Digital Transformation Digest: Net Neutrality's Fate Sealed?, Adobe Meets Alexa, Next-Gen Java Ready to Pour

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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Welcome to Digital Transformation Digest, Constellation's daily compendium of news and analysis covering forward-thinking enterprises, mega-vendors, startups and developers.

Net neutrality's fate is sealed a bit tighter: U.S. President Donald Trump has nominated Brendan Carr, the Federal Communications Commission's general counsel, to an open seat on the FCC's board. As the Register notes, Carr is a longtime associate of FCC chairman Ajit Pai, who is a vociferous foe of Net neutrality. Thus, Carr should be a rubber-stamp vote in favor of rolling back the rules, which mandate that telcos treat all web traffic equally, in a vote later this year.

Carr was Pai's personal attorney for three years and was appointed to the FCC post in January. While Carr's nomination is subject to approval from Congress, there is no indication of any stumbling blocks on that front, and once completely filled the FCC board will have a Republican majority led by Pai.

POV: The net neutrality debate goes back 20 years, to the early days of the Internet. While often framed as a consumer-rights issue, net neutrality should be on the radar of enterprises now more than ever, given factors such as the rapid ascent of IoT, the app economy and an overall march into cloud services. All those things will require more and more bandwidth, with strong reliability, availability and predictable, manageable pricing models across both the wired and wireless network infrastructure landscape.

Java 9 finally ready to pour?: While Oracle gained control of Java when it bought Sun Microsystems in 2010, the fact remains that major advancements in the venerable, widely used programming language are governed by an open source community. The current production version, Java 8, was released more than three years ago.

Java 9 has been in gestation ever since, but disagreement among Java Community Process members over the addition of modularity to the language has repeatedly delayed an official release. Oracle has been a strong proponent of the modularity features, saying they will add significant performance and scalability to Java-based applications. Opponents such as Red Hat had argued the specification wasn't ready for inclusion in a formal Java 9 release.

But this week, JCP members voted 24-0 to approve modularity in Java 9, saying enough progress had been made, as InfoWorld reports.

POV: Some readers may wonder why they should care about what from the outside can seem like prototypical academic bickering. But the fact is that Java holds a sizable piece of enterprise IT bedrock, both in terms of commercial applications sold by vendors as well as home-grown ones.

Three-plus years between major releases in the language benefits no one. While modularity is a touted feature of Java 9—which is now set for release in September—it also includes advancements in crucial areas such as security. Oracle has expressed a desire to increase Java's release cadence dramatically once Java 9 is released, with annual updates a goal. That would be a welcome move, but can't happen unless the JCP can shed some red tape.

Adobe wants to hear you talking: Adobe is tapping into the rise of voice-enabled digital assistants for insights into customer behavior and desires, through a new service in its Analytics Cloud. Here are the key details from its announcement:

[B]rands can capture and analyze voice data for all major platforms including Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana and Samsung Bixby. The new capabilities address the complexity in measuring voice interactions, with the ability to capture both the user intent (“play me a song”) as well as specific parameters (“from The Beatles”). Additional data points including frequency of use and actions taken after a voice request is made are provided as well.

Through deep analysis of voice data complemented by artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities in Adobe Sensei, brands can gain robust audience insights and recommendations, while automating the traditionally cumbersome, manual analysis.

Sensei's involvement will give teams more time to work on improving their voice services' core capabilities, Adobe says.

POV: This is a smart move by Adobe, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Cindy Zhou. "As more consumers utilize voice-enabled assistants to manage their day, shop, and find answers to questions, they are contributing valuable data on their habits and intent," she says. "Brands in turn can perform even more targeted searches for lookalike customers or provide improved personalization of offers."

Legacy Watch: Mainframe outage drives Hawaii DMV to a halt: Problems with a mainframe that services DMV branches all over the state of Hawaii have essentially shut operations down all week, with no resolution in sight.

Motor vehicle registration, drivers licensing, state ID’s, moped registration, out of state license and vehicle transfers and "any and all transactions which require logging into the state database" have been affected, according to a press release from the county of Maui.

The DMV is asking that only customers with "urgent needs," such as an about-to-expire driver's license, come down in person for service, the release adds.

Interestingly—but perhaps not surprisingly—the problem isn't related to the mainframe hardware, Hawaii News Now reports:

The issues began on Monday after the system was shut down for maintenance over the weekend, according to Keith Ho, the city's Deputy Director of Information Technology. The problem, Ho says, is a result of the city trying to run old software on a brand new mainframe.

"We turned the system down on Sunday, so that we can do backups, and then when we brought it up on Monday, we started to see (the slowdown), says Ho. "Because not a lot of people are using it on Sunday, maybe just police doing inquiries, we didn't know until Monday (that there was a problem)."

POV: Nobody likes to go to the DMV, but it's a necessary evil. The Hawaii DMV's situation is a good example of how much inconvenience it can cause the public when critical systems like this go down. It's also another reminder of how much legacy assembler and COBOL code, much of it decades old, is still out there and in some cases can be a ticking time bomb.

Digital Transformation Digest: Grocers Respond to Amazon-Whole Foods, Database Startup with NSA Roots Cashes In, and Much More

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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Welcome to Digital Transformation Digest, Constellation's daily compendium of news and analysis covering forward-thinking enterprises, mega-vendors, startups and developers.

Amazon-Whole Foods deal spurring grocers to transform: The Albertsons grocery chain is planning to overhaul its e-commerce systems in the coming year to better serve customers and shore up its play in food delivery, the Wall Street Journal reports. The move comes in the wake of Amazon's $13.7 billion deal to buy Whole Foods, a organic foods chain Alberstons was reportedly interested in buying earlier this year.

There's still time for counter-offers to come in for Whole Foods, possibly from Albertsons or Walmart. The latter is the U.S. grocery market share leader, with various estimates ranging from 15 to 20 percent, but Albertsons is no small player, with more than 2,000 stores and $60 billion in revenue. (Another suitor could be Kroger, which already has a robust organic foods business and is the second-largest U.S. grocer after Walmart.)

Beyond technology, Albertsons has invested in e-commerce related talent, bringing in executives from Macy's, Levi's and Disney with an eye on applying fresh ideas to the grocery space.

POV: While Amazon certainly has the infrastructure and potential to scale up a major grocery delivery business, it's interesting to note that Whole Foods, on a revenue basis, barely moves the needle toward that goal, given it has just about 1 percent of U.S. market share.

However, in terms of accelerating transformation in the grocery industry, the deal is clearly feeding the fire, evidenced by Albertsons' plans and no doubt many other chains. It could also help drive more business toward grocery delivery startups such as Instacart—a current Whole Foods partner—as chains choose to outsource. Overall, there are changes coming to the grocery business that will be felt by consumers going forward.

As for those potential counter-offers for Whole Foods? Here's how to look at that scenario, says Constellation Research founder and CEO R "Ray" Wang. For one, Amazon wants high-end customer data and Whole Foods delivers that. "It has distribution and customers, but needs data for pricing and selection," Wang says. "Other acquirers are seeing scale in their own industry but really need a technology or marketplace partner. Buying another grocery is really stupid. But if they bought Pepsico for distribution, that'd be interesting."

"Amazon is cross-industry and working across industries," he adds. "Other grocers who put in a bid are just there to raise the price. If they do buy Whole Foods, they’ll just kill it over time because their business models are not a good fit."

Encryption ends up low priority at Five Eyes meeting: This week, the "Five Eyes" nations of Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the U.S. and New Zealand held their annual meeting on intelligence, counterterrorism and cybersecurity measures in Ottawa. Many observers expected the two-day meeting to result in some concrete proposals around cryptography, specifically how law enforcement could circumvent it in the name of fighting and solving crimes.

But the official joint communication released after the meeting spends just a couple sentences on cryptography, and appears to essentially punt the problem toward technology companies:

[E]ncryption can severely undermine public safety efforts by impeding lawful access to the content of communications during investigations into serious crimes, including terrorism. To address these issues, we committed to develop our engagement with communications and technology companies to explore shared solutions while upholding cybersecurity and individual rights and freedoms.

POV: Go here to read Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Steve Wilson's take on why the encryption debate is far from simple.

Meet Kinetica, the GPU-powered database with NSA roots: Kinetica, an in-memory relational database startup that leverages NVIDIA GPUs in conjunction with commodity hardware, has scored $50 million in Series A funding, with investors including former Oracle president Ray Lane.

Kinetica's founders, Amit Vij and Nima Negahban, were hired in 2009 by the National Security Agency and U.S. Army Intelligence Security command to create a real-time terrorist tracking system. The database is now on its sixth product release but even the initial version was reportedly quite impressive, as Vij said in a statement:

At the time, our database ingested data from more than 200 different streaming big data feeds. This included drones that tracked every asset that moved at 30 frames per second; mobile devices that emitted their metadata every few seconds; social media like Twitter and Facebook; and cyber security data. We were evaluating billions of signals to find that needle in the haystack.

Current customers include GlaxoSmithKline and the U.S. Postal Service. Its being used in multiple ways, such as fraud detection, smart grid management, supply chain management, genomics research, and deep learning and machine learning.

POV: Kinetica is not the only company working on GPU-accelerated database technology, but would seem to have the early mover advantage given how long it's been in existence, and the success it's had gaining marquee customers.

The size of the Series A round, at $50 million, is much higher than typical, suggesting that Kinetica's investors are quite bullish on its prospects. Kinetica will use the money to increase engineering, sales and marketing headcount from the current 75, as well as open more offices around the world.

"The sweet spot for Kinetica has been interactive, geospatial analyses at scale, which has appealed to customers including government agencies, big retailers and big utilities," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen. "Advanced visualization capabilities have also appealed to pharmaceutical and healthcare companies."

While data-intensive geospatial and visual analyses are often performance constrained, Kinetica says its GPU-accelerated database and visual analytics platform can deliver up to 100 times faster performance than conventional systems using one-tenth the hardware, he adds. With the 6.0 release it's also diving into advanced in-database analytics applications combining machine learning and deep learning workloads, for which it's using libraries including TensorFlow, Caffe and Torch, Henschen notes.

GPU-accelerated databases have a bright future, so they're attracting healthy financial backing. In March, Kinetica competitor MapD raised $25 million in a Series B round. "GPU hardware remains exotic and unfamiliar to mainstream enterprises, however, so we're not yet in the hockey stick growth phase," Henschen says. "I expect continued experimentation, particularly in cloud environments where marketing partnerships could make a difference for these vendors. GPU-based systems won't thrive in isolation, so vendors and practitioners will have to ease the technical bottlenecks—such as getting high-scale data in and results out—of using these systems in concert with conventional systems and data platforms."

Microsoft gets multi-cloud friendly with Cloudyn buy: Microsoft has agreed to buy Israeli startup Cloudyn, which offers tools for managing consumption, spending and performance across multiple cloud services. The price tag was between $50 million and $70 million, Techcrunch reported.

While that sum is a rounding error on Microsoft's balance sheet, the deal has symbolic significance. Cloudyn was already a Microsoft partner, but supports other clouds as well as Azure. Judging from the tone of a blog post by Microsoft's Jeremy Winter, this approach may continue. Winter also notes that Cloudyn's tools helped a U.S. based Fortune 500 company realize a 286 percent return on investment.

POV: Cloudyn's capabilities could make Azure more attractive to customers, and certainly Microsoft wants to bring as many workloads to Azure as possible. However, Constellation believes that multi-cloud is the approach most enterprises need, whether they realize it now or not. Therefore, keeping Cloudyn open to other competitors would be the right move for Microsoft.

"Cloud economics are the key questions customers try to get on top of before making platform deployment decisions," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. "The question is, as part of Microsoft can Cloudyn still be the independent, impartial third party that tracks cloud infrastructure costs and makes recommendations in regards of where loads should run?"

Legacy Watch: Medtronic's ERP integration woes: Medical-device giant Medtronic has brought a key system for customer orders and manufacturing back online after a nearly week-long outage, as the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal reports.

Medtronic bought competitor Covidien in 2015 for $50 billion and has been working to bring the company onto its ERP system. A Medtronic spokesman "wasn't sure" whether the system outage was related to that project, according to the paper, but it's not too difficult to connect the dots.

POV: The thought of a week-long outage for a system that critical should make any CIO break out in cold sweat. Medtronic says it doesn't believe the outage will impact its earnings, but that remains to be seen. It is conducting a root-cause analysis of the problems; should it make those results public, they could have some valuable insights into the pitfalls of major systems migration.

Google Proposes Broad Reforms to Regulations on Law Enforcement Requests for User Data

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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Steve Wilson

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Steve Wilson is former VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, leading the business theme Digital Safety and Privacy. His coverage includes digital identity, data protection, data privacy, cryptography, and trust. His advisory services to CIOs, CISOs, CPOs and IT architects include identity product strategy, security practice benchmarking, Privacy by Design (PbD), privacy engineering and Privacy [or Data Protection] Impact Assessments (PIA, DPIA). Coverage Areas: -  Identity management, frameworks & governance-  Digital identity technologies-  Privacy by Design -  Big Data; “Big Privacy”-  Identity & privacy innovation Previous experience: Wilson has worked in ICT innovation, research, development and analysis for over 25 years. With double…...

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Google is getting a lot of attention lately over the $2.7 billion fine it received from the European Union over antitrust practices related to its search engine. The controversy stands to overshadow the company's recent effort to launch a policy debate around an important topic: The governance of cross-border law enforcement requests for information.

SVP and general counsel Kent Walker made the case in a speech last week to the Heritage Foundation, an influential Washington, D.C. think tank:

For as long as we’ve had legal systems, prosecutors and police have needed to gather evidence. ... With the advent of the post office, police got warrants to search letters and packages. With the arrival of telephones, police served subpoenas for the call logs of suspects. ... But the laws that govern evidence-gathering on the internet were written before the Information Revolution, and are now both hindering the flow of information to law enforcement and jeopardizing user privacy as a result.

These rules are due for a fundamental realignment in light of the rapid growth of technology that relies on the cloud, the very real security threats that face people and communities, and the expectations of privacy that internet users have in their communications.

Today, we’re proposing a new framework that allows countries that commit to baseline privacy, human rights, and due process principles to gather evidence more quickly and efficiently. We believe these reforms would not only help law enforcement conduct more effective investigations but also encourage countries to improve and align on privacy and due process standards. Further, reducing the amount of time countries have to wait to gather evidence means would reduce the pressure to pursue more problematic ways of trying to gather data.

Under the U.S. Electronic Communications Privacy Act, for the most part foreign law enforcement organizations are reliant on "diplomatic mechanisms" such as Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties when they want information held by a U.S. company. That process is far too bureaucratic and slow for most criminal proceedings, with an average wait of 10 months, Walker said.

Meanwhile, those same delays are prompting some countries to simply assert "that their own laws apply to companies and individuals outside of their borders." This places globalized U.S. companies in an "untenable situation," since they're at risk of violating U.S. law or that of the nation making the request, Walker added.

Google is proposing that the ECPA be updated to reflect that "law enforcement requests for digital evidence should be based on the location and nationality of users, not the location of data," as one measure.

A second would be for the U.S. and foreign nations that meet those "baseline" privacy, human rights and due process standards—which Google does not specifically define—to ink new pacts that would provide an alterative to MLATs.

Analysis: Unpacking Google's proposal

In principle, Google's proposal is most welcome, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Steve Wilson. "Clearly, something needs to be done to lubricate the necessary flow of information between cooperating law enforcement agencies," he says. "Equally, this sort of international challenge has been overcome many times in the past with extradition treaties, international shipping and aviation laws, as well as telecommunications and satellite regulations."

But the devil is in the details, and it's difficult to say how Google's view of the world and its problems align with most nations, he adds: "We live in awkward times where a great many developing nations are on edge, keen to assert their sovereignty in the global economy. A fresh complexity that didn't affect past treaty negotiations is that we have digital corporations now, with skin in the game, that are bigger than many countries."

Encryption: The elephant in the room

Wilson recalls the "crypto-wars" policy battle of the 1990s, which ended in a consensus that while criminals can use and benefit from encryption, it was also necessary for community security and would in reality always be available in roll-your-own form.

"The arguments today revolve around whether encryption is so powerful that it gives terrorists and organized crime a crucial edge over law enforcement," he says.

• Intercepts and decryption are just one tool of many used by law enforcement.
• Messages don't stay encrypted forever and police can find many points in the communications line at which to intercept criminal activity.
• Tampering with commercial cryptography will drive the most dedicated—and thereby most dangerous—criminals to build their own.
• Criminal can also resort to steganography, the practice of hiding secret messages in normal files such as graphics. Stenganography is much harder to detect and decode.

Salesforce Unveils New Einstein AI Platform Services: What It Means

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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Salesforce is continuing its steady stream of Einstein AI announcements, unveiling three new platform services that developers can inject into applications for sales, support, marketing and commerce.

The services include Einstein Sentiment, Einstein Intent and Einstein Object Recognition. They are derived from Einstein capabilities Salesforce gained through last year's acquisition of MetaMind.

Salesforce had already introduced Einstein Vision, an image recognition service based on MetaMind capabilities in February, but Object Detection goes a level deeper, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen.

For example, a seller of solar panels could use the Vision Service to differentiate between images of flat-roofed homes and pitched-roof homes, but the Object Detection can differentiate multiple objects within a single image, he notes. Coca Cola did a pilot project with the service, whereby retailers could simply take a picture of their Coke coolers. The Object Detection Service was trained to count the number of bottles or cans of Coke versus Diet Coke versus Sprite and so on and then automatically trigger a restocking order, Henschen says.

Overall, it's important for Salesforce to continue adding not only depth but granularity into its AI services when it comes to developers. "Generic smart applications can only go so far," Henschen says. "I think companies and their developers are excited by the prospect of building custom smart apps."

However, as is often the case with Salesforce, the new platform services aren't yet generally available and no firm dates for that status were provided. Einstein Sentiment and Einstein Intent are now in beta, while Object Detection is in pilot.

The news comes as Salesforce holds its second annual developer conference, TrailheaDX, and seeks to dramatically expand its developer community through an expansive online training platform called Trailhead. Other news announced this week includes Trailhead partnerships with Atlassian and Github, as well as an open beta for Salesforce DX, the company's new developer experience which combines its core Force.com platform with Heroku.

Digital Transformation Digest, 6/28/17: Salesforce Courts Developers, Cisco Revs Up IoT, Google and Nutanix Tie Up on Hybrid Cloud

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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Welcome to Digital Transformation Digest, Constellation's daily compendium of news and analysis covering forward-thinking enterprises, mega-vendors, startups and developers.

Salesforce adds AI platform services for developers, opens up DX in beta: The CRM giant has made a steady stream of announcements in recent months around its AI technology, Einstein, which is the product of a string of acquisitions and organic development. In the latest, Salesforce has unveiled new Einstein platform services for its developer base.

The services include Einstein Sentiment, for analyzing the tone of text generated by social media, web reviews and other mediums; Einstein Intent, which provides machine learning models that can classify the intent of inbound customer messages and route them appropriately; and Einstein Object Detection, for analyzing the content of images. Salesforce sees the last as ideal for retail, service and inventory management scenarios.

Go here for a deeper dive into the new services, with analysis from Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen.

Salesforce has also announced an open beta for DX, its new developer environment, which was first announced at last year's Dreamforce.

POV: Salesforce is betting big on expanding its already large developer base in a bid for growth. It has rolled out an extensive online training program called Trailhead, which is aimed at both those aspiring to be full-time Salesforce professionals, as well as "citizen" developers. The latter could be just as important for Salesforce's prospects given the potential for adding stickiness to its products within companies large and small.

The news is all happening in conjunction with TrailheaDX, Salesforce's second annual developer conference. Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller will be in attendance, so look for his coverage on his Twitter feed, Constellation's website and his blog this week.

Cisco ups its IoT ante post-Jasper acquisition: Last year's $1.4 billion purchase of IoT connectivity platform Jasper seemed like a shrewd move for Cisco, as it picked up one of the most mature and widely-used products of its kind.

Jasper was founded in 2004 and at the time of the acquisition, it already had 3,500 enterprise customers. (It now has 11,000, in a testament to Cisco's much larger channel and sales capability.) And on paper, the technical fit was sterling, with the combination of Cisco's networking gear and Jasper's software.

While there have been some incremental announcements since the deal, the big news arrived this week in the form of Control Center 7.0, which ties an array of Cisco technologies into Jasper's platform. You can go here for all the details, courtesy of Cisco.

POV: "It took some time from the acquisition of Jasper, but now we see the benefits in Cisco Control Center 7.0," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Andy Mulholland. "It's a combination of network topology types combined with the management experience of both Cisco and Jasper. As an example of the art of the possible in IoT connectivity spanning network types, it's well worth taking a close look."

Google teams with Nutanix for hybrid cloud: Google—technically, its parent company Alphabet—has inked a pact with hyperconvergence vendor Nutanix for hybrid cloud scenarios. Nutanix offers hardware and software for running mission-critical applications on private clouds, while providing connectivity to public cloud services for other workloads.

The integration is set to be complete in the first quarter of 2018. It will enable applications to be wrapped in Kubernetes-based containers and moved back and forth between Nutanix hardware and Google's cloud.

POV: This is certainly a big deal for Nutanix but also an acknowledgment by Google that hybrid cloud is what many enterprises want or require. Nutanix has strong credibility in its own right, with an enviable customer list using its products to build hybrid cloud datacenters.

Legacy Watch: Looming deadline for Office 2007 support: Companies and individuals still using Office 2007 have just three more months of support before Microsoft pulls the plug, as Computerworld reports. While they have the option of upgrading to a newer version of Office, such as 2013 or even 2016, Microsoft is pushing hard on the idea of jumping straight to the cloud-based Office365 or Office365 Plus, the fat-client version.

POV: It's not clear how many copies of Office 2007 are still chugging away out there, but we can be sure it's far more than one. Office365 has developed a rich feature set and is certainly worth a close look. For its part, Microsoft has a detailed end-of-life guide for Office 2007 at this link. (It also doubles as a passive but persistent product pitch for Office365).

SugarCRM Unveils Hint, for 'Relationship Intelligence'

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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Cindy Zhou

CMO
Level Access

Cindy Zhou is a practicing CMO.  Prviously, she was Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research covering Digital Marketing Transformation and Sales Effectiveness. With over 18 years of practitioner experience in corporate marketing, product marketing, product management, and sales operations, Zhou has spearheaded marketing transformation at multiple technology companies. She advised Constellation’s clients on strategies to light-up demand generation, prove revenue contribution, and maximize sales productivity. Prior to joining Constellation, Zhou was Global Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales Operations at BackOffice Associates, a global provider of data quality and information governance solutions to the Fortune 1000 and SAP SolEx partner. Before…...

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SugarCRM has firmed up its AI story with the launch of Hint, the first service from its new Relationship Intelligence product family. Hint is all about automating the task of collecting and organizing information about individual customers, as SugarCRM explains in a press release:

SugarCRM Hint reinvents enterprise applications by enabling end users to provide only a few contact details (e.g. email, name, company) for an individual and then automatically searches, tunes, and inputs the rest of the personal and corporate profile details for that contact. Hint does the work for Sugar users by gathering and analyzing customer intelligence from a broad range of social data sources so users can quickly and efficiently learn more about their prospects to establish a productive relationship.

Hint builds upon last year's acquisition of Contastic, a natural-language processing startup. It is compatible with Sugar versions 7.8 or higher and priced at $15 per user per month.

Hint represents a first step in a longer journey for SugarCRM, as the company notes in the release:

Future SugarCRM Relationship Intelligence products will rely on predictive analytics and machine learning techniques. These analysis techniques evaluate large data sets to reveal insightful patterns, prioritize opportunities, identify issues and make intelligent recommendations for next best actions in customer interactions and processes.

For what it is, Hint serves an increasingly important need, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Cindy Zhou. "Companies have been turning to third-party data solutions to append the missing information for both companies and their related contacts," he says. Having more complete information on the company, the decision-makers and contacts will help sellers improve their engagement with customers and prospects."

But Zhou advises clients to assess the fit and understand the depth and breadth of contacts Hint can provide. "Is there specialization in their particular target markets, industries or contact roles?"

POV: SugarCRM has chugged along over the years, despite remaining in the shadow of high-profile CRM vendors such as Salesforce and Oracle. It has differentiated itself with aggressive pricing-to-feature ratios, and the ability to run both in the cloud and on-premises.

With Hint and the upcoming Relationship Intelligence products, SugarCRM has made an initial entry into AI. While it doesn't have pockets as deep as larger competitors, SugarCRM is smartly focusing its initial AI efforts on core sales CRM capabilities—its sweet spot—compared to Salesforce's aggressive push to drive AI across every module.

DNS Up-and-Comer Cloudflare Launches App Platform

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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DNS service provider Cloudflare is getting serious about apps. The company has announced the Cloudfare Apps Platform as well as a $100 million fund that will distribute venture capital to startups that build apps on the platform. 

Founded in 2011, Cloudfare has now built out a network that spans 115 cities around the world, serving six million websites. Prominent customers include Uber and Fitbit. Cloudfare also offers CDN (content delivery network) services, firewalls and DDoS (distributed denial of service) protection. 

Cloudflare App Platform is a natural evolution of the business, CEO Matthew Prince wrote in a blog post:

Prior to today, if you wanted to write code that took full advantage of Cloudflare's global network you needed to be a Cloudflare employee. Our team is able to run code on thousands of servers in hundreds of locations around the world and modify our customers' packets as they flow through our network in order to make their web site, application, or API faster and more secure. Today, we open that access to the rest of the world.

The Apps Platform allows third parties to develop applications that can be delivered across Cloudflare's edge to any of our millions of customers. 

Cloudflare sits in a unique place. Our customers' packets flow through our network before reaching origin servers and in the way back to clients. That enables us to filter out bad actors, introduce new compression, change protocols, and modify and inject content. The Cloudflare Apps Platform enables developers to do the same, and produce applications that help build a better Internet.

Meanwhile, the developer fund is being backed by Venrock, Pelion and NEA, which were early investors in Cloudfare:

Building Cloudflare was a community effort. We can't wait to see what developers build now that we've opened Cloudflare's infrastructure and access to investors to a greater audience.

The App Platform stems from Cloudflare's purchase of Eager last year. Despite its name, the platform doesn't offer a full set of developer tools. Rather, it provides a way for third-party developers to wrap their JavaScript and CSS-based applications in an install.JSON file. Cloudflare's platform abstracts away complexity for website customers, allowing non-technical users to use a simple interface to configure and install apps on their sites. 

Eager's technology replaces an earlier app platform Cloudflare had built on its own. The company's app marketplace has about 50 applications so far but clearly the goal is to have many, many more. Like other stores, Cloudflare will take a piece of developers' revenue, in this case 30 percent.

POV: Surprisingly rich applications can be built with JavaScript and CSS, but you can expect the variety of applications that populate Cloudflare's store to include a fair amount of widgets, too, albeit useful ones, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses or department-level websites who want to add features quickly without engaging IT. Like any, the marketplace and platform's success will depend on developer and customer awareness, but Cloudflare's overall momentum, along with the $100 million fund, should ensure a fair amount of both.

Cisco Live 2017: Key Takeaways from CEO Chuck Robbins' Keynote

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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Cisco kicked off this year's Live conference with a keynote from its CEO Chuck Robbins, who walked attendees through recent and upcoming news announcements while laying out the company's vision for next-generation networks. Here's a look at the key takeaways from Robbins' talk.

The new networking realities: In 2016, the world hit an inflection point as the number of machine-to-machine network activations exceeded those of phones and tablets, Robbins said. Enterprises are already using billions of connected devices for new business models, preventive maintenance and other pursuits, and the pace by which more and more devices will be connected to the Internet is set to increase dramatically, he added.

Three things will define networks going forward: Scale, simplification and security, Robbins said. Of the last, he noted: "We all know what's in the press and as we add more and more things the threat surface expands. Once a month, something major happens. We have to ensure we're building security into everything we do."

Last week, announced major updates across its Digital Network Architecture product family. These include DNA Center, a management dashboard for all network functions; Software-Defined Access, which automatically segments network traffic through policy enforcement; and a machine learning platform for predictive analytics and business intelligence.

There's also new traffic analytics that can accurately detect threats in encrypted traffic more than 99 percent of the time, without needing to decrypt the data.

Robbins also discussed a new family of switches, the Catalyst 9000 line, which he called a "beautiful box." The switches include new custom-built ASICs and are fully programmable, allowing, for example, a hospital bringing on IoT devices carrying patient data to separate that traffic from desktop networks. It's also possible to run applications in containers or VMs directly on the boxes.

To that end, "what we believe is the network has to provide you the ability not only to connect but to deal with the data at the edge," Robbins said. 

Seventy-five large companies are already conducting field trials with the new software and hardware, according to Robbins. The various aspects of the portfolio will become available over the next several months, Cisco said.

POV: Robbins kept the product pitches fairly short and free of bombast, which is always welcome. He also did a good job of speaking directly to the thousands of Cisco administrators and architects present at Mandalay Bay, highlighting the importance of their roles and responsibilites in the IoT age. 

The multi-cloud reality: Cisco, like others, tried but failed to make inroads in the public cloud market and ultimately shuttered its Intercloud service in March. Thus it was not surprising that the cloud portion of Robbins' talk discussed Cisco's new strategy, where it will support multi-cloud management. 

Cloud computing began as a quest for simplicity in enterprise IT but with companies buying into a proliferation of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings now has become a problem of data control and security.

"This is a major challenge we have to solve," he said. "It's not going to the cloud, it's going to many, many clouds. And the network has a unique ability to help you navigate that by preserving your policy and your security."

POV: Constellation believes multi-cloud is the right direction for most customers. Cisco, however, is far from the only vendor trying to pivot into multi-cloud management and will have to find the right place in the market. 

Apple, Cisco cozy up a bit more: Robbins invited a surprise guest onstage in the form of Apple CEO Tim Cook. Their conversation consisted mostly of generalites about the companies' partnership, which big boost two years ago with the announcement of an enterprise-oriented "fast lane" service for validating iOS devices on Cisco networking gear. 

Cisco and Apple didn't have anything nearly as big to announce during Robbins' talk, but Cisco did unveil Security Connector, which takes functionality from its Umbrella and Clarity security products and combines it in one app. It provides features for incident investigation, blocking malicious sites and encrypting DNS requests, and can be used to manage iOS devices in conjunction with an mobile device management platform.

POV: While the fireworks weren't really there this year news-announcement-wise, Cook's appearance is some evidence the Cisco-Apple partnership has been a success. (Cook said as much, but neither he or Robbins talked numbers.) In any case, the deal always made sense for both companies on paper, with Apple gaining an inroad to enterprises through Cisco's channel and Cisco able to pitch its networking products as superior for iOS devices. 

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