and generally managing are all very expensive for large enterprises. Logs are also generally retained by enterprises for a lot longer than other observability metrics for later analysis, audit, and forensic evidence as needed. Siloed logs can lead to a different set of problems. Centralized logs, at a cheaper cost, to handle such volume is a dream come true for a lot of enterprises. Most legacy log vendors not only struggle to cope with that volume but also cost overruns can be prohibitive.

Constellation POV:

Era brings the sorely lacked log management capability to the Lightstep observability platform. While the petabyte scale search capabilities, index free, zero schema approach and low-cost object storage options such as Amazon S3 are very appealing to enterprises, Era Software is a dark horse that hasn’t been proven in the enterprise market yet. Based on my conversations with some of the CXO customer executives, and observability practitioners who have evaluated the solution recently:

1. The ServiceNow acquisition takes the issue of financial viability off the table for Era Software prospects. Having a venerable vendor such as ServiceNow behind Era Software’s capability will improve confidence and cross-sell.
2. Large enterprises already have a well-implemented log solution (even for the cloud-native logs) in place. Given how complex enterprise log management systems can get, it will not be viable for those large enterprises to rip and replace an existing solution with a newer one. Those larger log management systems themselves have become observability solutions over the years. It will be much harder for ServiceNow, even with this combined solution set, to break into those enterprises.
3. Existing log management solutions are expanding their observability solution set at a much more rapid pace than ServiceNow. While they may be lacking ServiceNow’s flagship tracing capabilities, most of them have a decent competing solution in place already.
4. Era is not a worthy full observability solution until now. Based on the roadmap plan, it will be mid-to-late 2023 before Lightstep + Era Software + ServiceNow can offer a fully baked-in, combined solution that might appeal to large enterprises for total observability. By then, a lot of them might have been deeply entrenched with other worthy competitors.
5. While Era Software offers a decent log collection capability for cloud-native, it lacks integrations with data center log collection capabilities for the hybrid enterprise.
6. The overall solution set is very narrow and focused on logs; it doesn’t offer a lot of capabilities that mature observability solutions do (when they were just Era Software). But this acquisition adds the right elements such as logs, metrics, and traces to bring the required observability signals to one platform.
7. While Era touts a lower entry point in pricing and much more value addition and much lower TCO than the famous, and very commonly used, log provider Elastic, the evaluators suggested they don’t have the capabilities that are offered by Elastic at the current time. Hence, they decided to pass.
8. Sending logs to an off-location, and cheaper storage can lead to a set of its own problems such as compliance, security, GDPR, and other privacy-based issues. How would that be handled in the combined solution? (ServiceNow stated that privacy and security are important and that Lightstep and Era Software combination will go thru this exercise to offer customers with choice and control of how their data is stored and secure, but that remains to be seen after the integration).
9. The lightweight, can-run-anywhere option is appealing – the solution can run locally and have a hot cash, or run at cloud locations as well if SaaS managed service.
10. S3 compatible storage and federated search options without moving the logs around are very appealing. But competitors, such as Splunk, introduced similar functionalities as well.
11. At the current time cost might be an appealing factor, we don’t really know how the combined pricing will look in the near future when the platform comes into shape.

Bottomline:

Digital transformation succeeds, or fails, based on observability implementation – whether it is cloud-native or hybrid. Visibility and holistic observability are foundational components of any digital application.

Because of that, the observability market is huge. Yet, when you think of observability, ServiceNow is not the first name that comes to mind. They are hoping to change that. ServiceNow acquired a decent tracing solution in Lightstep in 2021, and now acquired a decent technology that can help them bring logs into the Lightstep observability platform fold. They also promised to continue to build the functionality to appeal to large enterprises.

The competition is also heating up with all APM vendors and log management vendors adding decent wholistic observability solutions over the last few years. Is what ServiceNow doing is enough, and will they be able to build the missing pieces fast enough? Only time can tell. When the integrated Lightstep platform is ready to go, it might be worthy of consideration.

What do you think?

Further Reading:

1. Blog - News Analysis: Major Announcements From Splunk .conf22 Bring Observability and Security to the Forefront
2. Blog - Crisis/Incident Management in the Digital Era
3. Blog - In Digital Economy, You Should Fail Fast, But Must Also Recover Fast
4. Research Report - 2022 Trends in Site Reliability Engineering
5. Research Report - 2022 Trends in Incident Management
6. Research Report - Constellation ShortList™ Observability

Workday Rising 2022: Measuring Progress on Planning

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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Workday executives and customers detailed the evolution of the company’s ‘plan, execute, analyze’ platform at Workday Rising 2022 in Orlando.

In what seems like a wrinkle in time, it has now been four years since Workday acquired Adaptive Insights (since renamed Workday Adaptive Planning). Funny how a pandemic can help to make time fly.

Flash forward to Workday Rising 2022, September 12-14 in Orlando, Fl, and it’s a good time to evaluate progress on the integration of Workday Adaptive Planning (Adaptive) with the rest of Workday, particularly its core Financial Management (ERP) and Human Capital Management (HCM) apps. Indeed, Adaptive has put the “plan” in what Workday now bills as its “plan, execute, analyze” platform.

The headline from Rising where Adaptive was concerned was the announcement of ML Forecaster, a machine-learning-based feature that promises to automatically generate forecasts based on historical as well as third-party data, such as weather data or labor statistics. Workday has been working on this feature for more than a year, according to executives, and it’s co-innovating with a handful of customers in a beta period that’s expected to extend into the first half of next year.

One such beta customer, Team Car Care, a major Jiffy Lube franchisee based in Irvine, TX, is said to be using a blend of historical and weather data with ML Forecaster in order to predict daily oil-change traffic at specific locations as well as related staffing and stocking requirements.

It's early days for ML Forecaster, which isn’t expected to be generally available until next year. The feature will cover a broad set of use cases across finance, in contrast to the single use case supported by Intelligent Demand Forecasting, introduced in 2021. Other ML/time-series-based capabilities supported by Adaptive include Outlier Reporting, introduced in 2020, and Anomaly Detection, added in 2018 before Workday’s acquisition.   

Workday isn’t the only vendor in the planning space adding ML-based features. We’ve seen ML-based “augmented” features added by Planful and Anaplan, among others. The theme is invariably around enabling and empowering operational and financial planners to get more work done and to be more predictive. In Workday’s case, common, platform-based ML capabilities are also being developed and applied to the vendor’s ERP and HCM apps (which are covered by my colleagues R “Ray” Wang and Holger Mueller, respectively).

Workday Integration and Adoption

According to Workday Co-CEO Chano Fernandez, 75% of Workday Financial Management customers have embraced Workday Adaptive Planning.

As for the progress in Adaptive’s integration with the rest of Workday and Workday customer adoption, executives were (predictably) upbeat. During an analyst  Q&A session, co-CEO Aneel Bhusri told me that the number of Workday Adaptive Planning customers now stands at about 6,000, up from around 3,800 at the time of the acquisition. He didn’t say how many of those are Workday customers that have added Adaptive, but Co-CEO Chano Fernendez noted that nearly 75% of Workday Financial Management customers have Workday Adaptive Planning. What’s more, he noted that the ability to support workforce planning and financial planning with Adaptive has provided a “halo effect” that’s increasing Workday’s win rate in competitive deals for new customers.

In conversations with customers, there were some complaints that a few basic aspects of integration between Adaptive and the Workday core are still in progress. User setup and administration, for example, still happens separately between Adaptive and other Workday apps, and in some cases, duplicate data entries are required. Bhusri acknowledged that integration work continues, but larger initiatives, such as Workday’s move into public clouds from Workday own data centers, may have to happen first. Workday Adaptive Planning continues to run on Amazon Web Services rather than on Workday’s cloud.

On future app ties, Sayan Chakraborty, Executive Vice President, Product and Technology, said that work is underway to integrate Adaptive with the Workday Skills Cloud. “We see interesting synergies for skills planning and learning planning [with Adaptive] as well as staffing of projects,” Chakraborty said.

As for the continuing appeal of Adaptive as a stand-alone offering, Bhusri noted ExxonMobil as recent major customer win for Workday Adaptive Planning (without the use of any other Workday apps). Before the acquisition, Adaptive Insights was popular mostly with midsized companies, but ExxonMobil’s selection validates scale and performance improvements that Workday has brought to the platform since the acquisition to better serve its large enterprise customers.

Doug’s take: I’m seeing good progress overall for Adaptive under Workday, though the pace of integration has been, in some regards, methodical. Are emerging ML-based features moving the needle for customers? I’d say it’s still early days -- across the industry and all planning/performance management vendors -- on how heavily financial and operational leaders are counting on ML-based features and forecasts. You hear about good use cases, but I haven’t read or had an opportunity to write case studies (nor have I seen SuperNova Awards nominations) featuring computer-augmented planning capabilities. I welcome vendors and practitioners alike to share their ML success stories.