Spark Gets Faster for Streaming Analytics

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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Spark Summit East highlights progress on machine learning, deep learning and continuous applications combining batch and streaming workloads.

Despite challenges including a new location and a nasty Nor’easter that put a crimp on travel, Spark Summit East managed to draw more than 1,500 attendees to its February 7-9 run at the John B. Hynes Convention Center in Boston. It was the latest testament to growing adoption of Apache Spark, and the event underscored promising developments in areas including machine learning, deep learning and streaming applications.

The Summit had outgrown last year’s east coast home at the New York Hilton, but the contrast between those cramped quarters and the cavernous Hynes made comparison difficult. As I wrote of last year’s event, the audience was technical, and if anything, this year’s agenda seemed more how-to than visionary. There were fewer keynotes from big enterprise adopters and more from vendors.

Mataei Zaharia of Databricks recapped Spark progress last year, highlighting growing adoption
and performance improvements in areas including streaming data analysis.

The Summit saw plenty of mainstream talks on SQL and machine learning best practices as well as more niche topics, such “Spark for Scalable Metagenomics Analysis” and “Analysis Andromeda Galaxy Data Using Spark.” Standout big-picture keynotes included the following:

Mataei Zaharia, the founder of Spark and chief technology officer at Databricks, gave an overview of recent progress and coming developments in the open source project. The centerpiece of Zaharia’s talk concerned maturing support for continuous applications requiring simultaneous analysis of both historical and streaming, real-time information. One of the many use cases is fraud analysis, where you need to continuously compare the latest, streaming information with historical patterns in order to detect abnormal activity and reject possibly fraudulent transactions in real time.

Spark already addressed fast batch analytics, but support for streaming was previously limited to micro-batch (meaning up to seconds of latency) until last February’s Spark 2.0 release. Zaharia said even more progress was made with December’s Spark 2.1 release with advances on Structured Streaming, a new, high-level API that addresses both batch and stream querying. Viacom, an early beta customer, is using Structured Streaming to analyze viewership of cable channels including MTV and Comedy Central in real time while iPass is using it to continuously monitor WiFi network performance and security.

Alexis Roos, a senior engineering manager at Salesforce, detailed the role of Spark in powering the machine learning, natural language processing and deep learning behind emerging Salesforce Einstein capabilities. Addressing the future of artificial intelligence on Spark, Ziya Ma, a VP of Big Data Technologies at Intel, offered a keynote on “Accelerating Machine Learning and Deep Learning at Scale with Apache Spark.” James Kobielus of IBM does a good job of recapping Deep Learning progress on Spark in this blog.

Ion Stoica, executive chairman of Databricks, picked up where Zaharia left off on streaming, detailing the efforts of UC Berkeley’s RISELab, the successor of AMPLab, to advance real-time analytics. Stoica shared benchmark performance data showing advances promised by Apache Drizzle, a new streaming execution engine for Spark, in comparison with Spark without Drizzle and streaming-oriented rival Apache Flink.

Stoica stressed the time- and cost-saving advantages of using a single API, the same execution engine and the same query optimizations to address both streaming and batch workloads. In a conversation after his keynote, Stoica told me Drizzle will likely debut in Databricks’ cloud-based Spark environment within a matter of weeks and he predicted that it will show up in Apache Spark software as soon as the third quarter of this year.

The Apache Drizzle execution engine being developed by RISELabs promises better
streaming query performance as compared to today’s Spark or Apache Flink.

MyPOV of Spark Progress

Databricks is still measuring Spark success in terms of number of contributors and number of Spark Meetup participants (the latter count is 300,000-plus, according to Zaharia), but to my mind, it’s time to start measuring success by mainstream enterprise adoption. That’s why I was a bit disappointed that the Summit’s list of presenters in the CapitalOne, Comcast, Verizon and Walmart Labs mold was far shorter than the list of vendors and Internet giants like Facebook and Netflix presenting.

Databricks says it now has somewhere north of 500 organizations using its hosted Spark Service, but I suspect the bulk of mainstream Spark adoption is now being driven by the likes of Amazon (first and foremost) as well as IBM, Google, Microsoft and others now offering cloud-based Spark services. A key appeal of these sources of Spark is the availability of infrastructure and developer services as well as broader analytical capabilities beyond Spark. Meanwhile, as recently as last summer I heard Cloudera executives assert that the company’s software distribution was behind more Spark adoption than that of any other vendor.

In a though-provoking keynote on “Virtualizing Analytics,” Arsalan Tavakoli, Databricks’ VP of customer engagement, dismissed Hadoop-based data lakes as a “second-generation” solution challenged by disparate and complex tools and access limited to big data developer types. But Tavakoli also acknowledged that Spark is only “part of the answer” to delivering a “new paradigm” that decouples compute and storage, provides uniform data management and security, unifies analytics and supports broad collaboration among many users.

Indeed, it was telling when Zaharia noted that 95% of Spark users employ SQL in addition to whatever else they’re doing with the project. That tells me that Spark SQL is important, but it also tells me that as appealing as Spark’s broad analytical capabilities and in-memory performance may be, it’s still just part of the total analytics picture. Developers, data scientists and data engineers that use Spark are also using non-Spark options ranging from the prosaic, like databases and database services and Hive, to the cutting edge, such as emerging GPU- and high-performance-computing-based options.

As influential, widely adopted, widely supported and widely available as Spark may now be, organizations have a wide range of cost, latency, ease-of-development, ease-of-use and technology maturity considerations that don’t always point to Spark. At least one presentation at Spark Summit cautioned attendees not to think of Spark Streaming, for example, as a panacea for next-generation continuous applications.

Spark is today where Hadoop was in 2010, as measured by age, but I would argue that it’s progressing more quickly and promises wider hands-on use by developers and data scientists than that earlier disruptive platform.

Related Reading:
Spark Summit East Report: Enterprise Appeal Grows
Spark On Fire: Why All The Hype?

NRF Retail's Big Show 2017 Event Report - How Not to Get "Amazon'd"

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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She Started It! Documentary of Women Tech Entrepreneurs

Terri Griffith

Professor/Author/Speaker
Simon Fraser University

Terri Griffith holds the Keith Beedie Chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business. She spent two decades in the Silicon Valley and, in 2012 was honored as a Woman of Influence by the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Terri helps her students and their organizations accelerate performance and prepare for the futures of work. Through her speaking, writing, teaching, and research, she brings evidence-based leadership and innovation to high-tech, education, and global agribusiness organizations. She inspires and coaches groups on negotiating change and uniquely mixing existing and new capabilities. Her most recent work uses a “bottom-up” approach to automation, including artificial intelligence. Her award-winning book, The…...

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Last Tuesday, I had the pleasure of offering the welcome at the Santa Clara University screening of the award-winning documentary, She Started It. The film follows five women over two years as they launch, build, shut down, sell, and start again. We see them as they pitch VCs on the phone, on stage (e.g., 500 Startups), and in offices. It's a global perspective, taking us from San Francisco to Mississippi, France, and Vietnam. Cameos from luminaries like White House CTO Megan Smith; GoldieBlox CEO Debbie Sterling; and Ruchi Sanghvi, the first female engineer at Facebook, provide a broad context for the events.

More than a Film

From the Grace Hopper Conference to Santa Clara University, the film is often the start of a great conversation with leading women founders, investors, and mentors. At our Santa Clara Screening we were honored to have:

• Nora Poggi, Director/Producer of She Started It
• Brienne Ghafourifar, Co-founder of Entefy and featured in She Started It ('12 Santa Clara alumna)
• Debra Vernon, Attorney, DLA Piper LLP
• Andrea Zurek, Founding partner, XG Ventures (’92 & '99 Santa Clara alumna)

Some of My Key Moments from the Panel

A comment from a parent saying she will never tell her kids to "be realistic again." This is in response to the clear tension parents can feel between keeping their children safe, and letting them challenge the status quo as they strive to build a business.

Hearing the responsibility we all have for sharing all the culture and process that makes Silicon Valley support innovation and venture creation; the "share it forward" approach. I like to say that "SCU brings Silicon Valley to the world," as we host students from around the world for their Silicon Valley immersions and degrees. The idea that we all have a responsibility is one that I look forward to supporting. 

The importance of asking for help. Again, this is one that I think was an eye-opener for many in the audience. I tend to see this in a slightly different form when running negotiation workshops -- we have to share that it is critical to ask for what you want. ...and to negotiate for what you want. I'm not sure we're seeing the shift we need to in women negotiating their job offers (versus men doing it as a matter of course). 

The energy from one of our CAPE (California Program for Entrepreneurship) participants when she learned of the possibility of deferred legal payments. Debra Vernon later shared:

One key takeaway is that founders should know about [the fee deferral] option and ask for it and see what the lawyer can do to help. In my practice, I have also developed some fixed priced packages to accelerate formation and fundraising that help startups stay on budget.

The diversity of the audience. Entrepreneurs, and those with an entrepreneurial mindset, from ages 7 to 70; men; women; investors; educators; and other mentors.

The beautiful flow of the conversation and the willingness to share ups as well as downs.

Acknowledgements

My biggest thanks go to Leavey School of Business Dean’s Executive Professor, Tanya Monsef Bunger for bringing this film to campus. Tanya is the program director of Santa Clara’s Global Fellows program, Outgoing Chair of the Global Women’s Leadership Network, as well as being an active leader in many other national and international organizations supporting women and entrepreneurship. Our thanks also to Santa Clara University's Leavey School of Business and the School of Engineering's Frugal Innovation Hub for sponsoring this event.

Sites and Organizations Shared During the Panel

• Angel List: https://angel.co/
• CAPE Program: https://www.scu.edu/business/cie/cape/
• Entrepreneurs' Law Clinic: http://law.scu.edu/elc/
• Global Fellows: https://www.scu.edu/business/undergraduates/global-engagement/global-fellows/
• Global Women's Leadership Network: http://www.gwln.org/
• Leavey School of Business: https://www.scu.edu/business
• School of Engineering Frugal Innovation Hub: https://www.scu.edu/engineering/labs--research/labs/frugal-innovation-hub/
• StartupCompanyLawyer: http://www.startupcompanylawyer.com/
• Startup legal documents: https://www.dlapiper.com/en/us/focus/idraft/

Blockchain plain and simple

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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Blockchain is an algorithm and distributed data structure designed to manage electronic cash without any central administrator. The original blockchain was invented in 2008 by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto to support Bitcoin, the first large-scale peer-to-peer crypto-currency, completely free of government and institutions. 

Blockchain is a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).  Most DLTs have emerged in Bitcoin's wake. Some seek to improve blockchain's efficiency, speed or throughput; others address different use cases, such as more complex financial services, identity management, and "Smart Contracts".  

The central problem in electronic cash is Double Spend.  If electronic money is just data, nothing physically stops a currency holder trying to spend it twice. It was long thought that a digital reserve was needed to oversee and catch double-spends, but Nakamoto rejected all financial regulation, and designed an electronic cash without any umpire. 

The Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain crowd-sources the oversight. Each and every attempted spend is broadcast to a community, which in effect votes on the order in which transactions occur. Once a majority agrees all transactions seen in the recent past are unique, they are cryptographically sealed into a block. A chain thereby grows, each new block linked to the previously accepted history, preserving every spend ever made. 

A Bitcoin balance is managed with an electronic wallet which protects the account holder's private key. Blockchain uses conventional public key cryptography to digitally sign each transaction with the sender's private key and direct it to a recipient's public key. The only way to move Bitcoin is via the private key: lose or destroy your wallet, and your balance will remain frozen in the ledger, never to be spent again. 

The blockchain's network of thousands of nodes is needed to reach consensus on the order of ledger entries, free of bias, and resistant to attack. The order of entries is the only thing agreed upon by the blockchain protocol, for that is enough to rule out double spends.  

The integrity of the blockchain requires a great many participants (and consequentially the notorious power consumption). One of the cleverest parts of the BTC blockchain is its incentive for participating in the expensive consensus-building process. Every time a new block is accepted, the system randomly rewards one participant with a bounty (currently 12.5 BTC). This is how new Bitcoins are minted or "mined". 

Blockchain has security qualities geared towards incorruptible cryptocurrency. The ledger is immutable so long as a majority of nodes remain independent, for a fraudster would require infeasible computing power to forge a block and recalculate the chain to be consistent.  With so many nodes calculating each new block, redundant copies of the settled chain are always globally available. 

Contrary to popular belief, blockchain is not a general purpose database or "trust machine".  It only reaches consensus about one specific technicality – the order of entries in the ledger – and it requires a massive distributed network to do so only because its designer-operators choose to reject central administration. For regular business systems, blockchain's consensus is of questionable benefit.

2017 Is The Year Integration Enables Industry 4.0 Growth

• 35% of companies adopting Industry 4.0 predict revenue gains over 20% in the next five years.
• Data analytics and digital trust are the foundations of Industry 4.0.
• Cost-sensitive industries including semiconductors, electronics, and oil and gas are the most focused on adopting Industry 4.0, with 80% of companies in these industries saying it is one of their top priorities.

The recent article by Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Sprinting To Value In Industry 4.0, provides insights into how real-time integration between enterprise systems is an essential catalyst for Industry 4.0 growth. Industry 4.0 focuses on the end-to-end digitization of all physical assets and integration into digital ecosystems with value chain partners encompassing a broad spectrum of technologies. BCG surveyed 380 US-based manufacturing executives and managers at companies representing a wide range of sizes in various industries to complete the study.

Industry 4.0 Is  At An Inflection Point Today 

Having attained initial results from Industry 4.0 initiatives, many manufacturers are moving forward with the advanced analytics and Big Data-related projects that are based on real-time integration between CRM, ERP, 3^rd party and legacy systems. A recent Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC) study of Industry 4.0 adoption, Industry 4.0: Building The Digital Enterprise (PDF, no opt-in, 36 pp.) found that 72% of manufacturing enterprises predict their use of data analytics will substantially improve customer relationships and customer intelligence along the product life cycle. Real-time integration enables manufacturers to more effectively serve their customers, communicate with suppliers, and manage distribution channels. Of the many innovative start-ups taking on the complex challenges of integrating cloud and on-premise systems to streamline revenue-generating business processes, enosiX shows potential to bridge legacy ERP and cloud-based CRM systems quickly and deliver results.

There are many more potential benefits to adopting Industry 4.0 for those enterprises who choose to create and continually strengthen real-time integration links across the global operations. Recent research completed by Boston Consulting Group and PwC highlight several of them below:

• Manufacturers expect to gain the greatest value from Industry 4.0 by reducing manufacturing costs (47%), improving product quality (43%) and attaining operations agility (42%). 89% of all manufacturers see an opportunity to use Industry 4.0 to improve manufacturing productivity. Reducing supply chain costs (37%), enabling product innovation (33%) and attaining faster time-to-market (31%) are the next level of benefits manufacturers expect to attain. The following graphic provides an analysis of where manufacturers see Industry 4.0 having the greatest impact on their organizations.

• Manufacturers are gaining the greatest value from Industry 4.0 by creating pilot projects that create flexible, agile real-time platforms supporting new business models with real-time integration. Industry 4.0’s focus on enabling end-to-end digitization of all physical assets and integration into digital ecosystems relies on real-time integration to succeed. For manufacturers in cost-sensitive industries, the urgency of translating the vision of digital transformation into results is key to their future growth. The more competitively intense an industry, the more essential real-time integration

• Investing in greater digitization and support for enterprise-wide integration is predicted to increase 118% by 2020 in support of Industry 4.0. 33% of manufacturers surveyed report they have a high level of digitization today, projected to increase to 72% by 2020. The leading areas of these investments include vertical value chain integration (72%), product development and engineering (71%), and customer access including sales channels and marketing (68%).

• New product development and optimizing existing products and services are the greatest areas of growth potential for analytics and Big Data using Industry 4.0 technologies and integration strategies through 2020. Industry 4.0 is revolutionizing the use of analytics and manufacturing intelligence, setting the foundation for greater optimization of overall business and control, better manufacturing, and operations planning, greater optimization of logistics and more efficient maintenance of production assets and machinery. By better orchestrating these strategic areas, manufacturers are going to be able to attain levels of accuracy and responsiveness to customers not achievable before.

• Globally, manufacturing enterprises expect to gain an additional 2.9% in digital revenues per year through 2020, with digitizing their existing product portfolios (47%) leading all other strategies, further underscoring the need for real-time integration. Introducing an entirely new digital product portfolio is the second most common strategy (44%) followed by creating and offering new digital services to external customers (42%). Just over a third (38%) plan to create and sell big data analytics services to external customers.

The Future of Education – From the Students’ Perspective (Part 1: Online Classes)

Terri Griffith

Professor/Author/Speaker
Simon Fraser University

Terri Griffith holds the Keith Beedie Chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business. She spent two decades in the Silicon Valley and, in 2012 was honored as a Woman of Influence by the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Terri helps her students and their organizations accelerate performance and prepare for the futures of work. Through her speaking, writing, teaching, and research, she brings evidence-based leadership and innovation to high-tech, education, and global agribusiness organizations. She inspires and coaches groups on negotiating change and uniquely mixing existing and new capabilities. Her most recent work uses a “bottom-up” approach to automation, including artificial intelligence. Her award-winning book, The…...

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Author: Michelle Zhang

Michelle, a high school junior and one of my research assistants for the last three years, is helping me think about the future of education. Very interesting to see the perspective of students heading to college in the next year or two. These are not the issues I would have guessed -- and that's the point. Great to see how she and her colleagues are crafting their best learning environments. Great to see their counselors giving them the freedom to do so. Michelle's bio is below - TG.

Regardless of people’s opinions of online classes, they are an essential tool for students and teachers alike. For all the technological “purists,” who believe that the physical classroom will fade into obscurity in the presence of online classes, I think you’ll be waiting a while.  I don’t see the classroom going away any time soon. However, if a student with low self-confidence is taking a class that isn’t a good fit, then an online class is the long-awaited alternative to that problem. Both classroom and online classes are here to stay. Period. 

Life of College Prep for Today’s Students

The subject of college preparation brings about images of taking a huge number of Advanced Placement (AP) Courses, private counselors, and prepping for standardized tests insanely early. However, there is one thing that is seriously underestimated and often times overlooked in the college preparation process: online classes. As a high school junior, I, unlike other students at my school, do not take an insane amount of AP classes, and I am taking one class online, Pre-calculus. There has been hot debate about the existence of these online classes and how it will shape the future of education, especially at my school amongst the people I interviewed.

Photograph taken by Bahn Mi of the Schoolwatch Programme and released freely under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Benefits and Burdens of Mixing Online and Face-to-Face Classes

In my US History class, there is a new student, let’s call him Austin. In order to be able to take US History at my school, students must take World History, but he hadn’t had that class at his old school. Austin opted to take a World History class online for credits over the summer, and he was able to get it done with an “A” in two and a half months. He, like me, recognizes the flexibility that an online class brings, and says it’s great if you are missing a required class. Austin told me it is also good if one is not particularly good at that subject. He says:

History was never my forte, and if I took an actual World History class in school, I would not do as well. There is a popular belief that a student’s success in a class is completely dependent on their work ethic. That is not the case. Their success also depends on their confidence in a subject, how the teacher structures his or her curriculum, and how the teacher interacts with his or her students. If all the cards are against you, then an online class could be a good alternative.

Austin brings up a good point. As a student, there are not many variables that are in my control. I am able to choose what classes I take, but whether I will be receptive to the teacher or teaching style is not known. I decided to take Pre-calculus online as it gives me more confidence since I control the pace. For example, I can repeat a section as many times as needed. I also feel comfortable when asking a stupid question to the assigned teacher via email. Though the response is not instantaneous, I feel some anonymity thus I am more open.  

I talked to my counselor, and she let me take the class and I just completed it with a solid “A.” However, as good as online classes are, they should not completely replace the classroom as the medium in which we learn. Austin agrees with me saying,

“If a person is taking six classes, and two are online, then that is ok. Human interaction between student and teacher is necessary for future success.”

The other student I interviewed, let’s call her Elaine, has a different view on online classes. She herself has never had a problem with missing a required class. She also has never struggled in any subject. Furthermore, she did not know that students were allowed to take online classes. She says: 

An online class is a hassle because in addition to going to school every day and going home and doing homework and studying for exams, you also have to make progress in an online class. Even if out of six classes, one or two of them is online, it would still be a hassle.

Elaine’s argument is also a valid one, however, she is taking five AP classes, a gargantuan amount compared to Austin’s and my measly two AP classes. For Elaine, time is more valuable than flexibility because she simply has less of it every day. An online class and a class in school are on two different spheres, and Elaine does not want to deal with another class in a, to her, totally different sphere. That said, she does recognize that online classes are a valuable tool for learning saying,

“Online classes are a great way to make things flexible, but for people who do not have much time, it is just another thing they have to deal with”.

Flexibility, Focus, Hassle

People who value flexibility more argue that online classes open up a different avenue. People who value time more disagree saying that it takes more time to make things flexible rather than proceeding as is. To the latter, it conjures up pictures of someone who constantly has to adjust their schedule. To them, the adjustment itself wastes precious time. To others, making things flexible just means prioritizing what is important. Whether students take an online class or not is completely up them. It all depends on what they think is important, flexibility or time.

Michelle Zhang is a junior at Lynbrook High School in San Jose, CA. She began doing research at Santa Clara University with Prof. Griffith in her freshman year. Michelle is very passionate about community service. She is the President of Teach Seniors Technology (http://www.connectseniors.org/), a student-run non-profit organization, and teaches weekly classes. She likes to travel with her family, play guitar, and watch TV.

Lighting A Fire: Cisco Spark Is Building A Collaboration Ecosystem

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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One of the main topics I’ve been discussing ever since I became an analyst is the struggles people face at work caused by the use of too many tools. We use email, calendar, contacts, tasks, files, chat, audio, video, social networks, and several more applications as we connect and communicate with our colleagues. This complex cornucopia of applications results in content and people that are rarely connected, leading to a lack of context which makes it difficult to work effectively.

Three years ago Cisco started out on a project to combat some of these challenges, and that work came to life a year ago in the Cisco Spark platform. This week in San Francisco, Cisco held an event for the launch of the latest version of Cisco Spark and introduced a new conference room solution called Cisco Spark Boards. If you'd like a visual recap of the event, I've documented the major announcements in this Twitter Moment: Cisco Spark Event

The first version of Cisco Spark was primarily a group messaging application that people can access on the web or mobile devices like phones and tablets, but Cisco has been rapidly expanding functionality. Cisco Spark now includes voice calls and video calls, and with the latest enhancements not only have they improved the user interface, they have also added white boarding capability, which enables people to easily collaborate on ideas.

It’s important to note they have designed the white boarding capability of the Cisco Spark app to be very secure. When people draw, the system is not actually storing pictures of the content, but instead sending instructions representing the actions, similar to the way multiplayer video games work. So when someone draws a circle or arrow, th instructions for that action are encrypted and sent from their device to the server, then everyone else receives and decrypted those commands, resulting in the them seeing the picture.

In addition to the latest Cisco Spark enhancements, the big news of the day was the expansion of the Cisco Spark ecosystem into the physical world, with Cisco Spark Boards. These are 55 or 70 inch 4k resolution monitors that are mounted in offices or meeting rooms. They have 4k fixed lens cameras and a 12 microphone array which delivery very high resolution video and audio which they claim makes everyone in the room, no matter how close or far from the screen sound like they are sitting right next to you. The Cisco Spark Board can be used for presentations, white boarding, or video conferencing. The boards work in conjunction with the Cisco Spark app to make things easy, for example proximity detection finds all the people near the board who are using the app and can automaticly identify them.

MyPOV

There are several vendors that are doing parts of what Cisco Spark does; there are other group messaging apps, web conferencing apps, file sharing apps, whiteboards, etc. But it’s the way that Cisco is bringing this all together in a simple, secure and affordable ecosystem that makes this pretty unique.

A few of the areas that point to success for Cisco are:
1. Customers are very interested, and adoption is happening quickly. Cisco has millions of people already using WebEx and Jabber, so the potential pipeline for Cisco Spark is already there compared to vendors that have to start working with customers from scratch.
2. They are taking partner ecosystem for building integrations and bots very seriously. Last year Cisco announced $150M developer fund, followed later in the year with  Cisco Spark Depot, the catalog of applications and bots that can be added into Cisco Spark spaces. I would like to see more integration with core business applications such as CRM, office document suites, file sharing services, marketing tools, HR systems, etc. Without breaking any non-disclosure agreements, I can tell you many of these things are already in the works.
3. Vision. I often say shipping software is more important than slideware, meaning vendors need to deliver products not just tell me what their plans are. However, vision is still important and I have to say I really like what I’m hearing from Rowan Trollope (leader of Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group), Jonathan Rosenberg (CTO) and several other Cisco Spark leaders. I can’t share many details with you now, but their vision and roadmap has Cisco Spark going far beyond what is currently available. For example, think about areas like Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, wearable computing and more. Cisco Spark is the essentially the cornerstone of almost everything happening at Cisco, including their call centre business, WebEx, the work they are doing in IOT and more. Cisco's CEO Chuck Robbins has made it clear that Cisco Spark is a linchpin for the company. Hearing this from the top of the company down, and seeing what they are building gives me confidence they will deliver on their vision.

As with any product, of course there are things missing. I’d like to see more progress in areas like project management, integration with mission critical business applications, as well as automation and workflow via AI. Cisco’s recent acquisition of Worklife (one of the top vendors list in Constellation ShortList™ Meeting Management Tools) points to them being committed to filling some of these gaps.

Guidance

When I work with Constellation’s customers and the major collaboration software vendors, I always focus on what’s needed to really change the way people work. The biggest challenge to the adoption of any new tool is not cost, security, or user interface… it’s status quo. People are used to working the way they do, and unless they can be shown significant benefits to changing, they won’t budge. I really like what I’m seeing in the Cisco Spark platform, and I think their focus on simplicity, integration and security is creating a solution that every customer should have on their shortlist to evaluate.  

Have a few minutes to spare? Take Constellation's 2017 Digital Transformation Survey. Constellation will send you a summary of the results. 

Digital Workflows a Key Part of a Digital Transformation

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

Role: Vice President and Principal Analyst focusing on the IOT of Customer Experience and how the cloud is driving more flexible, agile, and robust customer service and customer experiences. In-app or in device customer service is the future. Coverage Areas: Next Generation Customer, Digital Marketing Transformation Bio: As a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, Inc, Petouhoff works with Fortune 100 and 500’s Senior Leadership teams to create strategic customer experience (marketing, sales and service) solutions which engage customers, build brands and grow businesses. Combining her experience as a former Forrester software analyst, PWC systems integrator and change management consultant, Petouhoff leads executive workshops to discuss to not only…...

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New research report, Nintex: Creating Workflows that Enable Digital Transformation, provides a vendor profile and buyer's guide of Nintex

As companies take on digital transformation, they need to consider the people (their skills and backgrounds), the processes (have they made them digital or they still doing things on spreadsheets?) and the technology (to enable the company to be more digitally oriented.)

A digital workflow and content automation platform that improves the way people work can help make this transition easy. This type of software needs to enable point and click workflow automation to handle everything from basic business functions to company-wide processes with a few clicks. 

In addition to WCA, the digital business platform also needs to have analytics. Why? Because the business will want to monitor the workflows and determine which ones are working well and which processes still need improving. (Most of the time companies don’t look to see if a process they have implemented is effective or efficient). In a new research report, I delve into the capabilities and examine the impact of a digital workflow/content automation platform, Nintex. 

Let’s say you wanted to see how well your expense claims process was working. In the figure below, Nintex Hawkeye is used for expense claim processing;  to look at claims submitted and service level agreement infringements data to sharing among the management to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of the expense claim process.

         Dashboard for Expense Claims Submitted

Not only can a company automate a workflow digitally, but they can also monitor, capture and share the process performance for expense claims. The company can see number of claims submitted (677), the amount of expense claims submitted ($1.41M), the average expense claim amount submitted ($2.08K) and what the SLAs infringements were (1996). They can also see how the average expense claim is rising in cost each year (bar chart) and the departments who are submitting the expense reports (the circle graphic.) In this one simple example, a company can take what used to be a manual or somewhat manual process, make it completely digital as well as provide analytics around how well the process is working.

Nintex’s user interface eliminates the need for complicated coding and training for lines of business, system integrators, and IT departments as they pursue digital transformation. In addition, the workflow analytics allow companies to more effectively optimize workflows across organizations, be more productive and intelligent, correct ineffective or inefficient workflows, and thus increase revenue as well as decrease costs.

In evaluating the value of digital transformation software, it is important to look at departments that drive revenue and affect customers. High return on investment (ROI) use cases are processes that involve content (documents, forms, records, etc.) for which requests for further automation and process improvement may take a long time for IT to accommodate.

To successfully compete in this increasingly digital world, enterprises need to transform their slow, error-prone operations from manual, analog processes to automated digital workflows and document generation. As companies consider their journey to a digital workplace, they will need to consider how they are going to transform all their processes that were once done on paper or in spreadsheets, to a fully digital process. A digital business platform is a great place to start. For more on this report, please click here.

Have a few minutes to spare? Take Constellation's 2017 Digital Transformation Survey. Constellation will send you a summary of the results.