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Research Summary: The Algorithm of You: How IoT Transforms and Differentiates Customer Experience

Research Summary: The Algorithm of You: How IoT Transforms and Differentiates Customer Experience

R "Ray" Wang
Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

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

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Using the Internet of Things to Boost Revenue and Deliver a Brand’s Personalized Promise

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to revolutionize the way business is run and to create differentiated customer experiences. IoT allows for the processing of massive numbers of device events and for commingling those events with business and customer events. This combination generates the next-best, in-context business actions, and thus, smart, differentiated IoT-driven customer experiences.

Companies use “the algorithm of you” to collect and process a myriad of data on each customer and potential customer via the IoT. This allows companies to know customers and prospects better and to deliver offers, products and services that are relevant and in context to clients’ real-time needs and desires via channels and devices customers prefer. In essence, the company learns over time about its customers and can automate the data processing and reasoning tasks to create superior customer experiences. In turn, these IoT-enhanced customer experiences, designed to impress, amuse and increase the customers’ loyalty to a brand’s products and/or services, will allow companies to gain more revenue and deliver on the promise of the brand.

Learn how can your company turn the idea of “IOT-driven customer experiences” into a tangible reality. This report details how to use IoT to create positive effects on both the bottom-line and the customer experience.

The next report in this series will examine how the Internet of Things powers the “as-a-service” economy, in which winners and losers will be determined by he quality and uniqueness of the customer experience.
Algorithm of You - IoT and Customer Experience

 

Your POV.

Have you explored IOT? What smart services will you enable to transform CX? 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.

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

Resources

Reprints

Reprints can be purchased through Constellation Research, Inc. To request official reprints in PDF format, please contact Sales .

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.

Copyright © 2001 -2016 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC All rights reserved.
Contact the Sales team to purchase this report on a a la carte basis or join the Constellation Customer Experience

 
 

The post Research Summary: The Algorithm of You – How IoT Transforms and Differentiates Customer Experience appeared first on A Software Insider's Point of View.

 Next-Generation Customer Experience Data to Decisions Future of Work Innovation & Product-led Growth New C-Suite Tech Optimization Leadership Chief Customer Officer Chief Experience Officer

The Future of Work: People, Places and Technology

The Future of Work: People, Places and Technology

Alan Lepofsky
Alan Lepofsky
Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

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On May 25th I had the pleasure of participating in an all day Think Tank about the Future of Work. The event was hosted by Adobe and took place at One Kearny in San Francisco, in conjunction with the release of a new FoW study Adobe has just published.

The Think Tank brought together eight industry experts to discuss potential changes in the future of work that will take place over the next 5 years in the categories of people, places and technology. Some of the things we discussed include:
- What is work? Is it something we do for money or personal fulfillment?
- What is employment? Should we all be contractors? What is loyalty? 
- Where do we work? Office? Home? In transit? In shared spaces? In virtual environments?
- What is work:life balance, or life:work balance, or blending, or integration, or just life?
- Should work be fun? Should we have choices of what we do, or do we need to just accept what’s available?
- What’s wrong with the tools (software and hardware) we use today at work, and how can we fix them?   How will AI, VR/AR, wearables, IoT, etc. impact getting work done?
- How should performance be measured? Today jobs can scale on the web far more than they could in the physical workplace. What is the return per employee?
- How should we be paid for work? Is money the only currency? 
- Are robots and AI going to replace us all?
- Have we seen all this before, and we’re just living in the middle of a current cycle, or is something different this time?

I had a great time interacting with and learning from the experts on people and workplaces, and hope I contributed on the topics of technology. I found the event extremely beneficial, and will use the information to guide several of the topics I write/speak about in the future.

One thing I would have like to have seen us do more of is push the boundaries further. To be fair, the day was focused primarily on the next 5 years or so, but imagine the next 10 or 20! Think about transit to work via hyperloop subways, ramjet planes or self-driving cars. What about when “function specific wearables" go away, and their functionality is just woven directly into our clothes, shoes, glasses, hats, etc. ex: Imagine a map displayed right on the sleeve of your jacket. What will work be like when augmented reality provides us information in real time, right within our field of view? How will holographic displays or flexible/foldable/bendable screens impact our ability to create and consume information? The future is exciting, and I can’t wait to be part of it.

Below is the recording of one part of the Think Tank, in which Jeremiah Owyang moderates a 90 minute discussion with us all. Stay tuned, as more content will be released from the day long event, including short interviews and highlights from our brainstorming workshops. *I am looking into if anyone has indexed the 90 minutes, listing the questions and their timing.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the future of work.  Will is remain the same? Will it be completely different? What do you hope changes? What do you hope stays the same?

Future of Work Tech Optimization Innovation & Product-led Growth New C-Suite Sales Marketing Next-Generation Customer Experience Revenue & Growth Effectiveness Data to Decisions Chief Customer Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief People Officer Chief Revenue Officer Chief Experience Officer

Greenhouse Open Conference - Best of Breed Talent Acquisition is alive and well

Greenhouse Open Conference - Best of Breed Talent Acquisition is alive and well

Holger Mueller
Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

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We had the opportunity to attend Greenhouse’s Green House Open conference in San Francisco, held from May 25th till 27th 2016. The conference was well attended with over 900 participants, coming from customers, prospects and the ecosystem, roughly tripling to last year’s event. The event was held at the Hilton Union Square, one of the most confusing labyrinth like event spaces, kudos goes to the Greenhouse event team for making directions easy to handle. 



 

So take a look at my musings on the event here:



 

No time to watch – here is the 1 slide condensation:



 



Want to read on?

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

Best of Breed vs Suite – The number one concern of HR professionals has been and will remain integration. Suites have always addressed the integration issues, but usually with the price of lacking best practices. Given the competitive nature of Talent Acquisition it is no surprise though that there is a well doing vendor ecosystem in the space, and Greenhouse provides the data point for that once again. The vendor is growing, expanding its product (see below) and remains strategic for its user group, always good to see competition spurned from innovation. It was also good to see that Greenhouse spend a lot of attention to change management and empowering recruiters to get hiring managers to adopt the system. While the power user of a Recruiting solution is very small user population in the enterprise, hiring managers are a very large population. If hiring managers don’t use the recruiting solution the recruiters prefer, there is an adoption issue and a potential conflict. So good to help recruiters convince their ‘customers, the hiring managers on the merits of the solution.
Another sign of traction for Greenhouse is the ecosystem the vendor is creating, with substantial complimentary vendor sponsorship and show floor presence at the conference.

Onboarding becomes table stakes – As a general trend for Talent Acquisition, Onboarding becomes part of Recruiting vendor offerings. Onboarding itself has traditionally been the lightest weight talent management function in terms of revenue and relevance. It comes as no surprise that it is not the Onboarding vendors that acquire or built recruiting functionality, but the recruiting vendors buying (e.g. Greenhouse Parklet – see here) or building the functionality (e.g. Jobvite – see here). And the move makes sense, enterprises spend a lot for a superior candidate experience, if that falls into shambles once the coveted candidate becomes an employee – not a good outcome. In ‘employment at will’ states it may even lead to talent leakage. And reducing that leakage, may well pay for the whole Onboarding solution as Greenhouse’s Stross pointed out in his keynote. Greenhouse has integrated Parklet now, the small Parklet engineering team is part of the Greenhouse team and the solution work together out of the box. What surprised me is that Parklet has not moved to the Greenhouse look and feel, as we are 6+ months after the acquisition.

Innovation and good housekeeping – Greenhouse not only announced its new Onboarding capability, but also made a mobile interviewing application available (on iOS for now only), both good moves. Moreover, he vendor is addressing usability concerns with new dashboards and a general UIX overhaul, check out what is coming in tweets in the Storify below). In a keynote of Jon Stross, shared the 4 leitmotivs of Greenhouse product investment, which are usability, flexibility, more data driven functions and Onboarding. The doers in the audience received many of the planned innovations well, always a good sign. On the functionality side Greenhouse will add multi job posts, tiered departments, and an API for internal job posts (maybe next area of functional footprint extension?), better collaboration support, improved interview kits and support for more user roles to name those future capabilities that stuck out for me.

MyPOV

A good conference for Greenhouse, that is growing and expanding its footprint. The customer base is energized and loyal, and overall happy with the products. That fact that such a large number of recruiting professionals took out 2-3-4 days out of their busy schedule, risking they may be falling behind on hiring targets, is a strong indication of a loyal user base. And it is good to see that Greenhouse is listening to its customer base, expanding the functional footprint and doing the necessary good housekeeping duties, most prominently addressing usability improvements.

On the concern Greenhouse needs to enable recruiters and hiring managers with more intelligence, maybe more predictive / 'true' analytics (more here), not to write the buzz word of machine learning. But users should not look at lists of candidates that are not sorted by urgency / relevance in 2016 – something the vendor must and will address.

But overall a good conference, Greenhouse is making good progress – and we can state that the Recruiting (and no Onboarding) market is doing well. Stay tuned.



Want to learn more? Checkout the Storify collection below. 


More on Recruiting
  • Musings - How Technology Innovation fuels Recruiting and disrupts the Laggards - read here
  • Musings - What is the future of recruiting? Read here
  • HRTech 2014 takeaways - read here.
  • Why all the attention to recruiting? Read here.

Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here.
 
2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 & 2016 (C) Holger Mueller - All Rights Reserved
 Future of Work Innovation & Product-led Growth Next-Generation Customer Experience Tech Optimization New C-Suite Data to Decisions Sales Marketing Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity AI Analytics Automation CX EX Employee Experience HCM Machine Learning ML SaaS PaaS Cloud Digital Transformation Enterprise Software Enterprise IT Leadership HR Chief People Officer Chief Customer Officer Chief Human Resources Officer

Natalie Petouhoff's Research Agenda and Published Research

Natalie Petouhoff's Research Agenda and Published Research

Dr. Natalie Petouhoff
Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

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

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If you are wondering what I have been up to lately, I thought I would put all the research I have published  into one place. Here’s a list of Dr. Natalie’s completed and published research and soon to be published content! It ranges from IOT, Analytics, Big Data, Customer Experience, Leadership, Organizational Change Management, Storytelling, Collaboration, Digital Transformation, Social Selling, Social Media, the Cloud, Marketing, Sales, SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, DaaS, AI, Machine Learning, Innovation, Social Networks, Social Media Monitoring, Mobile, Customer Service and Customer Success Management….and a few things in-between…

IOT (The Internet of Things), Innovation, AI, Machine Learning, Analytics and the Cloud

• The Algorithm of You: How IoT Transforms and Differentiates Customer Experience: Using the Internet of Things to Boost Revenue and Deliver a Brand’s Personalized Promise

• Digital Disruption: The Blind Spot That Could Sink Your IoT and CX Initiatives

• The Internet of Things Improves Customer Experience in Retail Supply Chain

• Halo Uses Xively’s Internet of Things Platform to Redefine Safety Devices

• The As-a-Service Economy: CX and IOT Mean You Have to Deliver Great Experiences- Upcoming

• Customer Experience IOT in the Automotive Industry-Upcoming

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Digital Transformation: Customer Engagement, CRM, Innovation, Customer Experience, Customer Service, The Cloud and Analytics

• Going Digital with Systems Integrators and Agencies: What to Expect

• The Future of Customer Experience - A Survey

• ROI Of Customer Service & Customer Experience

• How to Measure Customer Experience: Performance Management Maturity-Upcoming

• Case Study: Elaine Turner® Brand and Oracle Commerce, Marketing and Customer Service-Upcoming

• The Need for Inspiring Leaders to Orchestrate Customer Experience Initiatives-Upcoming

• Experience Management: How to Deliver Integrated Customer Experiences

• How Rackspace Creates the Next-Generation Customer Experience

• The ROI Of Agile Customer Care: Reduce Training and Easy To Add Channels

• Digital Imperatives for Omni-Channel Retail Customer Experiences

• Nine Pillar Of Successful Self-Service for Digital Customer Engagement

• 6 Pillars of e-commerce Customer Engagement

• 9 C’s of Customer Engagement – Delivery and Communication Styles: Channels, Content and Cadence

• 9 C’s of Customer Engagement – People Centric Values: External & Internal Culture, Community, Credibility

• 9 C’s of Customer Engagement – Right Time Drivers: Context, Catalysts, Currency

• How Delta Uses Microsoft Dynamics and Avanade to Create Next-Generation Customer Experiences

• How Microsoft Dynamics CRM Improves Productivity at Trek Bicycle

• Delta Uses Microsoft to Transform Flight Operations and the Customer Experience

• New Belgium Brewing Creates Great Customer Experiences Using Microsoft Dynamics

• Beyond Journey Maps, Delivering Mass Personalization at Scale

• The State of Customer Service and Support Evolves 

***********************************************************************************

Social Media, Customer Service, CRM, Analytics, Innovation and the Cloud

• How General Motors Using Social Media To Listen To Customers and Sell Cars and Deliver Service

• The ROI of Online Communities: Online Communities Provide Value Beyond Call Deflection

• Why Top Marketers Create Branded Social Networks for Customer Engagement

• The State of Customer Service and Support Evolves 

• ROI of Social Customer Service- Upcoming

• The Customer Service Playbook for Integration of Traditional, Digital, Social and Mobile Customer Service Strategies and Technologies-Upcoming

• Mobile Customer Service-Upcoming

***********************************************************************************

Digital Marketing, Analytics, Innovation and the Cloud

• Should the Chief Marketing Officer Oversee the Whole Customer Experience?

• Data-Driven Marketing Campaign Optimization

• VentureBeat: Should the CMO Run the Whole Customer Experience?

• Executive Brief: Can Brands Keep Their Promise?

• Oracle Moves Its Focus from the CIO to the CMO

• How to Staff the Team for Effective Content Marketing

• The State of Marketing 

• Marketing Funnels Are Dead, What’s Next?

***********************************************************************************

Digital and Social Sales; Commerce, Innovation, Analytics and the Cloud

• How Sales Leaders and Sales Reps Can Create a Social Selling Organization: Convert Average Sales Teams into Top Performers Using Social Networks

• Five Approaches to Drive Customer Loyalty in a Digital World

• The Modern Sales Experience

• Continuity of Customer Experiences Drives the Future of Commerce

***********************************************************************************

Customer Success Management, Analytics, Innovation and the Cloud

• The State of Customer Success Management

• Gainsight: Customer Success Management for a Post-Sale, On-Demand, Attention Economy

• ServiceSource: Customer Success Management for a Post-Sale, On-Demand, Attention Economy

• Bluenose: Customer Success Management for a Post-Sale, On-Demand, Attention Economy

• Totango: Customer Success Management for a Post-Sale, On-Demand, Attention Economy

***********************************************************************************

If you are interested in learning about any of these reports or research, a speech or webinar on any of these or related topics, please reach out to me here!

@DrNatalie Petouhoff, VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research

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Next-Generation Customer Experience Chief Customer Officer

Business Agility Delivered At The Pace Of Change

Business Agility Delivered At The Pace Of Change

R "Ray" Wang
Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

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

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Digital transformation is a methodology in which organizations change and create new business models and culture with digital technologies. Digital transformation has contributed greatly to a major business upheaval: since 2000, 52% of companies in the Fortune 500 have either gone bankrupt, been acquired or merged, gone bankrupt, or ceased to exist. These organizations failed to respond quickly to the pace of change. In fact, the lack of business agility led to their demise.

While most organizations face massive technical debt from legacy infrastructure and applications, market leaders and fast followers realize that the future requires making proactive and strategic use of digital technologies to support the future strategy of their organizations. They see the shift from analog to digital systems as a continued march to delivering business agility.

Modern systems start with an anticipatory approach aimed at solving the issue of massive individual scale and enabling connected experiences. These systems simplify the business environment by abstracting information from the older systems to create new paradigms. As business requirements evolve, these systems deliver platforms that enable organizations to continuously match an organization’s evolution. Consequently, new next-generation platforms and apps must deliver business agility at today’s and tomorrow’s pace of change. The progression to digital follows a progression from systems of engagement to digital systems that deliver mass personalization at scale (see Figure 1).

Constellation

Figure 1. From Analog to Mass Personalized Systems

Systems of engagement provide standalone and embedded social media and collaboration capabilities, which introduced new verbs to computing, including like, share, publish, collaborate, and subscribe. These systems started with a design point of “sense and respond,” with a goal of solving problems of massive social scale. These systems support interactive experiences, from touch-screens to gestures. Communication styles focus on conversations that happened in real time. The impact and reach shifts from departmental to more widely interconnected. Information moves from highly structured data to loosely structured knowledge. Intelligence builds on hard-coded or deterministic business rules, which provide a greater sense of smartness.

The next level of business agility is systems of experience. It starts with an agile and flexible design point. Experiential systems deliver massive contextual scale. Bionic, human APIs connect users to systems, with a communication style of role-tailored interactions. The speed of real-time, coupled with contextual relevancy, creates right-time interactions, where delivery of information and insight happen as needed. Right-time interactions improve the signal-to-noise ratio. Experiential systems move beyond the four walls of the corporate environment and push out to customer-, employee-, partner-, and supplier-driven segmented value chains. Knowledge flows into systems as immersive streams filtered by context. As these systems get smarter, intelligence gains a probabilistic, pattern-based, self-learning approach. To date, these systems do not exist out of the box, and market leaders must design, assemble, integrate, and build these systems from scratch. Early examples include ad networks, gamification models, and demand-sensing supply chain and commerce systems.

Leading technology providers are building for the future of digital with mass personalized systems. The shift to mass personalized systems delivers a customer segment of one and drives the goals of building a digital architecture. Leading technology providers assemble the components to deliver on an intention-driven design point for massive individual scale. These systems craft user experiences personalized from self-learning and designed by use case. The communication style reflects an appreciation for sentience, the ability to feel. Mass personalized systems move in a space-time continuum, as these systems not only anticipate personalized requests, but also build prediction models of what is most likely to occur. The impact and reach are tailored to people-to-people networks that move beyond corporations, but balance personal and business connections. Information management builds on context and then applies knowledge bases to deliver situational awareness. Intelligence is predictive. Early examples include decision-support systems, personal clouds, identity, and vendor relationship management systems.

As organizations have emerged more efficient from technical debt- and cost-reduction efforts over the past decade, leaders are poised to address the next set of business challenges, which require more than incremental innovation. In fact, incremental innovation is no longer enough. Organizations must manage the constant tension and expectation to create new business models or disrupt existing models with new technologies and the need to invest for the future without harming short-term profits. These market forces create a high priority for investing in business agility and will provide the catalysts to build the next generation of systems that meet the pace of change required to succeed in the digital world.

This blog post first appeared in Digital Magazine

Matrix Commerce Next-Generation Customer Experience Innovation & Product-led Growth Leadership Chief Customer Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Experience Officer

Event Report - Informatica World 2016 - The Cloud is the new platform

Event Report - Informatica World 2016 - The Cloud is the new platform

Holger Mueller
Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

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We had the opportunity to attend Informatica’s Informatica World conference in San Francisco, held from May 23rd till 26th 2016. The conference is well attended with over 3000 participants, coming from customers, prospects and the ecosystem. 



 

So take a look at my musings on the event here:



 

No time to watch – here is the 1-2 slide condensation:


 


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

Informatica is alive and well – When Informatica was taken private by Permira and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board in April of last year (see here), there were the usual concerns about a private equity investor cutting costs, stopping R&D investment and so on. A little more than a year later the largest Informatica World attendance speaks for itself. Contrary to concerns, R&D investment and marketing efforts have been strengthened to before. The final verdict is of course not out, as Informatica will have to hit certain (not disclosed) performance goals – but for now it looks like a good move for customers, as Informatica (see next takeaway) is re-architecting its offerings to run in the public cloud. And with 4500 iPaaS customers, 25k ‘citizen integrators’ and over 1M+ integration jobs processed per day, Informatica has a substantial market share in the integration game.

First cloud based products this summer - Informatica has supported ‘cloud’ for a long time, but that was always with Informatica’ s products running on premises. With more and more SaaS adoption, more enterprise automaton fragments move to the cloud, and equally enterprises get more comfortable with running (public) cloud based IT functions such as monitoring, and relevant for Informatica, integration. And the next generation application use cases and their inherent data gravity force integration vendors to move their integration services to the cloud. Neither provisioning, nor running the integration function on premises is economical, not to mention data transfer costs and latency. So it is good and key for Informatica moving its product portfolio to the public cloud, and with no surprise starting with AWS. In the closing keynote Informatica showed its PowerCenter product running on AWS, showed its BigData Management console on AWS and connected two SaaS properties, Workday and Xactly in under 2 minutes. That makes optimistic in regards of the release of the first cloud based products that is slated for June.

Deep SaaS integration show benefits – Informatica has typically gone the extra mile when it came to building connectors to various enterprise software assets. And that now benefits the speed to deployment of its cloud based integration. This is even more important as enterprises expect the connectors to be available for cloud based integration projects, especially as in some cases these cannot be built easily or at all as SaaS vendors only offer limited integration options and tools. So the early investment of Informatica pays off a second time, always something which is good and helps speed to market, which Informatica needs. The only concern for this approach is vendor based offerings and integrations, as we see e.g. between Salesforce and Workday, or NetSuite and Ultimate Software. But this does not mean that Informatica is at the losing end of the trend, as it often is the integration platform for the vendors to build their vendor based integration. And needless to say enterprises will find reasons to extend these interfaces, so having them based on a known and common toolset is a bonus.

MyPOV

A good event for Informatica that has transitioned well into the private equity ownership. Conversations with customers and partners show an engaged and energized ecosystem. Practically every system integrator doing business on our planet was present and sponsoring the event at some level. And with more heterogeneity in the future of enterprise software, things look good for Informatica. It now needs to show it can out-innovate and out-execute the other 5 key players in the integration game (alphabetically Jitterbit, MuleSoft, Scribe, Software AG, Snaplogic).

On the concern side Informatica must be careful of not re-building the status quo of integration, which was manual and often project based. Going forward software will be able to do the job, especially with cheap compute available in the cloud. Humans should no longer match data elements, write slow joins with errors, or create no sense making visualizations, in a not too distant future. No need to look further than e.g. AWS Quicksight. Moreover, Informatica sits well at the center – between SaaS properties, database and storage vendors as well as visualization vendors, any of them doing a successful foray into integration will mean increased competition. But none of these players has been able to do so in the last 20 years one can argue, why should they in the next 10? No reason for Informatica to slow down.

Overall a good Informatica World for Informatica customers, the vendor is doing the necessary investment to remain a trusted enterprise integration player for next 10 years to come. Stay tuned.

Want to learn more? Checkout the Storify of tweets of my colleague Doug Henschen and me below.

More on Informatica:
  • News Analysis - Informatica announces new cloud capabilities - Keep up the Salesforce ecosystem play - read here
  • Event Report - Informatica World 2015 - Product Progress and New Approaches - read here
  • News Analysis - Informatica's Sohaib Abbasi showcases Innovations for the Age of Engagement - read here
  • Future of Work - One spreadsheet at a time, Informatica Springbok - read here
  • Informatica pushes the cloud integration stakes - read here.
 

Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here.
2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 & 2016 (C) Holger Mueller - All Rights Reserved
 Tech Optimization informatica salesforce 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

Data: The Foundation Of Real-Time Digital Business

Data: The Foundation Of Real-Time Digital Business

R "Ray" Wang
Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

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

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From Big Data to small data, the digital world measures and values every interaction. Digital technology enables every touch point, click, conversation, picture, and byte of digital exhaust to be used to improve decision-making. In fact, data provides the foundation for success in a real-time digital business. This is why organizations must carefully design a data strategy as the first step in digital transformation.

To get started, successful organizations map out a data-to-decisions framework (see Figure 1). This framework uses all types of upstream and downstream data (for example, structured, unstructured, big, small, and contextual) to align with business processes, creating information flows. From order to cash, procure to pay, campaign to lead, hire to retire, and incident to resolution, context is applied to information flows.

In the next step, algorithms apply context attributes such as role, relationship, weather, product, geo-spatial location, time, sentiment, and even intent to the information flows. The bigger the data set, the more opportunities for algorithms to find patterns of insight. The goals are to ask questions of the data and expose patterns of insight, using performance, deduction, inference, and prediction.

Traditionally, most systems stop after discovering insight. In a digital business, though, insight powers the ability to guide decision-making. By using the ability to take actions based on data, organizations can consider how to identify the next best actions, make recommendations, suggest risk mitigation, and even suggest that no actions be taken. By designing a data-to-decisions framework, organizations gain the ability to build a digital business and enable real-time business.

Once a data-to-decisions foundation is established, organizations can think about how they can apply the framework to augment decision-making. Successful leaders start by putting together a list of questions they seek answers for. They prioritize that list and then begin addressing these questions within the data-to-decisions framework. The secret to success is not what answers can be provided, but what questions should be asked. Successful organizations learn how to ask questions that have never been asked before, sometimes by employing techniques such as design thinking.

Figure 1: Use the data-to-decisions framework to drive real-time business
Data-real time

 

 

 

 

 

With mastery of data to decisions, organizations eventually will move from real-time to right-time models. Real-time immediately provides data to decisions as requested, resulting in a data deluge. Unfortunately, real time on its own may not be fast enough. Organizations may need to anticipate when data should be delivered. Why? Real time describes the speed at which the transformation from data to decisions must occur. Right time is about the precision that relevant, contextual information can provide once cognitive capabilities are applied to the data-to-decisions framework. In other words, right-time systems ensure organizations see what they need to see before they even know they need it.

So where do you begin?

1. Start by identifying the questions your organization seeks to answer.
2. Ask what traits make up the most valuable products, employees, customers, and suppliers. These traits drive the questions around what context matters.
3. Determine the information flows and business processes that drive context.
4. Understand the people and devices touched to provide the next level of journey mapping.
5. Apply the data sources and channels of data to recommendation engines and decision frameworks.

After taking these 5 steps, you can then start creating big data business models powered by insight. Digital technologies, data, and algorithms should all be aggressively used to create business models that take advantage of insights. Visibility, relevance, and immediacy will come from these insights-based business models. The goals are to simplify the complexity of decision making and enable real-time digital business.

Data to Decisions Next-Generation Customer Experience Innovation & Product-led Growth Leadership Chief Customer Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Experience Officer

News Analysis - Salesforce selects AWS as preferred Public Cloud Infrastructure Provider - Good move

News Analysis - Salesforce selects AWS as preferred Public Cloud Infrastructure Provider - Good move

Holger Mueller
Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

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Earlier this week we were surprised by a partnership announcement of Salesforce and Amazon Web Services (AWS). The announcement has implications in both regards of best practices where SaaS based vendors may run their computing load, and market share potential in the highly competitive IaaS market. For Salesforce (and all SaaS) customers, this maybe a reflection point in regards of where and how SaaS workloads will be run in the future, so worth some analysis.

 
 

So let’s take apart the press release in our customary style – it can be found here (worth to checkout Salesforce co-founder Parker Harris’ blog post here):
SEATTLE – May 25, 2016 – Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced that Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the Customer Success Platform and the world’s #1 CRM company, has selected AWS as its preferred public cloud infrastructure provider. For the first time, Salesforce will expand its use of AWS to core services—including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, App Cloud, Community Cloud, Analytics Cloud and more—for the company's planned international infrastructure expansion.
 MyPOV – Good summary of the announcement, does not waste time to come to the core aspect – that also non AWS based Salesforce work load is moving to AWS (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, App Cloud, Community Cloud and Analytics Cloud) – but with an angle of Salesforce’s planned international infrastructure expansion. All SaaS providers are in a tough position in regards of compliance with data privacy regulations, given the mess vendors and enterprises have been left in with the invalidation of the EU / USA Safe Harbor agreement (more here). 
 
Many Salesforce services, including Heroku, Marketing Cloud Social Studio, SalesforceIQ, and the recently announced Salesforce IoT Cloud, already run on AWS infrastructure. Salesforce will utilize AWS to help bring new infrastructure online more quickly and efficiently.
MyPOV – This is what makes the announcement no surprise. Salesforce was using AWS already substantially – with acquired products / services like Heroku, Marketing Cloud Social Studio and Salesforce IQ, but it also took an AWS dependency in a planned fashion when basing its IoT Cloud on AWS. Even if Salesforce would have like to move to another IaaS overall – these 4 services already have created substantial ‘stickiness’ for Salesforce to use AWS for years to come. And given Salesforce’s pedestrian pace in all things platform (e.g. 6 years CEO Benioff announced moving away from Apex / force.com architecture at a DreamForce event) – it is a good move to keep running what is running.
 
“We are excited to expand our strategic relationship with Amazon as our preferred public cloud infrastructure provider,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, Salesforce. “There is no public cloud infrastructure provider that is more sophisticated or has more robust enterprise capabilities for supporting the needs of our growing global customer base.”
MyPOV – Good quote by Benioff – can’t get any better for AWS.
 
“Leading enterprises and ISVs around the world are migrating their business-critical applications to the AWS Cloud to be more agile and efficient, reduce costs, and take advantage of the security, reliability, and broad functionality we offer,” said Andy Jassy, CEO, AWS. “Companies rely on Salesforce to transform their businesses and we are thrilled Salesforce has chosen AWS as their public cloud infrastructure partner, helping them continue to scale, add new services and maintain their incredible momentum.”
MyPOV – Got quote by Jassy, mentioning the basic value proposition of AWS to ISVs: Keep building what you know best – your SaaS / PaaS product – we take care of the infrastructure below (IaaS). A good ‘divide & conquer’ approach.

 

Overall MyPOV

A good move by Salesforce, formalizing its relationship with AWS, which it was using extensively already. And a key win for AWS, as it not only formalizes existing load, but also gets non AWS load to move to AWS for the international expansion. And there is no larger SaaS property out there for AWS to convince to move to its infrastructure. What us unique that Salesforce has its own cloud infrastructure built on force.com / Apex / Oracle – so this is the first SaaS vendor saying they will not invest (as for international data center rollout) into its existing infrastructure – but adopt AWS. No secret that the writing is on the wall – if running all of Salesforce on AWS works internationally, the days Salesforce will run its (as of today 45 North American instances (see here)) on its own infrastructure – are counted.

The lesson learnt for enterprises is – even in the early stage of cloud – loads are sticky. Salesforce could have tried to bring its existing AWS load to other IaaS – but choose not to. That’s a loos to other IaaS providers who could have run Java byte code compatible loads (Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud etc.) and an indication that shifting loads in IaaS remains a tall order – even for a deep pocketed, experienced, cloud pioneer ISV like Salesforce.  [Update June 2nd 2016: Salesforce points out to me that the vendor will invest in both existing infrastructure and AWS based data centers for its global expansion. Likewise Salesforce will keep investing in existing data centers on existing infrastructure / architecture.] So place your bets wisely when picking IaaS vendors, as when your load grows, moving it may be non-trivial, hard – or even impossible.

But for now a win for Salesforce customers. Salesforce can save substantial CAPEX for its international expansion. Today the vendor operates 10 instances of its cloud outside North America, a small fraction compared to the 45 North American instances. As Salesforce becomes more global, both compliance and performance demands would have required more investment in an infrastructure that Salesforce ultimately is likely to move off from. So CAPEX savings that can (and are likely) going in the infrastructure changes that Salesforce needs to do to move its older products to AWS Cloud. And for AWS this is a key win as it now only has been able to convinced ISVs to be the go to public cloud infrastructure (most notably Infor) – it has now a case of an existing SaaS vendor moving to its infrastructure. And Salesforce is likely the most standardized, uniform load to move – so a very good move for AWS, getting more load and keeping the famous ‘flywheel’ spinning faster (if not familiar – more load, better economies of scale, lower prices, more load, etc.). Given AWS huge data center footprint, attracting a lot of uniform load and a lot of potential is very strategic to accelerate its own global data center rollout.

Now it will be key for Salesforce to offer roadmaps and timelines on where its international expansion will move to – and which products will run where and when… But for now congrats to both vendors, customers will benefit, the real questions is – what took so long to sign this partnership?

[Insider side note: Good to see AWS brevity in the press release - Salesforce press releases are soo much longer...]



More Apps / SaaS vendor and IaaS vendor partnerships (in chronological order):
  • Infor runs on Amazon AWS (read here)
  • SAP on IBM Cloud (read here) 
  • Lumesse on Salesforce Cloud (read here) and
  • NetSuite on Microsoft Azure (read here)
  • JDA chooses Google Cloud Platform (read here)
  • SAP chooses Microsoft Azure (read here)
 
 
More on AWS
  • 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.

More about Salesforce:
 
  • Event Report - Salesforce Connections - Bringing together Builders and Studios for Marketing Success - read here
  • Event Scorecard - Salesforce Dreamforce 2015 - App, Analytics, IoT... - pre event thoughts assessment - read here
  • Event Report - Salesforce Dreamforce - Value for customers - but some concerns on direction - read here
  • News Analysis - Microsoft and Salesforce Strengthen Strategic Partnership at Dreamforce 2015 - Good for joint customers - read here
  • News Analysis - Salesforce Unveils Breakthrough Salesforce IoT Cloud, Powered by Salesforce Thunder - First dips into IoT - read here
  • News Analysis - Salesforce Unveils the Next Wave of Salesforce Analytics Cloud—Delivering Actionable Insights Across the Customer Success Platform - Glass half full - and half empty! Read / watch here
  • Event Preview - What I would like Salesforce to address this Dreamforce 2015 - read / watch here
  • News Analysis - Salesforce Announces Salesforce App Cloud - A Unified Platform for Building Connected  Apps, Fast - It’s all coming together, across the clouds - read here
  • News Analysis - alesforce Delivers Salesforce1 Lightning Components and App Builder […] - More productivity for Admins and Developers - read here
  • News Analysis - News Analysis - Salesforce Launches Salesforce Shield - More PaaS capabilities coming to Salesforce1 Platform - read here
  • News Analysis - Salesforce Transforms Big Data Into Customer Success with the Salesforce Analytics Cloud - Read here
  • News Analysis - Market Move - Salesforce (re) enters HCM - will it rypple the market this time? - Read here
  • Event Report - Salesforce Dreamforce - A Customer Succes Platform, Analytics and Lightning - but really Salesforce is re-platforming - read here
  • Constellation Research Summary of Salesforce Dreamforce 2014 - read here
  • Research Summary - An in depth look at Salesforce1 - Better packaging or new offerng? Read here.
  • Dreamforce 2013 Platform Takeaways - All about the mobile platform - or more? Read here. 
  • Platform ecosystems are hard - Salesforce grows it - FinancialForce shrinks it - read here.
  • Our take on Salesforce.com Identity Connect - from three angles - Identity, CRM and PaaS - read here.
  • Takeaways from the Salesforce and Workday Strategic Partnership - read here.
  • Act II - The Cloud changes everything - Oracle and Salesforce.com - read here.
  • How many Pivots make a Pirouette? Salesforce's last Pivot - read here.
 
Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here. 
 

 
2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 & 2016 (C) Holger Mueller - All Rights Reserved
 Tech Optimization Future of Work Matrix Commerce Innovation & Product-led Growth New C-Suite Data to Decisions Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Next-Generation Customer Experience salesforce 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 Digital Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Operating Officer

IBM Watson Team Marks Progress, Previews Next Steps

IBM Watson Team Marks Progress, Previews Next Steps

Doug Henschen
Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Doug Henschen is former Vice President and Principal Analyst where he focused on data-driven decision making. Henschen’s Data-to-Decisions research examines how organizations employ data analysis to reimagine their business models and gain a deeper understanding of their customers. Henschen's research acknowledges the fact that innovative applications of data analysis requires a multi-disciplinary approach starting with information and orchestration technologies, continuing through business intelligence, data-visualization, and analytics, and moving into NoSQL and big-data analysis, third-party data enrichment, and decision-management technologies. Insight-driven business models are of interest to the entire C-suite, but most particularly chief executive officers, chief digital officers,…...

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IBM Watson team introduces new services, details evolved capabilities, forecasts market opportunities. But we’re still hungry for real-world success stories.

IBM’s Watson unit keeps developing new offerings, growing its ecosystem and explaining the big opportunities ahead. If only it could share more of the customer case examples that remain under non-disclosure agreement (NDA) wraps.

What would-be customers really want to see, after all, is examples of Watson clobbering real-world problems the way it trounced its puny human competitors in “Jeopardy.” But to be fair, a lot of building, learning, refining and ecosystem building is required when starting a business from scratch.

At the first IBM Watson Analyst Day held this week in Cambridge, Mass., the conversation was mostly about how IBM is setting the stage — a very big stage — for cognitive business. In the two-plus years since it was established as its own commercial business unit within IBM, IBM Watson has gone from addressing three industries to 20 industries, from doing business in one country to 45 countries, from one language to eight languages, and from three partners to 550 partners.

IBM Watson Progress

Instead of talking about big, high-profile cognitive projects spearheaded solely by IBM, the company is increasingly talking about the portfolio of cloud-based cognitive services that can be exploited by the growing developer community. Where Watson began with one application programming interface and hundreds of mostly internal developers, today there are more than 30 APIs and tens of thousands of developers, IBM said this week.

IBM also detailed a number of developer-oriented announcements:

Sentiment and Insight services. In a collaboration with Twilio, IBM this week introduced IBM Watson Message Sentiment and IBM Watson Message Insights. Pre-integrated with Twilio’s APIs, the services use sentiment analysis to detect sentiment in SMS streams at scale, in the case of Message Sentiment, and to distill the key meanings of messages, in the case of Message Insight.

Learning Korean. In a an agreement with SK Holdings C&C, a Korean IT services company, IBM Watson will be trained to understand Korean so South Korea-based developers can use localized APIs and services to accelerate the creation and deployment of cognitive applications.

Machine vision and voice analysis. IBM merged its AlchemyVision and Visual Recognition services to power a unified Watson Visual Recognition API. Separately, Watson Tone Analyzer for spotting snark, sadness, elation and other emotions in text is now generally available.

In addition to adding new APIs and services, IBM is also tinkering with the packaging of existing solutions to make them easier to consume. For example, Watson Engagement Advisor (WEA), which debuted in 2013, has had a makeover. WEA is designed to improve the customer service experience by assisting service agents or interacting directly with customers in complex service scenarios. IBM said this week that Engagement Advisor has been decomposed into more granular, developer-ready services that are pre-trained on common customer-service needs and intentions. An integration framework was also added to make it easier to connect to common applications and data sources.

Where Engagement Advisor deployments initially averaged six to nine months, time to production has been shortened considerably, says IBM. What’s more, the new tooling makes it more of a self-service proposition that than something requiring consulting support.

What’s Next

Among the big opportunities ahead for Watson, IBM execs detailed progress and plans in three domains:

Healthcare. Healthcare has been the top industry priority from the earliest days of Watson, so Watson Health was split out as a separate unit within IBM Watson. In fact, this week’s event was held at the just-opened Watson Health headquarters. IBM sees a $200 billion opportunity for Watson within the $8 trillion worldwide healthcare industry, so it has invested heavily in data drive cognitive healthcare solutions. This week we heard a bit about how the acquisitions of Truven, Explorys and Phytel have helped create one of the world’s largest collections of health data. That data is fuel for the IBM Watson Health Cloud and its analytics, image analytics and knowledge platforms.

Cyber security. Earlier this month IBM announced Watson for Cyber Security. The average company faces some 200,000 security events per day, including everything from network hacks and viruses to routine logons and user-access requests. A central tenant of Watson Cyber Security is learning to distinguish between ever-changing real threats and false positives so the technology can filter out the latter and free security professionals to focus on real problems. Toward this end, IBM is integrating its Watson for Cyber Security with the IBM QRadar SaaS app and IBM X-Force threat-intelligence database to give Watson rich troves of ever-evolving data to power cognitive security analyses.

Internet of Things. Not all IoT applications call for cognitive capabilities, but IBM sees a fit wherever there’s human-to-machine interaction at scale. For example, cognitive is envisioned in cognitive route-planning services that will combine real-time and historic data with traffic, weather and social event data, like concerts and ball games, to predict better routes. In another example, a steel plant customer of IBM’s it interested in a wearables application in which foundry workers are fitted with sensors so Watson can detect and alert managers to early signs of heat stroke.

MyPOV on Watson’s Progress

The one key factoid missing from this week’s event — one that Constellation Research advisory customers ask us about — is how many customers are successfully using IBM Watson in production? IBM doesn’t share such statistics, but analysts were recently given an NDA peek at industry use case and real-world customer examples. Nearly a dozen major companies were cited by name in this March briefing. I came away impressed, so I was a bit disappointed this week when customer citations and examples weren’t on the agenda.

As for IBM’s focus on delivering more granular, digestible services and enabling an ecosystem, these are good moves that will spread the burden of building what is more than just a new business unit. As IBM has described it, cognitive is a whole new era for computing.

The good news is that IBM is no longer going it alone. Systems integrators, in particular, have been introducing cognitive capabilities over the last year. In some cases the offerings might not fit IBM’s definition of cognitive — being closer to combinations of automation, robotics or artificial intelligence techniques. But the development work and conversation has begun, and competition will be nothing but good for this nascent market.

Related Reading:
IBM Analyst Forum: A Tale Of Two Titans
IBM Insight 2015 Spotlights Cloud Services, Spark, Watson Analytics Upgrades
IBM Watson Gets Ready to Scale


Data to Decisions Future of Work Tech Optimization Chief Information Officer Chief Digital Officer

SAP Sapphire 2016 - Top 3 Positives & Concerns: SAP changes - probably for the better

SAP Sapphire 2016 - Top 3 Positives & Concerns: SAP changes - probably for the better

Holger Mueller
Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

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We had the opportunity to attend Sapphire 2016 in Orlando, the event was the usual large show, with similar attendance like last year, an amazing, probably the best in the industry, show floor and massive partner presence. 

 
 
 

Earlier in the week I published my Day 1, Day 2 Keynote takeaways (here and here), before Sapphire I wrote and a News Analysis of the SAP and Apple partnership (here) on the newly announced partnership with Microsoft here. Preparing for this post I also read my Event Reports of Sapphire 2015 (here), Sapphire 2014 (attended, here) and Sapphire 2013 (from the fences, here). If you have 10 minutes to invest, those blogs provide a very good perspective on what SAP’s challenges were, which ones SAP has tackled and which ones remain. 
 
So check out my event report in video format:
 

Not much time to read? Check out my 1 slide summary here:
 
 

Top 3 Positives

A new, humbler SAP – The Day #1 Keynote of Bill McDermott was all focused on showing that SAP wants to change the relationship with its customers, show more empathy, listen more and overall be a better partner to do business. That’s always a good ‘true north’ for any company, it is interesting the vendor felt compelled to do so – so things may not have been well in this compartment. (Very) successful software vendors always face a challenge in this area, so it is good for SAP to be mindful and take things back. The only concern I have here is, customers don’t know how to move forward with their enterprise automation in the cloud age, so they look for the vendors to tell them. That’s’ not necessarily emphatic, but leadership, though it is always good when articulated in the right tone.

SAP discovers PaaS for the mainstream – SAP finally addressed one of the biggest riddles to me – not one, but two board members (Leukert & Singh) talked about SAP’s PaaS product, Hana Cloud Platform (HCP). Leukert even walked through the three key scenarios that HCP is built for – integrate, extend and build new apps from scratch. Moreover, it was good to see that both Leukert and Singh (later in the executive Q&A) would clearly commit to use the HCP for integration across the various SAP products. That is a welcome departure to the product individual integration mechanics used by the former mySAP xxx products. However, HCP is strategically important for SAP customers, as they cannot expect that SAP will provide all best practice automation for the 21st century in product. Some of that functionality will have to be built by extension of what SAP ships, or even as completely standalone application effort. Hence, my wondering why PaaS was not mentioned before – so today it is good to see that HCP gets the keynote attention that both product and solution require on the customer side.

Partnerships, Partnerships… – After A for Apple comes M for Microsoft – SAP showed (once more) that it can pull off major partnerships – the week before Sapphire it was Apple, at Sapphire it was Microsoft. Both partnerships have tremendous potential to make customer lives better. Board Chairman Plattner even said in his Q&A that this time it would be different – because integration is easier, and adoption is faster due to the cloud. Moreover, both partnerships have significant upside for SAP customers, deep native Apple applications, better productivity using Apple, a largely available adopted cloud IaaS with Azure. Now it is time for all three vendors to execute – as despite there is the cloud today – there still needs to be tangible value for the solutions the partnerships deliver. Nevertheless, early days of course…
 

Top 3 Concerns

S/4 HANA Adoption – SAP launched S/4 HANA in January 2015 (see my original blog from the launch here) – 17 months later is not too a long timeframe, but surprisingly SAP could not bring a European or North American customer on stage at Sapphire who was live on S/4HANA. Given that inside, S/4HANA is also the much earlier launched Simple Finance product; this begs some questions on adoption. When asked, SAP executives were all on the same positive line: S/4HANA is on track (McDermott), has surpassed expectations (Enslin) and grows faster than R/3 (Plattner). With 3200+ customers sold, 800 ongoing implementations and 160 customers live the product certainly is doing ok, but has so far not convinced the core as well as the lighthouse SAP customers to upgrade. SAP executives thought that a lack of roadmap and guidelines is the issue, and SAP will address that by end of Q2. And while certainly roadmaps are important (see the success & popularity of the SuccessFactors roadmaps) they are not the silver bullet for customer adoption. S/4HANA is the first real platform change for the core ERP offering of SAP – since R/2 to R/3. And things are different now – see the 6 difference on my S/4HANA launch blog here).

Best Practice Challenges – SAP has gotten quieter around ‘copying’ code from the business suite, then simplifying it and making it work on HANA. The concern remains that many of the Business Suite codified best practices are inherited from R/3 – and with that from last century. Business best practices have considerably changed. When e.g. Leukert showed in his keynote that SAP could now help a car manufacturer build an engine every 8 seconds, which is remarkable speed. However, what does it mean for inventory, logistics, supply chain and contract best practices? All these need to change and will be different on how business was done in the 20th century, when things moved at a more pedestrian pace. SAP will have to come up with the customers and thought leaders who are creating, defining, validating and implementing the 21st century best practices and find a way to transfer those into S/4HANA and other products.

SAP has given up on IaaS (and this might be a Positive) – SAP’s IaaS strategy has been confusing at best, starting with SAP Hosting over a decade ago. Confusion between HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC) and HCP are legendary. In the latest move, SAP announced a broad partnership with Microsoft, which on the IaaS side meant that SAP would support Azure for both HANA and S/4HANA deployments (read my analysis here). For a company that needs every $ from cloud to satisfy the financial projections, a remarkable and courageous move. Probably a wise one, too – as SAP may have realized that it cannot build the next generation IaaS platform with the know how available in house. In addition, SAP may as well have listened to customers, who keep telling vendors that the future is multi cloud. I was somewhat surprised when Chairman Plattner saw a high portion of customers staying on premises, while that is certainly possible, it will be important for SAP to be able to run its most complex customers on a public cloud architecture. Finally, it is good to start with, Microsoft, but SAP will need more partnerships with other IaaS vendors, firstly with AWS (which runs a number of SAP customers in production, in the public cloud already) and more to follow. In addition, regardless SAP will have to continue on its ‘Monsoon’ project – that heavily relies on OpenStack to run its acquired applications.

 

Analyst Tidbits

SAP Discovers DaaS – We learnt from CDO Becher more about the Sybase 365 based DaaS solution. For someone wondering what SAP would do with the Sybase 365 (see me asking in spring 2013 here) finally an interesting road to monetization, a DaaS (Data as a Service) offering, delivered digitally, without the enterprise sales ‘mini bus’ – is a good move by SAP.

SuccessFactors uses Analytics to foster Diversity – SuccessFactors wants to use ‘true’ analytics to bring more objectivity in HR decisions, a good move certainly, as humans are inherently biased, correctly programed software is not. Thomas Otter and I recorded this video on the topic – look here.

Apple & SAP Partnership – I had the opportunity to catch up with the development on the SAP side, and things look good in regards of execution. Native applications on iOS devices may create the necessary differentiation that could revive iPad sales in the enterprise. Using Fiori design language for it is a good approach. However, SAP will hear questions / concerns from customers to repeat the same on Android, from which they have more in house than iOS (looking at the world markets).

IBM & SAP Partnership – We also had the opportunity to catch up with the IBM / SAP team, and saw a Watson enhanced SuccesFactors application that is being built for a long-term SAP customer. Equally, we saw an improved / enhanced Field Service application, built by IBM, using SAP CRM in the backend, running on an Apple iPad. This partnership has a lot of potential; it now needs to show customer traction.

Vora Framework GA – Vora is one of the most positive developments coming out of SAP, as it keeps the vendor relevant in BigData application use cases, which is the vast majority of strategic enterprise projects. Launched in September 2015, it is good to see the Vora Framework go GA, now it will be key to keep innovating fast and best to leave the Spark only deployment behind.

Key HCP Innovation - API Hub & CloudFoundry – SAP has for a long time described the vision of a network economy, well that needs APIs, and SAP is now finalizing its plans with the API Hub, a good and overdue move. Moreover, developers can now develop natively on CloudFoundry, which has slowly but steady become the standard SAP PaaS platform. Long forgotten are the days when the initial CloudFoundry champions were hybris, and the ‘rogue’ people, but not forgotten by yours truly. A good move by SAP.

Business Objects is ... back - Chairman Plattner joked in its keynote that the SAP BI product portfolio is changing names faster than he can keep track of the name change... and bringing back the venerable Business Objects brand (as umbrella naming of the SAP BI tools) is likely no the latest name change. At least for me Business Objects does not associate with the analytics software needed in 2016 and beyond, I more associate data dictionary and cubes with the brand. Not really high on the agenda in 2016 and beyond. But maybe just me...
 

MyPOV

A good Sapphire event for SAP customers. The vendor is planning to change its relationship with customers, as McDermott set out on Day #1, and empathy is always a good start. SAP understanding the value of HCP is very good change for customers, too, who have to know that they can extend and build their own applications on a PaaS platform that is industry scale. When they realize that SAP have moved closer to CloudFoundry on the PaaS side, they will welcome that, too. Equally moving to Azure support is also something that will not concern customers too much, as most of them are there courtesy of Office365 anyway.

On the concern side, SAP will need to solve S/4HANA adoption, for me the challenge is less in roadmaps, but in the overall business value of running on S/4HANA, and the business operational implications from running this software. For that, SAP will need the famous ‘lighthouse’ customers in order to address the current gridlock.

But overall a good Sapphire for SAP customers, it is always good to see a vendor making course corrections for the better on the technology side, and the changes for a more prominent HCP, the standardization on integration, the rapprochement to CloudFoundry, the GA of the Vora framework and the move to 3rd party IaaS with Microsoft Azure are all moves that will make SAP customers more successful going forward. So stay tuned for more soon.


Check out a Storify of tweets of the Day #3 keynote below - there is always great insight on what SAP Chairman Hasso Plattner shares. 


More on SAP:
  • First Take - SAP Sapphire Day #2 Keynote - read here
  • News Analysis - SAP and Microsoft usher in new era of partnership to accelerate digital transformation in the cloud - read here
  • First Take -  SAP Sapphire Bill McDermott Day #1 Keynote - read here
  • Event Preview - SAP Sapphire 2016 - What to expect and look for - read here
  • News Analysis - Apple & SAP Partner to Revolutionize Work on iPhone & iPad - read here
  • Progress Report - SAP SuccessFactors makes good progress - now needs appeal beyond SAP - read here
  • News Analysis - SAP HANA Vora now available... - A key milestone for SAP - read here
  • Event Report - SAP Ariba Live - Make Procurement Cool Again - read here
  • News Analysis - SAP SuccessFactors innovates in Performance Management with continuous feedback powered by 1 to 1s  - read here
  • Event Report - SAP SuccessFactors SuccessConnect - Good Progress sprinkled with innovative ideas and challenging the status quo - read here
  • News Analysis - WorkForce Software Announces Global Reseller Agreement with SAP - read here
  • First Take - SAP SuccessFactors SuccessConnect - Day #1 Keynote Top 3 Takeaways - read here
  • News Analysis - SAP SuccessFactors introduces Next Generation of HCM software - read here
  • News Analysis - SAP delivers next release of SAP HANA - SPS 10 - Ready for BigData and IoT - read here
  • Event Report - SAP Sapphire - Top 3 Positives and Concerns - read here
  • First Take - Bernd Leukert and Steve Singh Day #2 Keynote - read here
  • News Analysis - SAP and IBM join forces ... read here
  • First Take - SAP Sapphire Bill McDermott Day #1 Keynote - read here
  • In Depth - S/4HANA qualities as presented by Plattner - play for play - read here
  • First Take - SAP Cloud for Planning - the next spreadsheet killer is off to a good start - read here
  • Progress Report - SAP HCM makes progress and consolidates - a lot of moving parts - read here
  • First Take - SAP launches S/4HANA - The good, the challenge and the concern - read here
  • First Take - SAP's IoT strategy becomes clearer - read here
  • SAP appoints a CTO - some musings - read here
  • Event Report - SAP's SAPtd - (Finally) more talk on PaaS, good progress and aligning with IBM and Oracle - read here
  • News Analysis - SAP and IBM partner for cloud success - good news - read here
  • Market Move - SAP strikes again - this time it is Concur and the spend into spend management - read here
  • Event Report - SAP SuccessFactors picks up speed - but there remains work to be done - read here
  • First Take - SAP SuccessFactors SuccessConnect - Top 3 Takeaways Day 1 Keynote - read here.
  • Event Report - Sapphire - SAP finds its (unique) path to cloud - read here
  • What I would like SAP to address this Sapphire - read here
  • News Analysis - SAP becomes more about applications - again - read here
  • Market Move - SAP acquires Fieldglass - off to the contingent workforce - early move or reaction? Read here.
  • SAP's startup program keep rolling – read here.
  • Why SAP acquired KXEN? Getting serious about Analytics – read here.
  • SAP steamlines organization further – the Danes are leaving – read here.
  • Reading between the lines… SAP Q2 Earnings – cloudy with potential structural changes – read here.
  • SAP wants to be a technology company, really – read here
  • Why SAP acquired hybris software – read here.
  • SAP gets serious about the cloud – organizationally – read here.
  • Taking stock – what SAP answered and it didn’t answer this Sapphire [2013] – read here.
  • Act III & Final Day – A tale of two conference – Sapphire & SuiteWorld13 – read here.
  • The middle day – 2 keynotes and press releases – Sapphire & SuiteWorld – read here.
  • A tale of 2 keynotes and press releases – Sapphire & SuiteWorld – read here.
  • What I would like SAP to address this Sapphire – read here.
  • Why 3rd party maintenance is key to SAP’s and Oracle’s success – read here.
  • Why SAP acquired Camillion – read here.
  • Why SAP acquired SmartOps – read here.
  • Next in your mall – SAP and Oracle? Read here
 
And more about SAP technology:
  • Event Prieview - SAP TechEd 2015 - read here
  • News Analysis - SAP Unveils New Cloud Platform Services and In-Memory Innovation on Hadoop to Accelerate Digital Transformation – A key milestone for SAP read here
  • HANA Cloud Platform - Revisited - Improvements ahead and turning into a real PaaS - read here
  • News Analysis - SAP commits to CloudFoundry and OpenSource - key steps - but what is the direction? - Read here.
  • News Analysis - SAP moves Ariba Spend Visibility to HANA - Interesting first step in a long journey - read here
  • Launch Report - When BW 7.4 meets HANA it is like 2 + 2 = 5 - but is 5 enough - read here
  • Event Report - BI 2014 and HANA 2014 takeaways - it is all about HANA and Lumira - but is that enough? Read here.
  • News Analysis – SAP slices and dices into more Cloud, and of course more HANA – read here.
  • SAP gets serious about open source and courts developers – about time – read here.
  • My top 3 takeaways from the SAP TechEd keynote – read here.
  • SAP discovers elasticity for HANA – kind of – read here.
  • Can HANA Cloud be elastic? Tough – read here.
  • SAP’s Cloud plans get more cloudy – read here.
  • HANA Enterprise Cloud helps SAP discover the cloud (benefits) – read here
Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here. 
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