| Constellation Research

Cloudera Progress Report and Analyst Day

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

We had the opportunity to attend Cloudera's Analyst Days in San Franscisco this week, held at the beautiful Ritz Carlton hotel. The third analyst meeting of the vendor saw record attendance with almost 60 analysts making the trip.

So take a look at this short video for my Top 3 takeaways:

No time to watch - read on:

Company Growth while preserving culture - The vendor is doing well in all regards, significant revenue, paying customer and partner growth. Talent acquisition challenges are being addressed with a new Budapest development location. Good to see the attention to keep the culture intact, being at 1100 employees not an easy task.

Cloud & Cybersecurity - Always a treat to listen to Mike Olson, his main point was that Hadoop is now around for real, and moving back to where it started - into the cloud. His other strategic outlook was on cyber security - where Hadoop clearly has a key technology enabler role.

Quality & Support - This was an area Cloudera said a year ago it would focus further on and it was good to see that Cloudera came back, reported on progress, and showed some good results.

MyPOV

Good to see the overall progress at Cloudera, the vendor is doing well, it has a plan to take advantage of the 'real' Hadoop adoption wave and it looks that it is handling product growth well. It's great to have Intel as an investor, but also as a partner to share future hardware design, so Cloudera can take advantage of them in its products. Unfortunately most of the product plans were under NDA, likely to be unwrapped in a few months, so can't comment on these.

On the concern side Cloudera needs to tie together the directions. The vendor went at length to make clear it understands and cares for the vertical needs of Hadoop adoption, but those needs have to find themselves in specific future product capabilities. And I am looking forward to see the first 'hard' feature uptake from Intel into Cloudera software.

Overall Cloudera is in a very good position to keep taking advantage of the rise of Hadoop as the critical data engine for enterprises. 2016 will be (another) key year - stay tuned, we will be watching.

More on BigData / Hadoop / noSQL:

News Analysis - SAP HANA Vora now available... - A key milestone for SAP - read here
Progress Report - Hortonworks wants to become the next generation for the enterprise – a tall ask - 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
News Analysis - SAP delivers next release of SAP HANA - SPS 10 - Ready for BigData and IoT - read here
News Analysis - Salesforce Transforms Big Data Into Customer Success with the Salesforce Analytics Cloud - read here
Progress Report - Teradata is alive and kicking and shows some good 'paranoid' practices - read here
Event Report – Couchbase Connect – Couchbase’s shows momentum - read here
News Analysis - Couchbase unveils N1QL and updates the NoSQL Performance Wars - read here
Event Report - MongoDB keeps up the momentum in product and go to market - read here
News Analysis - Pivotal pivots to OpenSource and Hortonworks - Or: OpenSource keeps winning - read here
Progress Report - Cloudera is all in with Hadoop - now off to verticals - read here
Market Move - Oracle buys Datalogix - moves into DaaS - read here
Event Report - MongoDB is a showcase for the power of Open Source in the enterprise - read here
Musings - A manifesto: What are 'true' analytics? Read here
Future of Work - One Spreadsheet at the time - Informatica Springbok - read here
Musings - The Era of the no-design Database - Read here
Mendix - the other path to build software - Read here
Musings - Time to ditch your datawarehouse .... - Read here

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

Tech Optimization Data to Decisions Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Innovation & Product-led Growth Future of Work Next-Generation Customer Experience Hortonworks Hadoop 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 Experience Officer

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SAP HANA Vora now available... - A key milestone for SAP

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Last week SAP used the largest Software and IT fair – CeBIT – to make news in a number of areas, the one of interest is around HANA Vora, announced last year in September (we attended the launch event, blog post here), and now GA in its first release.

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

HANNOVER — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced general availability of SAP HANA Vora, an in-memory query engine that brings powerful contextual analytics across all data stored in Hadoop, enterprise systems and other distributed data sources.MyPOV – Good summary, and they key step forward for SAP – as mentioned many times before, ‘Hadoop’ used to be a ‘bad’ word around SAP, that for the longest time was on the ‘in memory only’ track. We noticed the change at Sapphire 2015 and product certainty was created with Hana Vora in September last year.

To facilitate distributed data processing across enterprise and Hadoop data, SAP has contributed part of the code for SAP HANA Vora to the Apache Spark open source ecosystem.

MyPOV – Good to see SAP working with more open source in general, Vora maybe the largest contribution to open source that SAP has done so far. It certainly has the largest impact on SAP, as practically all next generation application use cases that enterprises are looking into, comprises BigData stored in Hadoop clusters. SAP before Vora could not address this data directly, so Vora is key for SAP to keep building 21st century applications. Even more important for Hana Cloud Platform (HCP), SAP’s PaaS tool that otherwise would not have been a competitive offering for stand alone projects, a market that SAP wants to be in and is effectively in.

SAP also announced that CenterPoint Energy Houston Electric (CenterPoint Energy) will implement the SAP HANA platform and SAP HANA Vora to bring together its highly distributed enterprise data framework. While Hadoop will allow CenterPoint Energy to reduce information technology costs associated with increasing Big Data storage requirements, SAP HANA Vora will allow for more informed business decisions through powerful data analytics. […]

MyPOV – Always good to see a customer on a press release, using the new announced capabilities – and good to see cost savings associated with Vora (no surprise, as HDD and SSD are cheaper than RAM).
CenterPoint Energy to Innovate for Customers

Delivering power to more than 2.3 million consumers, CenterPoint Energy collects electronic meter data every 15 minutes for energy usage reporting, which leads to substantial data storage costs. Within six weeks, SAP and CenterPoint Energy architected a testing environment that processed over 5 billion records of data with Hadoop, SAP HANA and SAP HANA Vora. As a result of its successful test deployment, CenterPoint Energy will implement and standardize on the SAP HANA platform and SAP HANA Vora.

MyPOV – Great to see the use case and very clear (as we blogged and stated many times) that in memory (so HANA) cannot be the all encompassing solution for IoT scenarios.

“Our initial analysis proved that SAP HANA paired with SAP HANA Vora is the right solution for us moving forward operationally, while allowing for innovation around our Internet of Things and predictive analytics initiatives,” said Gary Hayes, CIO and SVP of CenterPoint Energy. “With the help of SAP, we are transforming to a ‘live’ digital enterprise to better serve customers.”

MyPOV – Good quote from the CIO, Hayes, hitting the right points here – the combination of ERP data in HANA with IoT and Analytics capabilities, that otherwise would not have been easily integrated and accessible from SAP, with SAP tools.

Digitizing Businesses with SAP HANA Vora

[…] “As organizations begin their journey toward becoming smarter digital enterprises, the natural starting point and enabler is their core in-memory technology platform,” said Greg McStravick, general manager and global head of Platform GTM, SAP. “With SAP HANA and SAP HANA Vora, customers can turn massive amounts of Big Data into business context. We are pleased to work with companies like CenterPoint Energy who value the customer service enhancements that a single, end-to-end digital enterprise platform linking corporate data, social sentiment and other data such as weather patterns can provide.”

MyPOV – Good quote from McStravick – but while I understand the perspective, he has it wrong: It is not the Hadoop based BigData that gives context to the business data – but business data that is the context to the (gravitational) BigData. SAP needs to get that perspective right soon, so it can create value for its customers with the right solutions.

SAP HANA Vora leverages and extends the Apache Spark execution framework to provide enriched interactive analytics on Hadoop. The core foundation of SAP HANA is complemented by SAP HANA Vora, which is designed to add insight across large volumes of operational and contextual data taken from enterprise applications, data warehouses, data lakes and edge Internet of Things sensors.

MyPOV – Good description of what HANA Vora does – the ‘divouring’ of massive volumes of data residing in Hadoop, that in memory HANA could never hold. Keeping Vora to Spark keeps the HANA to Vora an in memory connection and thus on ‘even footing’. Good approach to keep the ‘speed’ argument going, but in most use cases we expect Vora to query data in Hadoop that is not RAM based.

SAP HANA Vora aims to solve key Big Data challenges by providing:
Data correlation for making precise contextual decisions — Enables mashup of operational business data with external unstructured data sources for more powerful analytics

MyPOV – Very powerful and very important – but it’s the business data that is the context – not the unstructured data.

Simplified management of Big Data — Allows data to be processed locally on a Hadoop cluster, removing any data ownership and integration challenges

MyPOV – Indeed, much easier to keep e.g. IoT data in Hadoop instead of cycling it into memory via federation tools from Sybase.

Online analytical processing (OLAP) modeling capabilities on Hadoop data— Makes real-time drill-down analysis possible on large volumes of Hadoop data distributed across thousands of nodes

MyPOV – Very powerful indeed, but the ‘drill up’ is equally important, just finding the business content to data stored in Hadoop clusters… even on a single occurrence level.

SAP HANA Vora is targeted at benefiting customers in various industries where highly interactive Big Data analytics in a business process context is paramount, such as financial services, telecommunications, utilities, healthcare and manufacturing. SAP has an established partner ecosystem, including Cloudera, Databricks, Hortonworks and MapR Technologies, that plans to support SAP HANA Vora. Read what SAP partners have to say at “Partner Quotes: SAP HANA Vora Now Available to Bring Contextual Analytics Across All Enterprise and Big Data Systems.”

MyPOV – Good to see this as an ecosystem play and good for SAP to have all key Hadoop and Spark players on board.

Supporting the Apache Spark Community

SAP has recently open-sourced new features to the Apache Spark ecosystem, one of the most active open source communities. These features include a data hierarchy capability that enables drill-down analysis on Hadoop data, and an extension to Spark’s data source application program interface (API) that improves distributed query efficiency from Spark to SAP HANA. These open source offerings are now available as a GitHub project. SAP plans to strengthen its commitment to the developer community by continuing to make more open source contributions in the future.

MyPOV – Good to see SAP using more open source, but also supporting open source with contributions. It will be interesting to see if any other enterprises software vendors will start contributing to Vora, or if this will remain an SAP only contribution.

Overall MyPOV

Always good to see software vendors deliver, especially when it is a strategic piece of software, that basically allows the vendor to survive for the next decades to come. Some people may think this is exaggerated, but those should keep in mind that SAP had no Hadoop story 12 months ago. The question will now have to be if Vora is the right and the full story – but it the start of a new book for SAP, and we are in the first chapter.

On the concern side, as elaborated above – SAP will need to make sure the perspective is not coming from the traditional (HANA based) ERP application, but from the Hadoop based Bigdata. That is where enterprises are building their next generation applications – in may use cases out of sheer necessity, because all other storage mechanisms and mediums are not cost effective or even – if cost played no role – feasible. The sooner SAP understands this – the better.

But for now, a good day for SAP customers as their vendor has done major step to future proof offerings and to remain a key player in enterprise software going forward. Tuning is always part of an offering and I am sure SAP will sooner than later get the whole story right.

How Do We Do More? CityTalks Inspires Questions

Gavin Heaton

Founder
Disruptors Co

Gavin is the Founder of Disruptors Co, one of Australia’s leading independent strategy and innovation companies. Gavin advises firms on strategy, marketing, product development and innovation. He is also a member of the Orbits program, the influencer network of  award winning analyst and advisory firm, Constellation Research. Gavin advises boards and leadership on innovation strategy, marketing, data-driven product development and corporate venturing. Gavin is on the board of Vibewire, a youth-led social enterprise based in Sydney, Australia and on the Technology Advisory Group for Good2Give – the workplace giving platform. ...

Sitting in the audience of the City of Sydney’s #SydCityTalk event featuring human rights advocate and former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, it was clear that she was preaching to the choir. The message of “people first” deeply resonated with the audience and spread out like a shock wave from the stalls back. It wasn’t that we haven’t heard discussions about the importance of human-centred policy and action before – it’s just apparent that this style of conversation has been missing from our public discourse for some time.

After all, we live in an age where our sense of humanity has taken a backseat on our roadtrip to the future, and we’ve packed off the difficult issues like climate change, asylum seekers and refugees to live with the relatives.

So hearing a discussion of how governments, business and citizens can work together seems strangely foreign and wildly exciting.

Mary Robinson packed plenty into a short presentation – sustainable development goals, global focus, Nelson Mandela, Richard Branson and Bill Gates and global recognition for the programs and actions of the City of Sydney. Be sure to watch her speech in the video below.

Debunking Trickle Down Economics

One of the most interesting talks of the evening was Richard Denniss, Chief Economist from The Australia Institute. Not only was he able to make economics sound interesting and entertaining, he was able to do so in a way that illustrated his main point – that trickle down economics does not work. While we have seen this for ourselves in the widening gap between rich and poor – and the accelerating distance between the poor and the poorest – the raw numbers from the IMF tell an altogether more compelling story.

The research from five IMF economists, drew attention to the issue of global inequality, dismissed “trickle-down” economics and urged governments to target policies toward the bottom 20 percent of their citizens.

The problem with inequality is that it actually cripples growth. If we invest in the top 20% of our population, then GDP declines over the medium term. While a 1% increase in the income share of the poorest 20% of the population results in a 0.38% increase in GDP.

Where to from here?

Each of the speakers told a compelling and vital story. But the facts and figures from Richard Denniss’ speech coupled with Mary Robinson’s urgent insistence on change made me wonder. In fact, it made many of us in the audience wonder – where do we go from here? The levers of change are being applied to the UN’s sustainable development goals – and Australia is a willing signatory. But there is a yawning gulf between intention and policy, signature and action. Where do we go from here? How do we take these good intentions and make change happen? And precisely who is this WE?

I would dearly love to hear an update on progress at the next City Talks event.

Perhaps it is too soon to expect change to take place – or maybe – just maybe, we need more impatience in the mix of government, business and citizen policy making.

You can watch the full replay of the event below.

Marketing Transformation Chief Marketing Officer

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The last thing privacy needs is new laws

Steve Wilson

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Steve Wilson is former VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, leading the business theme Digital Safety and Privacy. His coverage includes digital identity, data protection, data privacy, cryptography, and trust. His advisory services to CIOs, CISOs, CPOs and IT architects include identity product strategy, security practice benchmarking, Privacy by Design (PbD), privacy engineering and Privacy [or Data Protection] Impact Assessments (PIA, DPIA). Coverage Areas: -  Identity management, frameworks & governance-  Digital identity technologies-  Privacy by Design -  Big Data; “Big Privacy”-  Identity & privacy innovation Previous experience: Wilson has worked in ICT innovation, research, development and analysis for over 25 years. With double…...

World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has given a speech in London, re-affirming the importance of privacy, but unfortunately he has muddied the waters by casting aspersions on privacy law. Berners-Lee makes a technologist's error, calling for unworkable new privacy mechanisms where none in fact are warranted.

The Telegraph reports Berners-Lee as saying "Some people say privacy is dead – get over it. I don't agree with that. The idea that privacy is dead is hopeless and sad." He highlighted that peoples' participation in potentially beneficial programs like e-health is hampered by a lack of trust, and a sense that spying online is constant.

Of course he's right about that. Yet he seems to underestimate the data privacy protections we already have. Instead he envisions "a world in which I have control of my data... I can sell it to you and we can negotiate a price, but more importantly I will have legal ownership of all the data about me" he said according to The Telegraph.

It's a classic case of being careful what you ask for, in case you get it. What would control over "all data about you" look like? These days, most of the data about us - that is, personal data aka Personally Identifiable Information or PII - is collected or created behind our backs, by increasingly sophisticated algorithms. On the one hand, I agree wholeheartedly that people deserve to know more about these opaque processes, and we need better notice and consent mechanisms, but on the other hand, I don't see that data ownership can possible fix the privacy problem.

What could "ownership" of data even mean? If personal information has been gathered by a business process, or created by clever proprietary algorithms, we get into obvious debates over intellectual property. Look at medical records: in Australia and I suspect elsewhere, it is understood that doctors legally own the medical records about a patient, but that patients have rights to access the contents. The interpretation of medical tests is regarded as the intellectual property of the healthcare professional.

The philosophical and legal quandries are many. With data that is only potentially identifiable, at what point would ownership flip from the creator of the data to the individual to whom it applies? What if data applies to more than one person, as in household electricity records, or, more seriously, DNA? Who owns that?

The outcome we probably all seek is less exploitation of people through data about them. Privacy (or, strictly speaking, data protection) is fundamentally about restraint. When an organisation knows you, they should be restrained in what they can do with that knowledge, and not use it against your interests. Organisations should show self-restraint, and where that fails, there should be legal limits to what can be done with personal data. And thus, over 130 countries now have legislation which require that organisations only collect the personal data they really need for stated purposes, that personal data collected for one reason not be re-purposed for others, that people are made reasonably aware of what's going on with their personal data, and so on.

Berners-Lee alluded to the privacy threats of Big Data, and he's absolutely right. But I point out that existing privacy law can substantially deal with Big Data. It's not necessary to make new and novel laws about data ownership. When an algorithm works out something about you, such as your risk of developing diabetes, without you having to fill out a questionnaire, then that process has collected personal data, albeit indirectly. Technology-neutral privacy laws don't care about the method of collection or creation of personal data. Synthetic personal data, collected as it were algorithmically, is treated by the law in the same way as data gathered overtly. An example of this principle is found in the successful European legal action against Facebook for automatic tag suggestions, in which biometric facial recognition algorithms identify people in photos without consent.

Technologists often under-estimate the powers of existing broadly framed privacy laws, doubtless because technology neutrality is not their regular stance. It is perhaps surprising, yet gratifying, that conventional privacy laws treat new technologies like Big Data and the Internet of Things simply as potential new sources of personal data. If brand new algorithms give businesses the power to read the minds of shoppers or social network users, then those businesses are restrained in law as to what they can do with that information, just as if they had collected it in person. Which is surely what regular people expect of privacy laws.

Data to Decisions Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Matrix Commerce Tech Optimization Security Zero Trust Chief Executive Officer Chief Financial Officer Chief People Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Privacy Officer

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The Industrial Internet, Accelerator in a Box and Retail Disruption on #DisrupTV

Gavin Heaton

Founder
Disruptors Co

Each week, Vala Afshar and R “Ray” Wang host a web series DisrupTV. It’s a 30 minute deep dive into the world of digital transformation featuring the people and organizations that are leading that change.

This week’s episode featured GE’s Chief Digital Officer, Ganesh Bell, Constellation Research Principal Analyst, Guy Courtin and myself.

Setting a cracking pace, GE have become the poster child for the world of digital transformation, coining the term “industrial internet”, establishing startups in Silicon Valley and setting a vision to be a top 10 software company by 2020. In the episode, Ganesh talks about the challenges of transformation – of moving from an industrial company to a digital company and what it takes. It’s well worth watching the replay to learn more about the tangible impact of digital transformation that GE is making not just within their business but well beyond it.

Joining Ray and Vala, about 25 minutes in, I shared some insight into the world of enterprise innovation in Australia:

How enterprises are learning from startups – from the Qantas Hackathon to accelerators like Telstra’s Muru-D
Federal Government’s Digital Transformation Office and the recent launch of their Alpha Guide for digital government
Stone and Chalk’s Fintech hub in Sydney and the amazing Open Orbit business process improvement platform
Our Disruptor’s Handbook Accelerator in a Box program

Guy Courtin joined around 45 minutes in and brought amazing insight into the changing world of retail. From showrooming to the internet of things, he covered a vast terrain of disruption and opportunity, suggesting that bricks and mortar stores still have plenty of advantages over their digital only counterparts, and explaining that to be truly transformative, we need to stop thinking about “e” commerce and connect the dots around the customer’s commercial experience.

While the show ran for just over an hour, it’s jam packed with insight and energy. And DisrupTV is fast becoming an authoritative, must watch series for all those who are serious about the business of disruption and transformation in business. Check out recordings of past episodes here. And watch this week’s episode replay from Blab below.

Marketing Transformation Chief Marketing Officer

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SAP Ariba Live - Making Procurement Cool Again

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

We had the chance to attend SAP Ariba's user conference Ariba Live in Las Vegas, together with colleagues Chris Kanaracus, Guy Courtin and Ray Wang. The conference was well attended with over 2500 people in attendance.

Guy and I recorded a short video - take a look:

No chance to watch? Read on:

You can find Guy's Supply Chain and Procurement's takeaways here. My next generation Applications takeaways are as as follows:

Open APIs - As common these days, SAP Ariba will publish APIs, starting with five areas, hierarchies and approvals the most prominent ones. Kudos to the vendor for working from a roamap going forward so customers and prospects can plan their uptake of these APIs.

End User Enablement - We have been writing about end user enablement since a while and it is a key strategy for vendors, as it achieves a number of benefits: First it enables users with reasonable technology savviness to build their own applications. Secondly that helps enterprises to become more agile and to accelerate, critical for their future success. And lastly it protects the vendors from being disrupted from new market entrants, just using their APIs with an attractive user interface. Good to see Ariba enabling a lightweight end user PaaS, allowing to create forms and deploy them not only to the web, but also to tablets and mobile devices.

Platform Innovation - Ariba had one of the earliest internet scale, some may say cloud platforms and as such it shows its age. While there was not much happening two and more years ago on the platform side, its good to see that this has changed. SAP Ariba is actively using Hadoop, exploiting microservices and using popular frameworks like AngularJS. And of course HANA is more and getting though the product. The use case should also be interesting for the recently gone into GA HANA Vora (see below for news analysis when announced).

MyPOV

Good to see traction on the platform side at SAP Ariba. It looks like the division has found new speed and dynamics, that attending customers noticed. Procurement is a huge opportunity for SAP and its customers and it looks like there is a better grasp at getting into a very good position in the next years to come.

On the concern side SAP Ariba needs to execute on the new vision and roadmap. Networked applications of the scale that SAP Ariba needs to build are not trivial, even with today's advances on the cloud side. Operating this on internal data centers is a valid strategy, but can / could become also of concern as capability and TCO of the popular cloud based IaaS platforms will become more and more competitive.

But overall good to see the progress at SAP Ariba - we will be watching, stay tuned.

Matrix Commerce Revenue & Growth Effectiveness New C-Suite Data to Decisions Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Innovation & Product-led Growth Tech Optimization Future of Work Next-Generation Customer Experience SAP Chief Procurement Officer Chief Supply Chain Officer Chief Product Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Data Officer

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Marketers as Innovators – Join the #DisrupTV Live Stream

Gavin Heaton

Founder
Disruptors Co

This weekend – at 5am Australian daylight time – I will be joining the hosts of DisrupTV, R “Ray” Wang and Valar Afshar to talk marketing-led innovation, and provide a snapshot of the Australian innovation landscape. This weekly web series is streamed live on Blab.im and is focused on leadership, innovation and disruption in the enterprise and brings together A-list guests, the latest enterprise news, hot startups, insight from influencers, and much more. And when I say “A-list guests”, I’m not talking about celebrities. I’m talking about business and technology leaders who are changing the way that we do, think about and create value in business.

The show has featured:

Christine Stoffel, CEO and Founder at SEAT
Alex Osterwalder, CEO and Founder at Strategyzer (and inventor of the business model canvas)
David Bray
Kim Stevenson, CIO and VP at Intel
Crawford Del Prete from IDC
Whitney Johnson, author of Disrupt Yourself, and Brian Fanzo, live streaming pioneer

The discussion with Alex Osterwalder is eye opening and full of insight for those seeking to change the way businesses organise themselves, create value and operate in the world. It’s well worth tuning in (embedded below).

This week’s interview features GE’s Chief Digital Officer, Ganesh Bell. He leads digital innovation and transformation, and is responsible for the digital solutions business and digital engagement to drive business growth. I will be discussing the nature of corporate innovation, how a market-product fit wins over a product-market fit in the enterprise, and will touch on some of the initiatives arising from the Australian Government’s #IdeasBoom. We’ll also be joined in the “Influencer’s Corner” by Guy Courtin, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research.

Be sure to tune in at 11 a.m. PT/ 2 p.m. ET and remember to tweet your questions using the #DisrupTV hashtag.

Marketing Transformation Chief Marketing Officer

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ADP MOTM - ADP delivers: New UI, Benchmarks, Market Place & More

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

We had the opportunity to attend ADP’s yearly user conference ‘Meeting of the Minds’ in Fort Washington, at the beautiful Gaylord National. The conference was equally well attended as last year in Nashville with over 1000 attendees.

Always tough to pick the top 3 at an event – but here you go – take a look at the video:

No time to watch – read on:

New UI for Enterprise and Vantage – Last year at MOTM ADP promised to bring both Enterprise and Vantage products to the new UI the vendor had already used for a number of new applications. Especially the talent management product UI, Vantage looked like ‘vintage’ (pun intended). ADP had to move to a declarative way to build its UIs, encapsulate functionality in APIs and revisit workflows and information model, so taking a year is not a bad timeline for the effort. Attendees were looking forward to use the new versions when talking to them around the conference. Almost all is done, except for the practitioner UI in Enterprise and the recruiter role in Vantage. All should be done later this year. This moves the needle from product development to sales and services, with the question how fast customers can be in a position to use the new UI. It also removes the well reported ‘frown effect’ when demoing ‘vintage Vantage’ – which shortchanged a serious look at a pretty functional rich Talent Management product due to UI concerns.

Data Cloud powers Benchmarking – One of the more exciting products that ADP has created in the last years is the ADP Data Cloud, which is the platform not only to new reporting and visualization, but also the base for its predictive analytics and benchmarking products. And Benchmarking was the new capability showed at MOTM. As ADP pays over 30 Million people in North America it has a better data exposure to salary and more information than probably any vendor. ADP’s labor forecasts routinely beats the government’s labor forecasts. Now – as one of the first benchmarks – users can see salary and more information for a job role across the USA. Participation is very high, well in the 90ies of the customer base, as even the reluctant customers see immediate value. This puts ADP in a very good position to tap into future DaaS (Data as a Service) revenues. On the predictive analytics side things have slowed down a bit (like with other vendors), as HR practitioners remain skeptical towards analytics. All vendors (not only ADP) have to work hard to overcome this, and the path to predictive analytics success in HCM does not lead through the HR department but the business user, who needs any level of automation that works, and can right away see if a prediction / automation ‘works’ (or not).

Market Place – Since its launch a few quarters back the ADP marketplace has been growing fast to almost 100 signed up partners and close to half of them being live. ADP’s approach of allowing competitors on the market place (e.g. Cornerstone) and to compete on merit is a healthy approach that enterprises value. The cloud allows for ‘zapping’ the sales cycle to an afternoon, the provision of free (or cheap) sand boxes to enable ‘try & buy’ sales mechanisms and a fast way of implementation. The future of enterprise software consumption and it is good to see that ADP has enabled the platform and marketplace early.

Analyst Tidbits

New Onboarding – ADP has also released new Onboarding capability, a solution the vendor had the courage to onboard analysts with at the last analyst meeting in fall. The product has been delivered in a pretty functional version 1 that will be highly welcome (and is anticipated highly) be ADP customers.

Global Offerings – ADP keeps offering global solutions and related services like BPO. The offering has also been moved to the new UI starting with the portal, that most (international) employees see first. Partnerships are progressing, the most recent prominent one being the one with Workday (see below for News Analysis). We see ADP and NGA HR as the ‘last men standing’ to offer comprehensive BPO, whenever that market will find its prince, wakening it from now almost 10 years hibernation.
ACA keeps giving and giving – With new regulation and compliance burdens hitting enterprises and ADP’s record on compliance it is no surprise this is a well working offering for ADP. Enterprises need help with ACA, as every formal and informal poll shows, and ADP is ready to help, at a staggering scale, e.g. the vendor shared that it is providing more than an 8 digit number of 1095s this month.

Development best practices – ADP has transformed the way it builds product, how it goes to market and large parts of is culture. I think this is the first time a keynote speaker wore jeans (!) on stage, ok it was a developer, but still a milestone. It is good to see ADP is not resting on its laurels and looking at more innovative ways of building products. The session was under NDA, but it was exciting to learn about very short review and product deliver cycles. Some of the products can already be found on the ADP marketplace – I encourage you to find and try them.

MyPOV

A very good MOTM for ADP, the vendor has delivered what it promised a year ago and now has a competitive product, for the first time I can think of. Good to see ADP is not resting on its product laurels and has more interesting offerings and products coming. Naturally, focus now turns to sales and services, customers need to understand and adopt the new offerings. Too early to tell how well ADP will do here.

On the concern side ADP now needs to show its sales and services muscle. With over 800 sales reps in North America that’s not a question of presence but of mentality. It’s a different sales cycle to ‘grab land’ with an aging product but market leader position vs. winning and converting customers towards newly competitive products. E.g. the ADP sales force will have to show it can sell / upsell Talent Management now. And customers will have to be converted / upgraded to the new user interface (and platform in the case of e.g. Data Cloud) – a new challenge for the services organization. ADP customers need to understand well what it takes to move to the new offerings and chart the course to the upgrade / updated. But at the end of the day a good problem to have.

Overall good progress as ADP morphs into more of an overall global HCM software player from a North American payroll giant, a good trend for customers. We will be watching, stay tuned.

Announcements from #JiveWorld 2016

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…...

As part of the product keynote sessions Jive is unveiled the next generation of interactive intranet and customer communities. In addition, Jive unveiled how the WorkHub and new Jive Identity Service will unite all aspects of a person’s business ecosystem – from colleagues across a company to individual teams, to external stakeholders such as customers and partners – all in one, seamless collaboration experience.

Jive announced enhancements to Jive’s Employee Engagement solution, Customer Engagement solution and Jive Chime.

For the Employee Engagement solution, Jive is announced the following enhancements:

Corporate communications bundle: Jive’s new, out-of-the-box solution for internal communications teams includes simplified content publishing capabilities for rich, beautiful blogs, images and videos, auto-subscribed targeted news streams, a configurable news page and personalized email digests to draw users into the community, as well as impact metrics for message reach and sentiment.
Mobile intranet enhancements: The latest update to Jive Daily encourages visual storytelling by allowing users to take or add a photo from their mobile devices and share it directly into their community. Other features added in today’s Jive Daily release include the ability to mention places and create documents. Near-term feature enhancements include localization, enhanced metrics, additional enterprise security requirements and image collections.

For the Customer Engagement solution, Jive is announced:

New events center: In the coming months, Jive will help make employee and customer community events even more useful and engaging through the ability to directly manage an event lifecycle from before to during and after the event. Additionally, a new event performance dashboard will show the number of attendees and their engagement at-a-glance, as well as post-event success metrics, sessions grading and much more.
New social listening integration with Sysomos: Brands soon will be able to route relevant conversations on social media directly in Jive-x community, increasing brand affinity. This integration delivers the ability to listen and respond to over a billion conversations online, in real-time, by enhancing social interactions and dialogue with community members, and improving customer satisfaction along with lowering call center costs.

Enhancements Jive is making to the Jive for Healthcare Collaboration include:

Secure, HIPAA-compliant team messaging: Last year marked the launch of Jive’s real-time team messaging app solution, Jive Chime. Since then, Jive has developed a new hub set to connect clinicians in real-time. With Jive Chime for team collaboration, conversations are now actionable, items are easily tracked and users can set quiet hours and even connect via video.
Private support center for peer insights: With Jive’s healthcare collaboration solution, clinicians can search for, ask and answer questions from their peers, and interact with knowledge base documents. With these capabilities, healthcare providers have a simple, easy way to access pertinent information and opportunities to collaborate with leaders in their fields.

The competition is heating up. Collaboration with employees and customers is key. Will be interesting to see where this industry goes! If you want more information about the ROI of online communities – both the ROI of internal communities and externally facing communities – here’s my latest report with updates for many categories of ROI.

@DrNatalie, VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research

Covering Software that makes the world a better place to work and live

Next-Generation Customer Experience Innovation & Product-led Growth Event Report Executive Events Chief Customer Officer

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For Many B2B Marketers, It’s Time to Set the Foundations

Gavin Heaton

Founder
Disruptors Co

For all the how-to guides, blog posts on best practices, tips and tricks, there is a simple reality to modern marketing that we often overlook. In our rush to use the technology, spend our budget and brief our agencies, we forget that good marketing is established on firm foundations.

A recent study by B2B International found that the top business challenges relate to growth:

62% of marketers are focusing on growth
59% of marketers are driving / needing innovation.

But in the area of out performing the competition, there are two significant weaknesses:

Sophisticated segmentation
Unique selling proposition.

In the research, on 43% of respondents indicated that they were using a sophisticated approach to segmentation. This means that almost 60% are leaving the door open to their competitors who double down on segmentation, audience analysis and journey mapping.

Furthermore, B2B marketers are rating their USP as a weak 6.3 out of 10.

Yet on the surface, all these things are under the immediate control of the B2B marketer. Growth and innovation have tactical and strategic elements and can be tackled through short and medium term activities (yes, this is where those blog posts and tips and tricks can come in handy). Segmentation and analytics is a burgeoning field, and while skilled practitioners may be hard to find, they do exist. And there are great sources of training, conferences and even courses available in convenient online formats.

Messaging and the strengthening of your value proposition can be hard work – but again – there are agencies who can help, freelancers and brilliant techniques that can help you land on a compelling and differentiated messaging architecture.

But the data in this report makes me wonder whether we are looking at the right things. Are we valuing the right things. And are we looking for answers everywhere that we should not? I am convinced that the best marketing investment we can make is in our own skills. And that we should seek out a deep appreciation and understanding of the foundations of modern marketing, get back to basics and make our customers delightfully happy.

Marketing Transformation Chief Marketing Officer

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