| Constellation Research

Digital Transformation Digest: Oracle and Slack Team Up, Salesforce Aims Trailhead at Higher Ed, Ace Hardware Buys the Grommet

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. ...

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…...

Oracle ties up with Slack: While Oracle has made a lot of news during its massive OpenWorld conference this week, one item in particular stands out. The company recently became a customer of red-hot workplace messaging startup Slack, and now the pair have inked a product integration agreement, as Reuters reports:

The partnership will allow workers to use Slack as the interface for Oracleâ€™s sales, human resources and business software.

Slack entered the partnership to differentiate its messaging product among large corporations, a market the company has made a top priority since launching an enterprise-grade version of its messenger in January.

Slack is hoping the Oracle partnership will entice more corporations to choose its messenger over Microsoft Teams, Facebook Workplace and Atlassian Stride, all of which launched in the past year.

Oracle, meanwhile, said the partnership is key to serving younger professionals, many of which are accustomed to using messaging interfaces like Slack, Snapchat and Facebook Messenger.

POV: â€œOver the last few years weâ€™ve seen that the value of enterprise social networks increases when integrated with core business processes, a topic I call purposeful collaboration," says Constellation VP and principal analyst Alan Lepofsky. "Weâ€™re now seeing a similar trend emerge in the highly competitive group messaging market, where the value of conversations goes up when the discussions can contain business objects and processes."

Oracleâ€™s own product, Oracle Social Network (OSN) never got a lot of traction, so leveraging the popularity of Slack is a good move, Lepofsky adds. For Slack, this provides them another entry point into the enterprise market, enabling users of Oracleâ€™s CX, HR, ERP and other products to collaborate within Slack channels.â€

Oracle has 30,000 Slack seats of its own. It has made considerable efforts to overhaul its sales force, bringing in recent college graduates and training them on the job to sell its cloud products, with more experienced salespeople providing a mentorship role.

Salesforce links up with higher ed to push Trailhead training: Three years after launching Trailhead, its guided online training program, Salesforce is rolling out a version geared toward higher education students.

More than 70 institutions have signed up, including the University of Massachusetts-Lowell and the University of San Francisco. The program provides the Trailhead training content, mentorship from Salesforce employees and community groups.

Educators can include Trailhead content in a current class, or develop standalone ones. Salesforce has prepared instructional materials, such as slide decks and class formats, for teachers as well.

POV: The announcement, which Salesforce is making a few weeks before the big Dreamforce event, underscores how much Salesforce views the importance of training not only for existing customers, but as a market-seeding exercise.

Salesforce talks a lot about the "Salesforce economy," and in 2016 said its ecosystem will generate $389 billion in GDP and nearly 2 million jobs by 2020. Whether you quibble with those projections or not, Salesforce's rapid growth is unquestionable.

Trailhead was initially aimed at beginners and intermediate users of Salesforce's software, but over the past few years its content has grown to include much more sophisticated topics. It also remains free of charge, although users must create an account to be eligible to receive achievement badges and other gamification-related assets.

By pushing Trailhead into higher education, Salesforce follows a path well-worn by software vendors, who want to have college graduates hit the ground running with their technologies.

Salesforce is still making plenty of money with its official certification programs. But Trailhead's increasing popularity and recognition as a valid skills-builder may start blurring the line, cutting into that business. It will be interesting to see how Salesforce strikes the balance moving forward.

Ace Hardware buys majority stake in the Grommet: While Lowe's and Home Depot cast heavy shadows over the home improvement market, there is still a role for the likes of Ace Hardware, a cooperative of more than 5,000 stores around the world.

Ace has a venerable history, founded in Chiacgo in 1921. In contrast to the big box chains, most Ace stores are on the small side, located in neighborhoods rather than massive shopping plazas. The company has long touted its superior in-store customer service as a differentiator from larger competitors.

But Ace understands the importance of omnichannel commerce, and to that end has taken a majority stake in The Grommet, an online site that sells forward-thinking products developed by entreprenurs. Some of the Grommet's successes include FitBit, OtterBox and SodaStream. It has more than three million community members. Ace's majority stake builds on an existing partnership, as described by its announcement of the deal:

Ace Hardware and The Grommet first began working together in 2016 as part of a collaboration to bring new, unique and otherwise undiscovered products from independent Makers into select Ace stores.

â€œWe both stand as strong advocates for the underdog. From the very beginning we have appreciated our alignment in support for and advancement of the independent maker,â€ said John Venhuizen, president and CEO, Ace Hardware Corporation. â€œUnder Aceâ€™s ownership, I believe The Grommet can offer our customers more of that which fuels global economies and makes America special - the unbridled creativity of the local entrepreneur.â€

â€œThe Grommet has often been called a â€˜general store for innovation,â€™ and Ace is a trusted destination for the goods and services homeowners need to take care of their homes. That is a powerful combination,â€ said Jules Pieri, co-founder and CEO of The Grommet.

Ace will retain the Grommet's founders and plans to give it "considerable autonomy," according to a statement.

POV: The deal is interesting to say the least from a branding perspective, bringing together Ace's well-established but perhaps conservative image with the Grommet's hipster-driven mojo.

But the companies also share important core values. The vast majority of Ace's stores are independently owned under its cooperative corporate structure. That aligns well with the Grommet's focus on independent entrepreneurs, or "Makers" as product sellers are called.

The companies plan to emphasize the value of locality, both by advocating for local makers and featuring Grommet products with local relevance, they said in a statement.

It seems there are already natural synergies between Ace and Grommet users. Current Grommet customers visit Ace stores 50 percent more times than average Ace Rewards members, while spending nearly three times as much money, according to Ace retail analytics.

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Increasing Digital Competitiveness in your current Business model The lessons from GE and Industrie 4.0

Andy Mulholland

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research Constellation Research

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

Business is being disrupted, your Enterprise must transform! Variations of this message appear widely throughout the media, from business press, through general interest publications and into social media and events. The message that change is underway has been received, and noted. Boards and senior management are thirsty for more clarity as to the extent and speed of the ‘transformation’ and want more clarity to provide a bench mark for their own changes.

What is Digital Business and why does it both Disrupt and Transform is a question seldom asked, indeed definitions are usually, and obviously driven, but the context in which the question is posed. There is a simple answer, and keep this in mind when reading the rest of this piece;

A new generation of ‘Digital’ Technology is ‘Transforming’ the supply and consumption of assets, products and services and in so doing ‘Disrupting’ the established business models and markets for those items.

Similarly, it’s worth reminding what is ‘Transformation’ in when applied to Business. The Business Dictionary definition says. In an organizational context, a process of profound and radical change that orients an organization in a new direction and takes it to an entirely different level of effectiveness. Unlike 'turnaround' (which implies incremental progress on the same plane) transformation implies a basic change of character and little or no resemblance with the past configuration or structure.

This links to, and aligns with, the term ‘Disruption’ as defined by Clay Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor, in his much acclaimed book ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma’; A disruptive product addresses a market that previously couldn’t be served — a new-market disruption — or it offers a simpler, cheaper or more convenient alternative to an existing product — a low-end disruption.

Tech Crunch wrote a great article on Silicon Valley startups love of claiming ‘disruptive’ capabilities for their products entitled ‘What “Disrupt” really means’. Building upon the basics of the Innovators Dilemma with real examples to illustrate how products can disrupt markets, ending with the statement; Business models, not products, are disruptive.

Hopefully those three statements help clarifies the Enterprise objectives or actions, but competitively successful execution, is all about timing. Established Enterprises with successful business models rightly see change as a risk to their established position, delaying action until their market has been disrupted, which forces their belated response to be focused on their challenger’s terms, not their own strengths.

Startups see market disruption as their opportunity to grab a slice of the newly defined market, and consciously build their business model from day one to deliver in a Transformed manner. Second Tier Industry Sector players also see market disruption as an opportunity to rapidly increase their revenues at the expense of the market leaders. Both Startups and smaller second tier players can use their size, even their culture to transform quickly, even repeatedly.

Digital Business has the capability to disrupt and destroy established Industry sector markets simply because existing players find their established Business models to potentially handicap their ability to compete in the changed circumstances. Customer loyalty evaporates fast if the benefits of the disruptive change are high enough. For nearly 100 years the iconic Black Cab in London has been a byword for high quality service, but Uber has disrupted their market totally with 3.5 million Londoners holding Uber accounts.

Unionized Black Cab business operators attempt to force the Uber out through persuading the City of London to legislate in their favor, resulted in nearly 1 million of their customers petitioning for Uber to be allowed to continue. Demand for Taxi services remains high, or has become even higher through Uber, but Digital Business has disrupted the supply and consumption business model, resulting in Taxi operators facing the need to transform their enterprise business models.

Competent Boards and Senior Management no longer need convincing there is a potential ‘game change’ underway, the challenge is to assess, and plan responses. Quick win projects are naturally popular and can be thought to indicate progress, but to be meaningful a succession of ‘individual’ initiatives have to add up to an Enterprise wide transformation of their Business model. Much, much, more important is whether such initiatives convince customers and shareholders of the value of their actions.

Consider the following two statements, and recognize that the first dubbed ‘Evolutionary’ should be a planned path to prepare for the inevitable moment when it becomes necessary to launch the second, a Revolutionary counter attack. There is no denying that it is extremely difficult to predict when, even how, your market and its business model will be disrupted. Building a wide foundation of capability, culture and understanding using a planned Evolutionary path massively improves the ability to recognize the early market signs as well as successfully organize a response. Sadly, Evolutionary can become a mechanism to contain change to selected areas and allow denial to flourish across the majority of the Enterprise.

Evolutionary; An Enterprise can choose an Innovation program to develop new capabilities within its current Business Model as an Evolutionary move. In which case the timing, extent and pace of the change is entirely under the control of the management team.

Revolutionary; An Enterprise is forced to react to the competitive threat of one or more competitors disruptively transforming the market for your business model. In this situation, the Enterprise Management has lost the advantage of controlled innovation, and is in a forced pace Business model transformation.

The Manufacturing and Industrial Sectors provide an example of how Evolution is driving adoption rather the Revolution, even if the terminology used, (transformation and disruption), suggest otherwise. The two sectors provide many of the examples that are used to illustrate the adoption of IoT, and various innovations such as Digital Twins, Outcome based charging, etc. The sector has been boosted in the USA by the declaration by GE of their strategy to use the new Digital technologies to improve margins directly related to a campaign to gain a 1% reduction in direct costs. The strategy starts with an Evolutionary stage to improve competitiveness within existing Business models. There will come a Revolutionary moment when with the time, experience and understanding gained, GE, or one of its competitors, will launch a market disrupting move, using a transformed Business model.

Europe has experienced a similar boost driven by The German Federal Ministry for Economic affairs Industrie 4.0 initiative, so called to indicate the entry into the fourth Industrial age driven by new technologies. The dependence of the German economy on Manufacturing, particularly in specialist mid range sized companies, is endangered by the potential disruption of markets. The goal was to prepare German Industry through initially assisting the development of Evolutionary improvement to increase existing competitiveness in the World economy. Practical tools such as The Industrie 4.0 Maturity Index; Managing the Digital Transformation of Companies provide progress milestones, and naturally the skills gained increase the likelihood of German Industrial companies becoming the market disruptors.

Manufacturing and Industrial Enterprises certainly have benefited from some unique factors, including the established use of sensing and automation in production. The resulting duality in technology skills from Operational Technology and Information Technology brings direct experience in deploying Evolutionary initiatives. Conversely the sector has suffered badly from the Globalization of production into low cost economies and needs to find a new route to improved Business competitiveness. Short term goals to re-energizing the value from current business models by the use of new Digital technologies positon Evolutionary change as the obvious strategy. The lessons to learn from the sector lie in the successful Business execution of Evolutionary initiatives, rather than searching for examples of Revolutionary disruption and transformation.

In the coming years Product Manufacturers will change the ‘supply’ of products, into a supply of Outcomes and Buyers will have new choices in how they ‘consume’ the capabilities of the product. The shift from selling/ suppling air conditioning units with a maintenance contract to the users buying/ consuming the provision of a required temperature will disrupt the market and will force the transformation of Business models. Small pilots show the way, but a disruption at market level hasn’t happened yet, but Digital Technologies have provided big benefits to in field Service Maintenance.

It’s a big mistake to take the over enthusiastic use of the terms Transformation and Disruption look around your industry sector, and conclude there is no need to act as nothing like this has happened. Low key Evolutionary moves don’t create headlines, but they do change existing completion and lay a foundation for the inevitable sudden shift that will occur. Probably it won’t be an existing competitor, but an entrant intent in disrupting the current market to the consternation of many of the existing market leaders and niche operators.

That’s when the investment in Evolutionary initiatives as an organized strategy will suddenly be the basis of competitive survival. Until then the Evolutionary initiatives will improve current competiveness, put that way it’s hard to understand why any Board should be in denial of the need to act.

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Digital Transformation Digest: Oracle Unveils Its Autonomous Database, Researchers Develop 'Smart' Tattoos, Microsoft Lands BoA for Cloud

Chris Kanaracus

Managing Editor, Constellation Insights Constellation

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,…...

Oracle unveils 18c: While the news had already been spilled by Oracle chairman Larry Ellison a few weeks ago, in a keynote at the start of the massive OpenWorld conference he gave more details on the company's Autonomous Database Cloud, which he termd "the most important thing we've done in a long, long time." Here are the details from Oracle's official annoucement:

The Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud eliminates the human labor associated with tuning, patching, updating and maintaining the database and includes the following capabilities:

Self-Driving: Provides continuous adaptive performance tuning based on machine learning. Automatically upgrades and patches itself while running. Automatically applies security updates while running to protect against cyberattacks.

Self-Scaling: Instantly resizes compute and storage without downtime. Cost savings are multiplied because Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud consumes less compute and storage than Amazon, with lower manual administration costs.

Self-Repairing: Provides automated protection from downtime. SLA guarantees 99.995 percent reliability and availability, which reduces costly planned and unplanned downtime to less than 30-minutes per year.

POV: Autonomous Database Cloud is based on version 18c of Oracle's database. Initially, Oracle will deliver data warehousing capabilities in December. Support for OLTP (online transaction processing) workloads arrives in June 2018. It last delivered a major update to the database in 2016, with release 12.2. Oracle notably went "cloud-first" with that release, providing an on-premises version some time later. With 18c, it has changed the naming convention of the database to reflect the year of release.

During his keynote, Ellison unsurprisingly targeted Amazon Web Services, even conducting a number of demos to show 18c's superiority to AWS's Redshift database. He also pledged that Oracle will beat AWS on database pricing by 50 percent, and will put it in writing.

Oracle's business is built on the database at its core, and hence there is no bigger cloud migration target than on-premises database workloads. Ellison's intent is clear: Keep Oracle database customers in the proverbial family lest they be tempted to migrate to cloud rivals for reasons such as cost savings or flexibility.

The question is whether Oracle can truly deliver what Ellison promises. It will be the better part of a year before all of 18c's capabilities are available, and that's assuming Oracle meets its delivery target dates. As seen with the likes of Fusion Applications, it isn't always successful in doing so.

But there's definitely fire behind the gunsmoke from Ellison's keynote. "I'm sure machine learning-based automation is driving huge efficiencies in deployment and administration, as well as gains in performance based on automated optimization," says Constellation VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen. "The gains in data warehousing performance are also tied to improvements in the column store and query optimization."

However, as for those Oracle database on AWS vs. Oracle database in Oracle's cloud, one must remember that that's running Oracle's database on Exadata machines, versus running on generic servers, Henschen notes. "That's going to make a huge difference in query performance even without any benefits from Autonomous."

The same goes for Oracle's database on Oracle Cloud versus Redshift, which is a distributed database, but the work done at the storage tier in Exadata greatly reduces query loads before they even get to query optimiztion."

Autonomous Database Cloud will require an Oracle Cloud at Customer engagement, where machines are located in customers' data centers but run in autonomous fashion by Oracle remotely.

Traditional Oracle database administrators may have cause for concern over the future of their jobs in an Autonomous Database Cloud world. Fear not, Ellison said. Rather, the new product will free up DBAs to work on concerns such as schema development, analytics and security, he argued. Considering that some automation features have been part of the Oracle database product for years, that makes sense on paper. But assuming Autonomous Database Cloud delivers to the extent Ellison says it will, Oracle IT shops should start their skills assessments sooner than later.

Harvard, MIT researchers develop "smart" tattoo tech: Taking the concept of wearables to an uncharted place, scientists at Harvard and MIT have developed a special tattoo ink that can be used to monitor bodily conditions, such as blood pressure and glucose levels. Here's how the ink, dubbed d-abyss, works, as described in the researchers' formal paper:

[C]an traditional body modification techniques embrace technology and can the skin reveal changes inside the body? We present an approach to answer this challenge through tattooing optical biosensors into the skin that can react with changes in the interstitial fluid. Chemical biosensors detect changes in physical parameters and biomarker concentrations in the human body for monitoring of health status.

Recent advances in biosensors have focused on wearable devices. Wearable biosensors offer safety, ease of development, comfort, and maintenance, but suffer from a lack of direct access to the compartments in the body containing the relevant biomarkers. D-abyss has the access of an implantable biosensor but the interactivity of a wearable device.

POV: The researchers expect that over time, biotech companies and "skin professionals"â€”tattoo artistsâ€”willl work together "in order to embrace the idea of human-device symbiosis."

They have gotten ahead of some of the most obvious questions, as well. For one, tattoos could be made with inks that are permanent as well as temporary ones, mitigating the all-too-common bugbar of tattoo regret. As for patient privacy, the tattoos could use inks that are only visible under certain types of light.

Bank of America chooses Azure for digitial transformation: Microsoft Azure just got a big customer win, with Bank of America choosing Redmond's cloud for ongoing digital transformation efforts. Here's how the companies termed the deal in a press release:

Bank of America will take advantage of the combined power of the Microsoft Cloud for business transformation. Microsoft Office 365 will provide modern, cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools to some of the bank's 200,000 employees. The firm will also utilize Microsoft Azure, capitalizing on the scale, economics and intelligent capabilities of the platform and services.

"We are aggressively modernizing our technology infrastructure to enable current and future growth across all our lines of business," said Howard Boville, chief technology officer at Bank of America. "Our agreement with Microsoft aligns to our target of delivering 80 percent of our technology workloads on virtual platforms within the next several years, further establishing Bank of America as a digital leader in financial services."

POV: Microsoft won the deal with the help of its Financial Services Compliance Program, which gives institutions and regulators the ability to peer into its cloud operations for proof it has mitigated risk. Bank of America has been working on a massive, cloud-oriented IT overhaul over the past couple of years, including a steep reduction in the number of data centers it operates from more than 60 to eight.

For its part, Microsoft says more than 80 percent of the world's largest banks are already using Azure. Nonetheless, getting the Bank of America logo on Azure's NASCAR slide can't hurt at all.

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Digital Transformation Digest: Oracle OpenWorld Preview, AT&T Asks Supreme Court to Nix Net Neutrailty, and More

Chris Kanaracus

Managing Editor, Constellation Insights Constellation

On the eve of OpenWorld: Oracle's massive OpenWorld conference begins in San Francisco starting this Sunday, and as usual its agenda defies an easy summary, given the depth and breadth of Oracle's product portfolio. However, there are certainly a number of standout announcements on tap. Here's a look at some of the expected highlights.

On Sunday, CTO and executive chairman Larry Ellison will deliver a keynote detailing Oracle's cloud strategy, but particularly focusing on its new Autonomous Database cloud service. Ellison revealed its existence a couple of weeks ago during Oracle's most recent earnings call, terming it a "self-driving" database that can patch and tune itself while running. Oracle is also planning to offer a 99.995 percent uptime SLA for the database.

What to watch for: Oracle's database has had some level of autonomous features going back several versions, so it will be Ellison's job to explain what's new and different about the service's capabilities. It will also be interesting to see how Oracle addresses any concerns among its vast DBA community, which has been a huge driver of the Oracle database's continued market share dominance. Oracle has said the Autonomous Database can cut human labor requirements significantly.

Oracle CEO Mark Hurd takes the keynote stage on Monday. He'll make the case that it "is no longer a question of ifâ€”but rather whenâ€”companies will completely move their operations to the cloud," according to a statement. Hurd will be joined onstage by representatives from Bloom Energy, FedEx and the Gap, who will presumably share stories that reflect Hurd's premise.

What to watch for: Hurd will undoubtedly spend some time talking numbersâ€”how quickly Oracle has grown cloud revenue, projections of future growth, and so forth. If he spends more than a minimal amount of time on this, it will be a mistake. Oracle has been positioning itself as a one-stop-shop for cloud, from IaaS to PaaS to SaaS. The sooner Hurd can get those high-profile customers talking about their experience with Oracle's cloud vision, the better.

On Tuesday, product development chief Thomas Kurian and EVP Dave Donatelli will do a deep dive into Oracle's three cloud buckets. This keynote will also feature Oracle's positioning on emerging technologies, including blockchain, AI and IoT.

What to watch for: It might behoove Donatelli and Kurian to spend more time on Oracle's plays in emerging technology, as Ellison and Hurd will have already covered plenty of ground on its cloud strategy.

Later Tuesday, Ellison will deliver his second keynote of the show. He has chosen a timely topic for this one: Security. Here's how Oracle's website describes Ellison's planned talk:

How can you protect your organization amid rising security threats? Oracle CTO and Executive Chairman Larry Ellison details how Oracle is advancing the worldâ€™s most secure and trusted cloud infrastructure, platform services, and applications.

What to watch for: In the wake of incidents such as the Equifax data breach, Ellison has plenty of rhetorical fodder to work with. Expect this keynote to contain a healthy helping of his trademark competitive trash talk, as he compares Oracle's security approach to rivals such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft.

AT&T asks Supremes to overturn Net Neutrality: Along with CenturyLink and the cable industry group NCTA, AT&T has filed an appeal of a lower court's ruling upholding Net Neutrality rules to the Supreme Court. While Internet companies such as Facebook and Google strongly support Net Neutrality, which forbids network communications providers from applying any biases to lawful Internet traffic, telcos say the rules passed under President Barack Obama's administration are overreaching and out of date.

Meanwhile, current Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai is a vocal opponent of net neutrality, and the commision may vote to overturn the rules as soon as December.

POV: In light of the FCC's expected move, AT&T's appeal may seem superflous. But it does have the effect of getting a case on the Supreme Court's radar in advance of the legal fight that will surely come if and when Pai's FCC moves to alter or overturn net neutrality rules. Constellation believes net neutrality should be a top-of-mind issue for not just Internet companies, but all enterprises given the growing influence of macro trends such as cloud computing and IoT.

MIT researchers develop automatic software patching system: In a time when exponentially more consumer applications are being developed and released than ever, and the cloud is driving up the pace of enterprise software updates, a number of researchers at MIT are focused on a highly relevant topic: Automatic patch generation. Here are the key details as described by MIT's news service:

Several research groups, including that of Martin Rinard, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science, have developed templates that indicate the general forms that patches tend to take. Algorithms can then use the templates to generate and evaluate a host of candidate patches.

Recently, at the Association for Computing Machineryâ€™s Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Rinard, his student Fan Long, and Peter Amidon of the University of California at San Diego presented a new system that learns its own templates by analyzing successful patches to real software.

Where a hand-coded patch-generation system might feature five or 10 templates, the new system created 85, which makes it more diverse but also more precise. Its templates are more narrowly tailored to specific types of real-world patches, so it doesnâ€™t generate as many useless candidates. In tests, the new system, dubbed Genesis, repaired nearly twice as many bugs as the best-performing hand-coded template system.

POV: The researchers' work is a novel use of machine learning that clearly holds great potential for application development and security professionals. Currently, the system works only with code written in Java, but given the language's prevelance it's as good a place to start as any.

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Digital Transformation Digest: Cloudera SDX Unifies Big Data, Facebook Targets LinkedIn with ZipRecruiter Integration, IKEA Buys TaskRabbit

Chris Kanaracus

Managing Editor, Constellation Insights Constellation

Doug Henschen

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst Constellation Research

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst Constellation Research

Cloudera unveils SDX for unified data management: Big data platform vendor Cloudera this week unveiled SDX, a software framework aimed at solving today's data management problems. Cloudera's Mark Donsky explains the underlying issues in a blog post:

Organizations now run diverse, multidisciplinary big data workloads that span analytic databases, operational databases, data engineering applications, and data science applications. Many of these workloads operate on the same underlying data.

Table definitions, access permissions, business glossary definitions, metadata classifications, and governance artifacts â€“ collectively called â€œdata contextâ€ â€“ are difficult to keep consistent across a growing number of workloads.

Put even more concisely, hereâ€™s the challenge:

Compute is stateless and it exists inside the workload, whether itâ€™s cloud-based or on-premises, and whether itâ€™s transient or long-running. Data is stateful, and itâ€™s often stored outside the workload, whether itâ€™s in HDFS, Apache Kudu, Amazon S3, Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS), Isilon, etc.

Data context should be stateful and stored alongside the data it describes, yet much of it, such as the Hive Metastore and Apache Sentry, currently exists inside the workload. Consequently, this data context is not only lost if a transient cluster goes away, but also inaccessible to new application clusters.

Cloudera SDX, which is being released as part of version 5.13 of the company's enterprise Hadoop distribution, applies stateful data context across multiple deployment models. This will result in lower TCO, increased productivity, and better security and governance, Cloudera says.

POV: SDX is the type of innovation that isn't just nice to have, but which needs to be part of Cloudera's platform. "Big data, next-generation platforms are getting mature and need to be relied upon by enterprises for serious production work," says Constellation VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen. "That's why all the elements of data governance and data-lineage tracking have to be there. Cloudera is bringing advances in tracking of data lineage and governance, even involving empheral workloads in the cloud."

Facebook partners with ZipRecruiter for job ad placement: In another move against Microsoft's LinkedIn, Facebook is integrating with ZipRecruiter, a portal through which companies can post ads to many different job advertisement sites at once, as TechCrunch reports:

Before now, companies that wanted to use Facebook for recruiting, adding job ads to their Pages, would have had to do this directly through Facebook itself.

By partnering with ZipRecruiter and others like it, organizations will now be able to tick a box to broadcast the job add to Facebook among a wider mix of job boards that can be accessed through a one-stop shop â€” ZipRecruiter, as one example, covers hundreds of these boards.

The move is interesting because itâ€™s a sign not just of how Facebook is looking for more volume and usage of its jobs feature, but also the realization that it may not be able to achieve this on its own steam, leading to a more friction-free, user-friendly approach.

POV: Facebook has a richer social experience compared to LinkedIn and hence can provide a better base to find candidates, in particular people who aren't necessarily looking for jobs, says Constellation VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller: "Sitting on the social exhause of Facebook can lead to a totally different level of talent acquisition than what we have seen before."

IKEA buys TaskRabbit in bid to ease customer pain: You might like IKEA's furniture. But you probably don't enjoy the process of putting it together very much. The Swedish giant has apparently gotten the message and to that end, has struck a deal to acquire TaskRabbit, a startup with a mobile app that connects consumers with "Taskers" who can provide moving and packing services, home improvement, and of course furniture assembly.

TaskRabbit has a presence in 40 cities in the U.S. and UK. IKEA had already run a pilot program in London with the company prior to the acquisition.

â€œAs urbanisation and digital transformation continue to challenge retail concepts we need to develop the business faster and in a more flexible way, IKEA CEO Jesper Brodin said in a statement. An acquisition of TaskRabbit would be an exciting leap in this transformation and allows us to move forward with an even greater focus on innovation and development to meet changing customer needs."

POV: IKEA says it will run TaskRabbit as a standalone business and the platform will remain open to working with other retailers. Despite that pledge, one would expect IKEA to integrate TaskRabbit into its day-to-day retail operations, perhaps even to a greater extent than Lowe's and Home Depot do with their contract labor programs.

Overall, it's a smart move by IKEA given TaskRabbit's appeal to younger consumers, which represent a sizable part of its base. It's also a nice follow-up to IKEA's recent release of an augmented reality app for iOS, with which customers can shop for furniture in a 3-D virtual environment.

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Microsoft Stresses Choice, From SQL Server 2017 to Azure Machine Learning

Doug Henschen

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst Constellation Research

Microsoft Ignite announcements focus on giving customers options, including on-premises, cloud, operating systems, and ML and AI frameworks.

Microsoft is getting really serious about giving customers choices. That much was clear at this week’s combined Microsoft Ignite and Envision events in Orlando and, in particular, in announcements around databases, data-integration, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI).

Several announcements at Ignite were entirely about choice. On the hybrid front, for example, there was the general availability of Azure Stack, which lets customers put a slice of the Azure Cloud on premises -- on a choice of hardware-partner racks. But that’s about infrastructure. My focus was on what Microsoft described as creating “systems of intelligence.” I’ll focus here on database, database migration, data integration, ML and AI.

SQL Server 2017 Meets Linux, Docker

Microsoft announced that SQL Server 2017, the latest release of its flagship database, will be generally available on October 2. The big breakthrough is that this release runs on Linux as well as Windows (and the company is offering new-customer incentives including discounts for subscriptions and bundles with RedHat). Another new deployment option is within Docker Enterprise Edition containers for portability across clouds and on-premises. Beyond portability, SQL Server 2017 introduces advances in adaptive query processing, the ability to add clustered column stores for faster analytical performance and support for running models entirely in-database by way of R and Python.

Analysis: Linux is the favored operating system of the cloud, and the Windows-only constraints on Microsoft SQL Server where getting in the way of growth. Together with the docker option, these multi-platform and hybrid options should accelerate adoption.

Azure DB Migration Service Courts Oracle, MySQL

Now in private preview, Azure Database Migration Service is designed to help you migrate on-premises Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle and MySQL instances to Azure. Also in limited preview is a coming Azure SQL Database - Managed Instance, a platform-as-a-service option with VNET and private IPs support.

Analysis: There’s still only “close to full compatibility” for migration of on-premises Microsoft SQL Server to Azure SQL Database. The differences may be small, but Oracle touts its “same-DB-no-matter-where-you-deploy” advantage.

Azure Data Factory

This data-integration service for Azure, now in public preview, supports the creation, scheduling and orchestration of data-integration pipelines with the option to lift and shift SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) packages into the cloud. Microsoft says this soon-to-be-GA service will include discounted rates for active SQL Server licensees.

Analysis: I’d like to hear more about nuances of practical differences between Azure Data Factory and SSIS, if any, in capabilities, management, administration and the overall user experience.

Next-Generation Azure Machine Learning

ML and AI are the underpinning of “smart” systems that predict, spot patterns and exceptions, develop inferences about intent, and offer recommendations. Microsoft put ML/AI modeling capabilities in the cloud several years ago with Azure ML/Azure ML Studio. But that first-generation offering was strictly a cloud service run by Microsoft on Azure. The next generation of Azure ML gives organizations options through three components announced at Ignite and now in public preview.

Azure ML Workbench is a cross-platform client for data wrangling and managing experiments. It runs on Windows and iOS machines and is geared to developers and data scientists who need to take the first step to creating models, which is preparing the data. Users can tap into a broad range of data sources, including high-scale sources, and see samples, stats and distribution information about that data. The tool can learn the clean-up and normalization steps you want to take by example and then repeat them at scale. These steps are recorded for data transparency and lineage. From there you can use the data for your modeling experiments.
Azure ML Experimentation service is built supporting collaborative model development at scale. It uses Git repositories and a command-line tool to manage model experimentation and training. It tracks the code, configurations and data used in experiments as well as the models, log outputs, key metrics and the history of how those models evolve. This ensures transparency around models over time, which is often a requirement in regulated environments.Providing choice, the Experimentation service supports Python and an array of frameworks, including Tensorflow, Caffe, PyTorch, MXNet and DIGITS as well as Microsoft’s own CNTK and Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit. There are also plenty of deployment choices. Docker containers are used for portability to many environments while maintaining model and data governance, auditability and visibility. Experiments can run locally or remotely, on general-purpose VMs, scale up on Data Science VMs, scale out on Spark (in Azure HDInsight), and can even run on GPU-accelerated VMs.
Azure ML Model Manager service is for deployment and operationalization, supporting hosting, versioning, management and monitoring. Here, too, there are many more choices, including in-database in SQL Server 2017, in VMs, on Spark, in the Azure cloud and anywhere you can run Docker containers.

Analysis: Together all these options give data scientists and developers yet more flexibility around where they do their experimentation, training of models and operational scoring. Significantly, there’s more choice on frameworks, with Microsoft executives saying that algorithms shouldn’t matter – use whatever is best for the task at hand. Docker is the primary means of model portability, but Microsoft says deployment can be as simple as a single line of code while also giving Docker power users options to tune and tweak the deployment. You can also bring assets directly onto local machines, but you lose trace-ability. The whole idea here is supporting and bringing visibility to the entire, end-to-end lifecycle at scale. That’s a must-have for banks, insurance companies and a growing list of organizations that are doing predictive, machine learning and AI modeling at scale.

My Overall Take on Ignite 2017

There were so many more announcements at Ignite that will make a big impact in the near term (like global-scale CosmosDB) and over the long term (like Microsoft’s work on quantum computing). The overall theme was choice, with Microsoft offering an impressive, broad spectrum of cloud, on-premises and hybrid options for data scientists, developers, data-management and governance professionals, and on up to business users and the customers of Microsoft’s customers. Many of this week’s announcements are still in preview -- and there are gaps, here and there, yet to be filled. But I came away impressed.

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News Analyses Roundup - SAP's September Tech Announcements - SAP doubles down on technology

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst Constellation Research

As if enterprises, press and influencers would not be busy enough with Microsoft’s combined user conferences in Orlando and the dawn or Oracle’s Openworld next week- SAP decided to do an acquisition (with Gigya, ok these things happen when they happen), with a product launch event (for SAP Data Hub in New York) and its developer conference, SAP TechEd (happening in Las Vegas).

Here is the 1 slide condensation (if the slide doesn’t show up, check here):

News Analyses - SAP doubles down on Technology from Holger Mueller

Want to read on? Here you go:

SAP (hybris) acquires Gigya - This is SAP’s LinkedIn acquisition – only it offers IAM and SSO capabilities. The data will be interesting for hybris customers, the technology for SAP CP. And at a friction of LinkedIn (I assume here). A good acquisition for SAP customers.

SAP TechEd Holger Mueller Constellation Research

USS Enterprise with Captain Kirk

SAP gets back to EIM – SAP acquired EIM capabilities with Business Objects (acta) and Sybase – but hasn’t done much with it. The SAP Data Hub is a new and modern attempt to address these markets – and the SAP internal integration challenges. Running elements in Kubernetes containers is an elegant 2017 architecture. Catering for data to stay in place is a risky bet – but SAP Data Hub could feed into a (Big) Data Lake, too.

SAP Data Hub Launch Holger Mueller Constellation Research

The SAP Data Hub Scope

Demo at SAP Data Hub Launch

HANA Express gets more cloud support – SAP’s developer version of HANA is now running on (alphabetically) – Azure, Docker, Google Cloud, Huawei Cloud (!) and of course the SAP cloud. Developer versions are important for community learning, so these are good moves to foster the HANA developer community.

SAP CP Marketecture

SAP Cloud Platform – a ton is happening – Good to see the traction on SAP’s PaaS, SAP Cloud Platform (CP) where a ton is happening:

(Finally) ABAP support (beta) – SAP (finally!) courts its largest developer base and gives them a future. And ABAP is SAP’s (Salesforce) Apex or (Workday) Espresso – a very good DSL for business applications.
Mobile SDK (for iOS) – An area where SAP CP needed to get stronger – and the partnership with Apple needs a platform. Expecting the same to happen for Google.
CP Beta on GCP – SAP delivered as announced at CF Summit, always good to see vendors delivering. Important for SAP ML (Tensorflow!) and BigData requirements, and the overall partnership with Google.
S4/HANA SDK - 1000 customers need more software – Time to give the ecosystem a way to extend and build new pieces of S/4HANA, so good to see the SDK.
JAM APIs - finally some social – SAP’s weakest SMAC relationship, social… good to see APIs of JAM coming to CP, but more needs to happen here.
SAP Joins Cloud Native Foundation and Open API Initiative – An overdue move, when seriously courting developers and enterprises. Good to see.
Partnerships with Mendix, Egnyte and Built.io – Important partnerships for document management with Egnite and Built.io. Even more important for low code with Mendix, good to see SAP CP realizing that it can’t do everything inhouse, but low code is key for enterprise PaaS – so watch the space…

MyPOV

Overall good moves by SAP. Gigya is a good acquisition with multiple benefits. SAP Data Hub is a good attempt at EIM, but SAP customers have their solutions already, it will be a long slog for SAP to get the product in the install base. Good moves on the developer community with bringing HANA Express to more clouds. But most importantly is the beta of ABAP on SAP CP, as it makes CP the future platform of SAP code, and gives a future to almost 3M ABAP developer (my estimates) out there… finally a future for ABAP. SDKs and APIs are always good – we will see what developers and enterprises will build. The beta of SAP CP on GCP is key, given SAP’s commitments to Goggle Tensorflow.

On the concern side, SAP is coming late to many of these moves, but better late – than never. Extra kudos for the ABAP beta – we have asked SAP for many years about the future of ABAP developers. If you lose a developer community it is always hard to make up (look no further than IBM with Rational). And SAP decided to build the road before the destination with EIM. Ok. But SAP needs a SAP native (or certified) BigData / Hadoop capability. All next generation application use cases require it. It’s a red thread across the design thinking driven workshops SAP is having for Leonardo (from what we hear from customers). And deep learning needs BigData to rebuilt itself continuously.

But overall good to see SAP commitment in technology products. Becoming member of CNCF and OAI are good citizen moves on open source – that all key players have do to. It’s not too late, but urgency is needed – and SAP has shown some in the last days. Stay tuned.

Want to learn more? Checkout the Storify collection below (if it doesn’t show up – check here).

More on SAP

Event Report - SAP SuccessFactors SuccessConnect - New Leadership - Old Challenges - read here
Summer 2017 News Analysis - SAP Leonardo event July 2017 - read here
Event Report - SAP Sapphire 2017 - All in on Leonardo, but wait there is more... read here
News Analysis - SAP reshuffles Executive Board - sets up for next 5 years - read here
Event Report - SAP Ariba Live - The quest to make Procurement awesome - read here
Event Report - SAP Capital Markets and S/4HANA Update - Good Plan - Execution matters in 2017 - read here
News Analysis -SAP Introduces Jump-Start Enablement Program for SAP Leonardo IoT Portfolio >> Bundling and Simplification matter for IoT - read here
Event Report - Event Report - SAP TechEd Barcelona - Analytics, ML, PaaS and HANA 2 - read here
News Analysis - SAP to unveil HANA 2 - New platform vs a fork's tine - read here
News Analysis - Microsoft announces SAP's choice of Azure to help enterprises transform HR - The SaaS land grab is on - read here
Event Report - SAP / Trenitalia Digital Summit - SAP is serious about IoT - read here
First Take - SAP BW/4HANA - Data Gravity and Cloud win - read here
Event Report - SAP SuccessFactors SConnect - Push on all fronts - read here
Event Report - SAP Insider Vienna - HCP, BI and SuccessFactors are the takeaways - read here
Event Report - SAP Sapphire 2016 - Top 3 Positives & Concerns: SAP changes - probably for the better - read here
First Take - SAP Sapphire Day #2 Keynote - read here
News Analysis - SAP and Microsoft usher in new era of partnership to accelerate digital transformation in the cloud - read here
First Take - SAP Sapphire Bill McDermott Day #1 Keynote - read here
Event Preview - SAP Sapphire 2016 - What to expect and look for - read here
News Analysis - Apple & SAP Partner to Revolutionize Work on iPhone & iPad - read here
Progress Report - SAP SuccessFactors makes good progress - now needs appeal beyond SAP - read here
News Analysis - SAP HANA Vora now available... - A key milestone for SAP - read here
Event Report - SAP Ariba Live - Make Procurement Cool Again - read here
News Analysis - SAP SuccessFactors innovates in Performance Management with continuous feedback powered by 1 to 1s - read here
Event Report - SAP SuccessFactors SuccessConnect - Good Progress sprinkled with innovative ideas and challenging the status quo - read here
News Analysis - WorkForce Software Announces Global Reseller Agreement with SAP - read here
First Take - SAP SuccessFactors SuccessConnect - Day #1 Keynote Top 3 Takeaways - read here
News Analysis - SAP SuccessFactors introduces Next Generation of HCM software - read here
News Analysis - SAP delivers next release of SAP HANA - SPS 10 - Ready for BigData and IoT - read here
Event Report - SAP Sapphire - Top 3 Positives and Concerns - read here
First Take - Bernd Leukert and Steve Singh Day #2 Keynote - read here
News Analysis - SAP and IBM join forces ... read here
First Take - SAP Sapphire Bill McDermott Day #1 Keynote - read here
In Depth - S/4HANA qualities as presented by Plattner - play for play - read here
First Take - SAP Cloud for Planning - the next spreadsheet killer is off to a good start - read here
Progress Report - SAP HCM makes progress and consolidates - a lot of moving parts - read here
First Take - SAP launches S/4HANA - The good, the challenge and the concern - read here
First Take - SAP's IoT strategy becomes clearer - read here
SAP appoints a CTO - some musings - read here
Event Report - SAP's SAPtd - (Finally) more talk on PaaS, good progress and aligning with IBM and Oracle - read here
News Analysis - SAP and IBM partner for cloud success - good news - read here
Market Move - SAP strikes again - this time it is Concur and the spend into spend management - read here
Event Report - SAP SuccessFactors picks up speed - but there remains work to be done - read here
First Take - SAP SuccessFactors SuccessConnect - Top 3 Takeaways Day 1 Keynote - read here.
Event Report - Sapphire - SAP finds its (unique) path to cloud - read here
What I would like SAP to address this Sapphire - read here
News Analysis - SAP becomes more about applications - again - read here
Market Move - SAP acquires Fieldglass - off to the contingent workforce - early move or reaction? Read here.
SAP's startup program keep rolling – read here.
Why SAP acquired KXEN? Getting serious about Analytics – read here.
SAP steamlines organization further – the Danes are leaving – read here.
Reading between the lines… SAP Q2 Earnings – cloudy with potential structural changes – read here.
SAP wants to be a technology company, really – read here
Why SAP acquired hybris software – read here.
SAP gets serious about the cloud – organizationally – read here.
Taking stock – what SAP answered and it didn’t answer this Sapphire [2013] – read here.
Act III & Final Day – A tale of two conference – Sapphire & SuiteWorld13 – read here.
The middle day – 2 keynotes and press releases – Sapphire & SuiteWorld – read here.
A tale of 2 keynotes and press releases – Sapphire & SuiteWorld – read here.
What I would like SAP to address this Sapphire – read here.
Why 3rd party maintenance is key to SAP’s and Oracle’s success – read here.
Why SAP acquired Camillion – read here.
Why SAP acquired SmartOps – read here.
Next in your mall – SAP and Oracle? Read here

And more about SAP technology:

Event Prieview - SAP TechEd 2015 - read here
News Analysis - SAP Unveils New Cloud Platform Services and In-Memory Innovation on Hadoop to Accelerate Digital Transformation – A key milestone for SAP read here
HANA Cloud Platform - Revisited - Improvements ahead and turning into a real PaaS - read here
News Analysis - SAP commits to CloudFoundry and OpenSource - key steps - but what is the direction? - Read here.
News Analysis - SAP moves Ariba Spend Visibility to HANA - Interesting first step in a long journey - read here
Launch Report - When BW 7.4 meets HANA it is like 2 + 2 = 5 - but is 5 enough - read here
Event Report - BI 2014 and HANA 2014 takeaways - it is all about HANA and Lumira - but is that enough? Read here.
News Analysis – SAP slices and dices into more Cloud, and of course more HANA – read here.
SAP gets serious about open source and courts developers – about time – read here.
My top 3 takeaways from the SAP TechEd keynote – read here.
SAP discovers elasticity for HANA – kind of – read here.
Can HANA Cloud be elastic? Tough – read here.
SAP’s Cloud plans get more cloudy – read here.
HANA Enterprise Cloud helps SAP discover the cloud (benefits) – read here

Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here.

Tech Optimization Data to Decisions Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Innovation & Product-led Growth Future of Work New C-Suite Next-Generation Customer Experience Sales Marketing SAP Leadership AR PaaS SaaS IaaS Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP CCaaS UCaaS Collaboration Enterprise Service Chief Information Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief Customer Officer Chief People Officer Chief Human Resources Officer Chief Executive Officer

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Digital Transformation Digest: SAP's Open Source Move, Salesforce Launches Data Studio, Macy's Overhauls Its Loyalty Program, and More

Chris Kanaracus

Managing Editor, Constellation Insights Constellation

SAP makes more open-source strides at TechEd: Add SAP to the list of companies who have joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It has also joined the Open API Initiative. Both projects fall under the auspices of the Linux Foundation. The CNCF hosts a number of prominent open-source projects, chief among them the Kubernetes container orchestration system. SAP's membership will be more than a rubber stamp, according to technology chief Bjorn Goerke:

Besides our interest in incorporating Kubernetes into SAP Cloud Platform, we also have concrete plans to actively contribute projects and best practices from existing and new business scenarios for enterprises.

POV: SAP's move to join the CNCF was a long time in coming. Its members include dozens of prominent names, including IBM, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Google, Cisco, Intel, Red Hat and VMWare, and has more than 100 members overall.

The CNCF defines cloud native computing as an open source software stack that leverages containers, dynamic orchestration of containers and an emphasis on microservices-driven applications. The group says that projects under the CNCF's purview support cloud portability without the specter of vendor lock-in. Overall, the CNCF's goals are well-aligned with the needs of enterprises undergoing digital transformation and building next-generation applications, and SAP is wise to join and actively participate.

Google Cloud expands per-second billing: This didn't take long. About a week after Amazon Web Services announced the availability of per-second billing, Google Cloud has made its own announcement, while pointing out that it has had per-second billing for persistent disk storage since 2013. Here are the details from Google's blog post:

We are pleased to announce that weâ€™re extending per-second billing, with a one minute minimum, to Compute Engine, Container Engine, Cloud Dataproc, and App Engine flexible environment VMs. These changes are effective today and are applicable to all VMs, including Preemptible VMs and VMs running our premium operating system images including Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and SUSE Enterprise Linux Server.

Google's post argues that the difference between per-minute and per-second billing for most scenarios is minuscule, compared the jump in savings when one goes from per-hour to per-minute pricing. It also says only a few customers have been asking for per-second billing.

POV: Even if you buy Google's argument over the difference between per-minute and per-second pricing, the fact it so quickly moved to ensure customers the option was available across its IaaS portfolio is telling of the competitive stakes in play. A per-second billing option also supports innovative thinking about how to architect and code next-generation applications for maximum performance and efficiency.

Salesforce launches Data Studio: Today, marketers purchase a lot of audience data through brokers. Salesforce is looking to cut out those middlemen and in the process appeal to both marketers and publishers, which collect large amounts of high-quality data about their audiences.

Salesforce Data Studio is a data-sharing platform based on a product it gained through last year's $700 million acquisition of Krux. Publishers, or "data owners" as Salesforce terms them, maintain control over their data and dictate how its priced and how it can be used through a set of governance tools. Marketers looking for useful data sets get rich search and discovery capabliities. Here's how Salesforce describes the value proposition:

While legacy data exchanges and marketplaces have provided a way to acquire new audiences, they lack trust and transparency while adding too much cost and complexity to data provisioning and activation. They were designed by and favor the middlemen, the data brokers and resellers. For marketers, this means they rarely gain assurances regarding the fair price and origin of the data they acquire. Meanwhile, publishers are less willing to share their best data and canâ€™t realize the full value of any data without the right tools to provision it to marketers. Both sides worry about losing too much value to the brokers and resellers who manage the majority of data exchange transactions today.

Salesforce's announcement lists a large number of high-profile Data Studio customers, many of which were likely carried over from the Krux deal. They include Conagra, Anheuser-Busch, Heineken and Super Digital. Publishers on the platform include Gatehouse Media, Digital Trends, Fanserv, Publishers Clearing House, Univision and Penske Media Corporation.

Data Studio is generally available in stand-alone form as well as editions for existing customers of Salesforce's digital marketing platform.

POV: Under the Krux name, Data Studio was called Link. It doesn't appear Salesforce has many any significant changes to the product's approach and intent, but has injected some Einstein-flavored AI capabilities into the mix for improved audience discovery and indexing.

"There is a tremendous amount of value in verified and validated second-party data that has been challenging for marketers to gain access to," says Constellation VP and principal analyst Cindy Zhou. Data Studio provides a trusted and neutral platform for publishers and marketers to share this valuable data, Zhou adds.

Overall, Data Studio provides better transparency and potentially, results for publishers and marketers, but as with everything it comes down to the ROI case. Pricing wasn't available for Data Studio but more information should come at Dreamforce in early November.

Macy's overhauls its loyalty program: Struggling department store chain Macy's has hit the reset button on its customer loyalty program, Star Rewards, in a bid to drive up revenue. While profitable, Macy's has seen persistent revenue declines and has been closing underperforming stores. Here's how the new program will be structured:

Macyâ€™s new Star Rewards makes it simple for customers to receive benefits with every Macyâ€™s purchase. Based on annual spend, customers with a Macyâ€™s credit card will be automatically enrolled into one of three levels: Silver, Gold or Platinum. Rewards are tiered by level, with Macyâ€™s best customers receiving benefits that include free shipping, additional savings and earned points on every purchase. Additionally, cardholders are automatically upgraded to the next tier when annual spend reaches the new level. The program was developed with the customer in mind, based on a careful analysis of evolving shopping behaviors and consumer preferences.

POV: The Platinum tier will give customers who spend at least $1,200 per year 5 percent back as well as free shipping. That's the group Macy's is aiming to please, as well as to grow. The chain derives 50 percent of its annual revenue from the 10 percent of shoppers who spend at least that much money per year.

While this certainly reflects those customers' loyalty to the Macy's brand, the numbers are top-heavy enough to make any CxO queasy. But by catering to those bigger spenders more effectively, Macy's can fight back against poaching by competitors.

The new program is the brainchild of recently minted CEO Jeff Gennette, and time will tell if it pans out. Macy's has lagged other chains, such as Kohl's, in adapting to omnichannel commerce realities; more digital initiatives have been in the pipeline too long and it will be Gennette's job to get them rolled out.

Assessing Microsoft Ignite: Microsoft held its Ignite and Envision co-conference for enterprise IT and business executives this week, and made a series of significant announcements along the way. Several Constellation Research analysts were in attendance and have filed reports on what they saw and heard.

Constellation VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller walks through a number of topics in a deep-dive blog post, including Azure Stack, Cosmos DB, Visual Studio and Microsoft's quantum computing strategy.

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7 Key Takeaways for Digital Leaders from #MSIgnite #MSEnvision 2017

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…...

Microsoft's largest combined event of the year, Microsoft Ignite and Envision, are currently the pre-eminent industry showcases for the sprawling breadth and depth of the technology giant's extensive portfolio of platforms, tools, applications, and other enterprise capabilities.

Making sense of the 1000+ sessions, the evolution of dozens of products, as well as the shifting/maturing of the company's vision for digital transformation, digital workplace, and customer/worker/partner experience is a truly daunting task these days. Yet it's also necessary because the company remains perhaps the single most important overall technology vendor to the enterprise, with its platforms running the end-user computing devices, front office, back office, and cloud/edge infrastructure -- in some combination -- of virtually every organization in the world today.

2017 marks a watershed year for Microsoft, with a continuing sense of renewal in the company's fortunes under CEO Satya Nadella, whose new book Hit Refresh describing the reorientation and rebooting of the entire company during his leadership went on sale this week during Day 2. His keynote on the opening day was perhaps the most succinct strategic overview of what's new in Microsoft's strategic vision, which included some innovative and unexpected ones, as we'll see.

Microsoft's Demonstrates Increasingly Fast Pace for Products

The evidence for this renewal shows: The company's many product lines are evolving faster than they ever have before. For once, enterprises are no longer waiting for the company to innovate (a once common complaint.) Instead, they are now being propelled along by a steady stream of rapid product development by the software giant. This breakneck cadence is one that VP of Office, OneDrive, and SharePoint Jeff Teper has been helping orchestrate for several years now. This has aided the company in catching up in numerous areas, and in many cases pulling ahead, of its competition.

Thus, Microsoft's pace today is one of a fast-moving and nimble startup more than a technology juggernaut: Microsoft's flagship cloud offering, the rapidly growing Azure platform, is doing better than ever, and has arguably become the #1 enterprise cloud platform by some estimates, while wide global adoption of the popular and fast-evolving Office 365 cloud suite and other factors almost certainly makes Microsoft the overall largest cloud vendor in terms of enterprise sales.

Now it's up to organizations to decide how to strategically apply Microsoft's capabilities in their journey towards becoming fully transformed digital businesses. Answers to important questions will be key for momentous decision points of digital leaders over the next few years: Where is Microsoft actually going to take its customers in the next few years? Is the firm genuinely preparing organizations to reach an effective and unique disruptive posture, or are they largely raising every organizations' boat in the same way? More importantly, what are the irreversible business decisions (one way changes that cannot readily be undone) that would be made today by using Microsoft as a primary technology provider, especially with its newest offerings?

In other words, when looking at the strategic emerging technology landscape which IT and business executives simply must navigate successfully -- please see our 2017 Tech AstroChart for The New C-Suite -- and key business trends for digital -- consult our 2017 Business Trends AstroChart for The New C-Suite -- how can Microsoft best help today?

To assist digital leadership (CIO, CDO, CMO, CHRO, CCO, COO, CEO, digital-ready boards, and other IT/LOB executives) in answering these questions via analysis of the enormous volume of information coming out of Ignite and Envision, I've elaborated below on what I believe the key takeaways in a digital leadership context, based on all the news here in Orlando this week:

Seven Strategic Takeaways from Microsoft Ignite and Envision 2017

Microsoft's vision for the front and back office works far better when fully adopted; but enterprises must beware of implication of such commitment. Most digital decision makers prefer to hedge their vendor bets by bringing together multiple providers whenever possible. However, the growing integration between individual applications offers great advantages, but at considerable cost if you have to integrate everything yourself. In an ambitious enterprise data architecture strategy likely to change the status quo, Microsoft's underlying graph model for Office 365, Dynamics, and LinkedIn was showcased prominently in the main keynote at Ignite and Envision, demonstrating a clear path forward for analytics, cognitive technologies, customer experience, and even master data management to be vitally served by bringing together application data onto a single common connected fabric. This has genuine potential to unleash and put to work the entire digital knowledge of an organization to create value for stakeholders and has competitively significant potential. As Nadella pointedly noted during his keynote, every act of using Microsoft apps now enriches the enterprise graph for everyone in the organization continuously. This is the inherent power and advantage of a single deeply integrated cloud platform. Bottom Line: Digital leadership must be aware this value also comes in exchange for the not-inconsequential risk of enterprise cloud lock-in, a major cautionary signpost on this year's New C-Suite Business Trend AstroChart.
As a digital workplace reality, Microsoft has become the leading player, yet is still making major changes. Workforce experience and even employee engagement can be greatly impacted and improved by digital tools, such as Microsoft's new F1 offering for front line workers. The many different roadmaps shown at the two events for its flagship Office 365 platform show that Microsoft plans to continue a sustained and very fast-paced evolution for the large -- and some would say increasingly bulky -- set of front office digital capabilities, from office productivity to collaboration and engagement. But Microsoft's digital workplace vision tends to be highly tech-centric and focused on producing digital artifacts or enabling communication. Higher order functions like talent management, employee engagement, and orchestrating strategic change programs and change agents are still not well-represented, even as they are priorities of digital leaders today. A little more sobering was perhaps one of the most impactful announcements of either event: The announcement that Microsoft will phase out Skype for Business in favor of the new -- albeit exciting and future-facing -- Microsoft Teams for most unified communications functions (voice, video, chat, etc.) This was a brave move that is likely to be ultimately shown to be the right decision in my analysis, yet it will give headaches to IT teams everywhere as they scramble to deal with the implications, cost, deployment, and mass retraining of workers and support staff. Bottom line: Most organizations can now bet on Microsoft's fast evolving digital workplace as a vision and roadmap with a strong future, but only if they are prepared to deal with significant changes of direction as the company seek to quickly find the right path(s) forward.
Microsoft has become capable as a full-strength and combined business and technology partner for digital transformation. Citing Maersk, Rolls-Royce, Ford, and a long list of recognizable corporate names, Microsoft is currently enabling some major digital transformations on a global scale. Judson Althoff has been an effective spokesperson on this topic for the company for a while now and had a prominent keynote on Day 1 at Envision, which I attended. I've analyzed Judson's take on this topic before and found it credible, as Microsoft is preparing now to be as much a business partner as a technology company in helping companies lead the reimagining of their business. The Rolls-Royce case example was a good one, and was presented at length. Bottom line: The Microsoft vision and strategy for enabling digital transformation for its customers is broad, compassing, and increasingly proven through case examples, though it appears more bespoke than blueprint based as others are.
In vital emerging enterprise technologies, such Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, and artificial intelligence (AI), Microsoft is competent but largely remains tactical. Enterprises usually seek a partner that can stay ahead of where the market is and incorporate new disruptive technologies into the IT platforms that businesses have strategically adopted, as they emerge in the market. In this regard, Microsoft is staying competitive with SAP and IBM with its Azure IoT suite, Azure Cognitive Services (for artificial intelligence), as well as their emerging blockchain capabilities. I also had several conversations at Microsoft Ignite with Microsoft's cognitive product experts and was given a favorable impression that they are heading in the right direction overall. However, they remain focused on more foundational use cases and are only now considering the more strategic enterprise picture. Cognitive services, Internet of Things, and blockchain -- combined with supporting analytics -- all have the potential to remake our businesses in key enterprise activities like strategic decision making, forecasting, risk management, and compliance. However, the company does not yet deliver IoT, AI, or blockchain technologies for these types of functions as yet, though they do appear to be on the radar in my conversations. Bottom line: Though much of the vision is there, Microsoft needs more time to mature and up-level the business capabilities for the current crop of emerging tech that has high disruptive potential. Certainly some startups are well ahead here and will likely remain so for a while. (Please see my enterprise tech to watch in 2017 for a full list of disruptive tech.)
While big software suites are still the go-to choice for many digital leaders, Microsoft is enabling an increasingly modular, take-what-you-need services-based approach. Time and again in briefings with product managers and experts at Envision and Ignite, PowerApps was cited as a way for end users to shape IT into what they need, often by just taking a fraction of the Microsoft product that they need to solve a given problem. While user-defined IT is a candidate for my yearly tech trends list, the approach has as much to do with the microservices trend that has risen to the level of the C-Suite in many parts of the industry. Why is this important? Because it heralds Microsoft realization that IT must be able to go to the customer in whatever form, mode, and channel is best. To do this, Microsoft is attempting to make its IT solutions as consumable as possible in a multi-vendor and an increasingly federated/hybrid/decentralized IT world. This is actually fairly visionary and makes them a strong partner in many important and future-enabling ecosystem strategies, if they can sustain this as an initiative. Bottom line: Microsoft is becoming a much more digital-savvy and native company -- or least its heading in the right direction for now -- further strengthening it as a strategic business and technology partner.
As large and extensive as its capabilities are, Microsoft cannot by itself tackle the full set of priorities of The New C-Suite. The extensive announcements and elaborate roadmaps around so many existing products as well as the arrival of new ones at Ignite and Envision still belie the complexity of today's digital world. As rapid as Microsoft appears to be pushing on the accelerator to speed up product development and innovation, the digital world is still evolving faster, and enterprises must find ways (and partners) to manage the change velocity. Even though it's now arguable at the company's pace is one of the fastest overall in the industry, there's simply too much to do today to be satisfied by one vendor, no matter the size. Although there's been a recent wave of large organizations moving to becoming largely Microsoft shops, federated IT landscapes are actually becoming more the norm as apps and Shadow IT (for better or worse) proliferate. Bottom line: Microsoft can serve as the anchor IT provider, but a large and growing constellation of play-nice 3rd parties is required to succeed in digital transformation today.
Companies looking for a truly disruptive technology partner, can start to look at Microsoft anew. This is perhaps best demonstrated by the unexpected and surprising to many announcement of early quantum computing support in Azure, available later this year. While I'll complete my analysis shortly of why the quantum computing announcement at Ignite was potentially such major news, the fact that no other major enterprise vendor is announcing anything in this area, much less pre-announcing commercial cloud services shows that Microsoft is willing to take significant risks in a real way today, both with products and reputationally. Given the nascent state of the quantum computing market, this is a early and significant move that has the potential to both confuse customers as well as potentially lead them into the future. Bottom line: With this and other bold announcements of late, Microsoft is clearly willing to make significant bets. Digital leaders can certainly opt not to follow, but have more access to the major cutting edge technologies from Microsoft now than in years past.

While the news was largely incremental except for a few big announcements (quantum computing, hybrid Azure, and the shift away from Skype), the amount of house-being-put-in-order, refining, and detailing out of Microsoft's cloud offerings for the enterprise was both tangible and impressive in its own right. There was palpable buzz and excitement at Ignite in particular, as Microsoft exuded a message that it knew what it was about and was delivering on it. That said, Microsoft now has the scope and breadth of a vast product set, along with a vision that may be hard to stick to as a commercial company, especially in terms of modularizing its offerings (good for customers but it can certainly lowers sales potentially) and creating a comprehensive set of APIs that opens up data for integrating and ecosystem use (also good for customers, but is a path for migration away from Microsoft.) If they can keep this direction, and sustain a fast growing business out of it (which every sign shows it the case at the moment), Microsoft and its customers have a solid near future ahead of them given what transpired in Orlando this week.

Additional Reading

Microsoft Ignite & Envision 2017 Announcements and Analysis by Holger Mueller

Microsoft Stresses Choice, From SQL Server 2017 to Azure Machine Learning by Doug Henschen

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Seven Strategic Takeaways from Microsoft Ignite and Envision 2017

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Seven Strategic Takeaways from Microsoft Ignite and Envision 2017