The Constellation SuperNova Awards celebrate the leaders and teams who successfully apply emerging and disruptive technologies for their organizations. The 2018 SuperNova Award winners were announced on October 24 at the SuperNova Award Gala. This year's winners demonstrated leadership and foresight, leading successful high-stakes technology implementations that prepared their organizations for the future. Not only did these leaders convince their organizations to go along with their audacious plans to implement disruptive technologies, their projects worked!
All applications were evaluated by the SuperNova Award Judges, and then put to a public vote.
Holger Mueller is VP and Principal Analyst for Constellation Research for the fundamental enablers of the cloud, IaaS, PaaS and next generation Applications, with forays up the tech stack into BigData and Analytics, HR Tech, and sometimes SaaS. Holger provides strategy and counsel to key clients, including Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Product Officers, Chief HR Officers, investment analysts, venture capitalists, sell-side firms, and technology buyers. Coverage Areas: Future of Work Tech Optimization & Innovation Background: Before joining Constellation Research, Mueller was VP of Products for NorthgateArinso, a KKR company. There, he led the transformation of products to the cloud and laid the foundation for new Business Process as a…...
Read moreWe had the opportunity to attend SAP's developer conference TechED in Las Vegas, held from October 8th till 12th 2018 at the Venetian Conference center. Attendance was not officially disclosed, but from other events held at the same location I'd peg it at 3k+.
Alan Lepofsky - VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research. With almost two decades of experience in the collaboration software industry, Lepofsky helps organizations improve the way their employees work together to get their jobs done. Lepofsky’s primary research area The Future of Work, focuses on: integrating collaboration and business processes (Purposeful Collaboration), structuring work via Social Task Management, leveraging analytics and digital assistants to work more productively, the strategic impact of mobile computing on business transformation, and measuring workforce culture based on Digital Proficiency instead of age. Twitter: @alanlepoLinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/alanlepo , Title: Big IdeasIntelligent Collaboration: The Intersection of…...
Read moreIf I had a dollar for every time I've heard that email was dead. Yet, Microsoft Outlook, Google GMail, and IBM Verse remain critical applications for business people around the world. Likewise, acquisitions in the email market are accelerating. In just the last few months we've seen:
Why? Because email remains one of the primary channels for communicating with employees, partners, customers and prospects.
In this video, I discuss why email remains ubiquitous. However, that does not mean employees and customers are not using new channels like social media.
The key message is "USE THE RIGHT TOOL FOR THE DESIRED TASK AND OUTCOME."
Future of WorkTitle: 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…...
Read moreThe majority of enterprises today are currently striving with concerted effort to move their organizations into the digital future. Their overarching objective is to drive revenue growth, avoid disruption, and to access all-new business opportunities. Next-generation C-Suite leaders are increasingly focused on ensuring they have the right innovation and delivery capabilities in place at a strategic level to achieve this. To accomplish the aforementioned goals, which will take place mostly in fasting-growing new digital markets, many leaders are currently evaluating the right mix of foundational digital platforms to build upon. With effective choices, they can swiftly and confidently lead the transformation of their businesses as well as the creation of their own digital platforms and ecosystems.
This then was the backdrop for SAP's TechEd event in Las Vegas earlier this month, a prime showcase for its growing digital platforms and ecosystem. For its part, German enterprise IT giant has long positioned itself as an organization without peer that deeply understands the complex and sophisticated needs of the traditional large enterprise. The challenge: Many today still regard SAP as more of a legacy software vendor of organizations as their needs were defined five or ten years ago. In other words, more focused on ERP than on customer experience, the latter which is today's topical darling for revenue growth and customer acquisition/retention.
The argument for SAP's relevancy in an age of Amazon's, Microsoft's and Google's ascendancy — and many would say supremacy — in the cloud is that we now live in a new digital business operating environment that needs fresh market-facing strengths and capabilities. Ones that are less concerned with raw compute power or storage and more focused on the vital functional needs of the enterprise. The good news: The enterprise software giant is far from content to concede this point.
The pace of the company's innovation is evident in the steady drumbeat of SAP's cloud platform evolution both in breadth, depth, as well as scope of vision. SAP board member and head of products and innovation, Bernd Leukert, steadily but passionately laid this out on stage. In fact, the SAP Cloud Platform is now the crown jewel that the German tech company intends to use to seize the high ground in the industry to deliver an expanding product portfolio that will realize end-to-end digital experience and value creation in an overarching way, and to use its own business applications, as well as its developer ecosystem, to offer a more compelling business vision for the cloud.
To say there's an epic horse race is under way in enterprise cloud computing today would be an understatement: The business world as a whole is steadily and inexorably moving its IT infrastructure and digital operations out to the public cloud for numerous good reasons. As a result, the cloud vendor industry is collectively spending tens of billions in CapEx annually to seize this sea change market opportunity. For its part, SAP has exerted itself mightily the last several years to make clear its continued significance in a world where the public cloud foundation in most organizations is now owned either by upstarts in enterprise computing (Amazon's AWS and Google Cloud) or entrenched enterprise leaders that managed to make good on cloud (Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud.)
Understanding how SAP can differentiate and rise above the cloud giants is key here: A strong technical foundational base is far from the only cloud capability that enterprises need right now. SAP has bet that it again much better understands the true strategic requirements of the enterprise when it comes to shifting operations to the cloud while fully executing on digital transformation of their business.
I've termed this top-level new strategic requirement a digital transformation target platform, which I currently track on my shortlist of the same name. Put succintly, a digital transformation target platform sets itself apart from a pure-play enterprise public cloud platform or a managed service provider by providing a fuller and richer set of digital business transformation capabilities. These include embodying the latest digital best practices (devops, serverless, machine learning), industry templates/accelerators, digital business reference models/blueprints, citizen development/low code, business models-in-a-box, migration tools/services, and other means of enabling the digital transformation process from a combined technology and business perspective. Such target platforms must have global presence with regulatory compliance support across the majority of the developed world. These platforms must also have the ability to support the scale and combined transformational/operational needs of enterprise organizations of the largest size and complexity. Finally, they must also regularly incorporate the latest emerging technologies likely to fuel business growth over the next 5-10 years. These include technologies such as next-gen mobility, advanced analytics, Internet of Things (both IoT and IIoT), machine learning, AI, blockchain, APIs/microservices, and natural language interfaces, to name some of the more important ones.
If this seems like a tall order for any digital platform, C-Suite leaders must realize that modern digital capabilities indeed have a great deal of moving parts today, essentially everything needed to flourish in today's digital markets. This is the key opportunity for SAP: The SAP Cloud Platform, especially when combined with SAP Leonardo, forms just such a higher order capability and is demonstrating its ability to evolve and mature at a sufficient pace to maintain a leadership position. The platform can also run on top of many of the leading public cloud platforms. This lets SAP deliver on several differentiating elements, including a) offering choice at a cloud hosting level as a fully mulicloud-ready superplatform, b) avoid a punishing and needless race to the bottom in commoditized cloud computing services like compute and storage, while c) emphasizing the unique, high leverage, high impact enterprise capabilities that SAP has in the back office (supply chain, procurement, human resources, etc.) as well as increasingly the front office in CRM and customer experience.
SAP's argument is clearly -- and I would agree -- that organizations will need all this as a working set to transform faster, deliver on innovation quicker and more successfully, and seize that holy grail of business execution today: Shorter and less expensive time to customer value.
This was certainly the messaging I saw at TechEd, where we witnessed a raft of important announcements, that while often technical in nature, assured that SAP is thinking of the evolution of their cloud platform as a truly top-of-the-food-chain cloud capability that they hope that enterprises will end up demanding to add on top of their existing cloud stack(s) to a) save time, b) access key enterprise capabilities/products/solutions, c) eliminate silos/data redundancy, d) reduce unnecessary investment, and e) buy down risk.
SAP also announced an important foray into industry consortiums for trusted data in the supply chain and other key functions using blockchain as well. In my analysis, this is a vital strategic move to take the cloud conversation away from low-level computing and towards a more strategic trusted enterprise and industry data conversation. I attended a meeting of some of the key consortia members right before TechEd as a guest of Bernd Leukert. There was a great deal of excitment evident in members how easy SAP has made it for those already using their solutions to be able to add easily add vital business data to the blockchain.
My take: Blockchain holds great promise to help manage product authenticity, ensure compliance with trade regulations, manage product recalls, track items in the supply chain, and improve business performance management. But blockchain works best when there's one version of the truth in its immutable chain, as opposed to being spread out in many so-called "side chains." Consequently, a consortium can ensure trusted, shared data between enterprises in a single, common view. With many heavyweights in industry already part of its blockchain consortia, SAP has likely seized the advantage by playing to its strengths when it comes to numerous strong relationships its developed while running the key business systems of many large enterprises. Member of the C-Suite should be aware that increasingly, cloud platforms will seek to "own" the data for a given industry by using blockchain as a way to make it trusted, open, transparent, and controlled. SAP now appears on its way to adding this key data strategy to its platform.
The upshot of all this for C-Suite leaders, including the CEO, CIO, CDO, CMO, COO, CCO, and CFO, who are currently evaluating SAP as a long-term partner in their digital growth journey is the following in my analysis:
Summary: No longer your father's enterprise IT company, SAP is succeeding in executing on its vision of a front-end to back-end platform for innovation and customer experience for any size enterprise to use as their primary business environment, not just for legacy ERP and key operations. From Internet of Things to blockchain, as well as artificial intelligence and advanced cloud capabilities, sufficient evidence of platform evolution was on prominent display at TechEd 2018 Las Vegas to ensure that SAP Cloud Platform is a viable strategic enterprise cloud platform of the highest order. My advice is that members of the C-Suite should consider SAP's offering in their overall strategic plans and enterprise vendor shortlists.
New C-Suite Data to Decisions Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Revenue & Growth Effectiveness Matrix Commerce Sales Marketing Next-Generation Customer Experience Innovation & Product-led Growth Tech Optimization Future of Work Microsoft Google amazon SAP AI Analytics Automation CX EX Employee Experience HCM Machine Learning ML SaaS PaaS Cloud Digital Transformation Enterprise Software Enterprise IT Leadership HR IaaS Disruptive Technology Enterprise Acceleration Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP CCaaS UCaaS Collaboration Enterprise Service LLMs Agentic AI Generative AI Robotics Quantum Computing VR Supply Chain M&A Marketing B2B B2C Customer Experience Growth eCommerce Social Customer Service Content Management business finance Healthcare Chief Information Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Procurement Officer Chief Product Officer Chief Revenue Officer Chief Experience Officer Chief People Officer Chief Human Resources Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief AI Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Supply Chain Officer Chief Customer Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief Operating Officer
Book your hotel by October 5 to take advantage of discounted lodging.
Connected Enterprise is an immersive three-day innovation summit and executive retreat that features 1:1 interviews with visionary market makers, executive exchanges, fireside chats and disruptive technology demos.
Executives from across the globe, including leaders from Arby's Restaurant Group, CBRE, Estée Lauder, Spotify, Symmons Industries, The University of Texas System, and the U.S. government, attend the conference and leave with the knowledge and network to instill a culture of innovation and transformation for their organizations.
Here's a preview of what to expect at Connected Enterprise 2018.
Arrive at the Ritz-Carlton Half Moon Bay and spend the afternoon playing golf cliffside. Don't be shy. There's a group for everyone. We happily rent clubs for attendees.
Not a golfer? Ask us for a spa treatment instead.
Join us post-golf for a welcome reception in the clubhouse. Drinks and appetizers will be served.
Start the day with yoga or a walk.
We'll kick off the summit with panels discussing how leading companies are preparing for and implementing emerging technologies such as blockchain, AI, and quantum computing.
Navi Radjou will deliver the keynote, "Beyond Smartness, How To Innovate and Lead Wisely in a Post-Digital Society".
In the evening we'll travel to Sam's Chowder House, a Half Moon Bay institution, for the Cosmic Feast. We'll watch the sunset and treat ourselves to lobster.
Wednesday's panels will focus on today's real-world problems such as governance, data privacy, and digital transformation. Industry leaders will discuss their innovative approaches to these problems.
Kare Anderson will deliver her keynote, "Say it Better".
SuperNova Awards gala will begin at 7:00 p.m. We'll start the evening with a cocktail reception. At around 8:00 p.m. we'll sit down for dinner.
During dinner Steven Johnson will deliver his keynote address, "Farsighted".
At 9:00 p.m. the SuperNova Award judging committee will announce the winners of the 2018 SuperNova Awards.
Celebrate into the night at the fire pits.
Today we'll hear from leading C-level executives about how they led their teams, implemented disruptive technologies, and advanced their careers.
Sessions will end at noon. If you opted for a spa treatment instead of golf on day 0, wind down at the spa.
Can’t make the entire conference? Need help justifying your attendance? Need help with travel and/or lodging? Please reach out to me. If you would like to attend the conference to speak about your SuperNova Award, Constellation will try to the full extent of our powers to get you there.
Book your hotel by October 5 to take advantage of discounted lodging.
Connected Enterprise is an immersive three-day innovation summit and executive retreat that features 1:1 interviews with visionary market makers, executive exchanges, fireside chats and disruptive technology demos.
Executives from across the globe, including leaders from Arby's Restaurant Group, CBRE, Estée Lauder, Spotify, Symmons Industries, The University of Texas System, and the U.S. government, attend the conference and leave with the knowledge and network to instill a culture of innovation and transformation for their organizations.
This high-touch executive retreat includes all meals, three days of conference programming, open bars, entertainment, SuperNova Award gala, golf or spa. Connected Enterprise takes place at the Ritz-Carlton Half Moon Bay.
Keynote speakers:
Holger Mueller is VP and Principal Analyst for Constellation Research for the fundamental enablers of the cloud, IaaS, PaaS and next generation Applications, with forays up the tech stack into BigData and Analytics, HR Tech, and sometimes SaaS. Holger provides strategy and counsel to key clients, including Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Product Officers, Chief HR Officers, investment analysts, venture capitalists, sell-side firms, and technology buyers. Coverage Areas: Future of Work Tech Optimization & Innovation Background: Before joining Constellation Research, Mueller was VP of Products for NorthgateArinso, a KKR company. There, he led the transformation of products to the cloud and laid the foundation for new Business Process as a…...
Read moreWe had the opportunity to attend Salesforce's Dreamforce conference, held from September 25th till 28th in San Francisco. It was the usual 'zoo' of marketing spend and attendees all over San Francisco. Salesforce claimed over 170k in person attendees, at least on Tuesday it did not feel like that. But certainly, this is the yearly come together of the Salesforce ecosystem.
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| Apple and Salesforce partnership |
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| Salesforce Customer 360 |
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| Einstein Voice - The most prominent member of the Einstein family at Dreamforce |
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| AWS and Salesforce partnership Source: Salesforce Keynote |
Sherrie is responsible for acting as a liaison between clients and analysts while growing Constellation's footprint across North America. Prior to her career at Constellation, Sherrie worked with major technology suppliers of auto identification technologies as an account director at VDC Research. Contact Sherrie at [email protected]. ...
Read moreNews and announcements for the week of October 1, 2018
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