Microsoft Connect 2016 - Linux, Google and more

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…...

We attended Microsoft’s Connect event in New York, held on November 16th 2016.

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

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

Event Report - Microsoft Connect - No April's Fools - Linux, Google and more from Holger Mueller

Want to read on?

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

Microsoft joins the Linux Foundation – For a long-time Linux was the arch enemy of Windows, but realities with open source innovation and the new Microsoft make possible what was unthinkable a few years ago. One of the first Azure offerings running on Linux was another ‘surprising’ announcement at the time, in 2013, of Azure now running the Oracle database (read khttp://enswmu.blogspot.com/2013/06/how-cloud-can-make-unlikeliest-bed.html). Since then Microsoft has run more and more Azure loads on Linux and being part of the community at an influential and exposed level was an almost overdue move. For enterprises, it means that if there was any reservation towards Linux in the past, they are ready to revisited.

Google joins .Net Foundation – Google has been running .Net since some time. So similar to the previous takeaway, it makes sense to influence the community and be a prominent part of it. Again, a new frenemy relationship, as Microsoft and Google have tussled with each other mobile, social, browsers and. Microsoft gets a validation of .Net being an independent platform, Google can attract .Net load for Google Cloud and most importantly enterprises running .Net apps get more choice were to deploy these apps. So a win / win / win for all participants. Ironically both Microsoft and Google will be strong believers that their respective IaaS is the better one. Future will tell.

Coding gets (even) easier with Visual Studio 2017 - Microsoft keeps pushing the productivity limits of the developer experience further out. The IDE gets more productive, Rosslyn constantly monitors what the developer types, DevOps gets easier and so on. Good to see more team capabilities to Team Foundation Server 2017. Visual Studio Mobile gets all the good Xamarin capability for deployment and testing. And Visual Studio now runs – no surprise anymore – natively on a Mac.

Tidbits

SQL Server 2016 SP1 – Important housekeeping for Microsoft – as it brings the programming model together across SQL Server editions.
Azure Data Lake Store – A data lake on Azure, easy to access with e.g. on premise Active Directory and easy to expand to other data sources… it is HDFS compatible – but not native HDFS.
Azure Data Lake Analytics and Store – Microsoft’s high transaction data volume and processing cloud analytics service is now GA. Support of U-SQL, R, Python and .Net is interesting, but an Azure / Microsoft specific platform. To be fair, so are all competitor products.
Microsoft launched Teams recently (see here) – and of course developers can build on it, together with the just turned one Graph. Looks like the bot development framework is with Teams for now, too – which makes sense as Microsoft tries to make Teams its Chat platform.
Azure Progress – Some interesting information from Scott Guthrie on Azure progress. E.g. that Microsoft has operationalized more datacenter capacity in the last 9 months than in its history before. And that capacity will double again in 12 months. Check the Storify for more interesting pieces of information.

MyPOV

A lot of progress with Microsoft, almost more than Build, but often product and event cycles don’t align. It is good to see that developer productivity remains top priority for Microsoft and with that the vendor helps enterprises to build next generation applications. It is good to see Microsoft also embraces the reality of Linux, becoming a Linux Foundation member. Will be curious what Microsoft may contribute in the future. Moreover, Microsoft makes good on the premise to protect code investments – both from an UWP and a .Net perspective. Good news for enterprises to get another IaaS to run .Net applications with Google Cloud.

On the concern side Microsoft still has steps ahead to become an enterprise level PaaS that starts with analysis, design capabilities, does requirement collection, end to end test automation etc. It will be interesting and potentially very powerful to see Visual Studio and Teams come together. I maybe wrong, but it always seems to me that Microsoft is about the developer (nothing wrong with it) and less about the enterprise that needs to build a next generation application. Those run in conjunction with existing standard application packages, so integrating, extending those matters. And a lot of emphasis on mobile, but nothing on social network integration, automation etc.

But for now, a lot of good progress on all levels – from the partnership level to product level. Good to see the progress on making developer lives more and more easy, one release of Visual Studio at a time.

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

More on Microsoft:

First Take - Microsoft discovers teams - launches Microsoft Teams - read here
News Analysis - Microsoft announces SAP's choice of Azure to help enterprises transform HR - The SaaS land grab is on - read here
First Take - Microsoft Ignite - AI, Adobe and FPGA [From the Fences] - read here
News Analysis - GE and Microsoft partner to bring Predix to Azure - Multi-Cloud becomes tangible for IoT - read here
Market Move - Microsoft acquired Linked - Tons of synergies, start with Cortana, maybe too many - read here
News Analysis - Microsoft opens Windows Holographic to partners for a new era of mixed reality - read here
News Analysis - SAP and Microsoft usher in new era of partnership to accelerate digital transformation in the cloud - read here
Musings - Will Microsoft's Hololens transform the Future of Work? Read here
Event Report - Microsoft Build 2016 - A platform vision and plenty of tools for next generation applications - read here
First Take - Microsoft Build 2016 - Day 1 Keynote Takeaways - read here
Event Preview - Microsoft Build 2016 - Top 3 Things to watch for developers, managers and execs... read here
News Analysis - Microsoft - New Hybrid Offerings Deliver Bottomless Capacity for Today's Data Explosion - read here
News Analysis - Welcoming the Xamarin team to Microsoft - read here
News Analysis - Microsoft announcements at Convergence Barcelona - Office365. Dynamics CRM and Power Apps
News Analysis - Microsoft expands Azure Data Lake to unleash big data productivity - Good move - time to catch up - read here
News Analysis - Microsoft and Salesforce Strengthen Strategic Partnership at Dreamforce 2015 - Good for joint customers - read here
News Analyis - NetSuite announced Cloud Alliance with Microsoft - read here
Event Report - Microsoft Build - Microsoft really wants to make developers' lives easier - read here
First Hand with Microsoft Hololens - read here
Event Report - Microsoft TechEd - Top 3 Enterprise takeaways - read here
First Take - Microsoft discovers data ambience and delivers an organic approach to in memory database - read here
Event Report - Microsoft Build - Azure grows and blossoms - enough for enterprises (yet)? Read here.
Event Report - Microsoft Build Day 1 Keynote - Top Enterprise Takeaways - read here.
Microsoft gets even more serious about devices - acquire Nokia - read here.
Microsoft does not need one new CEO - but six - read here.
Microsoft makes the cloud a platform play - Or: Azure and her 7 friends - read here.
How the Cloud can make the unlikeliest bedfellows - read here.
How hard is multi-channel CRM in 2013? - Read here.
How hard is it to install Office 365? Or: The harsh reality of customer support - read here.

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

Tech Optimization Innovation & Product-led Growth Event Report Executive Events Chief Information Officer

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Event Report - Kronos KronosWorks - Solid progress and big things loom

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

We had the opportunity to attend Kronos yearly user conference KronosWorks, held in Orlando from November 13-16, 2016.

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

Event Report - Kronos KronosWorks - Solid progress and big things loom from Holger Mueller

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

Workforce Ready is a success – Kronos has been investing in its SMB product Workforce Ready since some time, now with the recent additions in functional footprint it has taken off more that one would expect, reaching a triple digit million amount for the first time. Overall customer growth is up 45% and global customer growth 110%. It shows that Kronos has realized the need for an integrated HCM Suite for companies under 2500 employees, that are having a large population of hourly workers. And no surprise, Kronos focusses on these industries. For most other vendors the anchor module is Payroll, but for Kronos it is Workforce Management and Payroll. Buyers in these industries don’t only have to worry about one or two payroll runs per month, but usually worry about correct punches every morning and afternoon.

Workforce Central grows, too – more to come – The bigger brother of Workforce Ready for enterprises, Workforce Central is growing fast, too – the data point being over 2000 enterprises having going live or currently implementing the product. Kronos is actively making the product better, the new HTML5 based UI works well, though is a bit conservative. Good to see Kronos also eliminating ‘sins of the past’ – Java on the desktop is gone, now its about addressing the use of Adobe Flash. But the real news is how we learnt that Kronos is actively working on the next generation of its larger enterprise workforce management product, with later in 2017 as a first date for first release of capabilities. A good sign as some of the architecture changes required to keep Kronos powering in the 21st century cannot rely on the older, but proven architecture. The way how Kronos tackles this and from the little we know right now, there is little to nothing to worry for customers and prospect. Kronos is very conservative and hype free – so this will be an interesting one to watch in an usually hype loaded industry.

Cloud works for Kronos customers – Moving to the cloud is Kronos’ biggest and still fastest growing business, and has reached 60% of Kronos revenues. In total 4M Kronos users are in the cloud today. Existing, not just net new customers, move to cloud, with 1.1M existing users having moved over to Kronos Cloud. On the technology side, it is good to see that Kronos can and has run on AWS Cloud in Australia. Like many other enterprise software vendors Kronos has also seen that AWS Cloud is not cheaper than an in-house managed cloud – at the moment, but it gives Kronos flexibility in regards of data residency and global presence.

MyPOV

Kronos is doing two of the hardest things that an enterprise software vendor can do: Building the next generation of its flagship product and converting existing customer to a new platform, in this case cloud. Most enterprise software customers don’t want to move off an implemented on premise version, it is often amortized, fits the needs of the user community and everyone has gotten used to it, making existing customer conversions often tricky, hard and slow. The pace at which Kronos has managed to do this is impressive. In conversations with customers they realize the value proposition of cloud and are ready to convert. We will have to see how the trend continues when Kronos reaches more conservative and cloud skeptical customers. But time is on Kronos’ side from the overall trend perspective.

On the concern side Kronos must keep managing the transition and innovate in its product. The current architecture is adequate, but not how you want a workforce management product be for the next 10 years to come. The good news is that Kronos has done the heavy lifting, moving to an API architecture, even more interesting being used as an API layer for Workforce Management capabilities by large enterprises who have opted in building their own Time and Attendance / Absence Management.

The next year has been important for Kronos for a while and I have been saying that for the previous years, too, as Kronos had to lay the foundation for the future. 2017 will be key. Stay tuned.
More on Kronos

Event Report - Kronos KronosWorks - New Versions, new UX, more mobile - faster implementations - read here
First Take - KronosWorks - Day 1 Keynote - R&D Investment, Customer Success and Analyticss - read here
Kronos executes - 2014 will be key - read here
Tweeting and feeling good about it - read here

Want to learn more? Checkout the Storify collection below (if it doesn’t show up – check here). And check out the Twitter Moment I created on the first day of the analyst meeting here.

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

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

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Tableau Sets Stage For Bigger Analytics Deployments

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,…...

Tableau announces scalability, governance, data-prep and ‘smart’ features due in 2017, but can the company land more enterprise-wide deals amid tightening competition?

Tableau Software just replaced its CEO after a few rocky quarters on Wall Street, but that didn’t seem to faze the enthusiastic crowd of 13,000-plus customers gathered at last week’s Tableau Conference in Austin, Texas.

Customers shared their love for the software, whooping and clapping about cool new features demoed during the popular “Devs on Stage” keynote. They also oohed and aahed their way through the opening keynote, as Tableau previewed a new data-engine and data-governance capabilities as well as compelling natural-language-query and machine-learning-based recommendation features.

Why the change in leadership given customer satisfaction levels and continued double-digit growth? More on that later, but first a quick synopsis of the coming attractions.

Hover-over insights, shown inset in blue, will bring instant analysis to Tableau that goes
beyond showing the details when you mouse over a data point.

Coming in 2017

Tableau broke its coming attractions into five categories: Visual Analytics, Data Engine, Data Management, Cloud and Collaboration. Here’s a closer look at what’s in store and a rough idea of what to expect when.

Visual Analytics: Tableau highlighted a bunch of visual data-analysis upgrades starting with instant, hover-over insights that go beyond just showing a data point when you mouse over a point in a chart. In the carbon dioxide emissions vs. GDP visualization pictured above, for example, the hover-over insight inset in blue shows that most of the countries in a lassoed set of plots selected from the chart are in Africa. Also presented are related insights into Internet and mobile phone usage. The software will generate these drillable insights automatically as the user hovers over a data point.

Tableau is also beefing up spatial and time-series analysis capabilities, adding the ability to layer multiple data sets against shared dimensions such as location. For example, you might want county, municipal and zip code views of the same geographic areas. Look for these features to show up in the first half of next year.

Further out on the horizon (in the second half of 2017) Tableau expects to introduce natural language query capabilities. Aided by semantic and syntactic language understanding, this feature will enable users to type questions such as “show me the most expensive houses near Lake Union” (see image below). In this case “expensive” and “near” are relative terms, so the tool will offer a best-guess visualization will slider adjustments for “last sales price” and “within X miles of Lake Union” so user can fine-tune the analysis.

MyPOV: Tableau’s differentiation compared to simplistic data-visualization tools is supporting a flow of visual exploration, correlation and analysis. The new hover-over insights and layered details will make Tableau visualizations that much more powerful, enabling developers to create fewer visual reports that can be support myriad analyses.

Natural language query capabilities expected in the second half of 2017 will simplify data exploration for novice and experience analysts alike.

Hyper Data Engine: Acquired in March, the Hyper Data Engine promises faster analysis and data loading and higher concurrency, supporting “up to tens of thousands of users” on a single shared server. Data loads that used to run overnight will take seconds with Hyper, says Tableau. Last week the company demonstrated ingestion of 400,000 rows of weather data per second with simultaneous analysis and data refreshes.

Hyper will replace the existing Tableau Data Engine (TDE), starting with the company’s Tableau Online service by the end of this year. Hyper is expected to become generally available in a software in the second half of 2017. Migration of TDE files will be seamless and the new engine will run on existing hardware, Tableau reports.

MyPOV: If Hyper lives up to its billing it will eliminate performance constraints that many Tableau customers endure when dealing with high data volumes, simultaneous loading and analysis, and high numbers of users. The proof will be in the pudding, but Tableau is confident that Hyper’s columnar and in-memory performance will ensure stream-of-thought analysis without query delays. In fact, they expect Hyper to eventually serve as a stand-alone database option as well as a built-in data engine.

Data Management: As Tableau has grown up from a departmental solution into an enterprise standard, the company has had to address the needs and expectations of IT. To address data governance, for example, it’s introducing (likely in the first half of 2017) a new Data Sources page and capability for data owners/stewards to certify data sources. A green “Certified” symbol (see image below) will show up wherever that data set is used to show that it has been vetted, that security rules are in force and that related joins and calculations are valid. More importantly, when users add their own data or otherwise depart from the certified data, visual cues will show that the calculations are derived from non-certified data.

To support data governance, Tableau will introduce a data-certification capability that will
show when measures are and are not based on vetted data and calculations.

Diving deeper into data management, Tableau is working on “Project Maestro,” which will yield a self-service data-prep and data-quality module likely to show up in the second half of next year. This optional, stand-alone module will deliver drag-and-drop-style functionality aimed at the same data owner/steward types who are likely to certify data sets. The idea is to deliver the basics of data-prep and data cleansing required for simple use cases. Tableau customers are likely to continue to rely on software from partners such as Alteryx and Trifacta to handle complex, multi-source and multi-delivery-point deta-prep and data-cleansing workflows.

MyPOV: Tableau has previously supported the concept of certified sources, but this upgrade is supported by collaborative capabilities (see section below) that will enable new calculations and dimensions to be suggested, reviewed and added to a certified set. Governance capabilities must be agile or users will quickly work around trusted-but-stagnant data sources. On the data-prep front, Maestro looks like it will deliver the 20 percent of functionality that gets most of the use. We’ll see whether it can address 80% of data-prep needs and how it stacks up pricewise versus third-party tools.

Cloud: Tableau addresses what it sees as a hybrid future with Tableau Online, its multi-tenant cloud service, coupled with cloud-hosted and on-premises deployments. Likewise, Tableau expects to see a mix of cloud and on-premises data sources. Tableau currently relies on pushing extracts out from on-premises sources, but in the first half of 2017 it expects to introduce a Live Query Agent capability that will securely tunnel through firewalls for direct access to on-premises sources.

On the cloud side, Tableau has connectors for popular SaaS applications such as Salesforce, but you can soon expect to see additional connectors for Eloqua, Anaplan, Google AdWords, ServiceNow. On the horizon are connectors for cloud drives such as Box and DropBox.

In a separate development expected in 2017, Tableau will port its Server software to run on multiple distributions of Linux. This move is important for cloud-based deployments because Linux dominates in the cloud and costs as little as half as much as comparable Windows server capacity. Tableau itself will be the first to take advantage by soon porting the Tableau Online service to run on Linux.

MyPOV: Tableau has a head start on cloud compared to its closest rival, Qlik, and I particularly like its embrace of the tools and capabilities of public cloud providers. For example, Tableau is encouraging the use of Amazon RDS for PostGreSQL, ELB for load balancing, S3 for backups and Amazon CloudWatch for load monitoring. And when natural language querying arrives, Tableau says it’s likely to take advantage of Alexa and Cortana voice-to-text services to support mobile interaction.

Collaboration: Tableau is adding a built-in collaboration platform to its software to facilitate discussion. The platform will enable users to exchange text messages directly with data stewards and other users to answer questions such as, “is this the right data for my analysis?” Bleeding into the new data-governance capabilities, you’ll also be able to see what data is used where and ask whether a new dimension or calculation can be added to a certified data.

Delivering on a longstanding user request, Tableau is adding data-driven alerting to its software. In another upgrade that will personalize the software, Tableau is adding a Metrics feature that will let users save their favorite stats and capsule visualizations so they can review them, say, each morning on their desktop or on mobile devices.

Tableau says its software will get smarter with the introduction of machine-learning-based Recommendations. The ambitions is to go beyond the “show me” visualization suggestions currently available to auto suggest data based on the user’s historical behavior, similar users’ behavior, group membership, data certifications, user permissions, recent item popularity, and the context of a user’s current selections. Don’t expect to see that functionality until the second half of 2017.

MyPOV: Some of this stuff seems obvious and overdue. Collaboration, for example, shows up in lots of software, and it particularly helpful for discussing data and analyses. Alerting within Tableau has heretofore been addressed by custom coding and third-party add-on products, but it’s a long-overdue, basic capability that should be built into the software. Smart, machine-learning-based recommendations are more cutting edge, but with the likes of IBM (with Watson Analytics) and Salesforce (with BeyondCore) already offering such features, Tableau may be in good company by the time it rolls out its own Recommendations feature.

Why the Leadership Change?

Over the last couple of years, Tableau has been stepping up into more big enterprise deals. It’s also facing more competition, including from the likes of cloud giants Microsoft (with PowerBI) and Amazon (which will soon release QuickSight). At the same time Tableau is moving into more cloud deployments and subscription-based selling (whether on-premises or in the cloud). These transitions have contributed to revenue and earnings surprises in recent quarters, and that’s something Wall Street never likes.

In August, Tableau tapped Adam Selipsky, previously head of marketing, sales and support at Amazon Web Services, to “take the company to the next level,” as former CEO, and now chairman, Christian Chabot put it in a press release. That’s just what Selipsky did at Amazon, helping AWS to evolve from departmental and developer-oriented selling to big corporate deals. It’s Selipsky’s challenge to keep Tableau growing and profitable even as it pushes into bigger deployments and increasingly cloud- and subscription-based deals.

MyPOV: Now that it’s in enterprise-wide deals, Tableau is facing more competition and deal-delaying offers of “free” software thrown in with big stack deals. Tableau has consistently won the hearts and minds of the data-analyst set, but on this bigger stage it must also address the needs of data consumers that might not be data savvy enough for the company’s usual interface. The Governance, Alerting, Metrics, Natural Language Query and Recommendations announcements — as well as new APIs for embedding into applications — are all moves in the right direction. Nonetheless, I won’t be surprised to see a lighter user interface and lower-cost-per-seat options that will round out Tableau as a platform for enterprise-wide deployments.

Data to Decisions Tech Optimization Chief Customer Officer Chief People Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Revenue Officer

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‘Free Your Data’ says SAP, perhaps in IoT World it should be ‘Data for Free’? (An overview on SAP TechEd Barcelona 7-10th Nov 2016)

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…...

The 20^th SAP TechEd gave Bernard Leukert, SAP Head of Products and Innovation, and Tanja Rueckert SAP Head of IoT, the opportunity to present SAP’s overall vision and direction with the linkage to IoT. A key message concerned Enterprises future with almost unlimited data that transforms the requirements and definition of Business value. Possibly because TechEd is a technology centric event the depth and coherence of the message was more focused and stronger than at the SAP Sapphire event earlier in the year.

Messers Leukert and Rueckert choice of phrases also gave interesting ‘insights’ into how SAP views the role of IoT and its contributing to Business. Quote; “Not the ‘Internet of Things but the Internet of Outcomes” aligned with the announced SAP intention to be “the Platform of choice for processing data into actions”.

To deliver the IoT element there was the announcement of HANA 2, offering a range of new capabilities for IoT, integrated with the recent acquisition of Plat.One as well as the ongoing strategic investment of Euro 2.0 Billion of funding. Adding all of this to the detailed work on reference architecture and integration guides makes it clear that SAP intends to be a strong contender in the IoT market place.

In the breadth of the technology market where all the major IT players, and more than a few Industrial and Telecom players, are all strategically committed to leadership in the IoT market differentiating positioning is vital. SAP has more experience in adding IoT sensing technology to its current Enterprise Applications, and indeed rolling out in their customer base, than is widely realized. Unfortunately for SAP when the rest of their customers chose words to describe them, thoroughness, and quality, dominate rather than innovation.

Given that back in the late eighties and early nineties SAP were one of the first to bet their future on Client-Server rather than Mini Computer technology; then the work on in-memory computing leading to the launch of HANA in 2010; it’s a little unfair to regard SAP as lacking in innovation leadership. So how does the ‘quiet’, but effective innovator in business efficiency use experience to create a differentiated position in IoT?

SAP believes that Enterprises will need to integrate all IoT inputs, both external and internal, into real time memory for the rapid processing required to create direct Business Intelligence outputs that to deliver operational excellent. If that sounds like the current HANA and BI capability reiterated, then it is certainly built on the experience obtained from this combination, which is no bad thing.

Now SAP has redesigned, everything to take Enterprise Operations to a wholly new and differentiated level. Think of the COO managing operations not on data that is 30 to 45 days old, but 3 to 4 minutes old, aided by a massive ‘real time’ Business Intelligence, to grasp the value SAP IoT plan to bring to Enterprises. (My words not an SAP quote)

To power this is HANA 2, (think of it as a 2^nd Generation of HANA, but entirely consistent with the original HANA), combined with a technology architecture to fully exploit Clouds, bring in Machine Learning and the Plat.One acquisition, plus further updating across the board in Business Objects, and Fiori. In short same names, but a distinctly next generation set of updates to enable a new integrated capability to transform the data from the ‘Internet of Things’ into the Business promise of the ‘Internet of Outcomes’ featured in the keynotes.

More, better, and faster insights are the standard benefits attributed to IoT so where does SAP bring a competitively differentiated capability? There are two sides to the answer; one, dramatic improvement in User Interfaces to to bring make much high amounts of data understandable and usable; and two, and much more complex, supporting the shift from todays CapEx business models to the OpEx business models that can under pin the Business Transformation to Agility and Smart Services.

Years of experience in BI have helped SAP to master Design Led thinking to introduce User Interfaces that hide complexity and offer graphical clarity coupled with intuitively driven actions. A look at SAP Fiori introduced a couple of years ago, shows the benefits, and, Fiori also gains additional integration plus full user device portability covering Watches, Tablets, Phones together with a new partnership with Apple.

Whilst much has been said about the the transformational ‘outcome’ of the move to the ‘Digital Services’ economy, much less has been said about the ‘things’ that have to happen in business and technology models to enable this. Naming the technology elements involved; IoT Connectivity, with Cloud Processing and increased Intelligence, (machine learning or AI etc.), that are combining to create ‘change’, doesn’t answer the key questions of ‘how’ enterprises will be apply to achieve this ability.

At the heart of the concept of ‘Agile’ and ‘Smart Services’ business models is the shift from CapEx,; writing off overheads in the relatively unallocated manner possible in volume business models, towards OpEx. To create an Agile Business able to continuously adjust to optimum responsiveness to market opportunities requires the ability to de construct a business into the key assets. Detailed information of the status of each together with its direct cost of use is essential. An Agile response is a orchestration of some, or all of the Assets, to deliver a market response.

The resulting ‘unbundling’ of a Business into its elements* puts a whole new definition on what ‘real time’ Business Intelligence using the huge amounts of data available from IoT sources actually means. Grasping this hugely important, and frequently overlooked, point turns the SAP IoT proposition around integration of Data with ‘real-time’ Business Intelligence to operate an Agile Services based Enterprise at the required levels of efficiency into sharp focus

And of course it also clarifies the SAP market positioning, and ability to build on and incorporate the existing Enterprise Applications, though it is not necessary for them to be all from SAP. For senior executives the approach, coupled with the concept of a Middle Office, offers an a low risk strategic path reutilizing existing investments and maximizing enterprise stability, and delivering value quickly.

In addition to the product sets SAP have also invested in creating reference architecture, integration guides and training of partners to improve time, costs and quality of deployments. Taken together it’s a comprehensive and cohesive approach to making IoT, Clouds, BI/AI work to deliver a real transformation in competitive Smart Service offerings, without the prospect of Enterprise Transformation disruption.

Addendum;

1) Warning! This blog is not intended to provide an over view of the whole SAP TechEd event, and product announcements, merely those elements that are associated with the development and deployment of IoT solutions.

2) * The concept of an ‘Atomic Corporation’ defined as operating an Enterprise made up of individual capabilities/assets (atoms) to achieve a new operating model was first discussed in a book of this name authored by Roger Camrass and Martin Farncombe. Published in 2004 the book was somewhat ahead of its time, (though it has been updated in a later revision), nevertheless it has turned out to be an accurate prophetic view. One reviewer at the time wrote equally accurately; “A radical view of the business future … If the authors are right, we’re on the edge of a revolution

New C-Suite

Read more about ‘Free Your Data’ says SAP, perhaps in IoT World it should be ‘Data for Free’? (An overview on SAP TechEd Barcelona 7-10th Nov 2016)

Trends: Five Data Center Trends For 2017

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

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

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As clients make a shift from on-premises traditional data centers to the cloud, mega vendors will rush to build out their hyperscaledata centers. Hyperscale data centers use nodes to flex up and flex down on compute power, storage, networking, and memory as demand increase or decreases. While only 6 to 7% of the world’s workloads are in the cloud today, Constellation estimates that by 2020, 67% of the world’s workloads will be processed by cloud data centers. Moreover, the growth in public cloud continues to exceed the growth in private cloud due to operational efficiency, improved security, and improvements in hyperscale. Constellation predicts by 2020 305 million (66.8%) of the cloud workloads will shift to the public cloud with 151 million (33.2%) in the private cloud data centers.

Constellation sees the following trends in 2017 for the data center:

Expect higher power density for the power plants for the new economy. With AI in the cloud driving workloads and demand, clients will buy compute power by the Kw/H. These hyperscale data centers have got to ramp up 10 to 100X in compute power and efficiency. The goal is to improve server side usage from 15 to 17% to 40 to 50%. Network functions virtualization (NFV) will improve this. The goal is to drive down PUE sizes and quickly flatten data center architectures. Workload density will move beyond the aspirational 3.0 workloads per server benchmark by 2018.
Push towards more green, more cold. The quest for efficiency continues with data center construction in colder locations and zones. Where possible, new construction requires more green power, more underground design, and higher efficiency of systems. A lot of engineering is going into the design of more efficient connections, better use of power, and more importantly distribution efficiency. The biggest opportunity will be in the smaller data centers, not the hyper scale ones. Constellation estimates almost 40 billion kw/hrs to shave off from the legacy on-premises data centers alone.
Increase security at the chip level and in the physical perimeter. Given the criticallity of the data center, organizations must up both their physical security as well as their network security. Expect an increase in more physical security systems. Importantly, security a the chip level is helping to improve the scale of defense required in sophisticated hacking and reducing the impact of inside jobs.
Greater use of DCIM to benchmark performance. The result is anywhere from 2 to 3X less down time. Resiliency and high availability take center stage in improving uptime. The convergence of logical and physical layers through SDDC should improve in maturity.
Continued adoption of OCP. With Facebook leading the way in the open compute project (OCP) and industry standardization, Constellation expects better interoperability over time across all areas of the data center. More importantly, how organizations bridge the gap in hybrid data centers will exponentially improve efficiency. This industry shift enables on-premises and cloud environments to work well together.

Your POV.

Understand the cloud and AI requirements for your data center strategy? Ready to ditch yours and jump to Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, or Oracle? Let us know what your experiences have been and feel free to reach out. Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationR (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) org.

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Disclosure

Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us. For the full disclosure policy,stay tuned for the full client list on the Constellation Research website.

* Not responsible for any factual errors or omissions. However, happy to correct any errors upon email receipt.

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Event Report - SAP TechEd Barcelona - Analytics, ML, PaaS and Hana 2

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

We had the opportunity to attend the European edition of SAP’s developer conference, TechEd, held in Barcelona from November 8th till 10th 2016. The event was well attended, with an estimate 4k attendees coming from clients, prospects, partners, SAP and exhibitors.

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

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

Event Report - SAP TechEd Barcelona - Analytics, ML, PaaS and Hana 2 from Holger Mueller

Want to read on? Here you go:

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

HANA comes in two flavors and a trial version – The major news of the conference was the announcement of HANA 2, effectively the creation of two flavors of HANA. For customers that are live with HANA based applications and don’t need any further advancements of HANA, SAP will keep HANA SPS 12 around for 3 years, freeing them from onerous re-testing of their live applications, caused by HANA innovation they don’t want to uptake. And HANA2 becomes the flavor that will exhibit new capabilities, starting with the announcement and have twice a year a new service release. Effectively SAP has declared what was formerly SPS 13 to be HANA 2 now, labelling it courageously as the platform for Digital Transformation. New capabilities coming with HANA 2 are attractive – starting with a container infrastructure, BYOL capabilities, Machine Learning and predictive Analytics capabilities are the ones that stuck out for me as being most game changing for enterprises building next generation applications. And to do that enterprises need developers who know the technology, and here SAP has done (finally) something what is a must have for any technology provider to the enterprise – offered a free development and limited runtime license for HANA – with HANA Express. Anyone can download HANA, the full version, to their machine, build application and deploy them – with memory being the gate (I believe 32 GB was the limit).

HANA Cloud Platform grows – For the first HCP has become the key product message in a SAP keynote by Bernd Leukert, where HCP was the key platform for the last third of the keynote, quite adequate for a developer conference. And there are numerous new capabilities that make a difference for HCP going forward, the one that stood out for me are a new container service (I could not figure out if is the same like HANA 2’s), BYOL capabilities, improved integration into SAP’s products, improvements of the API Business Hub, a connector to Ariba named Ariba Cloud Integration Gateway, machine learning capabilities, predictive analytics functionality. SAP has done a good job of adding more services to HCP, adding a workflow service, business rules engine with services, data quality services. Probably the most impactful services for enterprises trying to build these nature of applications, the smart data streaming capabilities will be most welcome, as streaming is always tricky, but especially when solved by an individual enterprise.

We had the chance to use HCP ourselves, building a Fiori based application, connecting it via OData / SAP Gateway to a production system, adding visualization of an address in Google Maps and using the Translation Services to have the app available in 20 or so languages, all build by a rusty developer analyst in about one hour. Available with UI5 as a mobile application. I tested 7 languages, including Hebrew, where the app changed from left to right menu as well as orientation. All without any real coding, but mostly XML script extensions and changes, a powerful proof point of where SAP HCP has come to.

SAP discovers Machine Learning – For a long time I have been giving SAP a hard time about the lack of machine learning vision, talk and product uptake. This has changed now with native machine learning capabilities coming to both HANA and HCP, a very important step forward for developers building next generation applications. On top of that SAP announced a machine learning powered Brand Intelligence solution that will use the currently ubiquitous picture and video machine learning capabilities to help marketers establish brand value. Invoice matching and bias elimination in recruiting with SuccessFactors are the other two use cases that SAP currently supports. Not surprisingly there needs to be a training effort for new technologies, and SAP is doing the right thing by starting a MooC effort. Too early to judge the uptake as the capabilities come in 2017, but SAP is doing the right things to get there. And similar SAP is launching a data science curriculum for 2017 – in true SAP style with a certification.

Analyst Tidbits

DaaS with ESA – DaaS is a key revenue source and capability going forward and SAP partnered with ESA to bring ESA satellite pictures to enterprise, of course via HANA and the SAP Digital arm. Kudos for having a consuming customer on stage with Munich Re, the insurer wants to add geographical data to its risk assessment. The service is free till the end of the year, we will have to understand monetization then, but a good start on a differentiating data source for SAP, making the consumption of the ESA data easy for developers.
Make it easier to build IoT apps – SAP introduced the an IoT enablement solution, that effectively connect S/4HANA (as the Digital Core) with tiered storage, in which SAP has enabled its Digital Twin capabilities (acquired assets with Fedem). It is an important step to make it easier for enterprises to build IoT applications with HCP, with storage tiering and connecting them with S/4HANA, a good move by SAP.
KXEN DNA is alive – When SAP acquired KXEN, I was bullish on the capabilities this could bring to SAP, in terms of shrink wrapped ‘true’ analytics applications. It was longer quiet than I would have liked, but now the know how is back with a focus on helping data scientists and analytic model worker with the SAP Business Objects predictive factory. Good to see.
YaaS now available in Germany – SAP’s hybris team, the division that early on focused on a microservice architecture on top of CloudFoundry is adding the German market (US already available). YaaS is a key strategy in the API Economy market, and key for developers to be more efficient at building their next generation applications. Available by the hybris marketplace, the ESA partnership is available through this architecture.
Analytics – Maybe missed by me, but the SAP Digital Boardroom has been completely re-factored on SAP Business Objects Cloud, leveraging the assets of the original Cloud for Planning product and more. Good to see Analytics applications now available in 34 countries from the SAP Store. All the EPM applications are part of the portfolio and BPC is now helping to move to Continuous Accounting. And a Roambi powered mobile app is available, after SAP has done some ‘hardening’ of the solution to bring it to SAP standards.
SAP has an assistant now - SAP recently announced its assistant - SAP CoPilot, it was demoed in the keynote, and comes from he Fiori team. It seems the team is a pursuing an open architecture, e.g. keeping their options open when it comes to speech recognition platforms. But it is early days, good to see SAP looking at this important space.
S/4HANA makes progress – SAP keeps pushing forward with S/4HANA both on premises and in the cloud, with the major functional piece that was still missing with Manufacturing coming soon in 2017.
SAP and Apple – The first deliverables of the partnership both vendors announced at Sapphire in May of this year are now available, there is a HCP SDK for iOS, both vendors did their first academy training partners on the SDK and shared that precision tool manufacturer MAPAL is part of the early adopter program.

MyPOV

From an announcement perspective, a very good TechEd for SAP, the product related announcements eclipsed what was announced at Sapphire this year. The keynote felt at times more like a Sapphire than a TechEd demo. But sometimes development cycles and marketing calendar are not on the same takt. Nothing a vendor can do and holding back is not an option, given the demands from enterprises. SAP could have stressed developer aspects / experience / side more, given the audience. But literally every major product line had substantial, architectural announcements, from the ‘sundeck’ of S/4HANA to the engine room with HANA. The new container and BYOL developer options for HANA and HCP stand out in my view. Good progress from SAP on the IoT side, too – where the purpose-built solutions got an important new facet with the digital twin. Good to see the push for machine learning – across multiple products, an area that SAP needs to move fast in, and has started now.

On the concern side SAP still needs to extend its reach to Hadoop natured storage options. In memory – no matter if with HANA or Vora / Spark remains intuitively cost prohibitive for customers to build next generation applications with SAP, as they all have a not sizeable at design time, not predictable data storage aspect. To be fair SAP acquired Altiscale recently, which could be a key enabler. But the lack of a Hadoop service from SAP hurts SAP on all levels – as a platform for both HANA and HCP, when building solutions as for IoT, when being a strategic partner, when building higher level constructs in BI / Analytics and OLTP applications and so on. Not to mention customer who have to figure this out themselves. The other source of likely confusion is between HANA Platform and HANA Cloud Platform. Agreed it is important to know that enterprises can build on HANA only if desired, but even Oracle ‘lumps’ the database into the PaaS layer. Similar challenges exist with the Hybris YaaS service vs. HANA see both on the ESA announcement. To the market, customers and prospects it doesn’t matter who build this at SAP, messaging, pricing need to be simple for enterprises not to lose time when looking at SAP development tools. Time for some message cleanup.

But overall good to see the progress on all fronts. Almost ironical that in the year where SAP started to partner for cloud IaaS (e.g. with Microsoft Azure and AWS Cloud) its up the stack products have found cloud stride in all regards, vision, speed of delivery and messaging. Exciting times ahead, stay tuned.

SAP to unveil HANA 2

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

SAP kicked off its European Edition of its developer conference TechEd in Barcelona today, and the big news was the announcement of SAP HANA 2.

Definitively work our customary news analysis (check out my tweets, too as I am attending the conference) it can be found here:

BARCELONA, Spain — Nov. 8, 2016 — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced SAP® HANA 2, the next-generation of the SAP HANA platform optimized for innovation. SAP HANA 2 will include and extend the proven technology from the first release of SAP’s breakthrough in-memory platform to provide a new foundation for digital transformation. In addition, new SAP HANA microservices in the cloud are available via SAP Hybris as a Service (YaaS) to spur developer innovation by embedding richer insight into modern applications. These announcements were made at SAP TechEd, being held November 8-10 in Barcelona.

MyPOV – Interesting that SAP Hybris is part of the first paragraph, but that was to be anticipated from Sapphire, where SAP discovered its new love affair with micro services. The ‘include and extend’ reads like a ‘fork’ in the product line – but let’s read on.

“SAP pioneered in-memory computing with the launch of SAP HANA in 2010 and throughout our journey we have driven breakthrough innovation on a highly stable core data platform for our customers,” said Bernd Leukert, member of the Executive Board, Products & Innovation, SAP SE. “The release of SAP HANA 2 will mark a milestone in the industry, as it represents the next-generation of SAP HANA that will propel customers toward a successful and prosperous digital future.”

SAP HANA 2 will be released to customers on November 30, 2016. The express edition of SAP HANA 2 will be delivered upon validation shortly after general availability to help organizations jumpstart new development projects. As an innovation platform, SAP HANA 2 will deliver technology enhancements twice a year to support agile IT.

MyPOV – Kudos for SAP to provide a hard date for RTC, and for shipping the express edition that is key for customer and prospect sandbox activities. Embedded also that HANA 2 will have new capabilities twice a year – a usual pace these days – but a pace that is possibly too fast for customers who do not need new features and want to run in production and now can stay on SPS12 for about 3 years.

Planned new key features and enhancements to help IT transform include:
• Database Management – IT organizations will be able to ensure business continuity with enhanced high-availability, security, workload management, and administration enhancements. For example, the new active / active read-enabled option will enable IT organizations to leverage secondary systems – previously used only for system replication – to offload read-intensive workloads for improved operations.

MyPOV – Always good to see SAP adding capabilities in Data Management, an era where the relatively you HANA product – now a first grader – was behind the university student or seasoned professionals (pardon the age comparison between database product and humans, but it illustrates the difference well) and need to catch up. Interesting that read performance gets mentioned here.

• Data Management – Businesses are expected to leverage all data regardless of where it resides with enhancements to enterprise modeling, data integration, data quality and tiered storage. For example, the new SAP Enterprise Architecture Designer, Edition for SAP HANA is a Web-based solution that will allow IT organizations to manage complex information architectures and visualize the potential impact of new technologies before they are implemented.

MyPOV – Same as Database Management – good to see SAP adding capabilities in the Data Management area. Looking forward to see the Enterprise Architecture Designer.

• Analytical Intelligence – Developers are projected to embed rich insight into applications with enhanced analytical processing engines for text, spatial, graph and streaming data. For example, new algorithms for classification, association, time series and regression have been added to the predictive analytics library, which will empower data scientists to discover new patterns and incorporate machine learning in custom applications.

MyPOV – Very important additions for HANA overall, an area where it needed to get stronger, with this release HANA gets to par with other database options for next generation applications.

• Application Development – Developers are expected to build and deploy next-generation applications with enhanced capabilities for the application server, development tools and languages. For example, Bring your own Language support provides a choice of additional third party build packs and runtimes that can be used within the SAP HANA extended application services, advanced model. Also, a new file processor API will enable developers to extract text or metadata from documents for delivering deeper insights.

MyPOV – BYOL is big news for HANA, and a good move by SAP. Look forward to check out the file processor at TechEd this week.

New SAP HANA Microservices in the Cloud
Users of cloud-based microservices powered by SAP HANA can enhance applications with analytical insight with simple APIs using any language or development platform.
The new cloud services include:
• Entity extraction, fact extraction and linguistic analysis: Use text data processing capabilities of a managed SAP HANA instance in the cloud for application enhancement with natural language processing.

MyPOV – Good to see capabilities that the SAP Hybris teams has developed to run the product on HANA – now finding their way to public consumption with HANA 2. NLP is a key component of next generation applications as voice is quickly becoming the new UI.

• Earth Observation Analysis service (beta): Co-innovated with European Space Agency (ESA) and based on the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) EO-WCS standard, this microservice accesses satellite data from ESA and uses SAP HANA spatial processing in the cloud. The new service was announced today in conjunction with Munich RE, for delivering real-time and historic information about vegetation, water, soil and other spectral indexes. […]

MyPOV – Always good to see co-innovation project assets making it into project, in this case it is good to see not only the co-innovator (ESA) but also a first adopter (Munich Re) on the press release.

Overall MyPOV

Always good to see vendors innovating and today it is SAP with HANA 2. Likely, the background of the move is a positive one: HANA has now been adopted by so many customers that run HANA based applications in production, that they want SAP to slow down and keep a working release stable and running. On the flip side SAP cannot rest idle, and other customers (sometimes even the same one) want SAP to keep innovating and build new capabilities into HANA at rapid space. So SAP has gone back to the old and proven trick of all enterprise software vendors of providing two releases – a stable one for production at the current state -and a rapid evolving one with HANA 2. And it looks like SAP got the priorities for HANA 2 right with Data and Database Management, Analytics and better developer support.

On the concern side one could say that is is ‘just’ a glorified fork (physical and / or logical) tine in the HANA product, with HANA 2 capabilities just being what would have come in SP13 (more or less). A true new platform would have been for SAP to embrace, endorse and extend Hadoop – running on all media – not just in memory, but SSD, spinning rust (aka HDD) etc. But what has not happened can still come…

Overall a good move by SAP, that helps customers to try out HANA with the Express Edition, stabilize and run in production with HANA SP12 and go on innovating with HANA2. And listening and helping out customers is not a bad path for anyone in enterprise software. Let’s check how each three will be adopted, stay tuned.

Microsoft launches Teams

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

We had the opportunity to attend the satellite location of the Microsoft Teams launch event in San Francisco on November 2nd 2016. The event was held at the Xbox Lounge on Bryant Street, always a grungy location for events like this.

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

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

First Take - Microsoft discovers teams - launches Microsoft Teams from Holger Mueller

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

Substantial V1 for Team Work - Obviously this is a version 1 for Microsoft, but it is not a quickly clobbered together effort, but a substantial new member of the Office product Family. Though I got not confirmation from Microsoft, Teams fells like a new incarnation of Skype, albeit much improved. But the native Chat as well as synchronous communication capability (ad hoc calls video conference) all point to that. Then Microsoft has created a well designed feed control – staple for any collaboration application today. It looks and felt (from a little product usage) like a well workable implementation of team collaboration and chat.

Suite level synergies – As all suite vendors do, Microsoft showed deep integration in other products, mostly the Office capabilities. Starting with the Outlook Calendar – though Microsoft decided to call it Meetings. And with OneNote, Graph and other Office members (of course Word, Excel and PowerPoint cannot be missed), Teams gives Office users what Office users know. Integration with PowerBI shows that there is more than ‘just’ Office to work with in Teams, and though not confirmed, one can expect Dynamics products to be exposed in Teams, sooner than later, too. But it is important to see that Microsoft has kept the product open and vendors like Asana and ZenDesk attended and have built integration into Teams. No surprise Microsoft stressed security – something customers do expect as a table stake, more a positive surprise was that Compliance was an emphasis, which is a welcome surprise to hear from Microsoft. And of course, it is the ‘Fall of AI’ – so bots are not missing, we e.g. saw the Polly and WhoIs bots at work in the chats. Lastly good to see – and the benefit of being a large enterprise vendor – Teams is available with a pretty global rollout in all major markets – right from the get go.

One more place to check things… - With Teams Microsoft created another gravity point for enterprise users to check for information and if anything is needed from them… Add that to Outlook and if a full Microsoft shop, Yammer. Over time Microsoft will and can bring this together, my guess will be in Outlook, as email gravity is expected to be the biggest (at least as I see the future). But for now the elephant in the room is Slack and similar vendors, who all get a lot of usage by users being tired of email – so Microsoft had to come to the independent, team collaboration product, to bring the fight to them. More importantly Teams give pro Microsoft minded enterprises decision makers a product that they will ask users to look at first. And then there are the 84M+ Office users who may just ‘bump’ into Teams. Over all these skirmishes and realizations, the downside of checking two places will be swept under the rug for a few years, I guess.

MyPOV

Good to see Microsoft tackling productivity, especially for teams that have been under supported in the past. It makes sense that Microsoft maintains the ‘toolkit’ philosophy as both Nadella and Koenigsbauer mentioned multiple times, 85M+ office users will not work in only one, pre-conceived way. And Microsoft is pulling the card of the large suite level vendors, who are loosing users and mindshare with point solution vendors – build a good version 1, bring the fight to the point solution, use the ‘higher ground’ of well know and liked products (e.g. OneNote, Word), stress security, roll the product out globally (nice utilization of the Office infrastructure on Azure), bundle it into the suite (Office) and make it – free. Microsoft has played all this right, and I predict it will reduce the speed of point solutions in the Microsoft productivity suite install base.

On the concern side, Microsoft is.. Microsoft. Users who for whatever reason want to escape the vendor’s products will always be at hand. A lot of the success of the chat collaboration solutions has been the desire to ‘do less email’ – but ultimately everything gets pulled back to email. Thorough, deep innovation in email (Outlook) is what is the long game, if not the war for productivity suites. AI, Robots, voice all play a role to get business users to new productivity levels. By taking the fight to point solutions, Microsoft may lose the eye on the real prize – collaborative productivity across all channels that the 21st century knowledge worker needs. But it is too early to call that, just an area to keep an eye on. The good news is that more competition in a market has never hurt the users, so expect more and better competition for team collaboration / productivity solutions out of the Microsoft Teams launch.

For now good news for Microsoft users and Microsoft using enterprises, an Office / Outlook integrated solutions is there with Teams now. True and hyped productivity from chat collaboration clients do not need to come from a 3rd party necessarily anymore. And Teams is broadly available for beta and soon GA – so time to give it a shot.

Also don't miss my colleague Alan Lepofsky's take on Microsoft Teams - you can find it here.

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

More on Microsoft:

News Analysis - Microsoft announces SAP's choice of Azure to help enterprises transform HR - The SaaS land grab is on - read here
First Take - Microsoft Ignite - AI, Adobe and FPGA [From the Fences] - read here
News Analysis - GE and Microsoft partner to bring Predix to Azure - Multi-Cloud becomes tangible for IoT - read here
Market Move - Microsoft acquired Linked - Tons of synergies, start with Cortana, maybe too many - read here
News Analysis - Microsoft opens Windows Holographic to partners for a new era of mixed reality - read here
News Analysis - SAP and Microsoft usher in new era of partnership to accelerate digital transformation in the cloud - read here
Musings - Will Microsoft's Hololens transform the Future of Work? Read here
Event Report - Microsoft Build 2016 - A platform vision and plenty of tools for next generation applications - read here
First Take - Microsoft Build 2016 - Day 1 Keynote Takeaways - read here
Event Preview - Microsoft Build 2016 - Top 3 Things to watch for developers, managers and execs... read here
News Analysis - Microsoft - New Hybrid Offerings Deliver Bottomless Capacity for Today's Data Explosion - read here
News Analysis - Welcoming the Xamarin team to Microsoft - read here
News Analysis - Microsoft announcements at Convergence Barcelona - Office365. Dynamics CRM and Power Apps
News Analysis - Microsoft expands Azure Data Lake to unleash big data productivity - Good move - time to catch up - read here
News Analysis - Microsoft and Salesforce Strengthen Strategic Partnership at Dreamforce 2015 - Good for joint customers - read here
News Analyis - NetSuite announced Cloud Alliance with Microsoft - read here
Event Report - Microsoft Build - Microsoft really wants to make developers' lives easier - read here
First Hand with Microsoft Hololens - read here
Event Report - Microsoft TechEd - Top 3 Enterprise takeaways - read here
First Take - Microsoft discovers data ambience and delivers an organic approach to in memory database - read here
Event Report - Microsoft Build - Azure grows and blossoms - enough for enterprises (yet)? Read here.
Event Report - Microsoft Build Day 1 Keynote - Top Enterprise Takeaways - read here.
Microsoft gets even more serious about devices - acquire Nokia - read here.
Microsoft does not need one new CEO - but six - read here.
Microsoft makes the cloud a platform play - Or: Azure and her 7 friends - read here.
How the Cloud can make the unlikeliest bedfellows - read here.
How hard is multi-channel CRM in 2013? - Read here.
How hard is it to install Office 365? Or: The harsh reality of customer support - read here.

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

Future of Work Chief People Officer

Read more about Microsoft launches Teams

Microsoft Enters The Group Chat Market with Microsoft Teams

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…...

Today in NYC Microsoft announced the preview version of Microsoft Teams, their new Group Messaging application.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Office CVP Kirk Koenigsbauer discussed how communication is changing to be more conversational, and Teams is focused on providing a more modern chat centric approach to collaboration.

"We built Microsoft Teams because at Microsoft we see both tremendous opportunity and tremendous change in how people and teams get work done. More transparency and openness in decision making. Flatter organizational structures to keep information flowing, and team members working from everywhere. With Microsoft Teams, we aspire to create a more open, digital environment that can meet the evolving and diverse needs of today’s teams. Microsoft Teams fosters easy connection and conversation to help people build relationships. One that makes work visible, integrated, and accessible across the team, so everyone can stay in the know."

MyPOV: Microsoft already has quite a complex portfolio of communication and collaboration products including Yammer, (Office 365) Outlook Groups, Skype and even GroupMe. Microsoft’s stance on this is that different people/teams work in different ways, and each tool is designed for different needs and audiences. After speaking with several Constellation Research clients who use Office 365, as well as customers attending Microsoft’s Ignite Conference, my analysis is that customers don’t agree. There is too much overlap, which causes training issues (which tool do I use and when) and information silos (conversations in one place but not in another). But having too many options is a better problem to have than not having any.

Microsoft has done a wonderful job over the last 2-3 years at enhancing the Office 365 portfolio, but they need to narrow down the communication choices, not increase them. Microsoft Teams could be the answer. If Microsoft decides that Teams is the priority going forward, and focuses on making Teams integrated across the complete Office 365 portfolio, the result would be a more consistent and seamless experience, where information is available to the right people within the right context.

A Highly Competitive Market

It’s impossible to have a conversation about Group Messaging without mentioning the hottest vendor in the market, Slack. Slack now claims 4 million active daily users, and is the vendor that kick-started the “Group Messaging” revolution. Is Slack worried about Microsoft Teams, apparently not based on today’s "Dear Microsoft,” blog post, where they emphasize "Slack is here to stay"

But Slack is far from alone in this space. There are so many choices in Group Messaging now that Constellation Research has divided them into two categories:
- Constellation ShortList™ Enterprise Group Messaging: Standalone, including: Flowdock, Glip, HiBox, HipChat and Zinc.
- Constellation ShortList™ Enterprise Group Messaging: Unified Communication, including: ALE Rainbow, Avaya Aura, Cisco Spark, Mitel MiTeam, Unify Circuit, Shortel Connect.

Adding to this complex market are IBM’s recently announced preview of Watson Workspace, Workplace by Facebook, and Google’s combination of messaging clients, Duo and Allo.

With so many choices, competitive differentiation rarely comes down to a simple checklist of features. Some of the key items that make a product successful are:

- the size of its partner ecosystem and the breadth/completeness of its product integrations
- the security/scalability of its infrastructure
- the domain experience it provides for specific industry/vertical use-cases
- the user interface/experience

As for partner ecosystem, Microsoft states: "We have over 70 Connectors and 85 Bots to date.”, which is similar to Cisco announcement of 70+ partners in their new Spark Depot (app

As for security: Microsoft states: "Microsoft Teams provides built-in security and compliance that businesses require. It meets a broad set of global compliance and data protection requirements, including ISO 27001 and 27018, SOC 1 and SOC 2, HIPPA, EU Model Clauses and more. Data is encrypted at all times, with full transparency into where data is stored. And, multi-factor authentication provides enhanced identity protection to ensure data stays safe within the team."

With respect to user interface, Microsoft is follow’s Slack’s lead by making sure Teams has an element of fun to it. They provide several emoji and gifs, all of which are customizable.

Recommendations

1) Microsoft needs to focus on the integration of Teams with the rest of the Office 365 portfolio. They are off to a good start, already showing how each Team includes OneDrive, OneNote and Planner. They now need to focus on Microsoft Dynamics integration to show how business processes and workflows can be a seamless part of the Team experience.

2) Since Teams is built on Skype, then need to showcase the seamless transitions from text based chat to 1:1 or group voice or video calls. No vendor has really nailed the “improve meeting experience”, perhaps this is Microsoft’s onramp to working on that challenge.

3) One of Microsoft's strengths (and revenue streams) continues to be the creation of Office documents (Word, PowerPoint, Excel). Microsoft needs to make sure Teams has the most seamless and powerful team collaboration experience around content creation, sharing, coauthoring, publishing and discovery of any product out there.

4) They need to leverage the new cognitive computing/AI features of Microsoft Cortana to automate/augment as many team collaboration processes as possible.

5) Make the content in Teams actionable. One of the issues with open and transparent collaboration is that it quickly gets noisy and people get lost and overwhelmed. Microsoft needs to make sure posts in Teams can be linked to tasks in Planner (for team) and Wunderlist (for personal).

6) Consolidation. Hopefully Microsoft will put a stake in the ground, pull off the bandaid and focus on reducing the complexity and overlap of their portfolio. If that means sunsetting some products, then they should do so.

It’s an exciting team for reinventing personal productivity and team collaboration, and Microsoft has a strong incumbent base to work with and grow, but the competition from standalone vendors like Slack, to unified communication vendors like Cisco, and the large collaboration vendors like Google and IBM are not sitting still.

Future of Work

Read more about Microsoft Enters The Group Chat Market with Microsoft Teams

Unveiling the Constellation ShortList for the Top IPaaS Offerings

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!   ...

Constellation Research estimates that by 2020, at least 60 percent of the data considered to be mission-critical will live outside of the corporate firewall instead of in on-premises data centers. This trend has accelerated through the mobile, social and big data movements, with data and applications increasingly living and running outside of the four walls of the enterprise. As organizations shift from ownership to access, artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of things (IOT), and block chain will all require contextual insights to be delivered at the speed of thought.

Against this backdrop, Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS) is emerging as a one-stop, cloud-based choice for supporting both data integration and application integration to help address the new requirements and challenges that organizations face. IPaaS provides the foundational and mission-critical capabilities required to support disruptive business models. Today, we’re releasing the top IPaaS vendors in the Constellation ShortList:

Dell Boomi
Informatica
Jitterbit
MuleSoft
SnapLogic

Over the past few weeks, we’ve launched more than 30 lists in our new Constellation ShortList program, which aims to help make the buying decisions easier for companies looking to implement disruptive technology in their organizations. Today, we also released the following lists:

If you missed the other announcements, feel free to check out our full library for this program here. When you’re ready, feel free to contact us to connect with the authoring analyst who can then help personalize the vendor selection process.

Read more about Unveiling the Constellation ShortList for the Top IPaaS Offerings

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