DisrupTV: Disrupting Business Models with Strategic Customer Success Management

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!   ...

Buying has changed, but selling hasn't. This is a big problem.

According to Michael Fauscette, chief research officer at G2 Crowd, 62% of B2B software buyers and end users will only contact a vendor’s sales team after they already made their purchasing decision. Yikes! How can competitive companies (potentially your business) even compete?

Increasing Power of the Customer

Customers are conditioned to look at reviews for making personal decisions. For Amazon’s Prime Day, for example, we look through the positive and negative reviews before buying a Roomba, Roku TV or other special deal. Or if we want to try a new restaurant, we jump over to Yelp to validate our decision. Fauscette explained that buyers want to get information from people that are like them. Relevance, timeliness and context are key to feeling confident about decisions.

Similarly for B2B and other technology purchases, G2 Crowd focuses on providing the right type of data and context for buyers and end users as they determine and/or validate their purchasing choices. They want to establish a real connection with other people from similar companies who are looking to solve the same types of problems. The increased value of crowdsourcing and brand advocacy requires companies to reevaluate their selling strategies based on the new mindsets of buyers.

Elevating Focus on Customer Success Management

As business models continue to shift, companies need to think differently about the way they sell. It’s no longer “sell and move on.”

Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, discussed the growing need for effective customer success management (CSM) with the changing buying/selling relationship. Customers have a lot more power and information available to them than in the past - knowledge is power, right? Subscription-based companies are continually accountable for providing value to their customers, or they risk having customers sign with other companies when their subscriptions end.

The importance of CSM has evolved within companies, and now the CEO and board members are taking note of how to better implement and re-energize these programs. In addition to the key players on the CSM initiative, to scale and offer effective CSM, technology investments are key.

Changing Technology Evolving the Customer Experience

Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, explained that companies are thinking more about how to use data to better serve and delight their customers, and are implementing technologies and trends, such as Internet of Things (IoT), to carry out these goals. With your product, you could leverage sensors to determine where, what, how, and when a customer uses it. This data creates the “algorithm of you (the customer)” and helps companies better understand their audiences to transform and build their services around what customers actually want.

At the end of the day, all companies should strive to make engagement and purchasing as frictionless as possible for customers. Long-term strategies should focus on this flow to keep the value and experience high. Dr. Natalie also highlighted the importance of saying “thank you.” For customers and employees, that message of gratitude can go a long way and make the difference in this fast-moving digital economy.

Check out the DisrupTV video below for the full interviews. Be sure to catch DisrupTV live every Friday at 11 a.m. PT on Blab.

DisrupTV Episode 0023: Featuring Michael Fauscette, Nick Mehta & Dr. Natalie Petouhoff from Constellation Research on Vimeo.

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Implementing Customer Experience, Cloud, IOT or Any Technology Project? Why Will it Fail.

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

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

Obviously no one plans on implementing a project that will fail. However, statistics show that over the past 20 years a very large percentage of technology projects do fail to result in the business outcomes that they were expected to meet. The real issue is that leading change (implementing new technology, whether it be CX, transitioning to the cloud, IoT, etc…) is different than the role of leading in general. But this point is often overlooked or some leaders don’t realize how big a difference there is in leading change compared to their every day leadership job.

The reasons projects often fail and the need for orchestrating customer experience projects using organizational change management range from:

Projects ran over budget, were late, or never completed.
Projects were attempted more than once because initial efforts failed.
Only a small part of the organization adopted the new processes or systems.
When the project went live, critical business systems halted, causing loss of revenue, increased costs, dissatisfied customers and frustrated employees.
Parts of the business (or possibly the entire organization) eventually reverted to the old way of doing things.
The return on investment (ROI) and/or stated benefits were never realized.
The project cost the business more money than it saved or generated.

Our research shows that there are seven steps for leaders of change leaders can use to be more successful.

Practice #1 – Understand the Business Case for Change

Practice #2 – Start with the Executive Team: Move It from Involved to Engaged

Practice #3 – Engage All Leaders and Prepare Them for the Journey

Practice #4 – Build a Broad Understanding of the Change Process

Practice #5 – Evaluate and Tailor the Change Effort

Practice #6 – Develop Adaptive Leadership Skills in Change Leaders

Practice #7 – Create Change Leadership Plans

Don’t become one of the statistics of failed projects. There are best practices that work.

@DrNatalie Petouhoff, VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research

Covering Customer-Facing Applications to Create Awesome Customer Experiences

Next-Generation Customer Experience Chief Customer Officer

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GE and Microsoft partner to bring Predix to Azure - Multi-Cloud becomes tangible for IoT

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…...

Microsoft is having its third large customer event of the year in Toronto right now, the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) and as to be expected there are a number of announcements to be made. Given its ramifications, I picked the announcement of both GE and Microsoft to bring the GE PaaS Predix to the Microsoft IaaS, Azure.

So let’s take apart the press release in our customary style it can be found here:

TORONTO — July 11, 2016 — GE (NYSE: GE) and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: “MSFT”) today announced a partnership that will make GE’s Predix platform for the Industrial Internet available on the Microsoft Azure cloud for industrial businesses. The move marks the first step in a broad strategic collaboration between the two companies, which will allow customers around the world to capture intelligence from their industrial assets and take advantage of Microsoft’s enterprise cloud applications.

MyPOV – Good summary, also makes right away clear that GE and Microsoft are partnering for something bigger and brining Predix to Azure was only one part of the partnership... more on that in the analysis below.

[…] As businesses look to connect their industrial machines from the edge to the cloud, bringing Predix to Azure gives customers greater choice and flexibility to securely harness the power of data from machines and systems of intelligence. Companies worldwide will be able to bridge the divide between the operational and information technologies that make up the Industrial Internet of Things.

MyPOV – Good to see a description of the opportunity, and stating the main benefit for customers, more choice and flexibility – always a win for customers. Microsoft also got mention on what the company is banking a lot (and CEO Nadella talks about) – systems of intelligence. And GE got in the IoT moniker of the ‘Industrial Internet of Things’.

“Connecting industrial machines to the internet through the cloud is a huge step toward simplifying business processes and reimagining how work gets done,” said Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE. “GE is helping its customers extract value from the vast quantities of data coming out of those machines and is building an ecosystem of industry-leading partners like Microsoft that will allow the Industrial Internet to thrive on a global scale.”

MyPOV – Good quote by Immelt, maybe a tad too much on the information discovery side, less on that aspect that IoT platforms need to (and do) steer the things, too. But it maybe the extent of the partnership with Microsoft at the moment.

As the shift to a more industrialized information age continues, the opportunity to deliver new digital solutions, insights and increased efficiencies is accelerating the need for higher level services. GE’s Predix platform is already helping industrial customers rapidly build, securely deploy and effectively operate industrial applications. Bringing Predix to Azure means those same customers will now have access to additional capabilities such as natural language technology, artificial intelligence, advanced data visualization and enterprise application integration.

MyPOV – And here we read what Predix really is – a purpose built PaaS for IoT. And good to see the attraction to Azure comes from natural language technology, AI, visualization, and enterprise application integration. The latter comes to a certain point as a surprise, but interesting it found it in the press release.

Azure will support the growth of the entire industrial IoT ecosystem by offering Predix customers access to the largest cloud footprint available today, along with data sovereignty, hybrid capabilities, and advanced developer and data services. In addition, GE and Microsoft plan to integrate Predix with Azure IoT Suite and Cortana Intelligence Suite along with Microsoft business applications, such as Office 365, Dynamics 365 and Power BI, in order to connect industrial data with business processes and analytics.

MyPOV – Good to see more specifics and glad to see that data sovereignty found a mention, a huge concern on the right side of the Atlantic, and an area to which Microsoft has paid a lot of attention. Also good to see the Azure IoT Suite mentioned, anything else would have been an area of concern, but this means that lower level connectivity to things will come via / through Azure. No surprise on Cortana Intelligence Suite, that was already pre viewed earlier in the press release. And certainly no surprise on Office 365, Dynamics 365 (with new 365 addition!) as well as Power BI. This is ‘music’ to the partners at WPC.

“Every industry and every company around the world is being transformed by digital technology,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. “Working with companies like GE, we can reach a new set of customers to help them accelerate their transformation across every line of business — from the factory floor to smart buildings.”

MyPOV – Good quote for Nadella, surprisingly candid – that the partnership is helping Microsoft to reach new customers. Seldom CEOs are so clear, good to see.

A developer preview will be released toward the end of 2016, and Predix on Azure will be commercially available by the second quarter of 2017. More information about Microsoft and GE’s partnership will be shared at Predix Transform, July 25–27 in Las Vegas, and Minds + Machines, Nov. 15–16 in San Francisco.

MyPOV – Good to see tangible time lines and milestones in a press release. De facto this means that substantial deployments of the partnership will be out into 2017.

Overall MyPOV

This is the second ‘mega’ partnership Microsoft announces – after the Azure partnership with SAP, the focus with GE though is on next generation applications, building IoT solutions with GE’s Predix. Both partnerships are important for Microsoft as they bring ‘load’ to Azure, and load is what power the economics of scale that make IaaS providers competitive. Microsoft needs these partnerships to fuel Azure growth post the era of the current number one growth engine for Azure – Office conversions.

For GE it is likely a good move, after partnering with AWS for IaaS earlier, Predix becomes effectively ‘multi cloud’, something enterprise want from a multitude of benefits: Commercial acumen, data sovereignty challenges, performance, are just the first that come to mind. From an overall uptake of Predix, the move comes early, as adding another IaaS means more testing, Q&A and documentation efforts. And using some of the Microsoft specific advantages, e.g. in AI, Speech and Machine Learning, means that GE will have to find a way to fork / abstract code for Predix. Something GE would ultimately have to do, but the point comes early in the life of Predix and the ‘tax’ for the additional deployment would have to ‘paid’ from now on. On the flipside this would have to happen sooner than later anyway and GE has the deep pockets on its quest to become a double digit billion software company, so not too much of a concern.

Unconfirmed on the technical details – so we are speculating here – the big winner behind the scenes is Pivotal / CloudFoundry, in which both GE and Microsoft are investors. As CloudFoundry provides cloud portability / multi cloud support this is going to be key benefit and showcase for the PaaS vendor’s deployment capabilities.

The winner of all of this are enterprises that are looking to fuel their next generation application platform needs with the help of GE and Microsoft. A purpose built PaaS platform like Predix cannot be passed over easily by CxOs, now that Predix gains another deployment IaaS, things look even more compelling for the platform. Especially global enterprise know that the rollout of the top 3 IaaS players with AWS, Microsoft and Google does not cover the world well enough form both a performance (that matters more to IoT) and data sovereignty (that matters less to IoT, as legislatures are just getting up to speed on the Safe Harbor replacement Privacy Shield these days). And most large enterprises are already Microsoft customers, so when they show interest into IoT, time to negotiate and throw in some Azure credits for this (which we expect Microsoft to possible even to proactively). The only concern at the moment is the relatively far out timeline with end of 2016 – making 2017 the realistic product deployment, but enterprises can start with Predix now – deploy e.g. on AWS and then later to Azure, true multi-cloud in the plans.

So for now congrats to both vendors on a key partnership, with a not mentioned (CloudFoundry) 3rd party laughing on the sidelines of this press release.

Unit4 Acquires Prevero - Analysis

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Earlier today Unit4 surprised with a ‘summer’ acquisition – wisely timed after end of the European soccer championships – which can always be a major distraction on the ‘old’ continent – of prevero, a German maker of BI and CPM products. (The marketing and aesthetically inclined notice the color match).

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

Utrecht, Netherlands & Munich, Germany, July 11, 2016 – Unit4, a fast growing leader in enterprise applications for service organizations, has acquired prevero, a leading provider of Corporate Performance Management (CPM) and Business Intelligence (BI) solutions. prevero helps more than 4,000 international clients optimize their financial and operational functions, using business data to uncover deep insight and take quick action.

MyPOV – Good summary that describes what has happened. Prevero has been working in Germany since the 90ies and has accumulated a veritable ‘who is who’ of clients in the German speaking parts of Europe.

prevero enables business leaders to align strategy, finance and operations by making smart decisions in every part of their business. Strong CPM and BI offerings complement Unit4’s self-driving business solutions for services organizations, enabling customers to model service delivery around insightful strategic and operational data. Key capabilities of the prevero suite include:
• Predictive analytics and business insights
• Modelling and simulations
• Ubiquitous access to information via in-memory technology
• Corporate-wide collaboration and planning
• Pre-built content for CxO offices and specific verticals

MyPOV - A good collection on what attracted Unit4. Planning and analysis are getting ever more complex these days and by expanding its functional footprint into CPM, Unit4 becomes more strategic and important to its customers and prospects.

Unit4 and prevero share a focus on delivering powerful industry-specific solutions. Together the companies will focus on extending the functionality and delivering pre-built content for Unit4’s key verticals including education and professional services.

MyPOV – Always good to see the focus on industries. Prevero had to focus on industries as it had taken substantial market share in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, those assets are now valuable for Unit4. The question is of course, how these best practices translate into other European and potentially North American markets. And while prevero has gone beyond Germany with presences in the UK, France, Italy to name a few – it is still early stages for the customer acquisition efforts of the vendor.

prevero is a market leader in the field of CPM and BI, recognized as a visionary in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for strategic CPM suites for the past three years. The solution will be available both standalone and integrated into Unit4’s People Platform technology foundation, delivering customers leading performance management technology with native integration to Unit4’s people-centric enterprise solutions.

MyPOV – Good accolades in the highly fragmented CPM market, the almost has local country champions on Europe. Well described on what makes CPM / BI vendors such attractive target for ‘tuck in’ acquisitions for ERP vendors: Their products are meant to operate stand alone, have integration capabilities and are therefore easily to integrate with other offerings.

“As services organizations face increasing pressure to drive organizational transformation across all functions, CPM and BI are critical to successful strategy execution,” said Stephan Sieber, CEO of Unit4. “This is particularly true for services organizations that need to find new service models and revenue streams. Through intelligent enterprise solutions they can become more strategic and ensure efficiency and excellence in execution. The combination of Unit4 and prevero delivers the best performance management and the best services resource planning, designed with the latest technology to simplify user experience and maximize productivity.”

MyPOV – Good quote from Sieber, describing the opportunity and vision on the road ahead.

“The combination of the two companies will deliver a market leading offering for strategic finance and other business functions, with the infrastructure and scale required for international expansion,” said Alexander Springer, prevero’s co-founder and CEO. “More than ever, services organizations are looking to optimize the performance of their often over-complex financial planning, budgeting and forecasting processes. They are also looking to drive that same kind of insight down to all facets of the organization. As part of Unit4, we will massively improve our ability to bring these capabilities to organizations globally.” […]

MyPOV – And Springer shares the ‘business plan’ – bring prevero’s capabilities to the global Unit4 customer base.

Overall MyPOV

CPM, BI and other horizontal players are always an interesting acquisition target for suite level ERP players, who lack the capabilities, but may need a jolt of fresh technology or simply more functionality. They are attractive as they immediately create a more strategic conversation topic with customers, something that never hurts an enterprise software vendor – as long as the conversation can lead to respectable sales and the acquired product is viable. On both of the latter points there can be little doubt on the prevero product side, given a proven track record with demanding German customers. What further helps these acquisitions is that CPM / BI vendors assume an integration scenario for their products to thrive, which helps to add them to an ERP vendor install base, we expect the same to happen with prevero and Unit4. And lastly a vendor like prevero can help create insights across multiple Unit4 products and version, something that customers always appreciated, so plenty of synergy and why the acquisition of prevero by Unit4 is a good move.

On the concern side, an acquisition is an acquisition – so key people need to be retained, the architectures and roadmaps harmonized, the sales capabilities expanded and executed. Nothing that we expect the Unit4 management team to be challenged with too much, but still areas end users will want to watch to monitor post acquisition progress.

But for now congrats to Unit4 to the acquisition of prevero, Unit4 customers get access to more and interesting BI and CPM capabilities, some interesting architecture (in memory) – both something that never hurts, and Unit4 gains a larger footprint and a more strategic exposure to the CxOs of its customers. We will be watching.

Digital Transformation Best Practices: Five Critical Success Factors

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…...

Digital Transformation Requires Five Critical Success Factors

Over the past 24 months, Constellation’s clients have experienced closer collaboration between clients and their software vendors and service providers to craft solutions that may not have existed in the past. This level of collaboration reflects the need for not only strategic differentiation, but also the desire to transform business models.

From over 100 client conversations, presentations at Constellation’s Connected Enterprise event, and at various Constellation innovation summits and design sessions, Constellation sees five success factors required for digital transformation among the client, software vendors, and service providers (see Figure 1):

Figure 1. Five Critical Success Factors To Digital Transformation

@Rwang0 5 Steps to #DigitalTransformation

Craft a cultural renaissance. Successful organizations drive digital transformation from the board level on down. Innovation must not come to a halt after a project has been completed. Organizations who have mastered digital transformation build a continuous pipeline of innovation and a deep bench of execution. While most organizations start this process by hiring a chief digital officer to lead the charge, the long term goal is to infuse a digital DNA among all executives and digitally enable CXO’s for success.
Start with design thinking. When leaders unlock solutions to questions that never would have been asked, they start the process of design thinking. By taking an empathetic approach, organizations can think outside the box. To accelerate the process, leaders must build diversity through digital artisans. If there are too many left brain folks, balance out the team with right brain folks. Got a lot of architects, balance out the team with an ethnographer or UX designer. When leaders build a diversity of thought processes, sparks of innovation serve as catalysts to enable transformation.
Commit to business model disruption. With 52% of the Fortune 500 merged, acquired, and bankrupt since 2000, success requires a rethink of the core mission and business model of the organization. In 2015, 55% of the Fortune 500 failed to make a profit. The reality – digital darwinism is unkind to those who wait. The winners have built digital business models. In fact, this is not a digital divide but a winner takes all market. In this post-sale, on-demand, attention economy, digital transformation is more than a technology shift, it’s about transforming business models and how organizations and brands engage. Success requires building trust and authenticity of the brand, designing business models to support the brand, and then building products, services, experiences, and outcomes that support the business models.
Apply a form follows functions approach for technology adoption. Digital technologies play a role in transformation. However, leaders should apply disruptive technologies that support the business model, not the other way around. Given the rapidly shortening life cycle of new technologies, market leaders and fast followers must build both agile frameworks and disposable technologies to address the pace of change.
Institutionalize and incentivize concept to commercialization. With roughly one-third of pilots succeeding and one-fifth of those pilots entering commercialization, moving beyond the pilot requires significant commitment to change. Why Business leaders with profit and loss responsibility often take the safe path despite the successful proof of concept and pilots. They fear failure from loss to their bottom line, potential cannibalization of revenue or market share, and political fallout of a failed project. Successful organizations provide the guard rails to improve the percentage of projects that succeed from concept to commercialization.

Your POV.

How are you preparing for digital transformation? Would you like to hear what other organizations have embarked on? Would you like us to present to your boardroom? Learn how non-digital organizations can apply a road map to disrupt digital businesses in the best-selling Harvard Business Review Press book Disrupting Digital.

Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationR (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) org.

Please let us know if you need help with your Digital Business transformation efforts. Here’s how we can assist:

Developing your digital business strategy
Connecting with other pioneers
Sharing best practices
Vendor selection
Implementation partner selection
Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support
Demystifying software licensing

The post Best Practices: Five Critical Success Factors To Digital Transformation appeared first on A Software Insider's Point of View.

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Ever wondered what apps you plug into an ERP?

Sholto Macpherson

SME Tech Commentator
Digital First

Sholto Macpherson is a business technology journalist and expert on cloud software and services for SMEs. Since June 2011 he has published http://DigitalFirst.com, which explores how SMEs can use the latest cloud technologies and the impact of digital disruption on the accounting industry.Sholto has 14 years’ experience contributing to magazines and websites, radio and TV segments, webinars and conferences on enterprise and SMB technology and the cloud-led productivity revolution. His stories have appeared in national and regional Australian newspapers and industry websites such as CRN.com.au and iTnews.com.au.Sholto won a national IT Journalism award for Best Columnist in 2012 for his Cloud Channel column in CRN Australia magazine on the transition from server software to cloud software…...

Does an ERP even need third-party apps? These business management systems cover everything from CRM to warehouse and project management – they are supposed to be the one app the company needs.

It turns out the answer is a resounding yes. While Xero and QuickBooks Online connect to several hundred apps that do everything from send invoices to tracking timesheets, ERPs attract apps that solve big-company problems.

Strolling around the expo floor at NetSuite’s SuiteWorld I met a gaggle of software companies with fascinating ideas for helping SMEs.

Kyriba

Price: From US$24,000 a year (three year contract)
Website: Kyriba

I had never heard of treasury management before – it’s above my paygrade, as the saying goes. Yet within five minutes of talking to Kyriba, I could see a lot of appeal to manufacturers and retailers in the Asia Pacific and elsewhere.

The use case is for companies with several offices overseas who want to know how much money they have and where.

If your head office is in New Zealand, manufacturing is in China, retail in France and distribution in the US, how do you know if you have enough money to pay your suppliers in each currency and country?

Kyriba shows you your balances, how much you’re paying in interest and services to various banks, and hedges against currency movement. “Companies are worried about two things – overborrowing and underleverage,” says Karthik Manimozhi, VP of worldwide indirect sales. “To sell in the Middle East you need eight banking relationships (with each country) and you need to know how much cash you have in those accounts. You would have to log into each of these portals to see how much they have and review it in Excel.”

Kyriba competes against treasury management modules in big ERPs such as SAP, Oracle and Infor. It uses automated bank feeds, updated several times a day, to monitor movement of receivables and payables.

It can also do automated payment workflows that update to the finance module in NetSuite.

Kyriba has a short overview of what it does (1.50 min.).

Huddle

Price: From US$500/month (for a min. 25 users)
Website: Huddle

Collaboration has to be one of the most abused terms in technology but I have to say this app looks good, demos well and (Hallelujah!) understands mobile. Possibly the most important aspect is looks – if the software is ugly everyone who was not born a geek is going to ignore it.

A collaboration platform with SharePoint in its sights, Huddle is better file sharing and project management in the cloud, with a modern interface and a well-developed mobile app.

Huddle has a relatively low profile given the size of its wins; its largest users include the UK and US governments and the six largest accounting firms in the US. Security is a primary concern and Huddle logs all actions and document changes.

The app can save documents directly from emails in Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Outlook (desktop) and Google Apps, and integrates with Microsoft Active Directory and identity management tool Okta.

Employees at professional services companies typically resort to unsafe methods of sharing files because they hate using Microsoft SharePoint, the dominant enterprise collaboration platform, says CEO Morten Brøgger.

Reasons for not using SharePoint include it takes too long for IT to set up (30%), the rest of the team doesn’t use it (30%), clients don’t use it (20%) and it doesn’t look professional (20%), a survey commissioned by Huddle found.

The program starts at US$20 a user per month with a 25 user minimum. This gives you 100GB file storage and 25 team workspaces.

Here’s a neat overview showing how it works (2 min.).

iCharts

Price: From $US65/user a month
Website: iCharts

Another overused term is Big Data. Now that we have it, people are trying to work out what to do with it. iCharts is a really clever approach to turning Big Data into Something Useful.

NetSuite’s 2015 app of the year, iCharts is a business intelligence dashboard that displays graphs natively inside Netsuite. A user can pull up a NetSuite dashboard showing various metrics in the accounting module and iCharts will invisibly add graphs from data sets stored outside of NetSuite.

The chart builder uses a drag and drop editor and it updates in real-time within NetSuite. The most common use case is companies with separate business systems wanting to perform analysis in one place without exporting and importing large data sets.

iCharts uses Google BigQuery, a cloud-based big data analytics web service designed to process very large, read-only data sets. BigQuery handles databases with billions of rows using a SQL-like syntax.

The possibilities of BigQuery deserves an article on its own. There are many applications for dumping a huge amount of data – or connecting a streaming river of data – and then using a visualisation tool to pull out real-time trends.

iCharts is brand new. It released a NetSuite version in 2014; the standalone BigQuery interface is coming soon. Companies will be able to buy an enterprise version that covers NetSuite and BigQuery together, says Rico Andrade, iCharts’ vice president of marketing.

iCharts has a good testimonial video (3.5 min.) and an overview of how it works (3 min.).

FloDocs

Price: US$3600/year
Website: FloDocs

Workflows are a big area of interest for me right now. Technology on its own is not so useful; it’s the magic about how to make it work for you that really matters.

FloDocs, like iCharts, received a special mention during one of the keynotes at SuiteWorld. It automatically documents all the changes and customisations a company makes to NetSuite, and can set up and enforce policies for making changes.

The classic scenario is when a business user adds a custom field to a NetSuite module. The company needs to know who added the field, whether it’s still required, can it be deleted and what processes does it affect.

The process editor uses swimlane diagrams for high-level design and text-based steps for the details. A NetSuite company could set up a process for credit checks that automatically routes a customer request to a category based on their payment history, number of invoices outstanding, and so on.

FloDocs, a Canadian startup, has a basic intro video about monitoring changes and another about setting up processes. (Note to FloDocs – get some better marketing videos.)

Disclosure: NetSuite paid for Sholto Macpherson’s travel and accommodation to attend SuiteWorld.

For more articles on the cutting edge of accounting technology subscribe to DigitalFirst.com

Future of Work netsuite Chief Financial Officer

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DisrupTV: Digital Transformation Meets the Marketing Disrupters

Aubrey Coggins

Constellation Research

The digital transformation of an organization, company, or industry, requires leadership at the top and within the companyâ€™s â€œfour walls.â€ Over the past few weeks, this theme has appeared through our conversations with key executives and news headlines discussed on our weekly show, DisrupTV.

Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social and author of â€œThe Social Business Imperative,â€ explained that social and digital transformation is a boardroom and core business-model issue. C-Level executives need to be leading these initiatives, starting with personally using the platforms where customers engage every day - e.g., Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter. While not every CEO will be a branded presence, they should understand how people are actually using social media. Unfortunately, if you arenâ€™t using these channels, you are going to be completely out of touch, she warns.

After the leaders actually lead by example, digital transformation must trickle down to the employees. Constellation Researchâ€™s VP and Principal Analysts Alan Lepofsky discussed how skillsets are evolving with the emergence of digitally proficient teams. Facebook, Snapchat - we werenâ€™t using these types of programs in a business sense a few years ago. The bar has been raised, and those â€œsocial media skillsâ€ arenâ€™t a standout any longer; theyâ€™re the baseline for being a competitive employee and company. The future of work requires immersive experiences and an objective.

The digital world is truly making marketing (or all company) programs more meaningful, explained Naveen Rajdev, CMO at Wipro. When reaching out to customers, itâ€™s more than just content marketing. Hereâ€™s a great example: We take thousands of photos but may only print and frame a couple of them. This is their approach with their printed magazine. Take what most important and â€œbeautifulâ€ and share those trends with customers to create content that will educate, encourage and inspire them. Sometimes taking digital principles and applying them back to printed collateral can create something that will really move the needle.

Digital transformation is really a shift in thinking and doing - not just the act of using digital programs themselves. Sunder Sarangan, CMO at Persistent Systems, explained that companies need to shift from the â€œwhatâ€ to â€œhow.â€ CMOs need to stand out and run programs that think about the experience, rather than the outcome of a program. You canâ€™t track metrics if you arenâ€™t implementing smart, relevant programs. Itâ€™s not â€œwhat isâ€ the program, but how are we going to use it to effectively engage with stakeholders?

The verdict is in. Executives need to be front-and-center with leading digital programs within their companies. Small businesses to Fortune 500 companies alike have complained about getting little-to-no ROI when it comes to their digital and social media programs. Why? You canâ€™t just delegate an entire social media program to an intern or newbie. Your investment could be equaling your return.

For the full interviews, check out the videos below. Be sure to also Tune into DisrupTV every Friday on Blab for more insights.

DisrupTV Episode 0020: Featuring Clara Shih, Naveen Rajdev & Alan Lepofsky 6.17.16 from Constellation Research on Vimeo.

DisrupTV Episode 0022: Featuring Sunder Sarangan and Jon Swartz 7.1.16 from Constellation Research on Vimeo.

Innovation & Product-led Growth Sales Marketing Data to Decisions Future of Work New C-Suite Next-Generation Customer Experience Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity DisrupTV Leadership Marketing B2B B2C CX Customer Experience EX Employee Experience AI ML Generative AI Analytics Automation Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Growth eCommerce Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps Social Customer Service Content Management Collaboration Chief Marketing Officer

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Have a Hot Lead? Don’t Fall Down on the Follow-Up

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…...

Marketers and sales leaders have access to mountains of data available to analyze buyer behavior, demand generation channels, ROI, nurture tracks, sales cycles and a myriad of other metrics. As all the focus is on dissecting buyer analytics and creating nurture processes, I’m noticing that companies are actually missing the boat on the basics – lead follow-up.

I recently spoke with a VP of Sales Operations about lead processing in CRM when he said, “You know what kills me Cindy? I attend quite a few conferences and spend time talking to different solution providers. We have a great chat, I’m interested and they say that they’ll contact me to arrange a meeting the following week. Then I’ll never hear from them again.” Now this is someone who is a hot lead by both demographic and behavior scores and he doesn’t get a follow-up?

This conversation led me to think back to all the conferences I’ve attended where my badge was eagerly scanned, and the booth staff typing away on the handheld with notes. I estimate that the post-event call or email follow-up I received is less than 20%, and I was by all definitions a solid lead with budget authority. To test this, I polled a random sampling of twenty B2B technology professionals, and the preliminary results were consistent. The average response indicated that only 15-20% of solution providers followed up with an email or phone call the week after an event or after completing a web contact form. They were all in a buy cycle and the companies that contacted them back had the advantage. I don’t believe any company wants to see hot leads go untouched, so the issue must be with the process.

Think your company might have a lead follow-up issue? Ask yourself the following questions:

Who is accountable for ensuring leads are processed in the CRM/Marketing Automation solution and distributed?
How are leads distributed today? Is it by urgency, geography, territory, industry, or other?
How long does it take (in hours) to send the first follow-up message or call?
How many times is a lead contacted when there’s no response?
Who is accountable to go back post-campaign and ensure follow-up did occur?

If you cannot clearly articulate the process and your answers included "unsure” or “don’t know”, then your company likely has a lead loss problem. If the average event lead costs $1,000, you can’t afford a 10% follow-up rate to justify ROI and risk an even greater issue - turning off that prospect and losing the opportunity.

Lead follow-up processes don’t have to be complex. Before your company starts down the path of leveraging data and analytics to put leads in the right “track”, start simple and consider these three success factors:

Speed - Time kills deals. Create a touch point that acknowledges and thanks their interest on the same day whether they filled out a contact us form on your website, visited your booth, attended a webinar, etc.
Frequency - Don’t stop at the first contact with no response. Aim for 3-5 touchpoints and if there’s still no response, mark the lead for future re-heat campaigns.
Accountability - Follow-up on the follow-up. Here’s an idea, create and automate a one-question survey to have the prospect rate the quality of communication with the company. I implemented this at a former company and discovered the survey was often the follow-up (that quickly changed).

As the lines between sales and marketing continue to blur, both are accountable to ensure a proper lead follow-up process. Leverage the CRM and marketing automation tech stack your company has access to, and automate as much as you can with workflow alerts post-campaign to track follow-up. With technology and some good old-fashioned phone calls, there is no excuse for 80% of leads to go untouched. So don’t get distracted by the mechanics of follow-up, and just contact the prospect.

Marketing Transformation Chief Marketing Officer

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AWS Enterprise Summit 2016 Frankfurt - The Long Road to German Cloud Adoption

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

We had the opportunity to attend AWS Enterprise Summit in Frankfurt, held on June 30th 2016. Always a welcome chance for a US based analyst – despite European roots, history and professional networks, to check in on the state of cloud on the ‘old’ continent. The conference was well attended with over 1200 participants, coming from customers, prospects and the ecosystem.

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 - AWS Enterprise Summit 2016 Frankfurt - The German Road to Cloud adoption is ... long from Holger Mueller

Want to read on?

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

AWS focuses on best practices – It was clear that AWS thinks that the US view on best practices adoption due to cloud, was what the German IT audience wanted to hear about. Both in examples from Continental (surprise –another automotive customer!) and AWS itself (with Stephen Orban) talked at length about the changes that need to happen in order to make IT more agile, more in tune with the challenges of digital transformation. Nothing out of the ordinary, the audience took notes diligently.

Security remains focus – AWS has done a very good job since its early days to address and overcome the security concerns of enterprises in regards of moving to the public cloud. No exception in Frankfurt – with a dedicated security track. From conversation with attendees, the security concern has largely been addressed in Germany, at least for the enterprises actively working on cloud deployments. As already heard a year ago at AWS Summit in Berlin, the German region in Frankfurt has eliminated almost all concerns around data residency and statutory concerns.

Adoption remains a constant challenge – Despite the interest and good reception, AWS (like other public cloud vendors) in Germany struggles with adoption. While it was ok to have e.g. only pilots and early phases of projects in Berlin in 2015 (e.g. Audi), not having a German enterprises presenting in the keynote about their live experience with AWS (ideally in Germany) - was certainly a surprise. The ‘live’ customer aspect in the keynote came from UK based autonomous driving startup Here. Definitively a great showcase for cloud in general and AWS in specific – but nothing to relate to for the average attending enterprise. And while Continental qualifies in these regards, the presentation was around a playful uptake of AWS services with a ‘Hau Den Lukas’ implementation. Great demo, but exactly that – a demo. To be fair, more customer presentations and example were presented in the separate track session, but e.g. a major pharmaceutical company being live in the US with AWS Workspaces, certainly qualifies as a live customer, but in the US and not in Germany.

MyPOV

A good event for AWS, the vendor has definitively the attention and interest of the German IT audience. I am sure AWS has good reasons for focusing more on IT transformation than showcases, but the ‘doer’ audience in Frankfurt definitively wanted to learn more on the showcase side. From my two dozen plus random attendee conversations, all were upbeat, interested but also wanted to learn more what other enterprises are doing with AWS. Even North American enterprise showcases would have been welcomed.

Having the Summit in walking distance from all major banks, next to the Frankfurt financial center, I would not have been surprised to see a more Finance / Banking focus at the event, but if the topic was addressed, I missed it. As in general, we saw again the lack of AWS ‘packaging’, basically bundling many of their services to something enterprises are demanding (e.g. an AWS IoT Platform). Enterprises will then know services work together for a specific purpose, enable e. g. a specific business goal and most importantly, all enterprises use, experience (and become references!) for that ‘bundle’ (others may call it product).

Overall a good reminder on how different the adoption stages of public cloud are between North America and Europe, in this case Germany. On the bright side for the cloud, definitively a change from ‘we have to do it (for IoT)’ (from AWS Summit in Berlin 2015) to ‘what are the best use cases’ (Frankfurt, June 2016), so a good progression in the ‘mental costume’ of European / German cloud evaluation / adoption. For European / German enterprises in the immediate adoption situation / decision, the recommendation is cearly to attend the North American events, most prominently reInvent in Las Vega this fall.

Stay tuned for more.

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

More on AWS:

News Analysis - Amazon Web Services Cloud now speaks… Hindi - Indian AWS Data Centers available - read here
News Analysis - Salesforce selects AWS as preferred Public Cloud Infrastructure Provider - Good move - read here
Event Report - AWS re-Invent - AWS lobbies for the enterprise - DB and IoT are the cheese - read here
First Take - AWS reInvent Wednesday Keynote - Good start & AWS is going for the enterprise read here
Event Preview - AWS re-Invent 2015 - watch / read here
Event Report - AWS Summit Berlin - AWS spricht Deutsch - but when will the Germans speak cloud? Read here
News Analysis - AWS learns Hindi - Amazon Web Services announces 2016 India Expansion - read here
Event Report - AWS Summit San Francisco - AWS pushes the platform with Analytics and Storage [From the Fences] read here
Event Report - AWS re:invent - AWS becomes more about PaaS on inhouse IP - read here
AWS gives infrastructure insights - and it is very passionate about it - read here
News Analysis - AWS spricht Deutsch - the cloud wars reach Germany - read here
Market Move - Infor runs CloudSuite on AWS - Inflection Point or hot air balloon? Read here
Event Report - AWS Summit in SFO - AWS keeps doing what has been working in the last 8 years - read here
AWS moves the yardstick - Day 2 reinvent takeaways - read here.
AWS powers on, into new markets - Day 1 reinvent takeaways - read here.
The Cloud is growing up - three signs in the News - read here.
Amazon AWS powers on - read here.

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

Tech Optimization amazon SaaS PaaS IaaS Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP CCaaS UCaaS Collaboration Enterprise Service Chief Information Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Executive Officer

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Gnerc - The Ultimate Enterprise Software Solution (Parody)

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…...

Often during product briefings, this is where my mind wonders to...

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Future of Work

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Unit4 Acquires Prevero - Analysis

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Ever wondered what apps you plug into an ERP?

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