2016 SuperNova Award Winners Announced at Connected Enterprise

Constellation announced the winners of the 2016 SuperNova Award winners last night at the SuperNova Awards Gala Dinner. 

The Constellation SuperNova Awards celebrate the leaders and teams who successfully apply emerging and disruptive technologies for their organizations. The 2016 SuperNova Award winners demonstrated the foresight, creativity and measured audacity to successfully implement emerging technologies for their organizations. More information about the winners below. 

All applications were evaluated by the SuperNova Award Judges, and then put to a public vote. 

2016 SuperNova Award Winners

Data to Decisions - Madhav Marathe, Director and Professor, NDSS Laboratory, Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech

Madhav Marathe and his team won the SuperNova Award for developing a suite of decision-support tools to help epidemiologists respond to and control pandemics. This project enables the institute to use predictive models to inform relief efforts. Analysts have deployed the technology developed by Marathe and his team during the H1N1, MERS, Ebola and the recent Zika outbreak.

Digital Marketing Transformation - Blake Cahill, Global Vice President, Digital, Royal Phillips

Blake Cahill and his team won the SuperNova Award for launching “Digital @ Scale”, a transformational strategy that brought together data from across Royal Phillips’ global marketing units. Before the project, Phillips' customer data was scattered and sporadic, making the maintenance of a central subscription status for their contacts a very manual process.The project, powered by Oracle Eloqua, has given both marketing and sales clearer visibility of new leads and existing leads and delivered a pipeline for sales worth € 9M in just nine months. Digital @ Scale initiative has since been implemented across 17 global markets in 60 countries.

Future of Work, Social Business - Michelle Ghandour, AVP Corporate Affairs, Canadian Tire Company

Michelle Ghandour and her team won the SuperNova Award for her implementation of Facebook at Work which ushered in a new way to collaborate to Canadian Tire, a ninety-four year-old company.  Canadian Tire implemented the platform quickly, enrolling 2,500 workers within the first 24 hours. Because the navigation is similar to Facebook, no training was required. Employees began collaborating immediately. Thanks to the implementation, content reaches twice as many employees. 

Future of Work, Human Capital Management - Patrick Ross III, Deputy Director of Membership, Team Rubicon

Team Rubicon is a nonprofit organization that unites the skills and experiences of military veterans with first responders to rapidly deploy emergency response teams to disasters across the globe. Patrick Ross and his team won the SuperNova Award for implementing Cornerstone OnDemand to speed the onboarding and training process so veterans can be deployed quickly when disaster strikes. The implementation enabled Team Rubicon to reduce volunteer onboarding time from four hours per volunteer to two minutes per volunteer.  

Internet of Things - Scott Strickland & Jim Flatt; CIO, Sr. Manager, Service Operations, North America; Denon + Marantz Electronics

Denon + Marantz is a provider of high-end audio and video equipment. Scott, Jim and team won the SuperNova Award for their leadership in an IoT customer service strategy. Denon + Marantz identified an opportunity to deliver proactive customer experiences via the HEOS product line which is connected to an Internet of Things (IoT) network. HEOS products use Oracle Service Cloud to monitor data in order to deliver predictive, personalized service experiences to Denon + Marantz customers. 

Matrix Commerce - Ken Finnerty, Vice President of Information Technology, UPS

Ken Finnerty and his team won the SuperNova Award his leadership in UPS My Choice and UPS Access Point. UPS My Choice gives customers control over the delivery experience while UPS Access Point enables customers to return packages at any UPS Access Point location. The UPS Access Point™ network, when combined with UPS My Choice® (UPS’s consumer-facing delivery management and notification service), offers consumers unprecedented control over the delivery experience. When consumers are not home to receive a package, UPS can re-route that package to a convenient Access Point™ location, such as a pharmacy, grocery store or dry cleaner for the consumer to pick up on their own schedule. Local small business owners who join the network experience increased foot traffic and exposure in their communities.

Next Generation Customer Experience, Murray Swartzberg, CIO, ATP World Tour

Murray Swartzberg and his team won the SuperNova Award for revolutionizing how tennis analysts and fans receive statistics about professional tennis. Under Swartzberg's leadership, the ATP partnered with Infosys to produce ATP Leaderboards, an application that provides statistical measures of the best performing players in the form of insights. The project is based on the real-time in-memory paradigm aligned with Infosys Information Platform Tooling & Apache Spark.

Technology Optimization & Innovation - Ed McMahon, CEO, Epec Engineered Technologies

Ed and his team won for their implementation of Netsuite ERP in a transformational project that improved scalability and efficiency across the business. Epec has reaped over $500,000 from its cloud investments with revenue increasing by 233%, making Epec one of the fastest growing electronic components-manufacturers.  

The Rewards

• One ticket to Constellation's Connected Enterprise 2017

• Three month subscription to Constellation's research library

• Three month membership in Constellation Executive Network, including three month access to Constellation Insights

   

Congratulations to the winners! Continue to be brave, innovative, and disruptive!

IBM World of Watson - IBM's bets its future on Watson

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

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We had the opportunity to attend the IBM World of Watson event, still going on in Las Vegas October23rd till 27th 2016. It is the first-time IBM brings all together under the Watson umbrella, and with keynote at a different venue (T-Mobile Arena vs MGM Garden Arena) tough to compare attendance with previous IBM events, so going with the 17k IBM shared. {Yes there was an intimate Watson ‘event’ with 1000 attendees a year ago – but not the same in my book like a large-scale conference as this one.)

 

 

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

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

 

Event Report - IBM World of Watson 2016 from Holger Mueller

Want to read on? 

 

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

Watson or bust – Not only does Watson get its own event, it also is the first-time CEO Ginni Rometty makes it to a Las Vegas event (that I am attending, ok) and the marketing spend in show floor, sponsors signage etc. seems to eclipse all the many events that started with an “I” in Las Vegas. The show floor itself takes most of the large space up in the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, and that with minimal partner presence (Box, Cisco and 2 more I think). So, Watson for everything, of course IoT, of course industries, sports, The Weather Company, personal development etc. – every possible use case for AI was on the show floor.

Bye Bye SoftLayer (in marketing) – IBM shared that it is consolidating its cloud brands with SoftLayer getting de-emphasized in favor of BlueMix going forward. Of course, all SoftLayer capabilities will remain preserved and continued. No surprise, the acquirer brand wins usually, and simplification is always a good true north. The message for developers is certainly attractive and simple – as it is all BlueMix. For enterprises with a differentiated IaaS and PaaS strategy the branding can be confusing, as enterprises may want / need the one and not the other. But with all things marketing – you never know – so we will be watching, how well this works for IBM.

Watson for Video – In many ways video is the new medium, as people read less, listen more but want visual stimulation, need to stay on top of large amounts of video, and watching video / TV is becoming an interactive experience. IBM has acquired video assets (Ustream and Clearleap), as they are also key to drive load to cloud infrastructure, the newly labelled BlueMix infrastructure now. And video is an area where Watson can make a difference, as pattern, picture, face recognition is well understood and mastered in Watson. Finding pictures, scenes in video is very powerful, as the next deluge – after the digital picture one – is from video. And the approach can be productized relatively easily, with little customization required, so a good showcase and revenue opportunity for IBM.

 

Analyst Tidbits:

• The Assistants are coming – It’s good to see IBM providing more packaged offerings, always tricky in the AI area, but good to see progress being made with a series of Watson powered “Virtual Assistants”, the most notable for customer service. It was good to see frameworks for creating bot / chat applications. Check out my colleague Alan Lepofsky's coverage on this soon here.
   
• Big partnerships – As usual IBM attracts partnerships with large corporation around its technology, of course here Watson. A partnership with GM brings Watson into OnStar for cross-selling, presence etc. A partnership with Pearson brings Watson into education. A partnership with Slack will bring Watson to IT professional with Assistants and open the popular chat platform for Watson and developers.

• Watson Data Plaform and Watson Machine Learning – Two examples of how IBM uses Watson to enhance existing products (Data Platform) and create new product offerings (Machine Learning). Both are important for IBM's success in the new ML / AI future that is coming soon. Check out my colleague Doug Henschen coverage on this coming soon here.

• Watson for iOS Apps – No surprise Watson also plays to augment (and likely differentiate) the applications IBM has built and is building with / for Apple on the iOS platform.
   
• Watson for Professions – In almost a persona driven design approach, IBM wants to bring Watson capabilities to professionals in marketing, commerce, supply chain and HR. Certainly a good way to tailor AI capabilities and make the attractive to professionals. 

 

MyPOV

It’s always good to see vendors ‘boldly go’ and IBM is certainly betting its future on Watson. We have written and talked about the immense potential of Watson not only for IBM and its customers, but the overall market and business in general. IBM has done probably the best job in the industry at applying Watson and related abilities to any possible use case that is there for AI technology. Bringing it all together at an event like World of Watson is an important step, and it is good to see that IBM is doing all it can to propagate technology and use cases.

On the concern side, IBM needs to make sure not lose the eye on ‘bread and butter’ business, e.g. buried in the announcements was a new, HTAP enabled version of DB2. That by itself would have carried a conference by itself not too many years ago. And pretty much all the solutions talk general capability with a grey line between Watson capabilities, product capabilities and what smart consultants are making possible. Prospects and customers want and need to know what are product vs. services capabilities, as the mix creates a very different value proposition. Hiding behind ‘it’s all about the solution’ won’t work for long, as tangible AI platform capabilities are key to evolve solutions that are powered by them.

Overall we see IBM going Big on Watson, and it’s always good when software vendor put the marketing behind promoting and evangelizing their product innovation, IBM has certainly done a major step in this regards with World of Watson, good to see the commitment, now it is important to see the adoption and dissect on the product vs. services demarcation line. We will be watching.

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


More on IBM:

• Progress Report - IBM Alliances Insights - Deep Plans, now it is execution time - read here - read here
• News Analysis - Workday, IBM Form Strategic Partnership on the IBM Cloud - The IaaS vendor race for SaaS load is on - read here
• News Analysis - IBM Boosts Support to OpenStack's RefStack... first serious attempt to make OpenStack interoperability real - read here
• Event Report - IBM Interconnect - IBM innovates and partners into the hybrid cloud era - read here
• News Analysis - IBM and VMware announce partnership to accelerate enterprise hybrid cloud adoption >> Looking promising - read here
• Event Preview - IBM Interconnect 2016 - read here
• Site Visit - IBM Design Studio Austin - read here
• MarketMoves - IBM strikes 3x in Fall - Cleversafe, The Weather Company and Gravitant - read here
• News Analysis - IBM launches Industry's First Consulting Practice Dedicated to Cognitive Business - a good move it's early times - read more
• News Analysis - IBM plans to acquire Cleversafe to propel Object Storage into the Hybrid Cloud >> a good move. Read here
  Market Move - IBM acquires StrongLoop - nodejs comes to BlueMix - read here
• News Analysis - IBM and ARM Collaborate to Accelerate Delivery of Internet of Things - The IBM NextGenApps Stack emerges - read here
• Progress Report - IBM Cloud makes good progress - but needs to attract more load - read here
• Market Move - IBM gets into private cloud (services) with Blue Box acqusition - read here
• Event Report - IBM InterConnect - IBM makes bets for the hybrid cloud - read here
• First Take - IBM InterConnect Day #1 Keynote - BlueMix, SoftLayer and Watson - read here
• News Analysis - IBM had a very good year in the cloud - 2015 will be key - read here
• Event Report - IBM Insight 2014 - Is it all coming together for IBM in 2015? Or not? 
• First Take - Top 3 Takeaways from IBM Insight Day 1 Keynote - read here
• IBM and SAP partner for cloud - good move - read here
• Event Report - IBM Enterprise - A lot of value for existing customers, but can IBM attract net new customers? Read here
• Progress Report - The Mainframe is alive and kicking - but there is more in IBM STG - read here
• News Analysis - IBM and Intel partner to make the cloud more secure - read here
• Progress Report - IBM BigData an Analytics have a lot of potential - time to show it - read here
• Event Report - What a difference a year makes - and off to a good start - read here
• First Take - 3 Key Takeaways from IBM's Impact Conference - Day 1 Keynote - read here
• Another week and another Billion - this week it's a BlueMix Paas - read here
• First take - IBM makes Connection - introduces the TalentSuite at IBM Connect - read here
• IBM kicks of cloud data center race in 2014 - read here
• First Take - IBM Software Group's Analyst Insights - read here
• Are we witnessing one of the largest cloud moves - so far? Read here
• Why IBM acquired Softlayer - read here

Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here.

2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 & 2016 (C) Holger Mueller - All Rights Reserved

Introducing IBM Watson Workspace

Alan Lepofsky

Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

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Today at IBM World of Watson, IBM announced the preview release (i.e. pre-beta) of Watson Workspace.

This is an IBM collaboration tool that allows people to create shared spaces where they can post questions, share ideas, collaborate on projects, etc. Essentially it’s a group messaging client, but with a twist… it’s being built from the ground up to leverage the cognitive computing capabilities of IBM Watson.

What does that mean? Well IBM’s goal is to provide a client that helps eliminate the information overload often associated with today’s collaboration tools. Today employees hold conversations in chat clients, assign tasks in project management tools, manage customer records in CRM systems, share files in another tool, etc. Watson Workspace enables people to integrate multiple tools into a single stream, creating a more seamless experience versus jumping back and forth between multiple tools. 

But bringing multiple applications into a single stream is not what makes Watson Workspace unique. There are several group messaging clients like Slack, Glip, Cisco Spark and Office 365 Groups that already do this. Watson Workspace’s (current) differentiator is a new feature called Moments. Workspace Moments leverages the IBM Watson cognitive APIs to create a summary of the posts taking place in a Space. It groups together posts making it easier for people to digest the vast amounts of information being shared. Moments even labels the items in the summary as questions, actions or decisions to provide context around why these posts are the ones you should pay attention to. 

MyPOV

Watson Workspaces is in the early days. It’s not even a beta, it’s a preview. But that’s great. One of the main things I’ve criticized IBM about over the years is how slow they have been to move from slideware to software. IBM has been talking about adding cognitive capabilities to collaboration tools for years, and they are finally starting to deliver. It’s early, but they are already learning things from Workspace that will help with future versions of IBM Verse and IBM Connections. For example, the image below shows a concept for email that applies similar “action, question, decision” labels inside the body of the message making it easy to quickly scan and get the gist of what you need to know/do. 

By making IBM Watson Workspace available now, it gives IBM three months to gather feedback and improve before IBM Connect in Feb 2017.

Finally, I think it’s important to notice the name: IBM Watson Workspace. Watson is one of the main strengths of IBM these days. However, most people associate Watson as “that computer that played Jeopardy”. Those a bit more in the know think of Watson as “that computer that’s helping doctors fight cancer.” What’s missing is general knowledge of Watson similar to Apple Siri. Now IBM is offering a product with the Watson name that could potentially be used by millions of knowledge workers around the globe.

So go sign up for IBM Watson Workspace and feel free to invite me into a space. The mobile clients for iOS and Android are availble, but are currently lacking the Moments feature.

Salesforce Dreamforce 2016 Recap: Have They Hit the Suite Spot?

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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Each year at Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference there is a central theme, this year it was clearly Artificial Intelligence, or AI. More specifically, it was the introduction of Salesforce’s new AI platform named Einstein, which adds intelligence to Salesforce’s core applications for Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, etc. However, in this blog post I’m not actually going to focus on Einstein, but rather on something more subtle that I’ve been observing about Salesforce for a little while now.

Even though the addition of AI was front and centre in almost every keynote and session, my main take away from Dreamforce is that they are now focusing less on the various systems of record themselves (example, the accounts, leads, support tickets, marketing campaigns, etc.) and more on the ways people can interact with them. In my opinion, Salesforce’s ability to surface those records within conversations, emails, calendar events and documents is one of their greatest strengths.

I’ve created the following image to explain what I mean.  

At the bottom of the image are three of Salesforce’s main products, Sales Cloud (CRM), Service Cloud (customer support) and Marketing Cloud (campaign automation). These are the applications where Salesforce customers create the systems of record that contain vital business information and processes.

At the top of the image are the ways Salesforce now enables people to interact with those records outside of the applications themselves:
- Community Cloud, which includes Salesforce Chatter (enterprise social networking), Files, and Communities
- SalesforceIQ, an email and calendar client (based on the acquisitions of RelateIQ and Tempo.AI)
- Quip, documents and spreadsheets

On the right there are examples how Salesforce is working with other software vendors such as Cisco and Slack to extend the reach of Salesforce data into other applications.

The the centre of the image you can see how Salesforce Einstein provides a layer of intelligence between the systems of record and the ways people interact with them.  For example,
- Community Cloud leverages Einstein to find answers to the questions people are posting communities
- SalesforceIQ (which was created via the acquisitions of Tempo.AI and RelateIQ) leverages Einstein to help people connect emails and calendar entries to the CRM and Service records of the people they contain

Quip - The Secret Weapon?

While Quip was only recently acquired, the teams have been quickly developing integrations. In the image below you can see that Salesforce records can be inserted as linkd into Quip documents, and values from CRM records can be inserted into cells in a spreadsheet.  

In my opinion, Quip is one of the most important acquisitions Salesforce has made. Today you can have conversations around a record via Chatter, and you can attach relevant files (say a sales presentation or product catalog) to a record. But imagine in the future if every Salesforce record has a “living document” as part of it, enabling people to collaboratively take notes, brainstorm ideas, generated reports, track tasks and more. Quip could be one of the most important pieces to a larger puzzle Salesforce has been working on.

Is Salesforce, the next enterprise productivity suite?

If you think back to just a few years ago, Salesforce was a product mainly used by a company’s sales reps. To expand their audience (and revenue) Salesforce added applications for other parts of the company such as customer support and marketing. Now, as the image above shows, they have provided several ways to create, share and discuss those records with colleagues, prospects and customers.
While Salesforce is not quite ready to compete with Microsoft (Office 365) and Google (G Suite) yet, they have assembled (via build, buy and partner) many of the components employees use to get their jobs done. Employee can use SalesforceIQ to access their email and calendar, Chatter for social networking and files, and now Quip to create and share documents and spreadsheets. Add Salesforce records to those applications, and sprinkle in some intelligence powered by Einstein and you can start to picture an environment where employees all across the company spend a great deal of their work day inside Salesforce products. Maybe it’s time for a name change from Salesforce to Workforce?

Qlik Gets Leaner, Meaner, Cloudier

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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Qlik’s acquisition by private equity firm Thoma Bravo is expected to bring disciplined growth as the company moves into cloud business intelligence and analytics.

It came as no shock in early June when business intelligence and analytics vendor Qlik announced an agreement to be purchased by private equity firm Thoma Bravo. The all-cash, $3.0 billion deal to take the company private came just a few months after hedge fund Elliott Management Corp. took an 8.8% stake in Qlik and declared the $700-million-annual revenue firm was ripe for acquisition.

Being private can be a welcome respite from the harsh scrutiny of Wall Street – something Qlik rival Tableau Software has been subjected to in recent quarters. On the other hand, the standard Constellation Research advice to technology buyers is to beware of private equity firms that seek to wring too much “value” out of an acquired company. Optimizing profitability is one thing, but will they invest too little in the product, innovation, customer service and the future of the company?

A new Qlik board member from Thoma Bravo, Chip Virnig, says the private equity
firm leaves it to existing management teams to run its many investments.

Against this backdrop, job number one for Qlik at its October 17-19 Qlik UnSummit in Miami Beach, Fla., was to reassure the more than 20 analysts and customers attending that Thoma Bravo is interested in growing Qlik and bringing it to the next level, not wringing it dry. Qlik also used the event to update influencers on its strategy and its progress toward cloud. That move is ushering in changes in architecture, partner strategy and more.

Thoma Bravo Stays Qlik’s Course

If you can know a company by its actions, it wasn’t encouraging for some to learn that Qlik’s first big move following approval of the Thoma Bravo acquisition in August was an 8% staff reduction carried out in October. But at Qlik’s event we met Thoma Bravo principal Chip Virnig, who was there to paint the big picture. A former Merrill Lynch analyst and 2006 graduate of Brown University, Virnig disarmed with his Ben Affleck good looks and straightforward way of explaining the company’s strategy.

“We don’t make $3 billion investments only to have the company look pretty much the same in five years,” Virnig insisted. “Qlik has to continue to grow and innovate.”

Thoma Bravo invests exclusively in enterprise tech, and it only invests in companies with solid management teams that it can entrust to keep acquired businesses growing, Virnig explained. The company tends to hold the companies it buys for three to five years before selling them or returning them to the public market. Along the way, existing management teams usually retain an ownership stake and they co-invest alongside Thoma Bravo, he added.

“We’ve been better than any of our peers at keeping existing management teams in place,” Virnig explained. “You lose at least a year if you have management turnover, and that’s too risky to our model.”

On that note, Qlik’s top management team, including CEO Lars Bjork, CTO Anthony Deighton, and CMO Rick Jackson, all retained their positions and led the UnSummit. One notable departure was Donald Farmer, the Microsoft veteran who served as vice president of innovation and design. He announced his resignation in September.

As for the staff reduction, Virnig called it a “one-time” optimization, necessary to ensure that Thoma Bravo investors, such as big pension funds, get a share of profits along the way to an eventual liquidity event. Such moves are typical within the first month of any Thoma Bravo acquisition, he said.

Qlik executives I spoke to at the event said that the closer an employee was to the product – to developing it, managing it, supporting it, marketing it or selling it — the more likely it is that they’re still at the company. And in a sign of Thoma Bravo’s focus, Qlik has also hired more sales and research and development staff, they said, although the headcount is still below the pre-acquisition level.

MyPOV on Qlik’s Thoma Bravo Era. My conversations with Virnig and Qlik management lead me to believe that Qlik is going to be leaner and more competitive. Management is unburdened by the distractions of Wall Street, but it has to meet clear-cut and agreed-upon performance and profitability measures. Thoma Bravo is counting on Qlik to grow and to continue to innovate, but to do so efficiently and, from the sound of it, through organic development work. “It’s not just what you spend [to invest in a company], it’s the people and the turnover,” Virnig commented. “Qlik is stable and doesn’t have turnover every six months like some of the Silicon Valley firms.”

Qlik has matured and it’s not growing at the torrid pace of a SaaS startup. But if it can continue to grow at its current pace – 24 percent revenue growth in its last quarter as a public company – Qlik will undoubtedly live up to Thoma Bravo’s strategy and be a more prominent BI vendor and corporate asset three to five years down the road. The question is whether the changing and increasingly cloud-centric market will disrupt Qlik’s growth trajectory.

Qlik’s Cloud Strategy

As I documented at last year’s UnSummit and this year’s Qonnections customer event, Qlik is a late entrant to cloud-based BI and analytics compared to many of its competitors. The company introduced its freemium-level Qlik Sense Cloud service in 2015. The service lets you load up to 250 MB of data and share Qlik Sense analytic apps with up to five other users. By year-end 2015 the service had 26,000 registered users.

In early 2016 Qlik introduced Qlik Sense Cloud Plus, which, at $20 per user, per month, lets you load up to 10 GB of data and sharing Qlik Sense analyses with unlimited numbers of users. Today the company has more than 80,000 registered cloud users, but Qlik didn’t divulge how many are paid or active users, as opposed to one-time or occasional tire kickers.

Qlik Sense Cloud will soon gain a Business service offering scheduled data refreshes,
cloud app and API connectivity, and user and group access controls.

Qlik’s next cloud step up, due within weeks, is Qlik Sense Cloud Business, which will support data integration from SaaS apps, such as Salesforce, and REST-based interfaces. It also lets you push data from on-premises databases and sources and schedule refreshes so you always have the latest data. The Business service will also provide governance in the form of user and group access controls and it will open up access to data in the Qlik DataMarket. Free DataMarket Essentials includes population (census), currency, weather, and socioeconomic data sets. Industry specific data, such as a Financial data from global stock markets, entails extra fees.

Qlik plans to deliver a full-on, multitenant cloud-based version of Qlik Sense Enterprise, its flagship product, sometime next year. But at UnSummit, Qlik mainly talked about the hybrid cloud deployment scenarios it sees ahead. In short, you’ll be able to run Qlik on premises, in private clouds, on public cloud infrastructure or on the Qlik Cloud, but the company is betting that the majority of companies will retain on-premises or private-cloud deployments over the next three to five years even as they add public cloud and/or Qlik Cloud components.

In particular, Qlik expects to see two popular deployment scenarios in the short term. In the first, companies will continue to index their various data sources in Qlik instances on-premises or in private-cloud deployments, but they’ll push Qlik Sense analyses into the Qlik cloud, where they can be broadly shared and where processing capacity can be elastically scaled to handle highly variable (Saturday night versus Monday morning) workloads.

In the second scenario, companies will use Qlik instances on Public Cloud infrastructure or in the Qlik Cloud to analyze cloud-centric combinations of sources, including data from SaaS apps, social networks, mobile apps and so on. That’s not to say that cloud instances will be used for cloud data and on-premises instances will handle the on-premises data, necessarily. There will be a mix in either case, but you’ll likely gradually move the analysis to where the majority of the data lives.

MyPOV on Qlik Cloud Plans. Qlik is sticking with what I see as a conservative path to the cloud. Qlik is well along on building out a microservices architecture that is already running Qlik Cloud, but the technology has yet to be introduced to shipping software. On some fronts, Qlik seems to be catching up to customer and partner cloud demand. For example, Qlik only recently started to craft formal programs to support managed-services providers and cloud-deployment partners that have introduced cloud deployment options for Qlik on their own. The company is also soon to announce ready-to-run, bring-your-own license deployment options on the AWS and Azure marketplaces. But that’s something that many rivals have offered for years.

In my view, Qlik needs to embrace powerful capabilities that are coming to public clouds, such as machine learning, natural language processing and other capabilities that will harness cloud scalability and processing power. Qlik executives were quick to point out that the company does take advantage of machine learning for data prep and various analyses. But they tended to dismiss “AI” and “cognitive” services as attempts to remove humans from decision-making. Meanwhile we saw a video at the event in which a customer was experimenting with Microsoft Cortana voice-to-text capabilities to create a natural language querying interface for Qlik.

I believe that customers running Qlik on AWS or Azure will want to mix and match capabilities. What’s more, the Qlik Cloud runs on AWS, so why not open it up to AWS services that Qlik won’t replicate, such as Kinesis stream processing and Alexa natural language processing? Qlik hasn’t said that it won’t take such an open approach, so  I’m hoping it will embrace and make it easier for customers to benefit from what AWS, Azure and Google can offer. Cloud computing is already disrupting the BI and analytics market as we know it, so vendors must differentiate by embracing available services and extending what customers can do.

Related Reading:
Oracle Vs. Salesforce on AI: What to Expect When
Qlik Extends Its Platform As Cloud Disruption Looms
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IoT Timeliness and Customer Centric Services

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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The big events by the major vendors in Autumn 2016 have been marked by the focus on using IoT to add ‘value’ in different deployments. The delivered ‘value’ usually is on the basis of the traditional IT Back Office model of using Technology for cost and efficiency improvement. However, IoT is an opportunity to create a Front Office revolution in customer interactions and satisfaction to the benefit of increased revenue at reduced sales costs. A point that under pins the much discussed transformation of the Digital Services economy.

The Salesforce annual Dreamforce continued their focus on how enterprises succeed through customers, but broader theme of using IoT connectivity and Services to change customer relationships, and business models was a dominant factor.

The technology industry, as a whole, does these events really well, and attendance remains the best way to really get a ‘feel’ for what is hot and happening even in the online age. After all if you don’t know what you don’t know it can be pretty hard to find it with a search engine! So while there can be no doubt this Autumn that the whole Technology industry gets IoT, AI and Services on the Cloud it doesn’t mean necessarily they have the same approach to Business deployment and the resulting ‘value’.

Salesforce has a reasonable claim to being a founding father of Front Office Transformation around better business engagement with the Customer., and at Dreamforce 2016 it showed. For the attendee this was as much a show to learn about Customer centric Business Models and Services, as it was a Technology company product show.

Coca Cola, General Motors, Eli Lilly, etc. all had their own sizable stands, (under their own names), to talk about their strategy in customer engagement. Most stream sessions seemed to be demonstrations by a wide variety of Salesforce customers about how they are transforming their customer interactions, (albeit with Salesforce technology). Major names in the Technology Industry, as well as new players with impressive new capabilities, were all present. 

All united by their use of Salesforce Platform(s) to deliver their capabilities resulting in something of a master class in understanding new Business Models to engage with customers. Clouds and Services may have been around for a while now, but adding IoT and AI Technologies is a further game change to up customer service levels.

Q. What is it that delights customers and is a new change factor?           

A. Timeliness…..     The fact, or quality, of being done, or occurring, at a favourable, or useful time.                        Source; Oxford English Dictionary

It is far to say that the original CRM Back Office IT systems worked in ‘computer time’, which does not correspond to the sensation of time experienced by frustrated customers, or employees. (Ever waited for the computer to find the copy of your order so you can buy the same item again?). CRM has come a long way since then, and its fair to say that Salesforce has played a leading role in its development and enjoys the respect of being thought of as a market leader.

Dreamforce as a total experience provided three big ‘strategic’ messages;

1. In the IoT world where everyone, and everything, is part of the connected economy of Digital Services concentrate on aligning your business to the customer 
2. Use AI to ensure that you can interpret everything from 1) smoothly and quickly to make the customer an optimized response
3. Gaining ‘Timeliness’ of activities using 1) and 2) is an enterprise wide transformation

GM staff discussed how the customer, and not just the car, was now central to their strategy. The customer is a continuous relationship across the ownership of many cars, together with GM provided Services in areas that touch on cars and transportation. As an example earlier this year GM made an investment of $500m in Lyft citing its potential for self-driving ‘cars’ to provide ‘rides’ for its customers rather than the current individual car ownership market model.

On the next stand Eli Lilly offered the insight of their ability to support your life long ‘Wellness’ through its Services, with the role of Doctors centered around ‘event’ interactions to deal with specific health issues identified at various times. Emerson wants to look after your comfort in your home environment rather than sell you HVAC with a maintenance contract.

All of these transforming Business models rely on IoT Devices and Connectivity to provide ‘insightful’ data to trigger the ‘Timeliness’ of the interactions that provide perceived customer value. Respectively; ‘Black Box’ driving monitoring, FitBit style lifestyle activities and temperature/HVAC sensors all contribute essential data as to circumstances in ‘real time’.

The connectivity of the hundreds of devices that will make up a single personal customer profile, aggregated with the monitoring of the hundreds of thousands of devices to provide coverage across the entire customer base is a complex job. It’s not the ‘Big Data’ and BI style analysis that has become familiar from the Web. It’s a ‘Small Data’ model as individual IoT ‘event’ triggers are small data packets in a steady flow albeit in aggregate this represents a large volume.

IoT is a game change through its introduction of a new ‘Timeliness’ in reading, analyzing and orchestration reactions to events and circumstances in a time frame that can change and optimize the outcome successfully.

Salesforce, in a move that is somewhat differentiated to other Technology Players application of IoT/AI, has applied the combined capability, in association with its Cloud based Services, to the whole (complex) process of customer relationships. 

AI, better thought of as Augmented Intelligence than Artificial Intelligence, is focused on analyzing data to identify possible/optimal actions before the outcome is transacted. This is completely different approach to using ‘Intelligence’ to BI, which analyses the results of transacted Business actions.

Though announced before the event, Dreamforce was where the full impact of Salesforce AI capability called Einstein was on show for the first time. The Salesforce Einstein keynote is well worth watching to understand exactly how events are analyzed and transferred into a complex series of actions that ensure no small detail is over looked. 

Naturally all such demos will take the capability to the extreme, but that should not to deter from the significance of what Einstein is able to achieve in respect of ‘Timeliness’ of responses to Customer engagement. However, it’s not only about transforming the Front Office, and Salesforce are also increasingly seen as providing support to operate the alignment with the Back Office resources.

Looked at strategically Salesforce with its Cloud Platforms and Services architecture are well on the way to forming an Enterprise Middle Office as the operational center of managing the ‘Agile’ Enterprise; see previous blog From IT Transactions with BI to IoT Interactions with AI An argument for a ‘Mid Office’ architecture.  Add to the Dreamforce announcement that third party Services operating on the Salesforce Clouds could be remain under their own names and it seems a genuine ‘open’ platform for Services may also emerge to strengthen the Salesforce capability to act as an Enterprise Middle Office.

Addendum

Constellation Research Paper;

The Algorithm of You: How IoT Transforms Customer Experience;  by Dr Natalie Petouhoff

Congratulations to the Supernova Digital Marketing Transformation Award Finalists!

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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• Data discovery was conducted 70% faster
• Time to execution decreased 70%
• Personalized email resulted in 300% more redemptions than paper redemptions
• $300,000 in additional funded redemptions

• 20% more efficient in daily social media workflow, which includes an 84% response rate to community members
• 50% increase in creative production for engaging posts and ad creative for paid campaigns.
• 103% increase in ad spend within the last 12 months. 
• Improved follower growth versus competition by 10%
• Grew the overall size of the community by 24%
• Increased community engagement by over 150%

• More than 2 million new consumers acquired and fully engaged through digital.
• Consumer acquisition via the website with 4% conversion into opt-ins and re-engagement rate of 35%
• Improvement of the lead management process and creation of blueprints. In UK & Ireland, a campaign with Digital @ Scale for improved lead management processes has, within five months, generated:
  • Marketing Qualified Leads: 600
  • Pipeline Revenue: € 9M
• The new process has given both marketing and sales clearer visibility of new leads and the status of existing leads; bringing the two departments closer together as they work through opportunities.
• New Campaign Governance Model uptake, for the first time ever, to secure Royal Philips’ online Brand reputation.
• New acquisition & welcome and re-engagement campaign blueprints and creation of best practices, available for all markets and business groups to support database growth and engagement:
  • New global direct marketing & privacy guidelines promoted across all markets and businesses.
  • New, mobile first, advanced emails and landing pages templates launched to speed-up digital campaign creation and boost conversion.

• Grew daily Facebook reach by 394% with the OfferCraft gaming campaign.
• Re-engaged over 200 inactive customers within a month.
• All organic campaigns 

How to Save Time and Buy the Right Enterprise Technology

Director of Customer Programs, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

Carole oversees the Constellation Executive Network, an executive community for innovative senior leaders who value strategic guidance from trusted advisors who understand the power of disruptive technologies. Carole brings over 15 years of marketing, strategic account management, and operations experience, specializing in high technology and professional services. She holds a BA from Santa Clara University and a MBA from Thunderbird, School of Global Management.     ...

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                                              Photo: Shutterstock via TechRepublic

Shopping: It’s a Love or Hate Relationship.

Most people seem to have a love or hate relationship with the act of shopping.  It could be as simple and mundane as basic grocery shopping that happens to be a weekly necessity for those of us who believe in Maslow’s hierarchy of basic needs where food and safety are part of the foundation. On the other hand, it could be as complex and time-consuming as buying enterprise technology.

Grocery Shopping & Delivery Have Been Disrupted.

Let’s take a look at the business of grocery shopping and delivery first; everyone needs food. Choices now include Google Express and Instacart for those who’ll pay for the convenience and time savings. Even Amazon has gotten into the fray as you can see from this Recode article, “Amazon is putting veteran leaders in charge of its’s big grocery delivery plans.”  If two heavyweight technology companies like Google and Amazon are investing in this, they clearly see an opportunity to fulfill unmet needs in this winner-takes-all market as R “Ray” Wang, Constellation Research’s chairman often states.

The Art of Enterprise Technology Shopping.

Now, let’s consider the art of enterprise technology shopping. Once you narrow down your options to the most likely type of technology that’s going to help you solve your business challenge, you still need to vet, procure, and then implement that technology and hope that you made the right judgement call. Careers can often be made or dismantled by this choice.

Your technology assessment could take anywhere from a few weeks to 18 months or more, depending upon your business criteria, the number of stakeholders involved, your organization’s business culture, and the complexity of the business issue that you’re trying to address. That’s precisely why we set up the Constellation ShortList™ program to help save time for buyers of large-scale technology, by making these insights freely available as a starting guide to the enterprise technology buying journey.

Technology Buyer’s Rights: How to Shorten Your Enterprise Technology Buying Cycle.

We’re releasing 40 Constellation ShortLists in our Research Library before the end of 2016. Take at these blog posts here, here, here, and here for more details on what’s been released already. That’s just for starters. Here's the full list of Constellation ShortList categories, if you're curious.

Why struggle to build a list of top contenders when you can trim that effort and start your buying process with a Constellation ShortList. You can then take consult with experts like our Constellation analysts to find out which technologies are going to be the most suitable for your business. As strategic advisors, our analysts cover a wide range of industries, including telecommunications, healthcare/medical, automotive, retail, government, manufacturing, finance/insurance, media/advertising, hospitality, and technology.

Enterprise technology shopping can be a challenge. Making the right decisions are crucial to organizational growth, and it’s not worth the aggravation to take an uneducated guess. If you take a look at R “Ray” Wang’s “Enterprise cloud buyers bill of rights,” you’ll get a sense of why he, and in fact, our entire analyst team, take your needs as a buyer seriously. 

Don’t Take our Word for It. Find Out Why It Matters.

It’s been thrilling to see the enthusiasm in the market, and we’re honored with early recognition from Ludovic Leforestier, one of the co-founders of the Institute of Industry Analyst Relations (IIAR) who is also the Director of Thought Leadership and Analyst Relations at BearingPoint. For those of you who don’t know about IIAR, it’s an independent organization that weighs in on perceptions of analyst firms on behalf of analyst relations professionals. Find out what Leforestier had to say about how Constellation’s disrupting the analyst industry with his post, "Constellation and the curse of the quadrant”. 

Constellation ShortLists Accelerate the Enterprise Technology Buying Journey.

Effective technology shopping requires forethought, planning, and expert guidance, so that you identify the pitfalls to avoid and the best practices to leverage. To streamline your efforts and maximize your business outcomes, that’s where direct advice from Constellation’s seasoned analysts can save you time and aggravation, in identifying the right technology for your business.

To get advice on matters like this when it counts and at the right time and get connected in an exclusive community for innovative leaders, a solid first step is to join the Constellation Executive Network. By joining you’ll get access to disruptive technology research, expert advice, analyst dialogues on trending topics, business insights, events, and more. 

SaaS Land Grab Ignites as SAP Makes Human Capital Management Solutions Available on Microsoft Azure

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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In a follow up move to its announced partnership from May this year, Microsoft and SAP extended their partnership to the HR area, something that could have been expected, but was not necessarily a given when considering the complex multi-vendor landscape both on the SaaS and the IaaS landscape.
 

 

But let’s dissect the press release in our customary style, it can be found here:

REDMOND, Wash. – Oct. 18, 2016 – Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday announced an expanded partnership with SAP to provide public cloud services for the SAP® SuccessFactors® HCM Suite. SAP will make its cloud-based human capital management solutions available on Microsoft Azure over the next five years. This is SAP’s first move to supplement its own infrastructure and operate SAP SuccessFactors solutions in a third-party public cloud, recognizing the experience both companies have in supporting global enterprise clients. With the addition of Azure, SAP has a trusted, global cloud and a powerful data platform to help it drive companies’ human resources transformation, and the potential to dramatically improve business outcomes.

MyPOV – Good summary, correctly referring to an ‘expanded’ partnership. The timeframe of five years seems to be pretty long, but both vendors have been found to be conservative, when it comes to timelines. The concern is that 5 years is the ‘half time’ of a good architecture, so whatever SAP will use as the base for the cutoff to support Azure – it will take some time and the platform may have some years of age already. But that number also reflect a medium term commitment of both vendors to each other. But you never know how long this will take - getting demo environments in Q1 of 2017 is a good start. Good also to see the focus on global, where Azure is doing well and that is crucial from a data residency perspective for many customers.  

 

“Microsoft and SAP share a commitment to empowering digital transformation across every aspect of business,” said Judson Althoff, executive vice president, Worldwide Commercial Business at Microsoft. “The combination of SAP’s market-leading, innovative human capital management solutions with Microsoft’s intelligent cloud will equip companies around the world to help maximize the potential and skills of their most valuable asset, their people.”

MyPOV – Good statement of new on board head of worldwide commercial business, Judson Althoff.

SAP will have significant additional capacity to run operational workloads of SAP SuccessFactors solutions on Azure, beginning with demo environments, to support its continuing client user growth. Azure provides enterprise-grade security, an open developer platform and advanced data services that organizations of all kinds can use to innovate and grow. With nearly 90 percent of the Fortune 500 as customers, the Microsoft Cloud is offered in more worldwide datacenter regions than any other major cloud provider.

MyPOV – Good to learn something about the start – and its conservative – with demo environments. Demo environments are a typical first use case for similar exercises, as they are not critical from a production grade perspective. But certainly critical for the success of a vendor, and with rising demo needs and demand (e.g. from SAP SuccessFactors Partner for Profit program) – it is key for SAP to find a cheap, elastic demo platform. At the same time the create, demo and throw away nature of demo environments give Microsoft and SAP plenty of chances to learn to setup these environments, something important for the next step that usually is development and test (see e.g. where Workday is with IBM here) and then off to the ultimate goal – production. Again rightfully the press release quotes Microsoft’s coverage of large enterprises, when they are comfortable to run Office on a IaaS, they will most likely be comfortable to run HR systems on the same IaaS, too. 

“SAP SuccessFactors is the fastest growing core HR solution, and offers an unmatched depth and breadth across the entire HCM suite, of any vendor in the industry,” said Mike Ettling, president of SAP SuccessFactors. “We’ve seen exponential growth in the past two years, with 42 million users now benefiting from our market-leading solutions. In selecting Azure, we will be able to expand our reach even further, with the reliability that is required of these mission-critical applications, and continue to innovate and enhance services to meet client needs across additional environments.”

MyPOV – Good quote of Ettling, touting growth of SuccessFactors. And one of the first areas where vendors feel growth pain is… demo systems and the pieces are adding up here. Demo systems and sand boxes are vital tools for vendors to ramp up their pipeline, something that SAP SuccessFactors is working hard to do at the moment, especially when it is done via the partner channel (also the case). 

This deal builds on the longstanding partnership between Microsoft and SAP, including integrations between Office 365 and SAP SuccessFactors HCM Suite, as well as SAP Fieldglass® Vendor Management System, SAP Ariba® and Concur® solutions. The Microsoft and SAP partnership also includes broad support for the SAP HANA® platform on Azure to enable companies to deliver mission-critical applications and data analytics from the cloud. Microsoft recently announced the general availability of Azure large instances, hardware configurations specifically designed for the largest and most demanding SAP workloads. SAP now enables its customers to build and deploy custom mobile hybrid SAP Fiori® apps on SAP HANA Cloud Platform that can be managed, deployed and protected with Microsoft Intune.

MyPOV – A ‘well we have been doing this since a longtime’ paragraph – that is often found in press releases, when vendors want to show continuity, experience working together and generally make the partnership look like a big deal. Wasn’t necessary in my view, as he first pick of an IaaS by SAP SuccessFactors would be enough of headlines, but so be it. The HANA statement is key, as SuccessFactors is under the ‘Hasso Mandate’ of moving to HANA, and if Azure had not been able to run HANA, some observers would have questioned it… but that’s not the case with Azure’s recent commitment to large memory instances… and that is essential to capture long term SAP load to move to Azure. Once the SAP customers move, they most likely will be on HANA based systems on premises, or move to HANA based systems in the cloud, Microsoft wants to make it a move to Azure. And of course Microsoft has a lot more to offer to SAP and other ISVs, beyond 'just' using Azure. 

Overall MyPOV

We live in the ‘age of the load landgrab’ – which is the fight of IaaS providers like Microsoft Azure here, to capture on premises load (here from SAP). That gets overlaid by SaaS load that is looking for a new home due to a generational or platform update (here SuccessFactors moving to HANA and maybe some more things) and fueled by even large enterprise vendors like SAP, to not put up the CAPEX needed for large datacenter / IaaS rollouts. On the flipside IaaS providers (here Microsoft Azure) are more than willing to put in the CAPEX as they are bound for growth no matter what at the moment and any uniform load from on premises software or SaaS software is highly welcome, in comparison to one customer at a time projects. And SAP signaled already at Sapphire this year that its own IaaS ambitions have been scaled down (see my blog here), as the partnership with Azure was already announced in May, this is the conjugation of this very partnership towards SAP SuccessFactors load.

For customers this is generally good news. Instead of waiting for their enterprise software vendor to figure out IaaS (or not), they can move to the cloud with the help of an IaaS provider who runs cloud infrastructure for a living. An alignment with other load of the enterprise will be of course welcome, as too much fragmentation across too many IaaS provider can quickly become a headache from a performance, compliance and commercial perspective. The good news for here is that most enterprises will be in Azure due to Office gravitas one way or the other. On the concern side customers need to pay more attention now to their SaaS vendors not picking up dependencies on specific cloud infrastructures – as it will limit future portability. For SaaS vendors eager to expand their functionality e.g. in the areas of Machine Learning and AI, this maybe a tradeoff they may be happy to take in the short term, but for customers it is something they may not want to live with middle or long term. So customers need to pay attention to the IaaS capability uptake of your SaaS vendors, in this case e.g. SuccessFactors using capabilities that only Azure offers.

 

It also marks an inflection point that a 'born in the cloud' load like SuccessFactors is looking for its next 'home' - no longer in its own cloud infrastructure, but looking for a stand alone IaaS partner, in this case Azure. Those options were not around for the early SaaS pioneers, who all sit on aging, often proprietary or now 'frenemy' platforms, moving to a partner's IaaS should free up CAPEX resources and ultimately provide a better return of R&D to SaaS vendors making the move, which should translate either in (higher) profitability and / or more functionality in the product. Both are positive developments for a SaaS vendor's customers.

But for now good to see the continuity of the Microsoft / SAP partnership, at the moment it’s a win / win / win for customers who get more live software demos and likely more sand boxes (always ask for them), Microsoft gets a shot at more SAP SuccessFactors load, starting with demo systems and SAP SuccessFactors gets a lot of demo environments and a proven IaaS partner (that SAP overall had chosen already before).

Stay tuned for more on this and more enterprise vendor / SaaS player with IaaS player partnerships, below are a few of the most recent and prominent ones.

Bridging Digital and Analog with Digital Experience Integrated Platforms

Aubrey Coggins

Constellation Research

Aubrey (Levinstone) Coggins manages Constellation's marketing and communications programs and is the producer of DisrupTV, a weekly Web series on innovation and the enterprise.  She previously served as a senior manager of corporate communications at Egnyte and held account roles at Access Communications and The Hoffman Agency. Born and raised in Texas, she received a bachelor's degree in Public Relations from The University of Texas at Austin – Hook ‘em!   ...

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As digital transformation efforts take center stage, the requirements for the convergence of digital and analog disciplines drastically increase. Ad tech, artificial intelligence (AI), content and data management, Internet of Things (IoT), and mass personalization at scale – all of these new and changing technologies require companies to adopt digital experience integrated solutions to effectively implement disruptive programs to shake up their industries.

Today, Constellation published a Constellation ShortList™ for Digital Experience Integrated Platforms. While no complete solution exists today, it aims to catalogue these offerings as they emerge and become business-model platforms for organizations. Here are the companies that made the Constellation ShortList:

• Acquia
• Adobe
• Demandware (by Salesforce)
• Episerver
• IBM
• Oracle
• Sitecore

Constellation advises early adopters using disruptive technologies on how to achieve business model transformation. Products and services named to this Constellation ShortList meet the threshold criteria for each category as determined by Constellation Research through client inquiries, partner conversations, customer references, vendor selection projects, market share and internal research.

Additional lists released today include:

• Enterprise File Sharing: Niche
• Enterprise Group Messaging: Standalone
• Enterprise Group Messaging: Unified Communication
• Social Task Management: Enterprise Suites with Project Features
• Social Task Management: Niche
• Sales Force Automation
• Customer Experience (CX) Services: SMB
• Field Service Management
• Enterprise Cloud Finance Apps

Test out the Constellation ShortList, and when you’re ready, contact us to connect with authoring analyst who can then personalize the vendor selection process for you.