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Event Report - Oracle Open World 2017 - Top 3 Positives / Top 3 Concerns - Overall good

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…...

We had the opportunity to attend Oracle OpenWorld, Oracle’s yearly mega user conference, held in San Francisco from October 1st till 5th 2017, at Moscone Center. Moscone is under construction, so it was tough to gauge attendance, but it seemed to be a tad down year over year. Massive press, analyst and influencer presence, as usual.

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

Event Report - Oracle OpenWorld 2017 - Top 3 Positives / Concers from Holger Mueller

Prefer to watch - here is the run down in video format:

Plenty of more video to watch if you prefer to consume content in that form:

On Oracle unveiling 18c - watch here.
My takeaways of Monday - watch here.
My takeaways of Tuesday - watch here.

Want to read on? Here you go:

Top 3 Positives

The Autonomous Database and Oracle Management and Security Cloud – This was the key topic of CTO Ellison’s keynotes- database on Monday, Cybersecurity on Tuesday. And the timing could not have been better, on a day Verizon has to share that all Yahoo user accounts were compromised, the ex-Equifax CEO gets grilled in Congress – there was certainly an open ear in audience and media for cyber security. Ellison drove home the point that Machine Learning, he called it as revolutionary as the Internet, will change security and software management. Oracle will start shipping the autonomous database for data warehouse loads in early 2018, transactional will come later.

Oracle Open World 2017 - Holger Mueller Constellation Research - 18c Database

Oracle 18c

AI Vision in keynote – As usual most product was announced in Thomas Kurian’s keynote. But what caught most of my attention was how well Kurian articulated the fundamental transformation that AI is bringing to enterprise software. Enabling Machine Learning on the IaaS layer, adding a Machine Learning service to PaaS and using Machine Learning in SaaS and DaaS was well articulated and understood – more than in other executive keynotes in the last years. And the keynote was nicely held together by an overarching demo, well done.

Oracle Open World 2017 - Holger Mueller Constellation Research - Elllison Machine Learning

Ellison on Machine Learning

Oracle SaaS is ready – The key takeaway of Kurian’s (for SaaS) and Miranda’s demo was that they expect all Oracle customers to now look at the current versions of SaaS cloud and to consider upgrading. Functional parity if not superiority has been achieved. Manufacturing (finally) is there and good enough to make the statement. Now future will tell how well Oracle can get customers to upgrade out of its heterogenous ecosystem. Definitively an area to watch.

Oracle Open World 2017 - Holger Mueller Constellation Research - Miranda Oracle SaaS

Miranda and the Oracle SaaS Suite

Top 3 Concerns

Mega ERP vendor 10 years off-cycle – We are witnessing a unique situation for the ERP buyer. While in the past the major vendors would miss a technology change by a few years at max, we now have market where Oracle and SAP are 10 years apart. Oracle announced Fusion in 2004, SAP announced S4/HANA in 2014. If this means that buyers may change to the relative newer suite in the era of cloud and machine learning remains to be seen. The question for Oracle customers is – is Oracle ready to upgrade from Oracle e-Business Suite, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, Siebel etc. and the question for SAP customers is – does a look at Oracle make sense.

Oracle Management and Security Cloud

Can Oracle attract the load – Oracle is late to the IaaS game, but has used the opportunity to redefine some IaaS best practices, e.g. having three data centers at a specific location. It has built a nested hypervisor to be able to attract heterogenous load. But Oracle still needs to show that it can attract the enterprise load – both organic – from existing customers – and external – from net new customers. The reason AWS gets so much attention in the keynotes is not only because AWS is the IaaS market leader, but also because Oracle must show a clear value proposition over AWS, to capture that load that is moving from on premises. When congressional representatives can ask ‘why don’t you put this on AWS?’ – fellow CxOs will as the CIO / CTO the same question. Verdict is still out.

Oracle Open World 2017 - Holger Mueller Constellation Research - Leone HCM Oracle Recruiting Cloud

Leone introducing Oracle Recruiting Cloud

Can Oracle become gentle? The SaaS Business is different to the perpetual license business. Enterprises and vendors need to work together directly and on a day to day basis. That means a certain degree of affinity does not hurt, but helps the relationship. And while Oracle is certainly respected, it is seldom liked by CxOs. Oracle cannot rely on technological superior products only to win over customers. It has to become more customer oriented, more gentle. The good news for customers and prospects is – that it is not hard. It usually means to give up margin. And Oracle has plenty of that.

Oracle Open World 2017 - Holger Mueller Constellation Research - Ellison 18c

Ellison introducing 18c

MyPOV

A good OpenWorld for Oracle customers. The vendor took the next step that ultimately all enterprise software have to take – the step to make products self-running and autonomous. The highest frequency of change for a RDBMS is going to be a security measure, even more as database load moves to the cloud. Automating both is attractive to enterprises, and Oracle is the first RDBMs vendor out of the gate with that vision and a tangible product roadmap. But more than the RDBMs needs to be supported, also more of the Oracle tech stack, so addressing that larger scope will be a key area to watch. We also witnessed what is most likely the largest upsell opportunity Oracle has created, as almost every production (and maybe also development and test database) will need the self-driving, autonomous features of Oracle 18c (that’s an upgrade) and the cybersecurity announced with Oracle Management and Security Cloud.

Beyond RDBMs Oracle has made progress on all layers of the stack. New Sparc / Exadata servers have been announced already before OpenWorld. IaaS gets cheaper storage, cheaper / better networking and more. Dyn seems to have been inherited. PaaS gets a Blockchain, Data Science Service and a serverless product. And Oracle can even partner with Microsoft, that re-iterated its commitment to Java. On the SaaS side, we will have to see that Oracle has reached functional parity or even a lead, that is easier said at OpenWorld than delivered with real customers. So, watch customer upgrades and adoption to the Oracle SaaS products.

On the concern side, Oracle needs to find a better way with customers and improve its image and day to day standing. Betting solely on the better product is risky. And with the overall bet of Oracle on the large, integrated, chip to click stack (from the Silicon to the user click in SaaS) – enterprises will even more think twice before they do business with a vendor of Oracle’s wreputation. Doing right and better with customers is always a good true North – but it seems it is not (yet) a priority for Oracle executives, as none of that was mentioned in the critical keynotes. More needs to be happen than just statements, programs and initiatives. And I know that Oracle executives know this – they just think they can get away with it by having the better product. That gamble will only work out if the product is so clearly superior, that enterprises have no alternative than use Oracle. To be fair, the Oracle integrated stack has that potential. There was a time when customers could only get a mainframe from IBM – like the vendor or not. But that’s not a long-term strategy, unless your product stays ahead of the pack – by miles. Fascinating to watch.

Overall, a good OpenWorld for Oracle customers. All product categories are being invested in and growing. Synergies in the layers of the Oracle stack emerge, e.g. in SaaS. Across the layers in e.g.Iaas and PaaS. And Oracle is plugging remaining gaps in HCM (for Taleo) and CX (for Siebel) on a single platform. At the same time Oracle is offering new capabilities, like multi environment deployment, serverless and more that make Oracle PaaS a serious contender for next gen applications. The AT&T deal, with Oracle’s Cloud at Customer deployment, may be a lighthouse opportunity after which more Oracle customers will continue their future with the vendor. So, it’s all about execution in Redwood Shores, once again. Stay tuned.

Want to learn more? Checkout the Storify collection below (if it doesn’t show up – check here) - all the major keynotes are covered:

Larry Ellison Sunday - Autonomous Database - read here
Mark Hurd Monday - Predictions - read here
Steve Miranda - SaaS - read here
Chris Leone - HCM Cloud - read here
Donatelli / Kurian - IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and DaaS - read here
Larry Ellison Tuesday - Oracle Management and Security Cloud - read here

Six Years of Guiding the Future of Work

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…...

Yesterday I celebrated my 6th anniversary at Constellation Research. I want to thank Ray Wang and my colleagues for all their support and how much I learn from them everyday. Also, to our amazing clients, you're why I do this. Since I began here my goal has been simple: to provide pragmatic advice about what's coming next for the way individuals and teams get work done. I'm not a cheerleader for change just for the sake of it, nor do I criticize new ideas just because they seem a little out there. I look for trends and patterns in technology and culture and try and extrapolate how they will apply to the business world.

One of the first things I worked on was advancing the conversation around "social business" from "reducing email" or "working transparently" to be more about focusing on real business processes. This is an area I dubbed Purposeful Collaboration and something I'm glad to see is a major topic today, as almost all collaboration tools are now focusing on integrating with business applications, enabling people to work together around a business object or process.

As the popularity of collaboration platforms grew, I realized that "working transparently" was going to cause a great deal chaos and noise, leading to information overload. To combat this challenge, work needs to be organized and structured. This is an area I originally called Social Task Management, or sometimes Structured Collaboration... which is now more often referred to as Collaborative Work Management. This is an incredibly hot space right now, with several vendors securing huge funding rounds, a few acquisitions, and new products being launched. Pay attention here, as focusing on work, prioritizing what needs doing, accountability and repeatability are keys elements to getting work done.

Another project I really enjoyed was working with Ray on debunking the whole "millennials work differently" conversation. After extensive interviews we came up with a framework that categorizes employees not by the generation they were born, but instead via their "Digital Proficiency". We've used this framework to work with clients all around the world to help them better understand their employees and plan their strategies accordingly.

Now you can't read a single IT article these days without a mention of Artificial Intelligence, or AI. I actually presented a session at Salesforce Dreamforce in 2014 called "From Clippy to Jarvis" which talked about how our software was becoming more automated, more intelligent, more helpful. The intersection of AI and personal productivity / team collaboration is still nascent, but there is no doubt it will become a standard (ideally invisible) part of every tool we use.

So what comes next? I'm more excited now that I was 6 years ago when I started. We've barely scratched the surface in truly helping people get work done. We're at the dawn of new ways to create, share, discover, visualize, and interact with context, colleagues and customers. The chart below provides a glimpse into some of the things I'm working on. The Future of Work is going to be amazing, I hope you'll join me on the journey.

Future of Work

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Digital Transformation Digest: DeepMind Forms AI Ethics Panel, HPE Brings App Store Experience to Factories, Open Source IoT Framework Hits Milestone

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. ...

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…...

Google's DeepMind forms AI ethics group: Following the lead of others in tech and academia, Google's DeepMind division has formed a panel of internal and external members focused on the application of ethics in AI research. Here's the rationale from DeepMind's official blog:

As scientists developing AI technologies, we have a responsibility to conduct and support open research and investigation into the wider implications of our work. At DeepMind, we start from the premise that all AI applications should remain under meaningful human control, and be used for socially beneficial purposes. Understanding what this means in practice requires rigorous scientific inquiry into the most sensitive challenges we face.

So today we’re launching a new research unit, DeepMind Ethics & Society, to complement our work in AI science and application. This new unit will help us explore and understand the real-world impacts of AI. It has a dual aim: to help technologists put ethics into practice, and to help society anticipate and direct the impact of AI so that it works for the benefit of all.

DeepMind will involve experts from the social sciences and humanities in conducting interdisciplinary research, according to the blog.

POV: It is tempting to dismiss DeepMind's move as public-relations windowdressing, particularly in light of criticism the company received this year over its use of National Health Services patient data.

While the new panel involves outsiders, conflict-of-interest questions are inevitable when it comes to a company developing research related to its own technology. Moreoever, DeepMind has had an internal ethics board for years, but its membership and activities remain secret. Ethics and transparency go hand-in-hand; to that end, DeepMind can do better.

HPE creates app store for factories: Hewlett-Packard Enterprise says it can bring an app store-like experience to the factory floor with the new Express App Platform. It runs on-premises and can help manufacturers bring on new software innovations without interrupting operations, as HPE puts it:

Digitizing manufacturing processes brings many benefits including operational savings, improved flexibility and new revenue streams, but traditional applications such as Manufacturing Execution Systems are often complex and difficult to modernize. Conversely, applications hosted in the cloud can drive digital innovation, but also lead to data protection, cost and latency issues. By hosting both old and new applications on one single platform in factory premises, the Express App Platform – Manufacturing eases the transformation and dramatically reduces the need for separate hosting of legacy and bespoke applications.

Customers can roll out applications from the Cloud28+ services marketplace with only six mouse clicks, HPE says. (Although that doesn't take into account initial setup of the Express App Platform). On the hardware side, the platform uses HPE SimpliVity 380 converged infrastructure. It employs Docker containers to deploy apps.

A variety of HPE professional services are also on offer. Express App Platform is available now in Europe, the Middle East and Africa with a global release coming later this year.

POV: Express App Platform reflects an ongoing blurring of the line between operations and IT departments, notes Constellation VP and principal analyst Andy Mulholland. "The expansion in the use of computers and associated technology across the enterprise is cutting across the previously neat definition that this belonged to the IT department," he says. "Yet at the same time, the IT department realistically has to have some involvement to ensure that the enterprise's core commercial systems remain functional and secure."

HPE are presenting an interesting answer to this challenge, but the question is whether it can satisfy the requirements of both manufacturing operational technology and enterprise information technology, or all right in the middle and satisfy neither. "The answer might be less about the capability of the product and more education on both sides on deployments," Mulholland says.

Open source IoT framework EdgeX Foundry hits a big milestone: A Linux Foundation project focused on IoT interoperabiity has reached an important initial goal, with its first major code release becoming available this month.

More than 60 organizations are backing EdgeX Foundry, which was launched in April. Its goals are pressing indeed, as the project's announcement describes:

The complexity of the current IoT landscape and the wide variety of components available are creating paralysis among businesses looking to deploy IoT solutions. EdgeX Foundry ... is building an open interoperability framework hosted within a full hardware- and OS-agnostice reference software platform to enable an ecosystem of plug-and-play components that unifies the marketplace and accelerates the deployment of IoT solutions.

Codenamed Barcelona, the release features stabilized key APIs, expanded testing of microservices and overall cleaner code. EdgeX Foundry has also established a biannual release schedule for the project, with the next major version set for April.

POV: EdgeX Foundry is based on code contributed by Dell EMC, which it developed under the codename Project FUSE beginning in 2016. Other members include Samsung, VMWare, AMD, Ubuntu and a host of smaller IoT tech vendors. Its high-level sponsorship bodes well for the project, but EdgeX Foundry is not the only effort of its kind, with the Eclipse Foundation's Project Kapua being one prominent example.

"IoT has reached a new level of maturity," says Constellation VP and principal analyst Andy Mulholland. "Perhaps we should talk of second-generation IoT, defining an open model built on making use of any-to-any relationships between IoT endpoints and consumers of the data."

EdgeX Foundry project is an important step in this direction, with significant support to ensure that real-world experience has driven the approach. "Equally important, the same support will ensure acceptance in commercial deployments," Mulholland adds.

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73% of Executives Are Researching & Launching IoT Projects In 2017

Manufacturing-based IoT connections grew 84% between 2016 and 2017, followed by energy & utilities (41%).
73% of executives are either researching or currently launching IoT projects.
The IoT platform market is expected to grow 35% per year to $1.16B by 2020.
B2B uses can generate nearly 70% of the potential value enabled by IoT.

These and many other fascinating findings are from Verizon’s State of the Market: Internet of Things 2017, Making way for the enterprise (16 pp., PDF, free, opt-in). The Verizon study found that the Internet of Things (IoT) gained significant momentum in 2016, with 2017 IoT investments accelerating. The majority of investments today are in IoT projects that are still in the concept or pilot phase, concentrating on tracking data and sending alerts. While easier to initiate and manage, the majority of pilots aren’t providing the depth of analytics data and insights IoT has the potential to deliver.

Key takeaways from the study include the following:

Manufacturing-based IoT connections grew 84% between 2016 and 2017, followed by energy & utilities (41%). Transportation and distribution (40%), smart cities and communities (19%) and healthcare and pharma (11%) are the remaining three industries tracked in the study who had positive growth in the number of IoT connections. The following graphic compares year-over-year growth by industry for the 2016 to 2017 timeframe.

Manufacturing is predicted to lead IoT spending in 2017 with $183B invested this year. Verizon’s study predicts that transportation and utilities will have the second and third-largest capital expenses in IoT this year. Insurance, consumer and cross-industry IoT investments including connected vehicles and smart buildings will see the fastest overall growth in 2017.

The IoT platform market is expected to grow 35% per year to $1.16B by 2020. From well-established enterprise service providers to startups, the platform market is becoming one of the most competitive within the global IoT ecosystem. The design objective of all IoT platforms is to provide a single environment for enabling API, Web Services and custom integrations that securely support enterprise-wide applications. Please see the post What Makes An Internet Of Things (IoT) Platform Enterprise-Ready? for an overview of the Boston Consulting Group’s recent IoT study, Who Will Win The IoT Platform Wars?
Improving the customer experience and excel at customer service by gaining greater insights using IoT leaders enterprises’ investment priorities. 33% of enterprises interviewed prioritize using IoT technologies and the insights it’s capable of providing to excel at customer service. 26% intend to use IoT technologies to improve asset management and increase Return on Assets (ROA) and Return on Invested Capital (ROIC). Consistent with how dominant manufacturing’s investment plans are for IoT this year, production and delivery capabilities are the top deployment priority for 25% of all businesses interviewed.
IoT has the potential to revolutionize pharmaceutical supply chains by drastically reducing drug counterfeiting globally. It’s estimated that counterfeit drugs cost the industry between $75B to $200B annually. The human costs of treating those who have been sold counterfeit drugs back to health are incalculable. IoT platforms and systems have the potential to drastically reduce the costs of counterfeiting, both on a personal impact and market standpoint. Drug manufacturers operating in the United States have until November 2017 to mark packages with a product identifier, serial number, lot number and expiration date, plus electronically store and transfer all transaction histories, including shipment information, across their distribution supply chains. Pharmaceutical manufacturers have a high level of urgency to make this happen and stay in compliance with the US Drug Supply Chain Security Act. IoT solutions are flourishing in this industry as a result.

Filed under: Cloud Computing, Internet of Things, Internet of Things Forecast, IoT, Louis Columbus' blog Tagged: Internet of Things, IoT, Louis Columbus' blog

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

Chris Kanaracus

Managing Editor, Constellation Insights
Constellation

Alan Lepofsky

Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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 Oracle’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: “Over the last few years we’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. "We’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."

Oracle’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 Oracle’s CX, HR, ERP and other products to collaborate within Slack channels.”

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.

“We 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,” said John Venhuizen, president and CEO, Ace Hardware Corporation. “Under Ace’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.”

“The Grommet has often been called a ‘general store for innovation,’ and Ace is a trusted destination for the goods and services homeowners need to take care of their homes. That is a powerful combination,” 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

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"—tattoo artists—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 if—but rather when—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 numbers—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 world’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 Machinery’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 doesn’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.

Data to Decisions Tech Optimization Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Chief Customer Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Digital Officer

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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 – collectively called “data context” – are difficult to keep consistent across a growing number of workloads.

Put even more concisely, here’s the challenge:

Compute is stateless and it exists inside the workload, whether it’s cloud-based or on-premises, and whether it’s transient or long-running. Data is stateful, and it’s often stored outside the workload, whether it’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 — ZipRecruiter, as one example, covers hundreds of these boards.

The move is interesting because it’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.

“As 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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Event Report - Oracle Open World 2017 - Top 3 Positives / Top 3 Concerns - Overall good

Event Report - Oracle Open World 2017 - Top 3 Positives / Top 3 Concerns - Overall good

Top 3 Positives

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Six Years of Guiding the Future of Work

Six Years of Guiding the Future of Work

Digital Transformation Digest: DeepMind Forms AI Ethics Panel, HPE Brings App Store Experience to Factories, Open Source IoT Framework Hits Milestone

Digital Transformation Digest: DeepMind Forms AI Ethics Panel, HPE Brings App Store Experience to Factories, Open Source IoT Framework Hits Milestone

73% of Executives Are Researching & Launching IoT Projects In 2017

73% of Executives Are Researching & Launching IoT Projects In 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top Event Questions [Anwered] - Microsoft Ignite and Envision 2017

Top Event Questions [Anwered] - Microsoft Ignite and Envision 2017

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

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

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

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

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Digital Transformation Digest: DeepMind Forms AI Ethics Panel, HPE Brings App Store Experience to Factories, Open Source IoT Framework Hits Milestone

73% of Executives Are Researching & Launching IoT Projects In 2017

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

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

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

Top Event Questions [Anwered] - Microsoft Ignite and Envision 2017

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

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