News Analysis - SAP reshuffles Executive Board - sets up for next 5 years

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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This morning SAP surprised us with the news of re-organizing its executive board, largely initiated by the departure of Steve Singh. As often with organizational press releases – you have to read it from the bottom up, but we will follow our customary process of dissecting the press release.

 

 

Here you go – the press release can be found here:

WALLDORF — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced newly expanded responsibilities of key executives. Robert Enslin and Bernd Leukert will shift and expand their portfolios as members of the Executive Board of SAP SE. The Supervisory Board of SAP SE has named Adaire Fox-Martin and Jennifer Morgan to the Executive Board.

MyPOV – Neat summary. Good to see two women coming to the executive board.

The moves underscore SAP’s commitment to customers’ ongoing digital transformation and its effort to foster top talent.

MyPOV – Ok – important – but then how do these appointments support digital transformation?

“I am pleased that executives such as Rob, Bernd, Adaire and Jen are stepping into bigger leadership roles to transform the way we drive innovations with our customers,” said Hasso Plattner, chairman of the Supervisory Board.

MyPOV – Mandatory chairman of the supervisory board.

In addition, two new leadership assignments were announced for current EMEA President Franck Cohen and SAP Cloud Platform President Bjoern Goerke. Cohen will become chief commercial officer and Goerke chief technology officer.

MyPOV – Good to see the next level repercussions, too. I can’t assess Cohen’s impact – but Goerke’s appointment is a good move. A company of the size of SAP needs a CTO, needs the ying and yang between a development leader and a chief technologist… now it’s up to Goerke to show he is up for the job and might become a member of the executive board – some time. Cohen is key to keep the European customers happy from a representation perspective and channels is a key business for enterprise software.
 

“We have always considered it a privilege to nurture careers and leaders,” said Bill McDermott, CEO and member of the Executive Board. “SAP is a company focused on innovation, scale and growth. I’m proud of this leadership team and know they are poised to keep SAP on the rise.”

MyPOV – Good quote by McDermott. The new setup gives more scale (2 sales leaders instead of one) and has more room to streamline product development and services. I asked what it means for e.g. a SuccessFactors customer – and McDermott’s answers was ‘no change’. But I expect over time the matrix line of SuccessFactors product development to get a little stronger towards Leukert than to the SuccessFactors leader, Mike Ettling. My interpretation here.
 

The Supervisory Board has asked Enslin, head of Global Customer Operations, to be president of the new Cloud Business Group. He will oversee SAP Ariba, SAP Fieldglass, Concur, SAP SuccessFactors, and SAP Hybris solutions as well as the SMB Solutions Group organization. Leukert, head of Products & Innovation at SAP, will expand his portfolio to accelerate SAP’s platform and digital transformation strategy. Enslin and Leukert will jointly lead key growth businesses at SAP, ensuring that development teams and customer-facing teams are in lockstep with one another from the design thinking and innovation process to customer-facing initiatives.

MyPOV – Enslin gets an entrepreneurial opportunity and also gets out of the grind and pressure of the global sales role, he has done that well for a long time, in a difficult product life cycle stage of SAP. Leukert will add responsibility on the development side, as a lot of innovation e.g. in platform (see Hybris choosing CloudFoundry 3+ years ago) happens in the acquired company’s products. Good to bring it all together… as mentioned I expect the line to Leukert / his team to become more solid – possibly the only one in 2 years or so from now. And that’s the course of all successful acquisitions over time, SAP has run Ariba, Hybris, SuccessFactors, FieldGlass etc. on a long leash on the product side for a long time.
 

With Enslin’s increased focus on cloud businesses at SAP, Fox-Martin and Morgan will ascend to the co-presidency of Global Customer Operations, overseeing all SAP regions and building on their success in the Asia-Pacific-Japan region and North America, respectively. Fox-Martin will oversee EMEA and Greater China. Morgan will oversee the Americas and Asia-Pacific-Japan regions. As chief commercial officer, Cohen will lead SAP’s channel business as well as assume responsibility for all sales processes and go-to-market initiatives across SAP. As CTO, Goerke will advance the company’s technology strategy and serve as a key external spokesperson.

MyPOV – Good to see two executives in charge of SAP sales, with all the new products and solutions SAP is providing / has provided a good move to have more bandwidth on frankly, a brutal job. One question that was missed to be asked was if Fox-Martin (who is Irish) would move back to Europe. There is a long tradition of managing China directly from Walldorf / Europe – so that makes sense. And Morgan is on ‘McDermott’s track’ as he stated on the call. And of course, good to see SAP adding two women to the board, I hope and expect them to do better than two previous women appointed (and since then left) before. Finally, good to see women leadership in a key, revenue generating function.
 

All changes will be effective May 1, 2017.

MyPOV – No time to lose.

Steve Singh, president of Business Networks and Applications, will leave SAP SE at the end of this month. Singh collaborated closely with Enslin, and together they transitioned Concur solutions into the SAP product family. Singh built a strong foundation for business networks at SAP and plans to focus on other entrepreneurial interests outside of SAP.

MyPOV – And here we are to the action of the reactio (in Newton terms) – Singh retiring for a more entrepreneurial role. Frankly, I was surprised that Singh stuck around so long, his brother, Ariba co-founder ‘bolting’ right at acquisition time. Writing was on the wall, eg. with McDermott showing up at SAP Ariba Live, not Singh like last year. He will be missed as an outside SAP voice and influence, he probably holds the record (need to do some math) of hanging around the longest as a founder / CEO of a large acquisition (remember Business Objects, Sybase, SuccessFactors leaders leaving quickly).

“Steve Singh’s character and entrepreneurial spirit are greatly admired around the world,” McDermott said. “When SAP acquired Concur Technologies, we knew Steve would play a significant role in strengthening the SAP cloud portfolio. We also knew he would eventually go back to his start-up roots. We could not be more grateful for everything Steve has done.”

MyPOV – Good / nice quote for Singh. Will be interesting what he does next, we wish him a long break to recharge batteries and all the best.

 

Overall MyPOV

Gravity is a powerful force in organizations, and gravity comes back to the ‘mothership’ of SAP in the form strengthening product under Leukert and bringing all acquired ‘cloud’ properties together under Enslin. The ‘board’ structure under which e.g. SuccessFactors and hybris were gone are now making place for traditional (matrix) reporting lines. So, this comes as no surprise, as acquisitions always get somehow ‘reeled in’ to the mothership – timing is the delicate part here. Moving too early ‘brakes’ the acquired company DNA and unique value proposition, doing it too late leaves enterprise with no talent and customers with staling products. I think SAP got the timing right here, e.g. preluding the whole move with adding ‘SAP’ in front of the brands of the acquired parties, in case of doubt even let this run longer than needed separately.

For customers, it means an easier way to do business. Two sales leaders for one makes it more time with the sales leader, more product under one leader makes sure things fit better together, all acquired products under one leader makes sure synergies are tapped in. The next big organizational piece to watch is how SAP will organize the go to market of S4/HANA beyond the current stage of ‘incubation’ under Leukert. It can’t stay there ‘forever’. A focus on channels is good, as more and more enterprise software will be consumed from marketplaces and partners directly. If SAP does this right – it could mean less friction and faster software purchasing processes. Lastly good to see SAP has a CTO again, an important function for a technology vendor of the size of SAP. So, overall good news for customers, who get more capacity with sales leaders on the top, a more streamlined acquired product experience and more product synergies.

Finally – putting my career coach / succession planning / board power assessment hat on – it gives plenty of room to grow and prove themselves for all SAP leaders involved – a good setup to determine who will succeed McDermott – in a 5+ year time frame.

 

 

Let's talk about how we talk about blockchain

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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In my last blog "IBM Blockchain as a Service and Hyperledger Fabric forge a new path", I mentioned how the language of blockchain technology is shifting.  Even the labels themselves are still fluid.  Debates rage over whether IBM and R3 should call their solutions “blockchains”.  For a year or two now, many writers have preferred Distributed Ledger Technologies, yet the increasingly dominant private blockchains aren’t very distributed at all.  So the thoughtful Dave Birch for one prefers to call them “shared” ledgers.  I like that, but who knows what terms will prevail? I do know that words matter and we should watch how they're used. 

The characteristics of third generation DLTs are shifting markedly, and the blockchain vernacular is losing some of its mystique.  Decentralisation distinguished the first generation blockchain, and some still say it’s essential. But let’s remember that the public blockchains don’t actually produce decentralisation; they are designed with decentralization as a starting point.  Nakamoto rejected financial institutions, and the Bitcoin blockchain was designed to handle e-cash with no central authority. Yet nothing in the original design indicated that decentralisation could fit all types of business, nor that the blockchain could decentralise anything other than e-cash. 

Immutability is another word that’s becoming a bit stale.  In my nearly twenty years experience in cybersecurity prior to blockchain, I don’t recall “immutability” ever being expressed as a requirement.  The idea seems peculiar to blockchain.  And it’s not actually a requirement so much as a means to an end.  The real need in the Bitcoin blockchain is to have a community monitor all transactions and detect Double Spends, which they do by committing all agreed transactions to a permanent record.  Immutability is a result of the massive redundancy of the network. Yet there are many ways to achieve satisfactory permanence in a file system, most of which had been immutable enough until blockchain came along. 

But if just one word was to go from blockchain discourse, I’d vote off “trust”.  I’ve long thought that trust only confuses the field of identity management, but trust is truly the phlogiston* of blockchain.  One of the worst misrepresentations of the first generation blockchain was as the “Trust Machine”, as if trust somehow gets mined from the network and imparted on its outputs.  

No, blockchain was designed to enable parties who don’t know each other and who trust no one, to nevertheless exchange real irrefutable value.

Security is generally based on a triad of Technology, People and Process. When we say that blockchain is “trustless”, we mean the system is operationally secure without relying on people or process.  And that’s a rare feat, even if it’s strictly limited to purely digital assets. 

Blockchain enables people to do an important thing without trust.  With Bitcoin, senders and receivers walk away from their transactions without any new conviction in one another.  Strangers before, and strangers after.  

As Distributed (or shared) Ledger Technologies continue to evolve, I can see “trust” fading away.  Expectations of DLTs are becoming more complex and more sophisticated than the utopian beginnings of blockchain and Bitcoin, as serious applications emerge in trade, logistics, finance, and supply chain.  The words we use for these things need to be precise.  

In a forthcoming Constellation Research report, I will be analysing how the blockchain’s ideals of immutability, transparency and consensus are being refined and re-engineered in fresh DLTs for complex real world applications. 

* FOOTNOTE Before modern chemistry, fire was explained as the result of a special essence called phlogiston, present in combustible materials being released, leaving behind depleted and lifeless ash. 

It will take a virtual village

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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In "We are hopelessly hooked" (New York Review of Books, February 25), political historian Jacob Weisberg canvasses the social impact of digital technology. He describes mobile and social media as “self-depleting and antisocial” but I would prefer different-social, not merely for the vernacular but because the new media's sadder side is a lot like what's gone before.

In reviewing four recent contributions to the field - from Sherry Turkle, Joseph Reagle and Nir Eyal - Weisberg dwells in various ways on the twee dichotomy of experience online and off.  For many of us, the distinction between digital and "IRL" (the sardonic abbreviation of "in real life") is becoming entirely arbitrary, which I like to show through an anecdote.
 
I was a mid-career technology researcher and management consultant when I joined Twitter in 2009. It quickly supplanted all my traditional newsfeeds and bulletin boards, by connecting me to individuals who I came to trust to pass on what really mattered.  More slowly, I curated my circles, built up a following, and came to enjoy the recognition that would ordinarily come from regular contact, if the travel was affordable from far flung Australia.  By 2013 I had made it as a member of the “identerati” – a loose international community of digital identity specialists.  Thus, on my first trip to the US in many years, I scored a cherished invitation to a private pre-conference party with 50 or so of these leaders. 

On the night, as I made my way through unfamiliar San Francisco streets, I had butterflies.  I had met just one of my virtual colleagues face-to-face. How would I be received “IRL”? The answer turned out to be: effortlessly.  Not one person asked the obvious question – Steve, tell us about yourself! – for everyone knew me already.  And this surprising ease wasn’t just about skipping formalities; I found we had genuine intimacy from years of sharing and caring, all on Twitter. 

Weisberg quotes Joseph Reagle in "Reading the Comments..." looking for “intimate serendipity” in successful online communities.  It seems both authors are overlooking how serendipity catalyses all human relationships.  It’s always something random that turns acquaintances into friends. And happy accidents may be more frequent online, not in spite of all the noise but because of it.  We all live for chance happenings, and the much-derided Fear Of Missing Out is not specific to kids nor the Internet.  Down the generations, FOMO has always kept teenagers up past their bed time; but it’s also why we grown-ups outstay our welcome at dinner parties and hang out at dreary corporate functions. 

Weisberg considers Twitter’s decay into anarchy and despair to be inevitable, and he may be right, but is it simply for want of supervision?  We know sudden social decay all too well; just think of the terribly real-life “Lord of the Flies”. 

Sound moral bearings are set by good parents, good teachers, and – if we’re lucky – good peers.  At this point in history, parents and teachers are famously less adept than their charges in the new social medium, but this will change.  Digital decency will be better impressed on kids when all their important role models are online.  

It takes a village to raise a child. The main problem today is that virtual villages are still at version 1.0.

How Ensono Used Workday Finance And HR Cloud To Innovate And Save Money

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

R “Ray” Wang is the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He co-hosts DisrupTV, a weekly enterprise tech and leadership webcast that averages 50,000 views per episode and blogs at www.raywang.org. His ground-breaking best-selling book on digital transformation, Disrupting Digital Business, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015. Ray's new book about Digital Giants and the future of business, titled, Everybody Wants to Rule The World was released in July 2021. Wang is well-quoted and frequently interviewed by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, and Bloomberg. Short Bio R “Ray” Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Founder, Chairman, and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation…...

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Beyond the Seat: Future of the Ticketing Marketplace

Russell Scibetti

Founding Editor, The Business of Sports
The Business of Sports

My name is Russell Scibetti and I have an extensive background in sports business, including CRM and database marketing, interactive and digital marketing, social media, corporate sponsorships and activation, and applied market research. From 2007 to 2014, I worked for Arizona State Athletics, Comcast-Spectacor (Philadelphia Flyers) and the New York Jets to manage and implement CRM, database marketing, market research and other technology-based sales and marketing initiatives. In 2014, I joined KORE Software as their VP of Product Strategy, where I am responsible for the strategic vision, planning and development of the KORE ProSports Ticketing, Sponsorship and Suites/Premium software products. I earned my MBA in Sports Business from the W.P. Carey…...

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I was really excited to participate on a panel at this year’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference discussing the future of the ticket marketplace. The other panelists included:

• John Abbamondi: Executive Vice President – Ticketing, Suites & Hospitality at Madison Square Garden
• Jamie Brandt: Vice President, Sales and Service at the San Francisco 49ers
• Jodi Mulkey: Chief Technology Officer at Ticketmaster
• Zach Long: Chief Marketing Officer at PrimeSport
• Patrick Rishe (moderator): Director, Sports Business Program at Washington University in St. Louis

We covered a wide range of topics over the course of the hour, including ticket pricing, product mix, creating personalized experiences, retention modeling, leveraging data for sales, and much more.

The video does require a paid subscription to content from 42 Analytics, but there is also a 14 day free trial option, so I hope you check out the panel and many of the other videos posted from this year’s event.

Digital Business Distributed Business and Technology Models Part Three; Distributed Services Business Management

Andy Mulholland

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

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

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Digital Business takes place within distributed network-based ecosystems using interactions in the form of various ‘Services’ to create Business value and revenues. The ability to dynamically orchestrate a set of Services involving various partners within the Business Ecosystem brings the requirement for a new kind of ‘Middleware’. Distributed Service Management ensures that partners in orchestrated Business Service activities have their individual transactions recorded and settled as necessary.

Previous parts of this series started with an examination of the Business activities and actions of an Enterprise, followed by part 2 defining the need for a new kind of dynamic infrastructure. In part 3a the need for a Distributed Services Technology Management is explored to introduce this part 3b adding the Distributed Services Business Management. (It is recommended to read the parts sequentially from Part 1, though a brief overview is included in the summary at the end of this part).

Blockchain Technology is seen as the most likely solution to providing Distributed Service Management, hence the recent wave of interest in the topic. However knowledge of what Blockchain Technology is, and how it can be applied, to Digital Business is generally poor. Bitcoin tends to be seen as Blockchain, whereas it is a specific implementation using aspects of Blockchain technology.

There is considerable development being devoted to develop Blockchain Technology to create Distributed Ledger implementations that will provide transactional synchronization across a Distributed System, or Business Ecosystem, without requiring any single, or centralized control. There are some significant issues that have to be addressed that lead to some experts expressing concern as to the level of enthusiasm for Blockchain as the basis for Distributed Ledgers, and in particular IoT.

Consider a Smart City example where its many businesses and consumers interact through many Smart Services and how that creates a complex web of commercial settlements. The intention is that new developments of Distributed Ledger will ensure all financial settlements, and possibly other forms of transactions, are recorded across the community with out the need for a central brokering Service operated by the City.

There are some serious issues to be addressed in the development of Blockchain based Distributed Ledgers for wide spread use. As well as the usual constraints relating to scale and operational speed there is a complicated core issue around the issuing and management of the secure ‘keys’ that lie at the heart of the technology.

Owners of any part of the value chain covering Sensors, Services, Resources, Assets and general Infrastructure all require a reliable trusted shared decentralized service to record transactions. Smart Services has been widely used as a term to describe the Business value offered in these systems, but the underlying technology is correctly called Distributed Apps, (Dapps), in recognition of the distributed, or shared, nature of its operating environment.

AirBnB currently uses the familiar technologies of the Internet + Web, but has a stated ambition to develop their Service as a fully functional DApp to allow global levels of scale and interactions.. Other popular Smart Services are likely to migrate into DApps over time to extend their business value propositions, and scale.

The role of a Distributed Ledger, (which is itself a DApp), is to provide a decentralized trust model that prevents fraud, or assumption of control, by allowing all participants to ‘check’ every transaction. (Note that an expert on the detail of Blockchain technology would wish this term to be expanded into much greater detail). The term ‘every transaction’ means between all members of the specific business ecosystem book every transaction, even if not a direct participant in the current transaction.

A Distributed Ledger would treat each IoT Device, or set of Devices that correspond to a chargeable business Service element, as a Node with its own version of the common Distributed Ledger. Whenever a pair, or group, of such IoT Devices/Nodes carry out an interaction, ending in a transaction, all registered Nodes are provided with a copy. A distributed consensus algorithm leads to shared agreement on the legitimacy of the latest transactions and the overall state of the network At which point all Nodes will update their copy of the Distributed Ledger to include the new transaction.

As there are so many versions of the ledger being maintained and compared separately fraudulent interactions are, dependent on the quality of the Distributed Ledger implementation, somewhere between very difficult and impossible. However there are several practical difficulties around scale; firstly the number of nodes and the size of the ledger; secondly the number of transactions equating to the frequency of updates. As a comparison the Bitcoin Blockchain deployment provides ledger updates roughly every ten minutes, introducing significant latency for real time applications, and volume is limited to no more than five entries per second.

The scaling issue currently sets requirements for brand new DLT developments. Expectations are that for initial IoT deployments it will be possible to achieve acceptable operating parameters. The Business Services ecosystem covering a Smart City would be expected to operate with an acceptable number of nodes and transactions in its early years.

The development of Smart City, other IoT business networks and DApps are all driving the requirement for suitable Distributed Ledger solutions. By their very nature Open Source would seem to be an attractive proposition. Two Open Source projects; Ethereum and Hyperledger, have successfully attracted support and build sizable community support though their focuses are different.

Ethereum founded in 2014, supports an eclectic mix of activities, often with crowd funding, where the focus is on DApps that require the decentralized transaction architeure. The Ethereum name will often come into a conversation of Blockchain, or DApps, but the community is not aimed at supporting large-scale IoT requirements for Distributed Ledger solutions. A sample of Ethereum projects can be found here.

The focus of HyperLedger is distinctly different, aiming to support the broader needs of IoT Distributed Systems that can be served by Blockchain based technology. The HyperLedger Explorer core project defines its mission as; ‘the fabric is an implementation of blockchain technology that is intended as a foundation for developing blockchain applications or solutions. It offers a modular architecture allowing components, such as consensus and membership services, to be plug-and-play. It leverages container technology to host smart contracts called “chaincode” that comprise the application logic of the system’(sic).

HyperLedger has significant support from well-known industry names, both Business users as well as Technology Venders. Premier Members include; Accenture, Airbus Industries, Deutsche Bourse, Fujitsu, IBM, Intel and JP Morgan. (A full membership list can be found here).

There are four HyperLedger projects underway that contribute in different ways to making Distributed Ledgers a reality for commercial operations; Blockchain Explorer, Fabric, Iroha, and Sawtooth Lake. Summaries of each project and its aims can be found here. It would seem that Hyperledger Fabric is destined to become the most significant in 2017 with its stated aim;

Fabric is an implementation of block chain technology that is intended as a foundation for developing block chain applications or solutions. It offers a modular architecture allowing components, such as consensus and membership services, to be plug-and-play. It leverages container technology to host smart contracts called “chaincode” that comprise the application logic of the system.

IBM aims in 2017 to accelerate the Hyperledger Fabric project by recruiting and supporting an Ecosystem of Developers who will be offered various IBM provided Facilities. This ambitious plan highlights the value in understanding the details which can be found in a Constellation post, Why IBM’s Blockchain Plans Make Sense,.

Clearly effective decentralized transaction management using Blockchain Distributed Ledger technology is a highly important part of the development of Services based ‘Trading” Business Networks. However, this has become, thanks to the coverage on the topic, the most visible element in the overall challenge of building, operating and maintaining a new generation of de-centralized systems.

Summary; Background

This is third part in a series on Digital Business and the Technology required to support the ability of an Enterprise to do Digital Business. An explanation for the adoption of a simple definition shown in the diagram below to classify the technology requirements rather than attempt any form of conventional detailed Architecture is provided, together with a fuller explanation of the Business requirements.

Part 1 - Digital Business Distributed Business and Technology Models;

Understanding the Business Operating Model

Part 2 - Digital Business Distributed Business and Technology Models;

The Dynamic Infrastructure

Part 3a – Digital Business Distributed Business and Technology Models;

Distributed Services Technology Management

Betterment Tosses Desk Phones and Moves to Cloud Communications

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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