Results

Unit4 Analyst Summit - New Architecture and Deep Verticals

Holger Mueller
Vice President and Principal Analyst Constellation Research

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

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We had the opportunity to attend Unit4 bi yearly analyst conference in Boston, held on June 15th, 2017, at the Boston Seaport Hotel. The meeting was (very – see the #MRS rule on Twitter) well attended, similar to two years ago – with about 20+ analysts attending.

 
Here is the 1-2 slide condensation (if the slide doesn’t show up, check here):



 


Want to read on? Here you go: 

 
 
 
 
 

Always tough to pick the takeaways – but here are my Top 3:

The People Architecture is Real – Two years ago Unit4 shared its vision of self-driving ERP and a people oriented architecture. The platform is reality since a year, built on top of Azure and passionately using the Microsoft technology stack (e.g. Luis for the Assistant Wanda). Unit4 has almost finished moving its ERP product – Business World On to the new platform – with a goal to be done by fall (which I read by end of the year). With that Unit4 is on the most modern ERP platforms, when it comes to adopting a modern tech stack, running on a public cloud IaaS (Azure) and taking aggressively advantage of platform capabilities, e.g. shipping Wanda on the Microsoft platform before Microsoft has an assistant in its Dynamics product suite. It’s seldom partners outpace their technology stack providers.
 
Unit4 Holger Mueller Constellation Research
CEO Sieber 
The Battle for the Service Industry Front Office – Unit4 serves service industries. Its European DNA and lack of North American presence has forced it to acquire US businesses like Three Rivers for a better footprint in Higher Education. It also wants a slice of the PSA market, with the recent Assistance Software acquisition (that despite being of Dutch origins, has more customers in North America than Europe). Assistance Software runs on top of Microsoft Dynamics, making it a nice launchpad for many geographies were Dynamics is running. And Unit4 is investing into these offerings, e.g. the Student Information Systems (SIS) for Higher Ed has completely been rebuilt on the new People Architecture. And Assistance Software is in progress to integrate as well with Business World On as with Dynamics for ERP integrations.

 
Unit4 Holger Mueller Constellation Research
The Future at Work Vision


Prevero is an ace up Unit4’s sleeve – Almost a year ago Unit4 acquired German CPM / BI vendor Prevero. Integration is advanced and most importantly Prevero has now more developers than ever, helping to build out the product. The beauty about CPM / BI is that Prevero not only creates value for the install base of Unit4 – but also is a value proposition that Unit4 can take to complete new prospects. Provero e.g. still supports interfaces into SAP. The product is (surprise) in memory based, has an attractive UX and enough customer proof points to be taken more than seriously by prospective customers.

 
Unit4 Holger Mueller Constellation Research
The Platform
 


MyPOV


Unit4 has made good progress. Creating a new platform is never easy – and to keep the revenue stream up, during the transition is never easy. The common best practice is to acquire new companies that can create revenue growth during that time and that’s what Unit4 has done with Three Rivers, Command Software and Prevero. Surprisingly the vendor chooses not to address its progress and status of its ERP product – Business World On – but we asked for it (see above). CEO Siebert made the point that ERP is getting commoditized and that the differentiation happens in the Front Office. A fair point certainly, but end to end replacements happen as well. Unit4 customers should ask actively for the status of Business World On.

On the concern side Unit4 has its hands full. New platform, Business World On almost completely on it, new acquisitions to integrate and a new value proposition for customers. The good news for customers is that Unit4 is almost out the tunnel… It would be well advised to find a more aggressive go to market in North America in regards of its ERP products. More competition is good for customers and markets. And modern offerings are only modern … for so long.

But for now, good times are comong for Unit4 customers, the vendor is over the mountain in regards of platform and the benefits should be visible to customers soon: Modern ERP software for services industries. Stay tuned.

.
 
 
 Tech Optimization unit4

Salesforce Launches Einstein Analytics: What It Means

Chris Kanaracus
Chris Kanaracus
Managing Editor, Constellation Insights Constellation

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

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Doug Henschen
Former Vice President and Principal Analyst Constellation Research

Doug Henschen is former Vice President and Principal Analyst where he focused on data-driven decision making. Henschen’s Data-to-Decisions research examines how organizations employ data analysis to reimagine their business models and gain a deeper understanding of their customers. Henschen's research acknowledges the fact that innovative applications of data analysis requires a multi-disciplinary approach starting with information and orchestration technologies, continuing through business intelligence, data-visualization, and analytics, and moving into NoSQL and big-data analysis, third-party data enrichment, and decision-management technologies. Insight-driven business models are of interest to the entire C-suite, but most particularly chief executive officers, chief digital officers,…...

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Constellation Insights

While the technology isn't entirely new, Salesforce's just-launched Einstein Analytics marks the next path forward in its AI and advanced analytics strategy. 

Previously branded as Salesforce's Wave analytics, the suite "adds a layer of artificial intelligence to the entire analytics workflow, automatically surfacing CRM insights and recommending actions to accelerate sales, improve customer service and optimize marketing campaigns," as the company puts it.

Salesforce has also rebranded its BeyondCore product as Einstein Discovery. It acquired BeyondCore, maker of an automated data analytics platform, last year. Einstein Discovery can analyze data from various sources, such as databases, Hadoop clusters and CSV files, and then derive insights displayed in dashboards it calls "stories," which include explanatory natural language narratives. The capabilities can help sales reps, agents, marketers and other roles improve customer interactions through predictive insights and prescriptive recommendations, Salesforce says.

Einstein Analytics also includes role-specific applications for sales, service and marketing. These existed prior to the rebranding, but going forward Salesforce plans to release more, including ones for industry verticals. It's also possible to build custom analytics applications with design, data preparation and data connection tools.

Salesforce is aligning Einstein Analytics with its Trailhead learning platform; there are a dozen modules available today there for developing analytic apps. It's also leveraging the ISV ecosystem in its AppExchange marketplace, which has generated more than 20 analytic apps so far, according to a statement.

All components of Einstein Analytics are generally available and pricing is as follows:

  • Sales Analytics and Service Analytics are $75 per user, per month.
  • B2B Marketing Analytics is $300 per month, for up to five users.
  • Einstein Discovery is $75 per user, per month.
  • Custom Einstein Analytics Apps are $150 per user, per month.

Salesforce first launched Wave in late 2014, but the analytics suite stumbled out of the gate due to factors such as complex packaging, high pricing and an architecture that was more like a traditional BI platform, not a set of plug-and-play applications. Salesforce ended up rebooting Wave the following year and attempted to remedy those problems.

Now, Einstein Analytics represents a third retrenchment of sorts, but one that will probably stick around for a while, given how much Salesforce has invested in the Einstein brand and underlying technology strategy.

"It made sense for Salesforce to consolidate all things analytics under the Einstein brand," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen. "As with Wave, Salesforce customers will Einstein Analytics to get beyond the basic reporting and data visualization built into Salesforce applications. Einstein Analytics supports deeper insight and analysis capabilities. Einstein Discovery adds automated insight, spotting trends, patterns and correlations of interest and offering recommendations with textual analyses that business users can understand. It’s a continuum of capabilities now all under the Einstein brand."

Now it remains to seen whether customers will find enough value in the Einstein Analytics suite, above and beyond Salesforce's core reporting and dashboard capabilities, to make what could be a substantial additional investment on top of their existing monthly rent. One sure way Salesforce can convince them is through numerous customer success stories; it still has several months to get some ready in time for Dreamforce.

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Is Amazon Thinking of Buying Slack?

Alan Lepofsky
Alan Lepofsky
Vice President & Principal Analyst Constellation Research

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

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Did Jeff Bezos wake up this morning and say: "Alexa, acquire Slack?"

Rumours are circulating that Amazon may be interested in acquiring Slack. Below are my thoughts on a) what market is this really in? b) how would it fit in with Amazon's portfolio?

 

For more information:

Future of Work

HireVue Digital Disruption 17 - Doubling down on Video Intelligence

Holger Mueller
Vice President and Principal Analyst Constellation Research

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

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We had the opportunity to attend HireVue’s yearly user conference Digital Disruption in Deer Valley, held from June 12th till 14th, at the panoramic Stein Ericson lodge. The conference was similarily attended as last year with attendees from customers, prospects, partners and the influencer community (the letter was “very well” attended – insider joke, check Twitter). 

 
 

So, look at my musings on the event here: (if the video doesn’t show up, check here)
 

No time to watch – here is the 1-2 slide condensation (if the slide doesn’t show up, check here):
 
Here you go: Always tough to pick the takeaways – but here are my Top 3:

HireVue doubles down on Video – HireVue sticks to its roots in video interviewing, now re-branding the capability with Video Intelligence. The core pitch remains the same – instead of doing static, lengthy assessments, do a video interview – and capture more data in a dynamic ambience. I think it was something like 20k data points that are captured in five minutes of video. Sifting through the video, doing transcripts is something HireVue can do – but needs to position more aggressively. The UI has been improved, always good to see. 
 
HireVue DIgital Disruption 2017 Holger Mueller Constellation Research Enterprise Software Musings
CEO Parker opens VUEDD17


Coach is here – Last year the new product announcement was HireVue Coach. The idea was that the video assets can be re-used to test training success. Employees, at the end of a training, deliver their lessons learnt / show their capabilities as requested. Managers / Trainers can use the same video tools as the Recruiter / Hiring manager to evaluate progress of the trainee. An elegant solution with a lot of market – but no easy sale, and requiring a healthy dose of changing existing (not so) best practices. But Coach is here – let’s see adoption numbers.
 
HireVue DIgital Disruption 2017 Holger Mueller Constellation Research Enterprise Software Musings
HireVue CodeVue


4M+ Interviews and now? CEO Kevin Parker shared that HireVue has now passed over 4M+ interviews, with 5M+ in reach during 2017. That’s an impressive set of data, that HireVue should leverage more to help customers better with their hiring success. Now HireVue asks customers to provide / share at least 300 or so videos to build the assessment model for the questions that will be asked to the candidate. With soon 5M+ interview videos (and hiring success) available – HireVue could help customers sooner and better with using their existing data repository. Yes, data ownership, privacy etc. all loom, but something that can be / has to be overcome.
 
HireVue DIgital Disruption 2017 Holger Mueller Constellation Research Enterprise Software Musings
HireVue Video Intelligence


 

MyPOV

Hirevue is under new management and Parker is assembling a new management team. I didn’t have the chance to attend the analyst session so I will reserve my judgement on the business plans for a later time. On the product side, the vendor has made progress and customers will welcome a more modern, consistent UX across the products.

On the concern side – HireVue, that was leading in terms of modelling for predictive analytics (yes, we called it like that a few years ago), has lost a little bit of its edge, as it has not changed to neural networks, the Swiss army knife to all things Machine Learning. Not too late, but key to move as the self-learning ability of (deep) neural networks is what is revolutionizing enterprises applications now.

Overall good progress, HireVue remains a product that pretty much every Talent Acquisition team needs to have on the look out list. With the prevalence of video in their private life (Skype, FaceTime, Allo etc.) - candidates reservation to interview via video dissipates quickly. We will have to see what happens next. Stay tuned.


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

 
 Future of Work Innovation & Product-led Growth Tech Optimization Next-Generation Customer Experience Data to Decisions AI Analytics Automation CX EX Employee Experience HCM Machine Learning ML SaaS PaaS Cloud Digital Transformation Enterprise Software Enterprise IT Leadership HR Chief Customer Officer Chief People Officer Chief Human Resources Officer

Examining Microsoft's Move to Join the Cloud Foundry Foundation

Chris Kanaracus
Chris Kanaracus
Managing Editor, Constellation Insights Constellation

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

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Constellation Insights

Microsoft is joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation as a gold member, in the latest instance of the company embracing open source under the leadership of CEO Sayta Nadella. The move also further cements Cloud Foundry's market position as a leading multi-cloud PaaS (platform as a service).

Azure's director of compute, Corey Sanders, explained Microsoft's rationale in a blog post:

The partnership with the Cloud Foundry Foundation extends our commitment to deeply collaborate and innovate in the open community. We remain committed to create a diverse and open technology ecosystem, to offer you the freedom to deploy the application solution you want on the cloud platform you prefer.

"It's a key and overdue move by Microsoft to join the at-the-moment winning PaaS platform," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. Cloud Foundry "gives enterprises load portability over all the major cloud platforms out there: AWS, Google, Microsoft, and if you want, even IBM and SAP," he adds.

While Microsoft had already been involved with Cloud Foundry on a project level, and the PaaS has been available on Azure since 2005, joining the Foundation means more than the $100,000 annual membership fee. Microsoft will step up its involvement and investment of resources into Cloud Foundry's development, as Sanders described:

In addition to joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation, we are also extending Cloud Foundry integration with Azure. This includes back-end integration with Azure Database (PostgreSQL and MySQL) and cloud broker support for SQL Database, Service Bus, and Cosmos DB. We even included the Cloud Foundry CLI in the tools available in the Cloud Shell for easy CF management in seconds.

With our joining of the Cloud Foundry Foundation and the capabilities listed above I hope you find Azure offers the best place for deploying portable and open Cloud Foundry applications without any lock-in.

Cloud Foundry initially landed on Amazon Web Services, but AWS has yet to formally join the Foundation. That could obviously change at any time, but meanwhile, other likely candidates to join include Oracle, which offers a competing PaaS—that like Cloud Foundry, is polyglot but emphasizes Java—but also wants to drive workloads toward its general-purpose IaaS (infrastructure as a service) offering.

This week, the Cloud Foundry Foundation Foundation released a number of data points highlighting Cloud Foundry's momentum. Among the highlights:

  • More than 5,000 developers have already gone through a certification program announced in March.
  • There have been 51,000 code commits in the past year.
  • Cloud Foundry has 35 percent of the PaaS market spanning both cloud and on-premises deployments.

Microsoft's announcements this week can be seen more examples of the company trying to be customer-friendly by embracing open source, but it's also pragmatic. Azure has become an increasingly popular target for Cloud Foundry deployments, and it therefore behooves Redmond from a business perspective to increase its investment in related tooling and integration.

But Cloud Foundry's ability to draw interest and support from so many cloud vendors also speaks to where buyers increasingly want to go.

"Cloud Foundry is the proof that enterprises want multi-cloud support, at least on paper," Mueller says. "They are not realizing this right away in most projects."

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Box Drive Adds On-demand Enterprise File Streaming

Alan Lepofsky
Alan Lepofsky
Vice President & Principal Analyst Constellation Research

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

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Today Box introduced the public beta of Box Drive, their new desktop integration that allows people to browse and access all the enterprise content they have access to, without having to synchronize the folders and files down to their local computer.

In the video below I discuss the trend of on-demand file-streaming and look at what the major players are doing in this space.

It's interesting to note, today's public beta release comes exactly 3 years after Box's acquisition of Streem. Coincidence? 

Reference URLs:

 

Hortonworks ploughs on - seeds Big Data

Holger Mueller
Vice President and Principal Analyst Constellation Research

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

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We had the opportunity to attend Hortonworks analyst day in San Jose, held June 12th 2017, at the Marriott San Jose, in advance to the Dataworks Summit, held at the McEnery Convention center next door. The analyst meeting was well attended with over 20 influencers present. From Constellation, my colleague Doug Henschen was there, and he and fellow colleague Chris Kanaracus have published two insight pieces, and we jointly published another on the IBM partnership – see below for links.

 
 

So, take a look at my musings on the event here: (if the video doesn’t show up, check here)

 

No time to watch – here is the 1-2 slide condensation (if the slide doesn’t show up, check here):

 

Want to read on? Here you go: 

Always tough to pick the takeaways – but here are my Top 3:

Hortonworks is doing well – The often-discussed challenges around the opensource based services model apparently are not too much of an issue for Hortonworks, that is showing healthy growth with 35%+ on revenue. All key metrics are up – so the vendor is doing something right. I asked the executive team on why the win and the list was long, but here it is (in the sequence they were mentioned): Native YARN support, Data Governances across products, one consistent Framework, Hybrid deployment, quality of Support, successful leverage of the ecosystem and delivering value to customers. All good value propositions to work with, the good news was – most of them were validated in the customer panel and customer conversations later.
 
Holger Mueller Constellation Research Hortonworks Financial Data
Hortonworks Financial Highlights


Hortonworks keeps pushing data in motion – A little more than year ago, Hortonworks surprised with a commitment to not only capture data at rest (with HDP), but also the plan to capture data in motion, aka steaming data with HDF. And Hortonworks keeps investing, rolling out HDF 3.0 at the conference, a release which most prominent features are Streaming Analytics Manager and new Schema Registry Capabilities The former is targeted at making the complex process of creating systems for streaming data more (end) user friendly, the latter is all about making HDF easier to implement. Both good moves to make HDF more attractive to enterprises building next generation applications. If this will tip the adoption challenge for HDF remains to be seen, oddly Hortonworks did not share any customer adoption numbers for HDF.

 
Holger Mueller Constellation Research Hortonworks Executive Team
Hortonworks Exec Team w (ltr) Gnau, Bearden, Davidson and Verma

Partnership with IBM – IBM and Hortonworks, both founding ODPi members, are working even closer together. After more partnering in February around hardware, both vendors now create a common offering in data science / machine learning / Big Data Query on top of HDP. The partnership was the easiest to pull off for IBM, given the common ODPi partnership. The challenge would be for customers who are not using Hortonworks under IBM DSX, but that should be a smaller number. If Hortonworks can get a substantial part of the IBM Big Insights business to run on HDP it will be a win for the vendor. And customers profit with more scale of their vendors – IBM will be able to focus (or reduce?) R&D spend, Hortonworks gets more load on HDP, and IBM’s sales force is reselling HDP. Moreover, Hortonworks gets a SQL on Hadoop offering with BigSQL, that’s key in competitive situations with nemesis #1, Cloudera.
 

MyPOV

Substantial progress by Hortonworks, that is sticking to its strategy with HDP and HDF. Adding more capabilities to HDF should make it more attractive to enterprises, but the verdict is still out if enterprises will build streaming applications themselves – or license them. Right now, Hortonworks is betting on the former.

On the concern side, HDF has not shown reasonable acceptable market adoption – at least that’s the interpretation since Hortonworks shared … no numbers on adoption. It’s going to be key for Hortonworks to get some traction, otherwise the return of R&D will be suboptimal for customers. On the brighter side HDP is doing well in the market, the IBM partnership will help further. It’s a departure from Hortonworks ‘open source only’ mantra, but reflects market realities and opportunities.

Overall good progress by Hortonworks, making good steps to offer its product in a more hybrid offering, both on premises and in the cloud. Let’s check adoption of products, partnerships and overall performance later in the year. Stay tuned.

 

     

      

     

     

     

    Tech Optimization Data to Decisions Innovation & Product-led Growth Next-Generation Customer Experience Future of Work Hortonworks Hadoop IBM AI ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Generative AI Robotics Analytics Automation Cloud SaaS PaaS IaaS Quantum Computing Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP CCaaS UCaaS Collaboration Enterprise Service developer Metaverse VR Healthcare Supply Chain Leadership Chief Experience Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Data Officer

    IBM, Hortonworks Deepen Their Big Data Partnership: Parsing the Details

    Chris Kanaracus
    Chris Kanaracus
    Managing Editor, Constellation Insights Constellation

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

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    Doug Henschen
    Former Vice President and Principal Analyst Constellation Research

    Doug Henschen is former Vice President and Principal Analyst where he focused on data-driven decision making. Henschen’s Data-to-Decisions research examines how organizations employ data analysis to reimagine their business models and gain a deeper understanding of their customers. Henschen's research acknowledges the fact that innovative applications of data analysis requires a multi-disciplinary approach starting with information and orchestration technologies, continuing through business intelligence, data-visualization, and analytics, and moving into NoSQL and big-data analysis, third-party data enrichment, and decision-management technologies. Insight-driven business models are of interest to the entire C-suite, but most particularly chief executive officers, chief digital officers,…...

    Read more
    Holger Mueller
    Vice President and Principal Analyst Constellation Research

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

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    Constellation Insights

    The Apache Hadoop ecosystem received a bit of a shakeup this week, with IBM's decision to eventually phase out its own BigInsights service in favor of standardizing on Hortonworks' Data Platform. Here are the key details from their joint announcement:

    Hortonworks will resell the IBM Data Science Experience with HDP, a leading Hadoop distribution, and adopt it as its strategic data science platform, giving developers a fast on-ramp to data science capabilities including machine learning, advanced analytics and statistics. Also, Hortonworks and IBM will create new solution bundles that integrate HDP with IBM Big SQL, IBM’s SQL engine for Hadoop, giving Hortonworks’ legions of clients and users a familiar method of managing their data.

    IBM is adopting HDP for its Hadoop distribution and will fully integrate it with Data Science Experience and Machine Learning. As a result, this solution will combine for users the rich data security, governance and operations functionality provided by HDP, and the advanced analytics and management of the Data Science Experience. IBM will migrate existing IBM BigInsights users to HDP.

    "It's no surprise that IBM is standardizing on HDP, as both distributions are based on the Open Data Platform Initiative standard and BigSQL was the only significant point of differentiation for IBM," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen.

    "This is a significant opportunity for Hortonworks as IBM has hundreds of customers on BigInsights, either on-premises or in the cloud," he adds. "If Hortonworks picks up even half these customers as IBM starts offering HDP for on-premises deployments and as the basis of its cloud offering, Hortonworks stands to gain significant share in the big data platforms market."

    Beyond gaining IBM's existing customers, Hortonworks will benefit from Big Blue's vastly larger sales force and longstanding relationships in large enterprise accounts. 

    Notably, BigSQL and DSX won't part of Hortonworks' HDP, which is open source. Rather, they'll be optional bundles, ones that provide important new capabilities for HDP.  "BigSQL gives Hortonworks an ANSI-SQL compliant SQL-on-Hadoop option akin to Cloudera's Impala offering, though it also handles relational sources and object stores, while DSX is comparable to Cloudera's recently-released Data Science Workbench," Henschen says. 

    "In the fast-paced open source big data market, Hortonworks and IBM have found each other, complementing their database and data science platforms," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. This is likely a win for joint customers, but for customers on other Hadoop distrbutions it's a point of concern: Do they move the data to HDP or stay where they are?"

    One might also wonder how Microsoft will react to the deal, given that its own HDInsight service for Azure is based on Hortonworks. 

    Still, this week's announcement is a natural progression for Hortonworks and IBM, given their existing partnership and status as founding members of ODPi. Mueller also points to another key partnership between IBM and Hortonworks this week, regarding support for the latter's DataFlow streaming engine on IBM Power Systems. "Streaming data is a performance critical use case, and it's likely streaming vendors— this case Hortonworks HDF—can reap performance and TCO advantages working closer with hardware vendors like IBM," he says.

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    Data to Decisions Tech Optimization Chief Information Officer

    Microsoft Spiking Docs.com: What It Means for Dynamics

    Chris Kanaracus
    Chris Kanaracus
    Managing Editor, Constellation Insights Constellation

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

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    Alan Lepofsky
    Alan Lepofsky
    Vice President & Principal Analyst Constellation Research

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

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    Constellation Insights

    Many acquisitions lead to product overlap, and Microsoft's $26.2 billion purchase of LinkedIn a year ago is no different. Redmond has announced that Docs.com, the filesharing service it launched in 2010, will be shuttered by December 15. Here's the rationale Microsoft gave for the move:

    Following Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn, SlideShare has joined the Microsoft family, and represents the ideal platform for publishing your Word, PowerPoint, and PDF content with its audience of 70 million professionals, and vast content library. For custom sharing, OneDrive offers additional tools, permission settings, and security to help share and protect your data and content. With the retirement of the Docs.com service, we hope to streamline our offerings in this space and provide you with a more cohesive experience.

    As of now, it's no longer possible to create a new Docs.com account, although existing users can publish and edit files until August 1. After that it's read-only through December 14. Users can choose to have compatible files automatically backed up to OneDrive or OneDrive for Business, but not to SlideShare.

    To put it mildly, Docs.com has not been a runaway success for Microsoft. Initially launched in partnership with Facebook, Docs.com was an attempt to find synergies between Microsoft's online productivity software and the massive audience provided by the social network.

    While you can still login to Docs.com with your Facebook account, the relationship between the platforms has long since faded into the deep background, thanks in part to factors such as Facebook's move to create Workplace by Facebook. Moreover, OneDrive has existed under various names and forms since 2007, and today has a much richer feature set than Docs.com. The case for redundancy is solid. 

    SlideShare, meanwhile, is no replacement for either Docs.com or OneDrive. Rather, it's a highly popular but uniquely positioned document-sharing service with a large existing audience of business users, both individual and corporate. The site gets 70 million unique visitors a month and 38 million registered users. While it competes with the likes of Scribd, SlideShare's already deep integration with the massive LinkedIn network is something rivals can't say they also have. 

    The imminent end of Docs.com is welcome one, as it will free up resources Microsoft can use to focus more attention on SlideShare's roadmap, not to mention integrating LinkedIn, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Alan Lepofsky. 

    "While I am sure a lot is going on in the background, not a lot of new features or integrations have manifested yet in their products," and it was disappointing that LinkedIn its related APIs didn't take high priority at last month's Build developer conference, he adds. 

    "What we're waiting to see is how LinkedIn and Dynamics come together," Lepofsky says. Indeed, the potential for synergies between LinkedIn and Microsoft's business applications has been a much-discussed topic since the acquisition.

    SlideShare's capabilities and audience have a natural alignment with Dynamics, especially for CRM (customer relationship management), marketing, recruiting and employee training. Enterprises have used SlideShare this way for years, albeit mostly in an ad-hoc manner. Now Microsoft has an opportunity to tightly integrate the SlideShare experience with Dynamics, while adding enterprise-friendly features. Constellation expects Microsoft will reveal its intentions along this lines—as well as a broader vision for the LinkedIn-Dynamics combination—at its Envision conference in September. 

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    Ford Centralizes Data Science Expertise to Democratize Data-Driven Decision Making

    Doug Henschen
    Former Vice President and Principal Analyst Constellation Research

    Doug Henschen is former Vice President and Principal Analyst where he focused on data-driven decision making. Henschen’s Data-to-Decisions research examines how organizations employ data analysis to reimagine their business models and gain a deeper understanding of their customers. Henschen's research acknowledges the fact that innovative applications of data analysis requires a multi-disciplinary approach starting with information and orchestration technologies, continuing through business intelligence, data-visualization, and analytics, and moving into NoSQL and big-data analysis, third-party data enrichment, and decision-management technologies. Insight-driven business models are of interest to the entire C-suite, but most particularly chief executive officers, chief digital officers,…...

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    Ford Global Data Insights and Analytics team spreads data access and analysis capabilities enterprisewide.

    With its data growing exponentially and digital transformations including mobility, continuous connectivity and autonomous vehicles quickly emerging, Ford recognized back in 2014 that it need to take a more comprehensive and strategic approach to data-driven decision making. These were key reasons why Ford hired its first Global Chief Data and Analytics Officer, Paul Ballew, and formed the Ford Global Data Insights and Analytics (GDIA) unit in January 2015.

    A veteran of Dun & Bradstreet, Nationwide Insurance, General Motors and J.D. Power and Associates, Ballew’s challenge was to “take big data and analytics to the next level inside Ford… establishing an enterprise-wide vision for analytics and integrating all research, analytics, processes, standards, tools and partner engagement,” stated a company press release.

    Analytics tools, methods and processes were in use throughout the company, but “it wasn't efficient to have individual pockets of the business going about analytics in inconsistent ways,” Adam Blacke, Lead Data Scientist, recently told me.

    GDIA was created to share best practices and drive optimized, data-driven decision-making across the organization. Drawing on a mix of Ford veterans formerly embedded within departments as well as new hires, GDIA has grown to a staff of more than 600. Through consultative engagements, it has supported all aspects of the business, from manufacturing, research and development and supply chain to marketing, customer service and administrative, legal and accounting teams.

    As I explain in my latest case study research, “Ford Analytics Team Democratizes Data-Driven Analysis,” GDIA’s centralized coordination promotes consistency and sharing of best practices. “We knew we could learn from each other,” said Blacke. “Previously, we had individual teams learning different things, but they weren't sharing across pockets of analytic exploration.”

    Centralization is one way organizations are making the most of available data science expertise, but there’s more than one way to achieve centralized oversight. Facebook, for example, developed a hybrid approach whereby data science experts remained embedded within specific business areas, but as I explained in this 2013 article, they also reported to then chief analytics officer Ken Rudin (who has since joined Google) and they met regularly with their peers from other business units.

    In the hybrid approach, experts develop deep expertise in one business domain and are always available to (and are funded by) that group. They also regularly share what they are working on with their analytics peers and trade ideas and lessons learned across business units. The chief analytics officer promotes the development of talent, sets and coordinates analytic priorities, and champions infrastructure and data investments to the benefit of all business units.

    Ford’s approach to centralization is equally valid and it does not prevent individual business units from retaining dedicated analytical resources. The centralized team approach is particularly beneficial in spreading data-driven decision making and optimization to departments and business units that are too small or otherwise ill- equipped to support analytics initiatives on their own.

    Analytics expert Thomas Dinsmore, author of Disruptive Analytics (one of the best books I’ve read on the topic of analytics), recently told me that data scientists should be handled like commercial airliners: they should always be overbooked. Centralization is one way to ensure that there’s always a steady, prioritized pipeline of analytics projects to tackle. But you can also get into trouble with centralization if the queue for analytics support gets too long or if there’s a lack of entrepreneurial innovation. Dinsmore says he’s seen organizations go back to more decentralized (or, perhaps, hybrid) approaches after giving centralization a try.

    My case study report details how Ford GDIA is organized and how it promotes democratized data access with tools from vendors including Alteryx, Qlik and Tableau. Alan Jacobson, Director of Global Analytics, explains how Ford helps users ask the right questions and choose the right tools. The report also details how GDIA tackled three projects where data science expertise made the difference in logistics and purchasing, manufacturing and supply chain management. Click here to download a free excerpt of the 14-page report.

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