HOT TAKE: DAM Good Buy as Acquia Expands DXP with Widen Pickup

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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For the record, I love the DAM space…and not just because it lets me say things like DAM space, DAM ShortList and DAM solution. Saying DAM all the time is just DAM fun. I’m adult enough to admit I’m not adult enough to let that DAM opportunity pass. But a DAM is a critical tool that has oddly been confused with or replaced by cloud file storage solutions that allow for controlled file transfer and access…please…I beg you…don’t make error in content judgement. It is part of the last mile of experience delivery. Stop thinking it is just a place to stick brand police stuff.

Now with that out of the way, let’s focus in on the news of the day and why it should turn some heads. Acquia, the digital darling of the open-source developer set, has announced their definitive agreement to acquire Widen, one of the longest running names in assets. Terms have not been made public at this point.

Founded in 1948 as Widen Engraving, this family-owned business has literally been at the heart of turning words and photos into engagement, engraving type onto plates which then churned newsprint. As print turned into color, Widen evolved into a print leader producing assets from brochures to ads. As print turned into digital, Widen evolved yet again applying the organization, collaboration and distribution processes and mindsets required to successfully create printed assets into a comprehensive digital asset management solution. Widen has literally been there from the earliest days when assets started to shift buyer and market perceptions.

Acquia is best known for providing the building blocks for how experiences are developed, displayed and deployed across an expanding list of digital presentation layers. Acquia splits into two product clouds, Drupal Cloud for composing and deploying experiences and Marketing Cloud for engagement development and orchestration. Acquia’s CMS comes in the exact size and shape an enterprise needs with traditional, hybrid and headless applications available, enabling content to flow where and how organizations intend and envision. Acquia’s Marketing Cloud takes that same open-source spirit of their CMS and applies it to how customer experiences and engagements are developed, deployed and optimized with a CDP, marketing automation and journey orchestration capabilities.

Now…an open-source digital experience platform has brought on a seriously enterprise grade DAM and product information management (PIM) solution for an end-to-end content operations and experience play. I like both of these solutions for very different reasons having named Acquia to the recent Constellation Shortlist for DXP and Widen to the ShortLists for DAM for High Volume Commerce, DAM for DX and PIM. This is a bit like the ultimate ShortList mash up. And gotta say...I like it. The thing to keep an eye on is where the DXP heads next.

For so many in the DXP space, focus has been on unifying the tools and the data that power the most powerful digital experiences from websites, mobile apps to advertising and email campaigns. The addition of a DAM and PIM advance the toolkit of what can be used to aid in telling those content stories and delivering on those moments. While Acquia remains the developer’s friend, tools like Widen add to the growing demand for marketing and business unit friendly solutions that make the work of engaging with a connected customer through cohesive, personalized and relevant stories easier and more secure. It starts to empower engagement teams to think beyond the confines of an asset they have created or a channel they have built and manage.

The real power in these systems is in the intelligence they can deliver BACK to the organization…HOW are these moments in an asset’s journey helping optimize the next step or next engagement? Are the moments of content engagement occurring where, when and as long as we expect? Is there more to content’s value than its ability to appear where we ask it to appear? What can the content and drupal cloud tell the marketing cloud about the customer? That’s where the DAM rubber meets the road.

What is taking shape in this Acquia acquisition is a clear shot across the bow of the engagement and experience players like Adobe, Salesforce and Oracle. Acquia isn’t just “that Drupal CMS” or that open-source “build it yourself kit.” The intentional expansion of the Acquia DXP signals a clear intention to mix it up with those marketing and experience cloud players. With the addition of Widen to the arsenal, content has a whole new toolkit and a pretty big sandbox to grow in.

How Headless Revolutionized Content Management

Dion Hinchcliffe

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Title: About Dion Hinchcliffe Dion Hinchcliffe is an internationally recognized business strategist, bestselling author, enterprise architect, industry analyst, and noted keynote speaker. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in digital strategy, the future of work, and enterprise IT. He works with the leadership teams of large enterprises as well as software vendors to raise the bar for the art-of-the-possible in their digital capabilities. He is currently Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Dion is also currently an executive fellow at the Tuck School of Business Center for Digital Strategies. He is a globally recognized industry expert on the topics of digital transformation, digital workplace, enterprise collaboration, API…...

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In my new research report exploring the future of content management, I examined the many new attributes and capabilities that a vital new category of content management services provides. Known as advanced content management, some of these improvements offered by these new types of platforms have led to a literal revolution in the art-of-the-possible when it comes to managing today's complex content ecosystems. However, the advancements have been quite rapid and so I find that that many organizations are still in the process of learning to fully appreciate and effectively absorb how these potent new features can transform what they do.

As shown in the first figure below, there are a number of compelling new capabilities that have emerged from hard won lessons over the years from both the traditional content management as well as enterprise content management (CMS) industries as they sought to reconcile early generations of such tools with what organizations actually needed to do with their content as a business and lessons learned in general from the last decade of operational experiences in the field.

For a limited time: A complimentary copy of my new report on The Future of Content Management

Of all these advances, however, there is one that stands head and shoulders above the others. That's because it has become a foundational capability that makes today’s more complex and sophisticated content scenarios not just possible, but straightforward and easy to manage.

Specifically, I am referring to the so-called “headless” capability of today's advanced content management systems. In the past, the traditional content management approach was to manage content by putting everything in a single bucket: Content, images, HTML, CSS, everything. This made it impossible to reuse the content easily because it was commingled with code. Even worse, all content typically was handled inside a single platform, not recognizing that today content must be managed from and delivered to whatever digtal touchpoint it needs to be on to satisfy the needs of the business with as little effort as possible.

As digital platforms have evolved to fill far more niches in our businesses, the need for more flexible ccntent services has emerged. Now, enterprises are developing websites, mobile sites, apps, digital displays, connected devices, and conversational interfaces that need access to content stores, wherever they might be, or perhaps one master content source at a central headquarters.

What is headless content management

As I highlighted in my research report, a headless CMS is any type of back-end content management system where the content repository body is separated or decoupled from the presentation layer, or the head. Content that is housed in a headless CMS is delivered via an industry standard interface (an API) for seamless display across different devices. 

By defining this simple industry standard, the content management industry, and all the platforms that support it, have enabled virtually any kind of arrangement of different content systems into one functioning ecosystem. 

The actual benefits of headless content management

One advantage of this decoupled approach is that content can be sent via the interface to multiple display types, for example, mobile, wearable, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices from a single content management system, alongside the website it's hosted on. A minor disadvantage of headless, however, is the requirement to maintain two or more separate content systems for a single site, which can require more resources. However, in practice, organizations often maintain different content management systems to their advantage because they offer different features that are uniquely designed for the strengths of a particular channel or use case.

Those who not only adopt headless content management standards for their content management systems but fully take advantage of what it offers, can realize the following benefits.

• A non-linear productivity improvement. The more content management systems an organization has, the more content that has to be manually moved around in order to get it to the desired locations. With headless content management, one headless content management system can seamless publish to an unlimited number of downstream content management systems automatically, and with no manual effort. For very large content ecosystems, this can literally be a 100-fold improvement in productivity.
• Greater consistency, quality, and reach in content distribution and publishing. Headless content ecosystems are much more reliable in terms of getting changes propagated to downstream systems and keeping them in sync accurately. This increases the overall quality of content production and distribution processes. It also makes it far likelier the right content is delivered at the right place at the right time.
• It offers a strategic system that runs more like their business. Headless content management systems are connected into content networks that look like the underlying business, whether it is publishing news in multiple languages on different sites around the world, maintaining documentation for a global company with different divisions, or maintaining a series of marketing microsites. The advantage of this is that content management flows mirror what the business does more naturally while requiring only some oversight instead of continuous effort to keep the business operating seamlssly, with its content flowing steadily as desired.

However, one obstacle to headless content management is that it does require a more sophisticated understanding of how federated content architectures work. In other words, a bit of technical skill and conceptual understanding in this area. However, even if it’s a bit of learning effort, a good working understanding of headless quickly pays off with all the attendant benefits cited above. This system runs like the business as a technical realization of what the business actually does, instead of relying on manual operation (importing and exporting content, etc.) to make it so. FInally, it's also clear that headless is here to stay, and consequently organizations must develop experience with it.

Those looking on capitalizing on the considerable power of advanced capabilities of headless content management have to take care of a couple of other things too, such as making sure all their content management systems are headless capable and producing their content in a format that can be easily federated across many different channels. For most non-trivial use cases, headless content management provides businesses with a sustainable strategic improvement to their operations.

Additional Reading

The future of enterprise content is modular and headless | ZDNet

How CXOs Can Attain Minimum Viable Digital Experience for Customers, Employees, and Partners

To Strategically Scale Digital, Enterprises Must Have a Multicloud Experience Integration Stack

HOT TAKE: Adobe Acquires Even MORE Collaboration with Frame.io

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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How much collaboration does Adobe want? $2.775 billion dollars’ worth…so far. The creative and experience giant announced a definitive agreement to acquire video workflow and production collaboration solution, Frame.io in a $1.275 billion deal. Add that onto the $1.5 billion dollar deal for Workfront which was completed in December 2020…you’ve got nearly $3 billion that says collaboration IS the future. At least the future of both marketing and creative work. But…I like to think that this is core to the vision of where Adobe is heading.

Predictably, there is a video…

So now the brass tacks: The deal brings some 100 million Frame.io users more deeply into the tools many are already using like Adobe’s Premiere Pro and After Effects. Frame.io offers video editors and production stakeholders the ability to streamline everything from collaboration to approvals in a cloud-first workflow environment. Through key partnerships with industry leading hardware solutions, Frame.io offers a real-time camera to cloud secure footage upload solution that, when viewed in the totality of the Adobe video production suite, can extend from camera to cloud to completion in a fairly seamless and collaborative manner.

A great deal of Frame.io’s value proposition is wrapped in the idea of taking the pain, inefficiency and lag out of video production. As someone who has waited for hard drives to be shipped around the world (and one odd incident of tape, drives and a midnight run across the border into Mexico...don't ask) before raw footage can be reviewed let alone edited…the idea of fast, reliable and secure access to footage from camera to editing is worth its weight in gold. Then...if you start promising me that the workflows can extend all the way through the always painful gauntlet of approvals, suggestions and general frame by frame nitpicking…well…now I’m just blushing from all this excitement.

Yes. The Adobe pickup of Frame.io adds some valuable firepower to the video suite. And it hasn’t been a secret that a great deal of innovation attention has been paid to expanding and enhancing Adobe’s footprint in the world of video which extends well into 3D, AR and VR now. But as I day-dream about it...that's just the starting point.

Similar to the Workfront pickup, Adobe identified a partner that deeply understands the work of their customers. With Workfront, it was a foundational understanding of what goes into the actual WORK of marketing and engagement. I see that same vein in this Frame.io acquisition. Frame.io isn’t just “some collaboration tool” …it is a production tool developed by post-production for post-production. It isn’t a random workflow…it is purposeful and intentional. It is unapologetically for the makers, creators and do-ers. And that's pretty much become Adobe's new mantra.

What gets really interesting is when you extend the roadmap for collaboration beyond the integration of Workfront with solutions like Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Assets, or beyond Frame.io with Premiere Pro. Imagine what happens when Adobe pulls the best of the best from BOTH Workfront AND Frame.io to reimagine what collaboration for creativity and experience really works like. THAT is the future that is worth at least $3 billion dollars in my mind.

There are plenty of competitors with collaboration and connectivity solutions. And there are oodles of solutions that address work coordination. My colleague Dion Hinchcliffe is one of THE leading experts in this space and has an exceptional ShortList outlining the leaders (hint: Workfront is already on it) in work coordination. But as a marketer, there is something I can say for certain: there is something just a bit different about the work of marketing and the work of creators. This is why tools like Workfront, Asana and Frame.io are as popular with creators as they are. Like the memes say…they just “get” us.

Only time will tell how far collaboration will connect the two sides of the Adobe coin—a coin that has had lines of demarcation segmenting Creative Cloud and Experience Cloud in a way that can feel like the gaps and fissures between marketing and creative teams themselves. If anything can bridge that gap in a meaningful way, it just might be collaboration and workflows. From camera to content consumption, once again, Adobe is just scooping up bigger chunks of territory in this shrinking land we call engagement.

It’s Always Sunny in the State of Marketing…Until It Isn’t

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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Salesforce recently conducted a survey of over eight thousand marketers from around the globe representing all shapes and sizes of organizations. Overall, the message was pretty darn positive: Growth IS the agenda and marketing DOES play a substantial role in turning growth strategies into tangible, measurable reality.

The study—click here to download—tracks with much of what I’ve seen in the past year. Some 90% of the Salesforce study respondents agree that 2020 upped the ante with digital engagement and three-quarters of marketers now work…and collaborate…from anywhere. For CMOs, who in the face of unprecedented change managed to weather the storm, taking a break is NOT on the agenda as 70% indicate that they plan to continue to redefine success to match company goals.

It should come as no surprise that the only thing outpacing the rise of digital channels is the rise of data sources. With 78% of marketers indicating that their customer engagements are data-driven, this data surge should be expected. Even attitudes and definitions of metrics changed due to the pandemic with 78% of marketers indicating that they have changed or reprioritized their metrics in the past year, with the big shifts in prioritization of customer acquisition costs (+26%) and content engagement (+23%) while revenue growth remains the top metric being tracked.

So why the title of this blog…why lay down the hint that things might not be awesome? Don’t get me wrong, the story told through the State of Marketing report is incredibly positive and shares what I believe is a true and honest story of just how far Marketing has come, especially through the dumpster fire of a pandemic year like 2020. We deserve to have a state of marketing that is optimistic.

But a journalist didn’t once dub me the “Debbie Downer of Marketing” for no reason.

At first glance, there is nothing really that notable about the list of Marketer’s top priorities or their challenges. Similar to their top two priorities in 2020, marketers are prioritizing innovation and engaging with customers…with their top two challenges being engaging with customers and innovating. Yes…in that order…on both counts. Now, thanks to Salesforce providing access to the survey’s data via Tableau, I decided to take a dive into these findings…because if I am being honest, I got suspicious about this whole innovation is a top priority point.

What I found was that for the CMO, innovation doesn’t actually reign supreme. Instead, the priority (and the biggest challenge) is engaging with customers in real time and creative cohesive cross-channel journeys in the second priority spot. This tracks for me as CMOs are keenly aware that as customers have embraced digital channels so too have they embraced the expectation that their digital experiences should occur in the channel of their choice in their definition of real-time. It also tracks with marketing’s understanding that while they can imagine any number of journeys…it is the customer that is wholly in charge of their own experiences. And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is what keeps the CMO up at night.

So, WHO is sweating innovation? Based on the data…marketing managers. Innovation stands at the top of the priority AND challenge chart…and what subsequently pushes innovation to the top of the overarching marketing data. This isn’t just innovation for innovation’s sake. Marketing managers are pushing boundaries and looking to innovate in order to achieve their biggest priorities and solve their greatest challenges. They are looking to solve the problem of HOW we engage in real time and HOW we orchestrate cross-channel journeys. All good, right? CMOs are looking long-term at how we craft the strategies, marketing managers are innovating to turn strategies into results.

All sunny in the state of marketing once more. So why do I keep bringing up cloudy skies? CMOs might not be setting marketing managers up for long-term success.

When asked to rate employee training teams receive, 47% of CMOs rate training as excellent…41% of marketing managers agree. Not a wide swath to be sure…but shouldn’t the recipients of the training be more enthused than the leader signing off on it? When you dig into what training is being offered, CMOs say that content marketing (47%), creativity (46%), data analytics (45%), communication (43%) and collaboration (41%) top the list. Managers shuffle the deck a bit, but for the most part agree: communication (48%), creativity (43%), content marketing (43%), collaboration (39%) and data analytics (37%).

Here’s where I get concerned…remember how marketing managers said their key priority and their top challenge was innovating…and remember how it was that innovation that could solve everyone’s big concern over real time customer engagement and cross channel journey orchestration. So why is it that campaign strategy (36%) and digital proficiency (34%) are, at best, in the middle of the pack for what marketing managers say their employers offer by way of training and support. Critical leadership skills like emotional intelligence, agility and adaptability and even resiliency rank far lower…and in an age of data dependence and digital innovation skills like data science and coding are near last.

In fact, the bottom three training opportunities listed by CMOs mirror the bottom three opportunities listed by marketing managers: data science (29%), coding (23%) and resiliency (22%).

Why are we training marketers to be successful in the year 2005 when our goals, priorities and challenges are distinctly SO 2025?

This isn’t to say that marketing skills like content marketing, creativity and communications aren’t important. We need to start upskilling based on what our teams, especially our managers and the functional teams on the ground fighting the good fight, are trying to solve…we need to train and educate so they can meet their own needs and expectations. They expect to be successful and to thrive. They WANT to innovate. So how are we helping that next generation thrive?

If there is a big ah-hah moment for me from this year’s State of Marketing report it is this: there is real cause to celebrate the resilience and fortitude of marketing, but the sun sets eventually. If we expect our digital tomorrow to be better than the dumpster fire we just survived, we need to start training teams to BE the marketers of tomorrow. Let’s start training for innovation, agility and resilience. Yes, let’s make sure content and creativity are still pumping through the veins of marketing, but let’s also remove the limitations of what a marketer can and can’t do. YES! A marketer can code. It IS possible. YES! A marketer can do more than just read a visualized data set…in fact, a marketer CAN pick up data science skills. And yes, in order to fulfill on that promise of humanizing marketing and engaging with each individual customer with empathy and contextual understanding, upskilling and uplifting marketers with emotional intelligence should be on the agenda right along with communication and collaboration.

We’ve all embraced marketing’s role as growth driver. Now, let’s get marketers ready for what comes next.

In Digital Economy, You Should Fail Fast, But Must Also Recover Fast

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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In digital economy, you must move fast to survive. Not in six-month release cycles. But moving with fast release cycles, continuous releases, a mature CI/CD pipeline is only a portion of the solution. If you continue to break your systems at a faster rate but are unable to fix them faster as well, you are setting up for unplanned disasters that will hurt your business sooner than later.

I recently did a podcast with my buddy Mike Kavis, Chief Cloud Architect at Deloitte discussing some of these areas of concern.

To achieve this, the DevOps culture, agile development, CI/CD pipeline, and microservices are in full swing at most digital powerhouses. I recently wrote about the digital powerhouse release cycles on how many changes they make per day. The classic microservice architecture from Netflix from a few years ago claims they have close to 800+ microservices (at that time). Netflix, Uber, and most other digital giants claim to make thousands of "daily production changes." Sometimes multiple changes to the same service. That is the power of agile development. "Fix fast and fail fast" is the mantra of successful digital houses where they can be very nimble and provide the changes the customers want, sometimes by making multiple changes to the same service. The canary, blue-green, and rolling deployments give power to the developers and DevOps teams to figure out how to get the functions and features fast to the consumers.

However, this can be a nightmare for centralized Ops teams. As I discussed in my previous article, per Gene Kim in his The Visible Ops Handbook, 80% of unplanned outages are due to ill-planned changes. Distributed systems produce a ton of noise. If anyone critical microservice or underlying infrastructure component goes down it is not uncommon for IT monitoring and observability systems to produce tens of thousands of alerts. It is very common in many digital-native companies the Ops teams get drowned in alerts and often are "alert fatigued." The noise to signal ratio is very high in these environments.

After looking at the processes are multiple large customer situations, I have to say the "fail fast" or development cycle, has matured enough, but the "find fast and fix fast" cultures of Ops teams are still not mature enough. Using yesteryears tools, processes, and skills to fight the modern war is the most dangerous thing any organization can do and yet it is very commonplace with today's IT teams. Most of them seem to band-aid something until something major breaks.

War/Incident collaboration rooms are broken

Given the virtual nature we are operating in during the pandemic, most enterprises have successfully adopted virtual incident collaboration rooms instead of physical war rooms. A good thing about the physical rooms is that you can physically see how many are in the room, and who is appropriate and figure out someone important is missing. This will help reduce the incident collaboration rooms to the right size quickly before they can deep dive into the issue.

With virtual incident collaboration rooms, everyone who is tagged with a remote association to any critical service will be automatically invited to a virtual incident room (eg. Slack channel) and everyone starts to guess what went wrong. Not only too many cooks but most of those engineers, developers, system admins who would be doing something else productive instead. Sadly, as one high-powered executive told me in confidence, they established a "Mean Time to Innocence" to reduce crowd in those situations. In other words, invite everyone you can think of, and if they can prove it is not their work that is offending then they can leave the room. 

Find what is broken and fix it fast

I have written numerous articles on this topic. You need to first figure out if what happened is really an incident. All notifications/alerts/anomalies are not necessarily incidents. An incident is defined as "Something that affects the quality of service delivered." If it is an unplanned incident, you also need to figure out if it is causing problems to any user. You also should have a mechanism to figure out how many high-profile customers are affected vs random users which need to happen before the customer knows the incident happened so you can fix it.

AI/ML systems, Observability systems, AIOps, and proper Incident Management systems, if set up properly, can help a lot in this area. Those are some of my coverage areas that I am researching here at Constellation. If you have an offering in this space, please reach out to us to brief us. I would love to find out what you do and include you in my research report.

Keep in mind in the digital economy you need to fail fast and recover fast as well. If you just keep failing without finding and fixing things faster your business will fail permanently soon enough. It is not about how hard you fall that matters, but how fast you get back up that matters more.

I am currently a research VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research a silicon valley research firm. My coverage areas include AI, ML, AIOps, DataOps, ModelOps, MLOps, CloudOps, Observability, etc. Contact me if you would like to brief me about your company or you need content/research work.

Why isn’t identity easy?

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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My presentation to this year's Identiverse, SWILSON Why Isnt Identity Easy HANDOUTS

From the beginning of e-commerce, we have tended to complicate "digital identity". Its relationship with “real” identity has never been clear and loosely defined metaphorical efforts like “electronic passports” have never fixed liability. The Anglophone (Five Eyes) countries have no tradition of National ID; occasional proposals have been roundly rejected by the public, which has poisoned most of the discourse of identity capability building. Private sector initiatives in banking and technology sectors (e.g. Identrus and Infocard) came and went. British and American efforts at grand public-private federations attracted very few Relying Parties (despite the urgency of better identity) and spawned no commercially sustainable identity businesses. Scandinavia and the Baltics have seemed successful with multi-purpose digital IDs but these are backed by specific legislation. A few free market identity frameworks remain in development in Australia and Canada. Progress has been disappointing and their futures remain uncertain.

The hottest developments in digital identity today are not about identity! Instead,Verifiable Credentials are digitally signed data structures which convey details of the credential issuers and other conditions specific to different use cases. Verifiable credentials are bound to cryptographic keys controlled by the credential holders, so they can't be copied, spoofed or counterfeited. Fresh verifiable credential standards are being developed that update earlier PKI certificates. Multiple credentials and identifiers can be conveniently carried in personal data wallets or data carriers, which ideally feature secure elements to house the all-important private keys.

In digital life and work, we need to show things about ourselves, typically discrete pieces of important data, backed up by metadata that proves origin, Ts&Cs, regulatory commitments, consent and so on, depending on context. If we generalise from credit cards ? including terminal, data carriers, standardised contracts and service providers ? we could build truly global infostructure for verifying everything we routinely need to know. 

In conclusion, we in the industry have made digital identity hard by solving for the wrong problem! Personal human identity is always going to be rich, relative and analog but the challenges in the digital domain boil down to trustable data. We know how to solve for data reliability, by blending cryptography and governance. Our industry has been evolving and shifting focus from identity through attributes to arrive now at Verifiable Credentials. Let’s keep up the good work, let’s be clear about where actual identity problems lie, and use our tools to build infostructure for verifiable data across cyberspace and the digital economy. 

The post Why isn’t identity easy? appeared first on Lockstep.

HOT TAKE: Qualtrics Just Turned UP the Volume on Voice with Clarabridge

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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It is officially summer and the shopping spree continues. Some are saying this latest trip to the Billion-Dollar-Mall is set to upend markets…and yes, that’s the short-term news for those following the customer feedback charts. I’m more inclined to see a bigger shake up beyond that as new and interesting moves across multiple players could be signaling a bigger win. But more on that in a bit. Let’s get to the meat of it: Last week’s late announcement has Qualtrics scooping up feedback and analytics darling Clarabridge for a cool $1.1 billion in stock.

Qualtrics has been on a streak since spinning out of SAP in summer 2020. By January 2021, the experience intelligence firm had crushed expectations on an IPO…paid off debt…and still managed to leave some acquisition bucks burning a hole in their pockets. In Clarabridge, Qualtrics has a worthwhile expansion of customer feedback and voice aggregation capabilities that they need to fully realize the vision of being the ultimate engine for experience decision-making and engagement optimization.

Clarabridge has made a name for itself as an AI-powerhouse taking natural language processing to new levels, turning customer service and call center interactions into the highest of high-fidelity signals informing and molding customer engagements. With the capacity to analyze ALL interactions from human to bot, the Clarabridge solution unifies customer interactions into a single analytics pane including attributes that include scores on effort made by the customer, emotion and sentiment, and a tally of topics covered over time. Now just imagine, for a second, where else Qualtrics can point all that AI and NLP power. Did I hear someone say enterprise wide unstructured data perhaps?

The beauty of this move is it takes the direct feedback customers provide through Qualtrics interactions with the direct dialogue customers are having with any agent, be them human or AI.

OK…so let’s address the big elephant in my post. That’s right…I can’t with calling either platform an “experience management” solution as I am 100% in the “customers are and will remain the only source of managing their own experiences” camp. But…I will say that when it comes to customer AND experience intelligence, Qualtrics is racing to the top of that hill. But they are NOT alone. With the Customerville pickup by IFS, you have Qualtrics running up the experience side of customer mountain while IFS races up via customer service, field service, enterprise asset management (EAM) and even ERP lanes. That doesn’t even start to address what competitors like Medalia and InMoment are cooking up.

So now I’m sitting here looking around at players like Invoca, SupportLogic and UserTesting and just…well…wondering. Remember how last week with the Zoom/Five9 acquisition news I said a reckoning was coming? Waves are being made…in crazy directions and it couldn’t happen at a better time when CX juggernauts across Marketing Automation and Sales Engagement are starting down an evolutionary path we are just starting to decipher.

But here is my off the wall hot take: The biggest winners in this just might be SAP...and SAP’s CDP and CX portfolio customers.

WUT? Has she lost it? Well yes, but that is a totally separate blog post. It is easy to forget…but don’t…Qualtrics is still owned by SAP (or more specifically, SAP is still the majority shareholder) and SAP customers have been bathing in the CX messaging of Qualtrics as a critical inbound connection to customer voice that needs to be ingested into SAP’s CDP.

Words like “native” and “out of the box” integrations have been core to the SAP/Qualtrics CX decision velocity story for some time now. So now…with Clarabridge…turn on the fire hose SAP CDP customers! It takes customer voice programs to a new level with AI powered analysis of natural language, connected to a persistent, unified and harmonized customer record that now feeds all that joy BACK into a system of engagement that spans sales, service, marketing and commerce. Suddenly asking about an NPS score looks even more outdated as customers can start asking, no really, why did LIZ walk away from that last experience putting out maximum effort for minimal reward…and what do we do next to flip that?

HOT TAKE: Zoom to Scoop Up Five9…and I’m Not Mad At It

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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For a first trip to the Billion-Dollar-Baby Mall, Zoom made quite the purchase with their $14.7 billion deal for cloud contact center software player Five9. The obvious conversations about this deal center around Zoom’s explosive COVID-fueled growth that needed someplace to crash. Sure, Zoom grew, by their own estimates, 326% in 2020, and that steep climb was going to slow. Acquisition felt like the obvious answer for anyone watching. Sorry…that’s the boring story.

Let’s establish a timeline…

April 2021 Zoom announces the Zoom Apps Fund. It’s a fund to jumpstart the growth of the Zoom ecosystem of apps. Everybody and their momma has an ecosystem and a fund or “ventures”. But look past Zoom’s whole these apps are an “important component in building the future of video communications” bit. Instead turn your eye to a new line that has crept into almost every corporate communication positioning Zoom as “core to how customers meet, communication and collaborate.”

Core to how customers meet, communicate and collaborate.

May 2021 Zoom announces Zoom Event Platform for Virtual Experiences. This one flew past a lot of folks. The new capabilities combined customers, communication, collaboration and, in the case of events, commercialization. With the new event platform, events can be ticketed, with controlled access and billing in one portal, and brings a new integrated networking module for attendee connection along with back-end tracking across everything from registration to revenue.

Core to how customers meet, communicate and collaborate.

June 2021 Zoom launches Zoom Phone Appliances, representing a move into hardware were Zoom tech meets hardware from big names like Poly and Yealink so bring video and voice calling to an all-in-one desk phone. And yes…thanks to that Zoom rooms tech…this slicer and dicer even does whiteboards.

June 2021 Zoom dipped a toe into the buying pond with the pickup of Kites GmbH with a global cross-language interaction solution to ramp up Zoom’s machine translation capabilities. So now, not only is Zoom going to core to how customers meet, communicate and collaborate…they can take it all global…with a fancy new phone.

Core to how ANY customer meets, communicates and collaborates…anywhere.

So now…let’s talk Five9. First it helps to understand that Five9 isn’t your average cloud center software kit. It too saw explosive growth in 2020 as brands across both B2B and B2C markets had to send their front line of customer engagement and experience home. Call center agents didn't just start working at home, they needed to be able to connect and engage with a customer caller that was also in the same motion of uncertainty and flux.

Five9’s solution is underpinned with AI tools that turn everything into smarter things…smart dialing, smarter self-service, smart routing, virtual agents, virtual assistants…basically everything smarter that employees and customers crave to make life (and work life) just a little bit easier. The cloud solution is also untethered to a single communications channel allowing a customer to choose not just when, but also where they need to or want to engage from mobile to messaging.

Dig a bit deeper into the portfolio and you start to see a common tread…it isn’t just about how call center employees could connect and, in essence, collaborate on problem solving and question resolution with a customer, but their platform could enable employees to connect and collaborate with other employees…and suddenly Five9 isn’t “just” a call center tool but part of a larger human capitol management story...and dare I say a larger enterprise communication and collaboration story.

Dare I say it…it starts to sound like solutions that are core to how people (customers, employees, families, whoever) meet, communicate and collaborate.

So now I have to ask myself…what DOES Zoom want to be when it grows up? All signs point to leaving folks like Ring Central and even Cisco in the dust for something higher up the chain and even more broad in the realm of customer experience. And they might just make it. For most platform players in the wild and bizarre world called “Customer Experience” where everyone from surveys to emails are claiming the title of “customer experience platform,” the foundation of most of these solutions is still some Kuato-like vestige of a CRM solution, feeding off of its host waiting for Quaid to arrive.

But…what happens to CX when the center of gravity leaves the familiar trappings of CRM and takes up residence in the land of communication and service? What happens when the center point for a CX platform is literally the center point for communication with any customer or any employee? My obvious questions are not what networking, router or VoiP system Zoom is eying next…but rather what CDP, omnichannel engagement solution, DXP, marketing automation or even sales engagement system could Zoom be eyeing next.

Sure, Zoom started as the “better and sassier” video conference to Cisco. But there is something bigger at play in the opportunity…something bigger than skaing up a stale market and a stale industry. It is the chance to unexpectedly reshape it all and drive analysts like me INSANE as we grapple with new acronyms to segment this new space. This Five9 pickup hints at just how big and bold Zoom CEO Eric Yuan can go. At least to me, this is just the opening salvo.

In the end, this is how I'd summarize this acquisition: Together, Zoom and Five9 dare to be core to how customers and employees meet, communicate and collaborate.

Monday's Musings: Get Ready For Big Government Vs Big Tech

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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THE AGE OF BIG TECH REGULATIONS HAS ARRIVED

Governments across the world seek to rein in the digital giants for political, economic, and societal rationale. While most digital giants have not flaunted the law, the public perception of their enormous size, massive scale, and unfair competitive advantage drive political motivations to check the power of big tech ahead of any economic or societal costs.

The recent five anti-trust legislation proposed by the House Democrats and the House Republicans Anti-trust agenda reflect the growing bi-partisan sentiment to reign in digital giants. Further, China’s crack down on its digital giants such as Alibaba’s Alipay and Didi highlight both the threat digital giants pose to the power structure of the CCP China government and the populist sentiment that government must do something to protect their citizens. And the recent global minimum tax deal endorsed by the G7 seeks to cut out loopholes that digital giants have effectively used to reduce their tax burdens.

Consequently, in the age of big tech regulations, both built-from-the-ground-up digital giants and joint venture digital giants will experience a high level of scrutiny for potential marketplace abuses. In highly regulated markets such as the EU, market dominance is defined as having more than 39.7% market share. But while the percentage thresholds for what constitutes market dominance may change, how dominance is defined will play a significant role in identifying digital giants that have the power to abuse their market position.

LOOKING FOR ANTI-COMPETITIVE PRACTICES

As we saw in the battle for mobile operating systems with Google Android versus Apple iOS, market share alone does not necessarily convey market dominance. Apple with less than 20 percent adoption versus Google’s 80 percent market share has managed to drive more profits than Google with a more attractive ecosystem. In the future, market dominance might be defined as the percentage of paid users, or percentage of total transactions, or percentage of personal data controlled, or percentage of economic value created.

Once a digital giant is deemed a dominant company, regulators and politicians seeking to create a more fair playing field should look out for these anti-competitive practices:

1. Forced upsell or cross-sell (Tying). When a company requires that the purchase of one product or service be made with the sale of another to restrict consumer choice. For instance, you want to purchase a video game and you are forced to buy the augmented reality headset with it whether you need it or not.
2. Bundling. Similar to forced upsell or cross-sell, when a supplier will only sell products that are put into a combined package and will not sell the individual item. For example, you are required to purchase an extended digital warranty for each digital product you buy.
3. Collusion and price fixing. When competitors work together to pre-determine and agree to either set, increase, or lower prices to impact the market. Imagine every digital mortgage broker got together to agree that they will charge no commission below 2.5 percent. In this case, fixing the floor in pricing would be a form of collusion.
4. Exclusive dealing. When a customer must purchase a majority or all of a particular type of good or service from a company and is excluded from purchasing from its competitors. One example would be when a hospital is forced to buy only one brand of hardware to run a type of healthcare software, even though the software could run perfectly on any device.
5. Exclusive rebates. Plans or loyalty programs that force a customer to purchase the majority or all their goods or services from one company and prevents them from purchasing from a competing one in order to receive a discount. An example of an exclusive rebate would be if one vendor provides rebates and volume discounts only if the customer makes all their purchase exclusively through that vendor.
6. Margin squeezing. When an integrated firm sells a product that is an essential input at a downstream rival for a similar price as the integrated firms’ finished product in order to hamper the rivals’ ability to survive or compete. For instance, a software vendor that resells its component code to competitors as well as builds its own software on the same code, decides to increase the price of the component code it charges competitors but charges its own internal teams less.
7. Predatory pricing. When a dominant entity reduces prices that create market side losses in order to force competitors out of a market. For example, a digital giant offers free shipping and returns for purchases at a loss to increase the cost of business for a competitor.
8. Price discrimination. When some market participants are arbitrarily charged higher prices unrelated to the actual costs of supplying, creating, or distributing the service or good. Charging small businesses one price for a product and large enterprises a higher price without a regard for how much volume they order could be considered a price discrimination violation.
9. Refusal to provide IP. When a dominant firm refuses to license critical intellectual property to potential competitors. An example would be if a critical security technology is banned for use in a competitor’s product, leaving them vulnerable to security attacks.
10. Refusal to supply. Similar to the refusal to provide IP, when a dominant firm refuses to supply limiting access to a competitor with a good or service to eliminate competition.  

ENCOURAGING INNOVATION THROUGH ANTI-TRUST LAWS

One of the negative consequences of a duopoly market for consumers is that they block competitors from gaining critical mass. In the course of a challenger’s lifecycle, leading digital giants will try to partner, acquire, or otherwise threaten it with retaliatory measures. The result? Each value chain will be left with only a couple of digital giants and very small players in niche markets.

In order to encourage competition, governments must enforce anti-trust laws that ensure a free-market system and corporations must respect these laws. In the US, three pieces of legislation form the core of our antitrust laws. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act sets rules to prevent restraint of trade or the conspiracy to restrain trade. Fines for violating these rules include up to $100 million for organizations and $1 million for individuals with up to 10 years of imprisonment. The Clayton Antitrust act regulates mergers and acquisitions, pricing, discounts, and other unfair practices that reduce competition and enable the creation of monopolies. The Federal Trade Commission Act bans all unfair or deceptive acts or practices and unfair methods of competition.  

In the US the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) plays a significant role in supporting free and open markets through competition. The creation, adoption, and enforcement of these rigorous anti-trust rules allows for vigorous competition on the merits of a company’s offerings. Anti-trust rules often remove the impediments to economic opportunity and powers economic growth. Without these laws, consumers face limited access to products and services and would pay higher prices for goods and services. Some of the common anti-trust rules involve the prevention of bid rigging, market allocation, mergers and acquisitions, and price fixing.

PROTECTING DIGITAL GIANTS FROM OVER-REGULATION

The balance between over-regulation and no regulation is delicate. To achieve it, regulatory bodies have to engage in a cost-benefit analysis. Most regulation is designed to protect the consumer and the smaller competitors. But regulation must also consider the benefits that come from a duopoly market: the stable creation of a new market, increase in the number of jobs, and market efficiencies gained for the consumer. New markets create and expand new categories for spending and for hiring. New types of jobs are created along with new opportunities for both the new market and its ancillary ecosystem. Market efficiencies include cheaper pricing, easier access, and more choices for customers.

In some markets, the minimum efficient scale for a given product, service, or experience is one or two per market—or even per planet. At that point these entities may emerge as regulated duopolies like Airbus and Boeing. They both sell planes, everyone can board them at an airport, and few passengers care what type of plane they are boarding. These factors should be taken into account when considering regulations of digital duopolies. 

A key guideline to keep regulation in check is to put the burden of proof on governments to show how an organization’s actions or behaviors harm consumers in a market as opposed to measuring how a policy change may improve competition. For example, dominant streaming services built on membership and advertising revenue may end up creating new models that disrupt traditional cable, satellite, and movie theater distribution. The net result is that consumers will pay less per view, content creators and consumers will avoid massive distribution fees, and more money will go back to the content creator. These benefits could outweigh the fact that there are only two streaming players with a dominant market share, and that more expensive, traditional competitors are being disrupted in the market.

The successful balance between growth and regulation will require a deft hand and smart regulators. The massive influence of digital giants on politics, society, and the economy require the smartest and most skilled professionals to ensure that policies not only address the policy needs of today, but also builds in a futurist view of the impact today’s policies may have for generations to come.

My book, "Everybody Wants to Rule the World," talks about what needs to be done to regulate big tech while balancing the costs and benefits. Get the book on pre-order now and receive the first 3 chapters today: https://amzn.to/3uR9Q9I

Your POV

How will we balance innovation with regulation?  What's required for free and fair markets?

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