Chris Kanaracus

Managing Editor, Constellation Insights Constellation

Chris Kanaracus is managing editor of Constellation Insights.  Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members.  Prior to joining Constellation, Kanaracus spent seven years covering the enterprise software industry for IDG News Service, where he frequently broke exclusive stories with a focus on end-customer issues. Kanaracus has also held various managerial and reporting roles at newspapers in New England since 1998. Twitter: @chriskanaracus , Title: Big IdeasConstellation Insights Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members. ...

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Alan Lepofsky

Vice President & Principal Analyst Constellation Research

Alan Lepofsky - VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research. With almost two decades of experience in the collaboration software industry, Lepofsky helps organizations improve the way their employees work together to get their jobs done. Lepofsky’s primary research area The Future of Work, focuses on: integrating collaboration and business processes (Purposeful Collaboration), structuring work via Social Task Management, leveraging analytics and digital assistants to work more productively, the strategic impact of mobile computing on business transformation, and measuring workforce culture based on Digital Proficiency instead of age. Twitter: @alanlepoLinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/alanlepo     , Title: Big IdeasIntelligent Collaboration: The Intersection of…...

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Amazon Web Services unveils Sumerian: AWS re:Invent, which kicks off this week in Las Vegas, is a big highlight of an otherwise slow time for tech conferences. In its first group of announcements at the event, AWS launched Sumerian, a new service for building virtual reality, augmented reality and 3-D applications. Here are the key details from AWS's announcement:

VR and AR apps created in Amazon Sumerian will run in any browser that supports WebGL or WebVR graphics rendering, including Daydream, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and iOS mobile devices. Getting started with Amazon Sumerian is as simple as logging into the AWS Management Console. There is no software to install or upfront costs—customers pay only for the storage used for 3D assets and the volume of traffic generated to access the virtual scenes they create. To learn more about Amazon Sumerian, visit: http://aws.amazon.com/sumerian.

POV: Sumerian has stiff competition out of the gate from well-established development platforms such as Unreal Engine and Unity, and to a lesser extent with emerging 3-D image services, which include Google Poly. AWS is betting Sumerian can gain a foothold based on factors like ease of use—it claims developers with no relevant experience can use Sumerian's drag-and-drop editor to build immersive experiences in just a few hours—pricing, cloud-based delivery, and the ability to build other AWS services into applications, such as the Lex chatbot engine or AWS IoT.

Dedicated AR/VR development firms, in contrast, already have deep investments in the likes of Unity and while you can expect some tire-kicking from those circles, Sumerian has an uphill battle to win serious amounts of their business. Amazon's entry in that market has been Lumberyard, a desktop-based development engine with heavier-duty capabilities than Sumerian (but which is also integrated with AWS services). Lumberyard is geared for native applications that run on iOS, Android, PCs and gaming consoles.

When it comes to enterprise applications, the 3-D/AR/VR space is in its early days, but the technologies show promise for quite a number of use cases beyond the likes of customer support. If Sumerian lives up to its billing, it's not difficult to imagine enterprises, ISVs systems integrators taking a look at it.

"I think training and education will be the first to embrace AR," says Constellation VP and principal analyst Alan Lepofsky. "Then we'll see engineering—product design and manufacturing."

For regular day-to-day workers, it will be about creating new ways to display information, both in context—right in the flow of work— as well as peripheral information that will help support the current process, he adds. "The meeting experience is ripe for innovation."

Cybersecurity consolidation continues: The post-U.S. holiday news cycle began with a pair of acquisitions in the cybersecurity arena, with private equity firm Thoma Bravo paying $1.6 billion for Barracuda Networks and McAfee buying Skyhigh Networks for an undisclosed amount.

Barracuda competes with the likes of Palo Alto Networks with its family of network appliances and cloud security products. It went public only several years ago, in 2013, but has struggled a bit of late. The purchase price works out to $27.55 a share, slightly over its $23.69 close at the end of last week, but Barracuda was trading just over $40 in 2015. Part of Barracuda's challenge has been transitioning to be more of a cloud subscription-based business, and less reliant on sales of its on-premises, physical appliances.

Going private again will give Barracuda a way to duck the pressures of the public market, but customers can expect Thoma Bravo, like most private equity concerns, to look for operational cost savings. Thoma Bravo has been spending big on tech companies in recent years, paying $3 billion for Qlik last year in one notable deal.

Meanwhile, McAfee is buying Skyhigh about eight months after being spun out from former parent Intel. Skyhigh is known for its cloud access security broker technology, which will work in concert with McAfee's endpoint security products. Generally speaking, CASBs serve as gatekeepers between cloud services and on-premises environments, giving companies the means to monitor and control employee access to SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings in a unified manner. Skyhigh also offers threat detection and protection and the ability to provide access controls for custom-built apps.

POV: This past year has seen a notable amount of security vendor consolidation. Vendors and investors see a market opportunity in an environment where damaging, extremely high-profile hacks such as the Equifax breach have heightened enterprise anxieties over cyberattacks. It's in turn a response to many years of best-of-breed security purchases by enterprises over the years; the pendulum may be swinging in a different direction, under the notion that consolidation—assuming the proper investments in integration are made—can present a more unified line of defense.

Chris Kanaracus

Managing Editor, Constellation Insights Constellation

Chris Kanaracus is managing editor of Constellation Insights.  Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members.  Prior to joining Constellation, Kanaracus spent seven years covering the enterprise software industry for IDG News Service, where he frequently broke exclusive stories with a focus on end-customer issues. Kanaracus has also held various managerial and reporting roles at newspapers in New England since 1998. Twitter: @chriskanaracus , Title: Big IdeasConstellation Insights Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members. ...

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Salesforce's Q3—the highlights: During an abbreviated U.S. holiday workweek, Salesforce released its third-quarter financial report, beating analyst estimates for revenue and profits on a non-GAAP basis. As the industry's largest pure SaaS vendor, Salesforce is an important bellwether regarding broader technology trends and the buying appetites of customers. To that end, CEO Marc Benioff and other executives provided more color and insight during a conference call with analysts. Here are some of the key highlights.

- Salesforce has promoted Bret Taylor to president and chief product officer, and Alex Dayon to president and chief strategy officer. Taylor is former CTO at Facebook and the founder of Quip, a collaboration application startup Salesforce acquired in 2016. Dayon is a longtime executive at Salesforce, coming aboard in 2008 when Salesforce bought his company, call center tech provider Instranet, which became the core of Salesforce's Service Cloud offering.

Taylor takes over the CPO job from Dayon, which seems like a desire by Salesforce to put someone with the most serious and up-to-date technical chops in charge of product direction and marketing (both will report directly to Benioff). Thus, Taylor's ascension may prove to be significantly more than an executive deckchair move with respect to Salesforce's product strategy going forward.

Salesforce's initial user experience, referred to as "Aloha" internally, has been succeeded by Lightning, which was introduced a few years ago. While Lightning's uptake has "far exceeded our expectations," Salesforce sill has "a huge amount of work to do" before getting all users on Lightning, Benioff conceded on the call.

Lightning should be viewed not just as a new interface but as a "decoded platform," Taylor said:

This means that people are experts in their business who are not necessarily experts at computer programming can make meaningful business applications that transform their companies and transform their relationship with their customers. So, it's truly an enabler.

- Salesforce is landing more "wall-to-wall" deals with large companies as they start with CRM and then add the rest of Salesforce's clouds for support, marketing and other areas, but the process tends to be evolutionary rather than big-bang, president Keith Block said.

The appetite to digest a full wall-to-wall digital transformation from the first interaction with the CEO is actually very, very rare. Typically it is, 'we love the vision, we understand what the future brings, whether it's a B2C platform or B2B platform, what artificial intelligence and Einstein can bring, but let's start off incrementally and prove the value and then we can go wall-to-wall.

- The channel is becoming much more crucial for Salesforce all the time. Partners now account for more than 50 percent of Salesforce's new business, Block said. The world's biggest systems integrators are in turn making plenty of money with their Salesforce practices, and have the relationships to pull together deals Salesforce couldn't necessarily complete on their own:

In my trip to Europe last week I was with the CEOs of two of the five global firms. They have incredible reach. They are in the boardroom. They are able to paint a vision alongside with us many times we go into the boardroom or with the sea levels we together. Just as important is our ability to drive the success of the customer and that's where we need these very close relationships with the SIs.

What Whitman leaves for Neri at HPE: Hewlett-Packard Enterprise also released earnings this holiday week, and along with them a piece of news that was at once a surprise yet not entirely unexpected save for the timing. HPE CEO Meg Whitman will leave her post in February, after more than six years on the job.

During Whitman's tenure, she oversaw a historic breakup of the former Hewlett-Packard into the consumer-centric HP and HPE. Whitman made another series of changes at HPE, selling off its services business and much of its software catalog, while investing billions in companies such as storage vendors SimpliVity and Nimble as part of a push into "hyperconverged" infrastructure products.

Neri is a longtime HP employee who began in 1995 as a customer service engineer for the EMEA region. He worked his way up the executive ranks in both consumer and enterprise-oriented roles, and has served as HPE's president since June, when Whitman launched a new strategic plan called Next. As such, Neri has obviously been groomed to be Whitman's successor for some time.

He was also the architect behind many of HPE's recent acquisitions, which are driving its hyperconvergence strategy. As incoming CEO, Neri seems to have a wide-open runway to test it out at scale. Moreover, Whitman's HPE Next plan was finalized in time for the start of its new fiscal year on November 1; Neri will need to continue executing on it, but the big decisions about operational efficiency—cost-cutting, in other words—have already been made.

While HPE has undergone the transformation into a smaller, more focused company Whitman said it would, what it does seem to lack is some sizzle in its public identity. Whitman brought the star power that Neri has yet to develop on his own.

But there are parallels to draw between his ascencion and that of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who took over from the larger-than-life Steve Ballmer and like Neri, has engineering in his roots. Microsoft today is a much different company in tone and approach than under Ballmer's leadership; assuming Neri maintains the support of his board, shareholders and employees, significant changes could be afoot at HPE over the next couple of years.

Chris Kanaracus

Managing Editor, Constellation Insights Constellation

Chris Kanaracus is managing editor of Constellation Insights.  Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members.  Prior to joining Constellation, Kanaracus spent seven years covering the enterprise software industry for IDG News Service, where he frequently broke exclusive stories with a focus on end-customer issues. Kanaracus has also held various managerial and reporting roles at newspapers in New England since 1998. Twitter: @chriskanaracus , Title: Big IdeasConstellation Insights Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members. ...

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Why the looming net neutrality reversal could fail: Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai will publicly release his proposal to overturn the Obama administration-era rules regarding Internet regulation known as net neutrality on Wedesday. Net neutrality bars ISPs from favoring legal Internet traffic based on payments or other considerations; opponents like Pai call the rules an anticompetitive overreach, while proponents say they protect consumers.

In advance of his plan's formal release, Pai published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal laying out his now-familiar case. Here are some key excerpts:

In the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the government called for an internet “unfettered by Federal or State regulation.” The result of that fateful decision was the greatest free-market success story in history.

Encouraged by light-touch regulation, private companies invested over $1.5 trillion in nearly two decades to build out American communications networks. Without having to ask anyone’s permission, innovators everywhere used the internet’s open platform to start companies that have transformed how billions of people live and work.

But that changed in 2014. Just days after a poor midterm election result, President Obama publicly pressured the Federal Communications Commission to reject the longstanding consensus on a market-based approach to the internet. He instead urged the agency to impose upon internet service providers a creaky regulatory framework called “Title II,” which was designed in the 1930s to tame the Ma Bell telephone monopoly.

This burdensome regulation has failed consumers and businesses alike. In the two years after the FCC’s decision, broadband network investment dropped more than 5.6%—the first time a decline has happened outside of a recession. If the current rules are left in place, millions of Americans who are on the wrong side of the digital divide would have to wait years to get more broadband.

POV: The FCC's Republican majority board is set to vote on the proposal December 14, and given the boards's partisan makeup, it's expected to pass. However, opponents are not just making noises of protest in advance of the vote; they also have quite a hole card to play. Federal law states that decisions by agencies such as the FCC can be overturned if an appeals court found they were made in an "arbitrary" or "capricious" manner.

Given that the current rules came into effect only after many years of heated debate and legal wrangling, there could be a case for terming the FCC's upcoming vote as arbitrary or capricious. It's also possible that Congress could intervene in the fray, passing a bill that could find a compromise set of rules, but in the current political climate that outcome seems less likely. Only one thing is for sure: The net neutrality debate is far from over, looming repeal or not.

HPE brings AI to the storage tier: Earlier this year, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise spent $1 billion to aquire Nimble Storage, maker of flash-based storage products, with an eye on complementing its 3PAR storage family. But HPE wanted more than Nimble's hardware; for its money, the company also picked up InfoSight, a predictive analytics software platform geared for data center performance and proactive maintenance.

Now HPE has added support for InfoSight in 3PAR and believes the combination will provide a compelling differentiator in a crowded market. Here are the key details from HPE's announcement:

HPE InfoSight lays the groundwork for an autonomous data center with the new AI recommendation engine. Building on its predictive capabilities, HPE InfoSight now preemptively advises IT how to avoid issues, improve performance, and optimize available resources. The recommendations are based on advanced machine learning that leverages almost a decade of data science expertise and rich telemetry collected from more than 10,000 HPE Nimble Storage customers.

POV: The first release will provide root-cause analysis of problems between storage mediums and host VMs; a portal that displays performance, capacity, health and other information from 3PAR arrays; and predictive analysis for spotting anomalies and potential problems.

HPE is delivering Infosight to Nimble and 3PAR storage customers with active support contracts at no additional cost, beginning in January. InfoSight was Nimble's proverbial secret sauce prior to the acquisition, and has been collecting customer data for roughly a decade. Now HPE can map over that system intelligence and historical analysis to 3PAR system management, although it will take time for HPE to collect large amounts of 3PAR-specific data for use with InfoSight. Nonetheless, it has to start somewhere. One would imagine InfoSight will get applied to other members of HPE's extensive storage family over time as well.

Capital One gets into the container game with Critical Stack: While still by and large a bank, Capital One has designs on becoming something more, including a trusted technology provider to companies in highly regulated industries like its own. To that end, Capital One has launched a beta for Critical Stack, a container orchestration system derived from its 2016 acquisition of a company of the same name:

The use of containers and microservices is on the rise as more organizations recognize the automation, speed and cost savings benefits of modern computing infrastructure.

For large enterprises, especially those in highly regulated industries, security and compliance considerations are paramount. Critical Stack, powered by Capital One, was designed to help enterprises more fully automate compliance and security controls, as well as orchestrate streamlined deployment and configuration of apps and infrastructure in the cloud.

POV: Capital One has been a pace-setter among large banks in recent years on the technology innovation front, moving many of its systems to Amazon Web Services. The beta release of Critical Stack will eventually lead to a commercial product; how successful it is remains to be seen. Critical Stack is compatible with Kubernetes, the Google-backed container orchestration system that has gained a great deal of momentum in recent times, so much so that compatibility is less of a choice than a must.

Chris Kanaracus

Managing Editor, Constellation Insights Constellation

Chris Kanaracus is managing editor of Constellation Insights.  Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members.  Prior to joining Constellation, Kanaracus spent seven years covering the enterprise software industry for IDG News Service, where he frequently broke exclusive stories with a focus on end-customer issues. Kanaracus has also held various managerial and reporting roles at newspapers in New England since 1998. Twitter: @chriskanaracus , Title: Big IdeasConstellation Insights Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members. ...

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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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Tesla's Semi launch puts autonomous trucking in the spotlight: One thing Tesla founder Elon Musk is good at doing is garnering amazing amounts of attention for his company's product launches, even when they won't be reality for years. It was no different this week with the unveiling of Tesla Semi, an electric, semi-autonomous tractor trailer Tesla says will be in production by 2019.

That timeline gives Tesla more than two years from today to actually deliver the first Semi, and it's no stretch to wonder whether it will meet even that mark, given problems the company has had scaling up production on its passenger vehicle lines. But Tesla is far from the only player in electric-powered trucking, with Daimler Automotive Group and Volvo two other notable entries with prototypes well underway.

What Tesla's announcement delivered is the kind of focused blast of hype that will push electric and autonomous trucks further into the mainstream conversation. Here's a look at some of the key issues at hand.

• Finding their range: Volvo has said its initial electric trucks will have a base range of about 150 miles, with the potential for 300 miles through additional battery packs. Tesla claims the Semi will have a 500-mile range, a distance that puts electric trucks in the long-haul game by circumventing the lack of a pervasive national charging system. While the trend in trucking over recent years has been to atomize routes into more regional runs, longer-range electric trucks will no doubt find appeal in the market.
• Expect consolidation and partnerships: What Tesla brings in sizzle to the trucking industry, it lacks in certain key substances like well-established channel relationships with semi-truck buyers, which range from retailers like Walmart to thousands of trucking firms large and small. This week, Tesla grabbed headlines noting that Walmart and other firms have already placed preorders for the Semi, but in the long run—no pun intended—the electric truck market will probably be dominated by the incumbent players, with Tesla and others partnering or licensing their innovations. However, stay tuned for marketing efforts aimed at the many independent truck owner-operators out there, who hitch their rigs to trailers from many different customers.
• What do truckers think?: Trucking industry jobs remain in high demand and despite predictions of an autonomous trucking future, major changes will take decades to implement. In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of veteran truckers and ones just entering the workforce have to contemplate what the electric revolution could mean. Tesla's announcement of Semi drew quite a bit of attention this week from truckers on a popular industry forum.
  Some of it was skeptical and even mocking, with posters questioning the effect of large numbers of electric trucks on the nation's power grid, or how they would be designed to handle situations like long wait and idling times at major loading ports. But others argued that the introduction of electric truck alternatives should serve as a wakeup call to traditional truck makers who have slipped on quality and safety metrics. The voices on the ground are important to hear in any major call for change, and trucking is no different.

Microsoft launching Cassandra-as-a-service: In one of several notable database-related announcements this week, Microsoft is prepping support for Cassandra in CosmosDB, its globally distributed database service. It will allow developers to use CosmosDB with the Cassandra SDKs and tools they're already familiar with, Microsoft said.

POV: With CosmosDB, Microsoft has delivered a next-generation, globally scalable database offering consistency and other performance advantages over NoSQL databases, says Constellation VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen. It has also made this very new database accessible to developers by exposing it through familiar, open-source APIs, including those of MongoDB, DocumentDB, Gremlin Graph and Spark. "The Cassandra API adds yet another option, but one that's most consistent with the attributes of CosmosDB," Henschen adds. "Both Cassandra and CosmosDB excel in powering globally distributed applications, so the offering of a Cassandra-based cloud service on Azure running on CosmosDB is particularly attractive."

While CosmosDB is quite new, Microsoft executives insist that it's able to support all the features of the Cassandra API and will deliver performance that meets or, in the case of consistency, exceeds what's possible with a Cassandra database deployment. To that end, any company considering Cassandra as a managed service will surely put Microsoft's option on CosmosDB on its short list to try, Henschen says. "For now they'll be pioneers, as there’s not a long list of CosmosDB customers, and even fewer with experience using it with the Cassandra API. But with both CosmosDB and Google Spanner raising expectations for global database deployments without performance and consistency compromises, there will be plenty of tire kickers."

Amazon Web Services throws support behind neural network interoperability: A few months ago, Facebook, Microsoft and other notable tech companies formed the Open Neural Network Exchange, a project geared at fostering interoperability between deep learning technologies. Now Amazon Web Services has joined ONNX and is contributing ONNX-MXNet, a Python package that adds ONNX learning models to the deep learning framework Apache MXNet.

POV: Putting the acronym alphabet soup aside, what this means is a significant step forward for cooperation between rivals in an important area of AI research. Rather than forcing developers to re-implement deep learning models framework by framework, ONNX seeks to reduce or even eliminate that type of gruntwork, enabling the focus to be on innovation.

Chris Kanaracus

Managing Editor, Constellation Insights Constellation

Chris Kanaracus is managing editor of Constellation Insights.  Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members.  Prior to joining Constellation, Kanaracus spent seven years covering the enterprise software industry for IDG News Service, where he frequently broke exclusive stories with a focus on end-customer issues. Kanaracus has also held various managerial and reporting roles at newspapers in New England since 1998. Twitter: @chriskanaracus , Title: Big IdeasConstellation Insights Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members. ...

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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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Net neutrality vote looms for December: It could be a matter of a few weeks before the U.S. rules governing Internet traffic undergo a major overhaul. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai is set to unveil a final, formal proposal to overturn so-called net neutrality regulations passed under the Obama administration, according to a number of published reports. A vote by the Republican-majority FCC board would be taken at its scheduled meeting in mid-December.

Net neutrality bars ISPs from blocking or slowing Internet traffic associated with legal content. It also prohibits them from favoring traffic based on special payments or other considerations. But Pai says the rules, passed in 2015, wrongly classified ISPs as "common carriers" under Title II of the Communications Act. The classification allowed for net neutrality's protective measures but on balance is an anti-competitive overreach, critics argue.

POV: The net neutrality debate stems from a much earlier time than 2015. In fact, its general contours have been in play for the better part of two decades. That makes the potential for the rules being overturned that much more significant. Net neutrality has long been framed as a consumer protection issue, and that it remains. Other key supporters are Internet companies such as Google and Facebook, which is only natural.

However, today and going forward, Internet traffic is of increasing concern to enterprises of all kinds, and of all sizes, as they seek to create new digital business models, sell and market more effectively, and serve customers who live online more and more. While partisan decisions can be fleeting in Washington—a rules change in December could last only a few years, if current president Donald Trump is not reelected or leaves office under other circumstances—the upcoming FCC meeting is nonetheless extremely important.

Walmart results, online sales boom: The world's largest company continues to drive major gains in online sales, with U.S. e-commerce revenue up 50 percent in the third quarter, Walmart officials said this week.

Importantly, Walmart's pivot to ecommerce is having a holistic effect on the brick-and-mortar business, which still accounts for the vast majority of revenue, and vice versa. CEO Doug McMillon explained the effect this way on a prerecorded conference call:

Our associates are using technology and apps for inventory management and price changes that help make their jobs easier and increase productivity in the stores. Store leverage is helping to allow our strategic investments in eCommerce to continue. It’s also exciting to see how we’re removing friction from the customer experience with express pharmacy, an easier money services process and by expanding pickup options with our automated towers and online grocery. We now have online grocery in more than 1,100 stores and look forward to expanding this popular offering to another 1,000 locations next year.

POV: While its e-commerce strategy may have taken some time to gel, nobody can accuse Walmart of moving slowly now, and some of its recent moves hold lessons for all retailers.

For one, Walmart has recognized that e-commerce demands almost limitless choice. To that end, it has tripled the number of unique SKUs on Walmart.com in one year, to 70 million. A significant piece of that growth is from third-party sellers, but beyond sheer scale, Walmart has taken brand cachet into account, inking deals with the likes of Bose, KitchenAid and Lord and Taylor.

Walmart has also taken steps to preserve the identity of Jet.com, the online retailer it acquired in late 2016 for $3.3 billion. Jet.com built up a reputation quickly with more affluent urban shoppers and milennials, with natural crossover between those two categories. So far, Jet is running business-as-usual under Walmart ownership while continuing to build out its identity with house brands like Uniquely J. Walmart's investment in Jet.com was about horizontal expansion in its customer profile base, not just top-line revenue.

The quarter all eyes are on is the current one, of course, given it holds the busy holiday shopping season. Beyond revenue and profit expectations, the spotlight will be on how well Walmart executes on the customer experience, both in-store and e-commerce.

Microsoft makes Databricks a first-party Azure service: One of Microsoft's key selling points for Azure is its open nature, with support for many third-party technologies. But its new partnership with Databricks is on another level entirely. Here are the key details from an official Microsoft blog post:

Once you manage data at scale in the cloud, you open up massive possibilities for predictive analytics, AI, and real-time applications. Over the past five years, the platform of choice for building these applications has been Apache Spark ... However, managing and deploying Spark at scale has remained challenging, especially for enterprise use cases with large numbers of users and strong security requirements.

Enter Databricks. Founded by the team that started the Spark project in 2013, Databricks provides an end-to-end, managed Apache Spark platform optimized for the cloud. Featuring one-click deployment, autoscaling, and an optimized Databricks Runtime that can improve the performance of Spark jobs in the cloud by 10-100x, Databricks makes it simple and cost-efficient to run large-scale Spark workloads.

Microsoft and Databricks are integrating the latter's platform with Azure on a deep level, including with special connectors to Azure's storage services for faster performance. Add in other Azure-related benefits for caching, query optimization, auto-scaling and other factors and the result is a superior offering for data scientists and engineers, Microsoft says.

POV: Databricks has more than 700 customers on its current platform, which runs on AWS, but Ali Ghodsi, cofounder and chief executive officer, told Constellation VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen that the company has heard lots of requests for an option on Microsoft Azure. Azure Databricks will deliver all the capabilities of the current Databricks platform, but it will be sold and serviced by Microsoft, so it will be a first-class citizen on Azure, with integrations with Active Directory, Blob Storage, Azure SQL, PowerBI, CosmosDB, Stream Analytics and more. For now it's a preview release and the companies are not projecting release dates, but expect general availability by Q1 or early Q2 2018, Henschen says.

"Companies could probably build many big data and analytics capabilities comparable to what you can do in Databricks using combinations of multiple Azure services, but Azure Databricks brings to Microsoft's cloud a well-thought-out, comprehensive and collaborative environment that spans the capabilities of data lakes, data warehouses and streaming systems together with advanced analytical capabilities including machine learning," Henschen says. "This move bolsters Microsoft's credibility as a source of open-source tools and platforms. At the same time it’s a big win for Databricks in terms of exposure to enterprise customers and a whole new base of customers that prefer Azure to AWS."

There is much more detail about the partnership and planned features in Microsoft's full blog post. On balance, they validate the notion that Azure Databricks has serious skin in the game from Microsoft's end; it's far from a case of Redmond certifying a third-party technology for Azure and handing over the proverbial keys in exchange for a cut of revenue. For CIOs, enterprise architects and data science organizations with existing or contemplated investments in Spark, there are good reasons to pay attention to Azure Databricks at a minimum, and become an early adopter program participant as a further step.

Chris Kanaracus

Managing Editor, Constellation Insights Constellation

Chris Kanaracus is managing editor of Constellation Insights.  Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members.  Prior to joining Constellation, Kanaracus spent seven years covering the enterprise software industry for IDG News Service, where he frequently broke exclusive stories with a focus on end-customer issues. Kanaracus has also held various managerial and reporting roles at newspapers in New England since 1998. Twitter: @chriskanaracus , Title: Big IdeasConstellation Insights Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members. ...

Read more

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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Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst Constellation Research

Holger Mueller is VP and Principal Analyst for Constellation Research for the fundamental enablers of the cloud, IaaS, PaaS and next generation Applications, with forays up the tech stack into BigData and Analytics, HR Tech, and sometimes SaaS. Holger provides strategy and counsel to key clients, including Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Product Officers, Chief HR Officers, investment analysts, venture capitalists, sell-side firms, and technology buyers.  Coverage Areas: Future of Work Tech Optimization & Innovation  Background: Before joining Constellation Research, Mueller was VP of Products for NorthgateArinso, a KKR company. There, he led the transformation of products to the cloud and laid the foundation for new Business Process as a…...

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Google introduces TensorFlow Lite: During its past two years as an open-source project, TensorFlow has emerged as one of the leading maching learning frameworks in the industry, drawing interest and investment from well beyond its creator and core contributor, Google. Now the TensorFlow team has released a Lite version of the framework aimed at mobile and embedded devices, in a move that will draw excitement but may also seem belated to some.

Here are some of the key details from the team's announcement:

TensorFlow has always run on many platforms, from racks of servers to tiny IoT devices, but as the adoption of machine learning models has grown exponentially over the last few years, so has the need to deploy them on mobile and embedded devices. TensorFlow Lite enables low-latency inference of on-device machine learning models. It is designed from scratch to be:

Lightweight Enables inference of on-device machine learning models with a small binary size and fast initialization/startup

Cross-platform A runtime designed to run on many different platforms, starting with Android and iOS

Fast Optimized for mobile devices, including dramatically improved model loading times, and supporting hardware acceleration

To the last point, TensorFlow Lite includes support for Android Neural Networks API, which works in conjunction with custom hardware accelerators that are found more increasingly on mobile devices these days. It also comes with support for some key machine learning models, including Inception v3 for image recognition; and Smart Reply for quick, automated responses to incoming chats.

TensorFlow Lite should be viewed as an "evolution" of the existing TensorFlow Mobile and will eventually supercede it through a much larger scope, according to the team.

POV: "In the battle of AI platforrms distribution is key," says Constellation VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. "The more places algorithms can run, the more value there is for developers and enterprises. Google delivering on the TensorFlow Lite announcement gives developers broader reach for one of the popular neural networks and AI platforms, and it's an important move for TensorFlow.

That being said, the move is a fairly obvious one, particularly since Google is the company behind Android, notes Constellation VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen. "Since most of us are carrying supercomputers around with us in our pockets, we should be able to take advantage of machine learning and nueral nets," he says. "What's more, application developers will want these capabilities accessible to users no matter the platform. MXNet and Torch already run on Android and iOS, so it stands to reason that Google would want to extend the versatility of TensorFlow to be a first-class citizen on mobile devices."

ADT buys Datashield for hybrid cybersecurity: While ADT has long been known for its physical security systems—alarms and sensors for businesses and homes alike—in fact, the company has its own offerings for network security, and has partnered with security software providers for some time. Now ADT is taking the strategy a step further with the acquisition of Datashield, which makes a platform for managed threat detection and response. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

POV: Datashield uses a combination of its software and assigned security experts who investigate and rectify validated threats. This is an advantage over simply sending customers a torrent of security alerts for their own teams to monitor and assess, according to the company. It competes with the likes of Dell SecureWorks.

As others have noted, Datashield presents ADT with ample cross-selling opportunities. Where the challenge lies is educating its customer base on the value proposition, as well as living up to the cost savings Datashield claims its dedicated security monitoring centers can deliver as an outsourcing play, compared to hiring more infosec staffers. ADT is rolling Datashield into a new division called ADT Cybersecurity, which could get some initial traction in a market wracked of late by some of the highest-profile and damaging data breaches ever.

Microsoft embraces MariaDB on Azure: After Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010, MySQL co-creator Monty Widenius responded to uncertainty over the database's future under Oracle's ownership by leading a fork of the codebase called MariaDB. While experiencing some fits and starts, MariaDB today has become a mature, widely used relational database. A point of validation to that end came this week, with Microsoft's announcement that it is joining the MariaDB Foundation, which oversees the platform's development.

MariaDB will also be offered as a fully managed service on Microsoft Azure, with a preview version coming in the near future. MariaDB will join MySQL and Postgres on Azure.

POV: Microsoft's move isn't as monumental as others it has made in the open-source realm, such as its initial support of MySQL and decision to join the Linux Foundation. Still, it provides more open-source credibility for Redmond while sticking a thumb in the eye of Oracle and its MySQL unit, notes Constellation VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen. Microsoft has taken pains to position Azure as a broadly open cloud platform focused on customer choice, and supporting MariaDB both as a service and on the foundation level falls squarely in line with that attitude. 

Chris Kanaracus

Managing Editor, Constellation Insights Constellation

Chris Kanaracus is managing editor of Constellation Insights.  Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members.  Prior to joining Constellation, Kanaracus spent seven years covering the enterprise software industry for IDG News Service, where he frequently broke exclusive stories with a focus on end-customer issues. Kanaracus has also held various managerial and reporting roles at newspapers in New England since 1998. Twitter: @chriskanaracus , Title: Big IdeasConstellation Insights Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members. ...

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Twitter eyes more enterprise business with premium APIs: While Twitter has long provided APIs (application programming interfaces) for its data at no charge, it also offers enterprise-focused tools based on its acquisition of Gnip back in 2014.

But that two-item API menu has had a functional gap, one Twitter is trying to fill with new "premium" APIs. The free ones provide basic querying and data access, while the enterprise versions offer the full history of Twitter information along with more real-time access. Here's how Twitter describes the value proposition of its premium APIs:

The new premium APIs bring the reliability and stability of our enterprise APIs to our broader developer ecosystem for the first time. They include a clear upgrade path that scales access and price to fit your needs. We’ve built these new products to enable innovation — whether you’re just getting started and building a proof of concept, or are an established company experimenting with new products and ideas. 

Launching today in public beta, our first premium offering is the Search Tweets API, which provides access to the past 30 days of Twitter data. Soon, we’ll add an additional endpoint that will enable access to the full history of Twitter data, going all the way back to @jack’s first Tweet in 2006.

Premium APIs also deliver more tweets per request, greater query complexity and richer metadata. They're offered under monthly contracts, with access available in usage-based tiers. Pricing begins at $149 per month but scales up to $2,499 per month.

Twitter has already posted an API roadmap, which can be viewed here.

POV: The Twitter firehose remains a crucial data source for developers, both in the startup and enterprise realm, as well as CxOs. Twitter's failure to provide a middle-ground level of API access to its data until only now has been a sore spot. Developers have found themselves quickly running up against the free APIs limits, only to be unable or unwilling to invest in Twitter's enterprise-level tooling. With ad revenue struggling, Twitter needs new revenue; it's an open question as to whether premium APIs will generate it quickly, with the answer coming down to awareness, price point, perceived value, and the level of trust between Twitter and developers.

Google's Cloud Spanner goes global: This year, Google introduced Cloud Spanner, the distributed database platform that underpins services like AdWords. While generally available, Cloud Spanner was limited to regional deployments. That's not the case any longer, as Google has rolled out multi-region configurations of the database:

With this release, we’ve extended Cloud Spanner’s transactions and synchronous replication across regions and continents. That means no matter where your users may be, apps backed by Cloud Spanner can read and write up-to-date (strongly consistent) data globally and do so with minimal latency for end users.

Additionally, when running a Multi-Region instance, your database is able to survive a regional failure. This release also delivers an industry-leading 99.999% availability SLA with no planned downtime. That’s 10x less downtime (< 5min / year) than database services with four nines of availability.

POV: While Cloud Spanner's capabilities are impressive, one has to wonder where its relevance is save for very large enterprises running highly complex workloads. To that end, Cloud Spanner may be battle-tested within Google but remains a new product in the commercial sense.

So far, Google's named references for Spanner include SaaS vendors such as Marketo. The marketing automation provider had actually moved its underlying database platform to a non-relational store some time back in order to gain needed scalability, but ran into problems over time since its products are so aligned with transactional data. Cloud Spanner is providing traditional relational characteristics along with the scale Marketo needs for its services, a spokesman said. Other references include Evernote, which is converting 750 MySQL instances into a single Cloud Spanner instance, according to a statement.

Cloud Native Computing Foundation provides Kubernetes coherence: The influential industry group Cloud Native Computing Foundation has announced a certification and interoperability program for Kubernetes, the increasingly popular open source project for software container orchestration.

Some 32 certified Kubernetes distributions and platforms are availble under the program, which uses a testing suite to validate submissions for conformity with standards. They include offerings from Alibaba, Canonical, Apprenda, Cisco, Cloud Foundry, Docker, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat and SAP, among many others.

POV: Kubernetes originated at Google and over the past three years has become one of the fastest-growing open source projects ever. Containers underpin the next generation of cloud architectures, so some level of cohesion among industry players is to be expected, but the level of cooperation evidenced by the certification program's success is nonetheless remarkable.

Moreover, the sheer amount of critical mass it provides around a single, interoperable version of Kubernetes makes the prospect of a fork almost unthinkable. This is one case where enterprises will benefit from the shared interests of many vendors, who will have to compete based on the quality of services and value-added features.