| Constellation Research

Workato’s Workbot cuts business users some slack with Slack integration

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…...

I have written about Workato before, the startup that makes it easier for business users to integrated business applications with each other – with no coding skills. But there is more than interfaces that connect systems with each other, there is also a need for business users to access information on an ad hoc, single transaction, atomic data level.

So let’s take a look what Workato just announced, the press release can be found here:

Today we see a new trend emerging how business is done. Instead of working with single, siloed information systems, most prominently email and enterprise solutions, business people are gravitating towards more ad hoc, informal ways of communicating, chat being one of the communication platforms of choice… one of them capturing a lot of mind and market share is Slack, which recently has passed two million users. One of the many things the Slack team has done right is to make the chat platform open and extensible for partners and third parties.

This openness has allowed Workato to build a ‘microservice to interfaces’ a workbot that operates on a single interface item level, e.g. a customer, a lead, an opportunity or a service request. Instead of the business user having to switch context – from the collaboration application (here Slack) to the business application (e.g. Expensify, Salesforce, ServiceNow, QuickBooks, Zendesk, etc.) – Workbot does that work for the business user, as part of the chat.

Take a look at the following example, where Workbot gathers more information to provide the business user a richer content in a more productive way:

Workato Constellation Enterprise Software Musings Holger Mueller

The above chat between Maddy and Workbot makes Maddy’s work life not only easier – but also more productive:

Alert Function – Workbot alerts Maddy of an event (from Zendesk).

Information Gathering – Workbot gathers more information as Maddy requests it (from Salesforce, Zendesk).

Action Support – Workbot adds information to the systems on Maddy’s request (into Github, Salesforce and Zendesk).

Collaboration Support – On Maddy’s request Workbot sends a SMS message to alert a colleague of the situation (using Twilio).

Note that Maddy never had to leave Slack, staying in one and the same user interface, on one and the same platform. Assuming Maddy is a customer service representative and tuned to reasonable multi-tasking speeds, she will likely have 3-5 of these conversations open, but resolving them more efficiently thanks to Workbot.

As mentioned Workbot is built on top of the Workato integration platform, that build on user friendly recipes for integration. This is why how the first version of Workbot supports a substantial number of applications with Saleforce.com, Zendesk, Eventbrite, Expensify, ServiceNow, Intercom, QuickBooks Online, Jira, Github and Mailchimp.

Implications for the Future of Work

We already know that the enablement of the business end user is key for success of an enterprise. Central IT functions react too slow and often too late to support business users whose workday gets more and challenging year over year. More work needs to get done with less people and less time available, so business users are clamoring for any productivity gains they can get a hold of.

We recently took a look how Workato enables the integration of different business applications in an easy, no technology understanding requiring way (see here), now Workato uses the same technology, not only to transport data en masse, but to interface business information as the business user is ‘in flight’, in a business transaction or collaboration scenario.

At the end of the day this means

Information goes from bulk load to atomic data item – Interfaces become more granular, resolving latency and recency challenges as well as addressing performance and scalability questions.
Information finds the business user – not vice versa – Instead of switching context and searching for relevant information, information ‘finds’ the business user as needed.
Collaboration is where the work is done – At the end people solve business problems, to do so they need to collaborate. Breaking down traditional moats between e.g. enterprise applications and collaboration tools is a key move to make business users more productive.
Conversation becomes the new interface technology – Instead of thinking in IT dimensions such as interfaces, files and processes, the conversational query of data and creation of actions will make business users more effective than ever before. And different users are doing different things in an enterprise, use a different lingo, all things a conversational approach can reflect well.
The Robots are coming – and business users will love it – A lot has been said and abundant fear has been mongered about the arrival of robots. And concerns may be valid in the long run, in the short term robots like Workato’s Workbot will be highly welcomed by business users – making them more productive and allowing them to focus on what matters, their business’ success. The robot’s ability to learn and suggest actions will be highly welcomed – as long as they work as expected and delight the business user.

MyPOV

Workato has created a new product, Workbot, effectively a smooth ‘scale down’ of its interface capabilities, with full re-use of platform, recipes etc. – while achieving what ultimately matters – making business users more productive and with that more successful. Workato can implement Workbot on other open chat platforms (e.g. the also popular HipChat) and bring more of its interface repertoire to the market in the near future.

Workato Workbot should do well in the market, as it makes every party a winner: Slack gets more actionable chats, more loads on its platform, Workato re-uses existing capabilities and gets more eyes on its software, partner apps of Workato find more usage beyond their traditional user interface and thus increase value for their customers, but most importantly business users win, as they become more productive. And it’s the latter that really matters. We will be watching…

More on Workato

First Take - Apple wants to change the Future of Work. Works with cloud apps vendors and Workato - read here

Unify makes progress, needs to close the circuit

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

We had the opportunity to attend the Unify analyst summit, which happened this week in beautiful Bermuda (a surprisingly convenient location from NYC). Over 40 analyst were there to get updated on the state of transformation and product progress of Unify (the former Siemens Enterprise Communications, if you like go even more back to Rolm).

Fellow colleague Alan Lepofsky joined me, and we recorded a short takeaway video, so take a peek:

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No time to watch – here are my top 3 takeaways:

Unify transformation is WIP – After the launch as Unify, the vendor has gone through some difficult times to right-size the operation. Executives were surprisingly open on progress and challenges, based on the numbers shared it looks like the vendor has started to turn a corner. Customer references were all Avaya takeaways, so it is clear where Unify is trying to grow from going forward. The vendor claims around 30M seats and seems to be able to win business at usual call center attrition rate (5-8% p.a.), all key vital signs.

Unify is now Atos (but keeps operating under the Unify brand) – It was a first that an acquisition closed live during an analyst event – and so did the acquisition of Unify by Atos. It was good to see that Atos’ head of Managed Services, Eric Grall was in Bermuda, as the services part of the Unify business will report into him. Grall said that Atos intends to follow the same playbook as with the recent acquisition of Bull, separate the acquired vendor in services and the rest. It will be interesting to see how Atos will harmonize its portfolio e.g. with existing assets like BlueKiwi. If you haven’t seen it yet – take a look at my blog post on the acquisition here. Lastly Unify brings to Atos a key ability, channel savviness, which Atos needs for its Bull offering and does not have currently. Sure different partners are needed for call center vs hardware / security, but it makes Atos / Unify a more attractive partner, allowing for the capture of more share of wallet at customers. And keeping Unify’s channel capabilities intact will be key for Atos.

Circuit needs adoption – The Circuit product by now has all the ingredients to become a driver for more growth for Unify. Kudos to Unify for letting the analysts use the product during the event, and at first look it worked well. Behind the scenes capabilities are positive, too, the offering is Openstack based, uses Opensource offerings like e.g. Cassandra and operates (for now) in two data centers on both sides of the Atlantic. Unify has spent a lot of time to take cost out of the infrastructure, allowing the vendor to offer Circuit under a freemium model. The product is open and can be extended by developer, a must have capability for any collaboration player, given the ‘zoo’ of collaboration products out there.
Overall Circuit is offered under 4 different licenses. Now the product needs adoption, that 11+ months after launch has not yielded more than 1k users / month. Given a 30M install based even a subpar upsell / cross-sell effort. But Unify wants to do more with Circuit, so will be good to see what happens on the adoption side in the next quarters. Switching to a more viral marketing, ‘land & expand’ model as well as aggressively going after enterprise software ISVs who seek collaboration capabilities are potential strategies.

MyPOV

A good event for Unify, but the vendor realistically now has to layer one more transformation on top of its own core business transformation. Both are important but the latter even featured prominently in the press release this week, so more challenges Unify executives have to rectify. As usual with acquisitions, one can expect executive changes, buffering the ripple effects of organizational change will be key for Atos. And while Atos is becoming more and more global, it is still a French company en coeur, and mixing that with the Teuton / American culture is an experiment that can up as well as not so well. The opportunity is there, as no player on the communications / collaboration space has offered one common, easy to use application and end user experience. Just look at the challenge of the average enterprise employees to launch and run a web collaboration challenge. While practice makes champions here as well, the industry has for too long offered disjointed user experiences, hard to run products (plug in anyone?) – leaving productivity behind. The synchronous capabilities (and to make phones ring) is a key differentiator for Unify, as when push comes to shove in the real world, people pick up phones. But till we see a unified communications and collaboration platform, seamlessly integrated to where business is done – the enterprise applications, with ease of use like the point solutions that are popular today, it will be still a while and is Unify’s (as competitors) opportunity to grab. We will be there to analyze.

More on Unify

Market Move - Atos completes acquisition of Unify - gets more into IP - read here

NRF16 – The Store Strikes Back

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Guy Courtin was formerly Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research covering Matrix Commerce and how the Internet of Things drives the evolution of commerce.  Guy has over 15 years experience in the technology space and specifically in the supply chain space. Most recently he was the Vice President of Research at SCM World. Where he focused on the service providers that empowered supply chains. Prior to SCM World, Guy held numerous senior positions. He was responsible for product marketing at RSi, a retail supply chain solution provider. There managed RSi’s go to market strategy around their leading cloud based supply chain solutions. He also spear headed Progress Software’s supply chain group. Where he was responsible for driving revenue and market share as well…...

Another cold January in New York City and another NRF Retail Big Show survived! As I have found with the countless times I have attended NRF the event is a whirlwind of insanity, but it is over before you know it. The insights, meetings and seeing old friends makes the entire adventure well worth it. So here are the take aways from the NRF16:

The STORE IS BACK – okay maybe that is a tad dramatic, the store never went away, but the store in recent years has been down played. No longer is that the case. Many vendors and retailers I met with made a point of discussing their plans and initiatives for transforming their stores. The store is no longer viewed, by most, as simply the physical location that I want to go to in order to transact for an item. It is taking on a host of new responsibilities in the new commerce environment. At the crux of these new characteristics is the focus on the customer experience. Salesforce took us on a two site visit at Design Within Reach and Suitsupply, both in the Soho part of New York City. Other than the “cool” factor of the stores, what was discussed was how each store had meticulously thought of how to maximize the real estate they had and more importantly how they could leverage technology to better address their customers’ needs and experience once in the store. That experience has to go beyond offering you free cappuccinos or coupons, but how to ensure that the customer needs and untapped wants are addressed at the right time and with the right product. Other examples were of how True Religion is working with Aptos to empower the store associates to provide consumers with better experiences when it comes to finding that right pair of jeans. Putting the entire inventory catalog on the wrist of the store associate (via an Apple Watch) allows True Religion to be able to meet that customers’ demand, literally at the touch of a finger. There was also Avanade that had a smart grocery store shelf on display. Customers could simply pick up items and the smart displays would provide a host of information from nutritional content to where the food was sourced from. These were some intriguing examples of how retailers were working with service providers to bring exciting new technologies into the store – allowing the store to find its voice in the new commerce landscape.
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What is more important – perfect view of the order or the client? When we say perfect view of the order it really entails having a better understanding of your inventory levels across all channels. When it comes to the client is about truly understanding the context for the customer, what is driving their current, past and future demands. Having that 360 degree view of the customer has been all the rage recently, but are we missing the key element – the view of the order and of the inventory? This question kept ringing in my head as I went from meeting to meeting. What resonated with me was the need to address both, that the success of each was inevitably tied to the other. Service providers ranging from IBM to IFS are challenging the market on how to approach the need to have greater inventory and order visibility. It is not simply about the creative understanding of the customer, but also the ability to truly understand what products where and when that are available within the supply chain to fulfill the customers’ demands. Bottom line – regardless of how sophisticated and creative a retailer is in getting the customer to engage, if the product is not there at the moment of truth, then all those efforts are in vain.
Smarter and dynamic fulfillment is the key – A major component of modern retail, driven by the consumer, is the push towards accessing orders wherever and whenever they desire. We already see the variety of methods we can access our orders – order on line delivery in store, order on line deliver to home, buy in store deliver to home, browse on line ship to store to name a few. As these forms of delivery continue to take on new dimensions, the business processes and technologies that support these new forms of last mile fulfillment will have to keep pace. This is continuing to place a strain on retail supply chains to meet these demands. Companies like 1800Flower are looking at all the nodes in their supply chain to assist in fulfilling their customer needs, in particular how their warehouses can play a more active role in the customer journey. We are seeing a growing number of retailers looking to redefine how they can meet the last mile in the retail supply chain. 2016 will continue to see these parts of the supply chain being leaned on to meet growing customer demands.
Cool technologies are the future: smart displays, IoT, virtual reality and robots – Last year there were lots of 3D printers on the floor, they seemed to have disappeared this year. Which I found surprising since in 2015 we have seen tangible examples of how retailers are leveraging 3D printers. For example Lowe’s is using the technology to offer customers the ability to procure items, such as door knobs and fixtures, that are no longer being produced. A great example of how retailers can expand their product offerings for their customers. Of course there remained plenty of examples of disruptive technologies on display on the floor of the Javits Center. Vendors such as Zebra Technologies, IFS, Avanade, Aptos to name a few were showcasing smart displays and how their customers were leveraging the technology. From greater view into their inventory to displaying information or being able to transact view the monitors – these smart displays are only beginning to find an important role within the store. Robotics were on display from the likes of Wipro – assisting with store navigation and shelf maintenance. IoT also was a theme that ran throughout the meetings I attended – companies like Checkpoint are continuing to add increased sensors and beacons within the store. They highlighted a timely use case in leveraging RFID and readers within a meat department of a grocer to allow greater and more efficient monitoring of the high margin but perishable product. In light of the recent news with Chipotle the use case is addressing headline news. Look towards 2016 as a continuation of disruptive technology growth within the retail landscape.

Once again I survived NRF and the cold New York City weather…it was actually a great trip…albeit I am still fighting some germs I picked up from the trip. I am very excited with the prospects for 2016 in the retail and supply chain space. Evolution is continuing to emerge at a rapid pace. Retailers cannot afford to take their eyes off the ball, they have to look internally to ensure they have the right business processes and mentality to keep pace. Service providers and vendors must also strive to act as true partners for this journey.

It is not going to be any easier in 2016, but it will continue to be exciting times.

You can also view my video from the show – click here.

Matrix Commerce Next-Generation Customer Experience Marketing Transformation Revenue & Growth Effectiveness Innovation & Product-led Growth Tech Optimization Data to Decisions B2B B2C CX Customer Experience EX Employee Experience business Marketing eCommerce Supply Chain Growth Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP Leadership finance Social Customer Service Content Management Collaboration M&A Enterprise Service AI Analytics Automation Machine Learning Generative AI Chief Customer Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Supply Chain Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Financial Officer Chief Growth Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief Product Officer Chief Revenue Officer Chief Technology Officer

Read more about NRF16 – The Store Strikes Back

The 2016 Marketing & Tech Innovation Awards

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…...

DMN and The Hub have combined forces this year to present the Marketing&Tech Innovation Awards, which honor the most innovative strategies, platforms, and people in marketing today. I was thrilled to be a judge in this year’s selection. The winners will be announced on March 10^th, but take a peek at the finalists below and let me know who you think should win!

Case Study Categories

Analytics Innovation

evolve24
Sales Predictions Using Social Conversations

Experian Marketing Services and Golfsmith
Analytics for the Holidays

Grapeshot and Sawyer Studios
Lila & Eve

Merkle
Connected Attribution Solution

Visual IQ and BuildDirect
Marketing Attribution Solution Implementation

Content Marketing Innovation

Aflac
One Day Pay

gen.video
How Scalable UGC Video Content Catapulted Crest Pro-Health HD to #1

New York International Auto Show
Virtual Tour

Stein IAS
The Digital Marketing Maturity Campaign

Verifone Media and Aria Resort & Casino
Verifone Media helps Aria Resort & Casino Enhance Tourist Engagement on the Vegas Strip

Email Marketing Innovation

Experian Marketing Services and Finish Line
Finish Line: College Fleece Program

Experian Marketing Services and Delta Air Lines
Delta’s Flight Cycle Program

Merkle and Samsung
SUHD Product Launch

Merkle and Marriott
Marriott Drives App Engagement Through Email

netCORE Solutions Pvt. Ltd. and Reliance Life Insurance Company Ltd.
Connecting the Dots and Humanizing Email Experience See Faster Email-to-Sale Conversions

Mobile innovation

Event Marketing Strategies and Nationwide
Nationwide: Make Safe Happen Safety Experience

FORENSIQ
Mobile Ad Fraud Study – Mobile Device Hijacking

Harte Hanks and Samsung Mobile
Samsung Note 4 Product Launch with Harte Hanks

Stein IAS and Key Technology
Mobile Virtual Reality Experience

Omnichannel marketing innovation

Experian Marketing Services and American Eagle Outfitters
Reserve, Try and Buy: An Omnichannel Shopping Experience

FordDirect
ConsumerConnection

RedPoint Global and Xanterra Parks & Resorts
Xanterra Parks & Resorts – A Journey to One-to-One Marketing Excellence

Belk Inc., iCrossing, and Kenshoo
Driving Triple-Digit Increase in Conversion Rates

WIT Strategy and Selligent and Extra Space Storage
Selligent/Extra Space Storage

Social innovation

Grey Global Group and Volvo Cars North America
Volvo Interception

LEWIS Pulse
#Trending: Raising the Bar on Cross-Channel Social Media Coverage for Events

Plat4orm PR and Metia
Microsoft in Health

Principal Financial Group
See Your Retirement

W2O Group
Nothing can be perfect

Platform Categories

Most Innovative Analytics Platform

Brandwatch
Brandwatch Analytics

Experian Marketing Services
The Intelligence Manager of the Experian Marketing Suite

Fluid PR, Inc.
AppsFlyer

Merkle
Citizens Big Data Platform

Origami Logic
Marketing Signal Measurement Platform

Most Innovative Customer Experience Management Platform

MaritzCX
MaritzCX Platform

Epsilon
Epsilon’s Agility Loyalty

Influitive

Kitewheel
The Kitewheel Customer Journey Hub

Qubit
Qubit Visitor Cloud

Most Innovative Integrated Marketing Suite

Act-On Software

Blanc & Otus
Oracle Marketing Cloud

Blueshift
Blueshift Segment-of-One Marketing Automation

Experian Marketing Services
The Experian Marketing Suite

Salesforce
Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Personalize and Optimize 1:1 Customer Journeys

Most Innovative Mobile Marketing Platform

BLANC & OTUS
DoubleDutch

Comunicano, Inc.
FollowAnaytics’ Enterprise Mobile Analytics Platform

HookLogic
The HookLogic Platform: Powering Mobile Ads with Attribution Data, Anti-Ad Blocking, and Awesome Results

Button
Button

Swirl Networks, Inc.
Swirl Network’s Beacon Marketing Solution

Most Innovative Social Media Platform

500px
500px, photo sharing’s underdog, swings big in 2015

Sprout Social

Tracx
Tracx Social Business Cloud

Stars of Martech Categories

Content Marketing Scribe
Cassandra Jowett, Senior Content Marketing Manager, Influitive

Craig Vore, Insights Manager, Strategy & Optimization, Outsell

Denice Surjan, Senior Marketing Manager, Experian Marketing Services

Dr. Maruthi Viswanathan, Managing Director, RxPrism Health Systems

Steve Sachs, CEO, OneSpot

Data Scientist

Christopher S. Penn, Vice President of Marketing Technology, SHIFT Communications

Jonathan Smalletz, Lead Analyst, Merkle

Stacey Hawes, Senior Vice President, Data Solutions, Epsilon

Digital Ace

Chad Blodgett, Senior Vice President of omnichannel, Rakuten Marketing

Tuomas Peltoniemi, President, Asia, Digital Arts Network

Marketing Technologist

Emad Georgy, SVP & Global Head of Software Development & Product, Experian Marketing Services

Francis Wallinger, Chairman, Alchemetrics Ltd

Gwendolyn Lefevre, Vice President, Marketing Operations & Digital Marketing, Bottomline Technologies

Programmatic Prognosticator

Amy Good, Adaptive Media Investment & Technology Lead, Nestle Purina Pet Care

Lewis Gersh, CEO, Founder and Chairman, PebblePost

Victor Wong, CEO and cofounder, PaperG

Social Strategist

Michael Rusten Gabriel, Marketing Manager, Envision Creative Group

Stephanie Capouch, Social Media Manager, WP Engine

For more information about the finalists and the event, click here.

@Drnatalie, VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research

Covering Customer-facing Customer Experience Capabilities – People, Process and Technology

Next-Generation Customer Experience Chief Customer Officer

Read more about The 2016 Marketing & Tech Innovation Awards

Oracle Cloud - More ready than ever, now needs adoption

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

We had the opportunity to attend the third Oracle Cloud analyst summit earlier in the week, held in New York at the iconic Walldorf Astoria. One could wonder if Oracle executives know that the very founder of the Walldorf, a certain Mr. Astor came from Walldorf Germany, which happens to be the headquarters location of one of Oracle’s key rivals, SAP SE, but that’s another story…

As usual with these analyst days, we were inundated with slides and news, so very hard to distill the Top 3 – but take a look at the video I recorded (or for more details the Storify) below.

No time to watch, here are the top 3 takeaways:

Oracle is ready to push cloud – All cloud providers need load to utilize and grow their infrastructure. Oracle has a huge potential load sitting with its on premises run applications. Common market wisdom was that Oracle was tapping into that and ‘aggressively’ converting that load from on premises into cloud. But CEO Hurd was very adamant that this wasn’t the case. According to him cloud customers are mostly net new, and he used the very slowly dwindling on premises license sales as proof point (-2% YoY). So where will Oracle get more utilization in 2016? One strategy that was not explicitly mentioned, but the informed attendee could read between the lines, was Oracle’s push for exogenous load with its nested hypervisor capability. Not sure when / if I missed this before, but the nested hypervisor allows Oracle to take load from VMware, AWS and Google. On top of that, EVP Kurian mentioned support for Microsoft Hypervisor would be coming soon. All this means that Oracle will be able to pitch Oracle Cloud to CIOs / CTO’s running load on these hypervisors. It certainly introduces another dependency, but as discussed vividly, it’s an attractive outlet to e.g. running a native VMware load on premises. Assuming the nested hypervisor works well, Oracle needs salespeople to pitch the ability to prospects. Considering last week’s announcement that Oracle plans to hire 1400 salespeople for selling cloud into its EMEA region, one has to assume that Oracle executives are certain the cloud products are working and the vendor now wants to go for load much more aggressively than in the past.

IaaS ready for primetime!? – In the overall Oracle cloud offering, IaaS was the late comer. At Openworld Chairman Ellison even openly shared the Oracle learning steps, SaaS required PaaS, PaaS required IaaS. And Oracle’s offering follows that sequence in regards of maturity, market share and adoption. So all eyes on IaaS, and for the first time Oracle executives in their presentations got very close to both detail and comfort level that we see from e.g. public cloud rivals AWS and Google. Details on storage, networking and more were very abundant, more importantly the confidence with which the executives talked about the infrastructure allows the interpretation that execution has happened and Oracle has found its operational patterns for IaaS. But now comes the rollout of capabilities that takes time. Speaking to Oracle partners and ISVs outside of North America the other week in India, makes clear that new capabilities are first and foremost coming to the North American data centers. Nothing unusual, but the speed of creating a common worldwide platform will be key. And as tradition – I asked EVP Kurian in regards of the ‘bubble up / ripple’ effect of IaaS changing under the hood while operating a growing SaaS suite. The answer was same as at Openworld, standards, APIs, encapsulation shield the SaaS teams. Kurian also shared that SaaS teams are shielded by a dedicated cloud ops team, a good move. Still a considerate challenge, though a good problem to have.

DaaS remains a key differentiator – Oracle remains the only cloud vendor stressing DaaS – Data as a Service capabilities. The future of enterprise applications is more than running software, but also allowing access to data sources that power next generation applications. Oracle has been adamant of DaaS being part of xaaS – right from the first cloud summit 2 years ago. And Oracle plays this from a dual perspective, both offering the data consumption as a service (see the recent acquisition of Addthis) but also the tools to become a DaaS provider. As the reader knows, Constellation Research strongly recommends enterprises to look into DaaS monetization and to make DaaS a revenue stream. Oracle is well positioned to take advantage of this trend, but needs to expand its DaaS portfolio beyond marketing – into other areas of business automation. A generic DaaS offering allowing enterprises to monetize data will be a first step. And network effects e.g. in regards of benchmarking are something always of value to enterprises, understanding the network effects and benefits is an area where Oracle can e.g. learn from SAP.

Analyst Tidbits

UIX matters – User experience has not been what Oracle has been traditionally known for. The more surprising Oracle dedicated demos and presentations on the topic. And no surprise, the Oracle UIX team around VP Ashley has made good progress from a few years back. The new ‘Waterfall’ design does not fall behind any best efforts in the industry. It’s also good to see that Oracle has managed to propagate a common interaction paradigm across its products, not a trivial undertaking given the vast range or products and users.

HCM shines – No surprise – the HCM suite shined one time more in regards of customer adoption, live customer numbers across the Oracle SaaS portfolio. It always helps to be early, and Oracle is pushing HCM on a worldwide base. The Oracle HCM suite has some interesting and unique differentiators as shared back at HCM World 2015 (reputation management, competitions etc.) – it now needs a new set of 2016 differentiators, EVP Miranda like all presenters was pressed for time, and my guess it they are reserved for the HCM World event in spring later this year.

MyPOV

Oracle is making progress with its overall cloud offering. As a welcome change and sign of progress this was the first cloud summit with no mention of hardware and database beyond their relative importance to cloud, a good change. That said we lacked some details e.g. on how Oracle runs its cloud, e.g. I’d be very interested how many Oracle made machines are in the Oracle cloud footprint. Oracle’s CAPEX for cloud is behind that of key public cloud rivals, but then Oracle maintains it can run more Oracle on Oracle thanks to the ‘chip to click’ integrated tech stack. That would mean that more uptake of Oracle Cloud would mean more revenue for Exa-Machines and 2-socket servers (launched a little less than a year ago). But seeing the TCO comparisons would mean that one Oracle infrastructure $ can run 3-4 times more than e.g. an AWS infrastructure $ - for the same load. That will be a key and interesting area to watch, as if and when it materializes, it would be another explanation what makes Oracle executives so bullish on competing with the cost leaders. We have seen e.g. with Storage that Oracle can be an effective cost leader. I asked CEO Hurd if cloud for Oracle is more a product or a sales challenges. He responded with a diplomatic ‘cloud is a blessing for Oracle’ response, but the confidence with which Oracle executives spoke about cloud makes clear that the challenges have morphed from a product to a sales and marketing challenge. When I asked Hurd on who will be Oracle’s #1 competitor in 5 years he punted the question, it would have been an interesting insight. Where Hurd was very clear (he is a big tennis fan) that Nadal won’t win the Australian Open, and that Djokovic is he is favorite…

Back to Oracle’s cloud offering, getting the overall stack to work isn’t trivial, and there is always room for potential hiccups on the product side, always keep in mind that what Oracle is creating is very likely the largest software project out there, from my estimate is 25k+ product developers working up and down the integrated / engineered to work together tech stack. No easy undertaking. But a unique effort in the industry, now it’s up to Oracle to get customers to adopt. And here may lie Oracle’s biggest challenge – as mentioned in my OpenWorld takeaways, the vendor is well respected, but less ‘loved’ by its customers than other key players. Getting the ‘love’ and passion for Oracle into its customer base is emerging as the biggest challenge for Oracle in the medium term.

Recent blog posts on Oracle:

Event Report - Oracle Openworld 2015 - Top 3 Takeaways, Top 3 Positives & Concerns - read here
News Analysis - Quick Take on all 22 press releases of Oracle OpenWorld Day #1 - #3 - read here
First Take - Oracle OpenWorld - Day 1 Keynote - Top 3 Takeaways - read here
Event Preview - Oracle Openworld - watch here

Future of Work / HCM / SaaS research:

Event Report - Oracle HCM World - Full Steam ahead, a Learning surprise and potential growth challenges - read here
First Take - Oracle HCM World Day #1 Keynote - off to a good start - read here
Progress Report - Oracle HCM gathers momentum - now it needs to build on that - read here
Oracle pushes modern HR - there is more than technology - read here. (Takeaways from the recent HCMWorld conference).
Why Applications Unlimited is good a good strategy for Oracle customers and Oracle - read here.

Also worth a look for the full picture

Event Report - Oracle PaaS Event - 6 PaaS Services become available, many more announced - read here
Progress Report - Oracle Cloud makes progress - but key work remains in the cellar - read here
News Analysis - Oracle discovers the power of the two socket server - or: A pivot that wasn't one - TCO still rules - read here
Market Move - Oracle buys Datalogix - moves more into DaaS - read here
Event Report - Oracle Openworld - Oracle's vision and remaining work become clear - they are both big - read here
Constellation Research Video Takeaways of Oracle Openworld 2014 - watch here
Is it all coming together for Oracle in 2014? Read here.
From the fences - Oracle AR Meeting takeaways - read here (this was the last analyst meeting in spring 2013)
Takeaways from Oracle CloudWorld LA - read here (this was one of the first cloud world events overall, in January 2013)

And if you want to read more of my findings on Oracle technology - I suggest:

Progress Report - Good cloud progress at Oracle and a two step program - read here.
Oracle integrates products to create its Foundation for Cloud Applications - read here.
Java grows up to the enterprise - read here.
1st take - Oracle in memory option for its database - very organic - read here.
Oracle 12c makes the database elastic - read here.
How the cloud can make the unlikeliest bedfellows - read here.
Act I - Oracle and Microsoft partner for the cloud - read here.
Act II - The cloud changes everything - Oracle and Salesforce.com - read here.
Act III - The cloud changes everything - Oracle and Netsuite with a touch of Deloitte - read here.

Finally 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 New C-Suite Oracle 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 Digital Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Operating Officer

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Oracle Data Cloud: The Data-as-a-Service Differentiator

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,…...

Oracle is amassing an impressive collection of data and data-enrichment capabilities for marketing and more, but will analytics-as-a-service be the next battleground?

Oracle held its Oracle Cloud Summit (analyst) and Oracle CloudWorld (customer) events in New York this week at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, and I must say I came away impressed. What got me really excited, however, was the burgeoning Oracle Data Cloud.

You have to be impressed with the breadth and depth of Oracle’s cloud offerings. The Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) suites are comprehensive, and the newer Infrastructure as a Service portfolio is filling out quickly.

The Oracle Data Cloud currently addresses marketing use cases, but the company plans to
address sales, service, commerce, loyalty and other data-enrichment opportunities.

As for Oracle SaaS, it’s not just the collection of apps that makes the suite attractive. The apps are all built on Oracle PaaS, so customers can use PaaS-based Identity, Integration, Process, Document, Sites and Social services to unify, customize and extend whatever collection of cloud-based apps they choose.

For now the Oracle Data Cloud is tied exclusively to marketing apps. The Data Cloud lets you bring in your CRM customer file and get a better understanding of what your customers do on other sites and on competitor’s sites based on insights from second-party and third-party data. You can also model and predict customer behavior based on this holistic view, not just the customer’s limited interactions with your company. Most importantly it helps you find lots of promising prospects that match the profile and behavior patterns of your best customers.

The Data Cloud stats are impressive. It offers demographic, social, online behavior and offline transactional data. That includes more than 1 billion global consumer profiles and data on 110 million U.S. households and 10 billion transactions worth more $3 trillion. That’s big.

I took note of Oracle Data Cloud and the company’s Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) strategy coming out of last year’s Oracle Open World. Earlier this month Oracle added yet more data with its acquisition of AddThis, which handles audience behavior tracking and content recommendations for websites.

Oracle made it clear this week that its ambitions for data enrichment extend beyond marketing. “Over time, applications will be differentiated based on richness of the data,” said Oracle’s President, Thomas Kurian. He specifically cited sales, service, commerce and loyalty management as future areas of interest for data enrichement.

So the long-term vision is broad and ambitious, but I don’t think we’ll see Oracle Data Cloud services moving much beyond marketing in 2016, as there’s much to do just in that domain. For starters, Oracle will have to digest the AddThis acquisition, brining that data into the Data Cloud. But beyond that, Oracle execs tell me they’re working on beefing up social data services and B2B data services, areas where Salesforce has strength. And there are new types of data that Oracle wants to bring into the mix, most likely before it gets into new application areas.

Oracle also has to keep its eyes on competitors including Amazon, IBM and Microsoft, among others, that are working on analytical services as well as data services. Given the scarcity of data-science talent and the pressure to act on data in a timely way, many companies may want to skip the challenge of data blending and in-house analysis and buy insights as a service.

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Atos completes acquisition of Unify - gets more into IP

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

It seldom happens that an acquisition is being closed during an analyst event, but so it happened today – Atos completes the acquisition of Unify from Gores Group and Siemens.

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

Bezons, January 20, 2016 Atos, an international leader in digital services, today announced that it has completed the acquisition from Gores Group and Siemens of Unify, the world number three in integrated communication solutions generating €1.2 billion annual revenue. The acquisition creates a unique integrated proposition for unified communications improving the social collaboration, digital transformation and business performance of its clients.

MyPOV – Sums it up well, as Atos’ Eric Grell made clear here in Bermuda, it’s all about for Atos to be in a good position to support business model change, namely Digital Transformation. And Atos sees Unify key in helping enterprises deal with new ways how consumers deal with enterprises, obviously on the communications side.

The transaction has been approved by employee representatives’ bodies and has received the required approvals of the regulatory and antitrust authorities in the European Union, United States, Russia and Brazil. Cash consideration for Atos was € 366 million (adjusted from working capital) to acquire 100% of Unify. Net debt was € 48 million at closing and the pension deficit was € 176 million. This leads to an Enterprise Value of € 590 million as disclosed on November 3rd, 2015 at the signing of the transaction.

MyPOV – That is probably close to record time for an acquisition of this scale, given it was only announced November 3rd 2015. But shows how all involved parties – Atos, Siemens and Gores Group wanted to move fast. Siemens and Gores Group wanted Unify off the books, and Atos wanted them on the books, and Unify wanted to move anyway. But getting employee body / worker council approval so fast is quite an achievement, considering at what (slow) speed these things can move in Europe.

As a reminder, in order to generate the expected costs savings by 2017 (€ 130 million on an annual basis), Unify is completing its current € 267 million restructuring plan. In addition, Unify is starting, as planned, its € 103 million further restructuring plan which is fully provisioned at closing. Both restructuring plans are funded by the sellers.

MyPOV – Interesting to see this paragraph as part of the press release – but a key reminder that Atos is acquiring a business that is in the midst of restructuring. What we see and hear currently in Bermuda is encouraging, but it needs to be understood that the restructuring at Unify isn’t over yet.

As of February 1st, 2016, the Services activity of Unify (c. € 0.4 billion annual revenue) is integrated in the Atos Service Line “Managed Services”.

MyPOV – Key reminder where the Unify revenue will go – from a Services perspective, which will reside in Eric Grall’s area of responsibility. It seems not be fully clear where the Unify product teams will report to at this point, but it is likely it will go to the current CTO and former Bull Executive Philip Vannier. But then other Atos owned Communications products - e.g. BlueKiwi are with Ursula Morgenstern, Head of Consulting & Systems Integration, Cloud & Enterprise. I am sure we will know soon.

Overall MyPOV

Few industries are more affected by the move to cloud than professional services providers. Revenue streams, markets, skills etc. are all in turmoil due to the move of enterprises to less sophisticated, easier to setup and operate cloud based software. More or less all players know that they need to upgrade skills, increase global coverage and prepare themselves for the upcoming best practices and business model change. A number of player are take clearly product centric strategies – e.g. Infosys – and we count Atos by now in that category, too. Executing that strategy is full of challenges, images and branding changes, sales and marketing challenges, skills modulation – all not trivial DNA changes for a traditional services based vendor. But once embarked in the transformation, speed and execution are of the essence and Atos seems to be on a good course, with good speed. We will watch how the new Atos + Unify will unfold in the markets and with customers. Stay tuned.

For more on collaboration and communication - check out my colleagues' Alan Lepofsky blog here.

Tech Optimization Future of Work Innovation & Product-led Growth Next-Generation Customer Experience New C-Suite Data to Decisions Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Chief Information Officer Chief Experience Officer

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Event Report: The Future Of Jobs From #Davos16 #WEF

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

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

Will We Move Beyond Man Vs Machine In The Fourth Industrial Revolution?

The World Economic Forum released it’s Future of Jobs report. As expected, the business model disruption across technology, societal, and economic forces have created urgency to understand the jobs and skills required for the next decade. The survey and research design relied on interviews with global CHROs and other senior talent and strategy executives that impacted over 13,549,000 employees.

20160118 Future of Jobs Report Analysis #WEFTalks from Constellation Research on Vimeo.

Inside The Drivers Of Change

The top five drivers of demographic and socioeconomic drivers of change include

Changing work environments and flexible working arrangements (44%)
Rise of the middle class in emerging markets (23%)
Climate change, natural resource constraints and the transition to a greener economy (23%)
Rising geopolitical volatility (21%)
New consumer concerns about ethical and privacy issues (16%)

The top five technological drivers of change include:

Mobile internet and cloud technology (34%)
Advances in computing power and big data (26%)
New energy supplies and technology (22%)
The internet of things (14%)
Crowdsourcing, the sharing economy and P2P platforms (12%)

Figure 1. Time Frame to Impact Industries and Business Models

@Rwang0 #WEF Future of Jobs Forces

Source: World Economic Forum

The Bottom Line: Drivers Of Change Hint At Larger Systemic Forces Impacting The Labor Market

The confluence of new technologies, demographics, and socioeconomic shifts have created an impact in how jobs will be created and what skill sets will be required. Success in the future of jobs may require a new perspective on how growth should be calculated. What if growth was measured by per capita? The result would show the benefits of a decreasing population abetted by automation, robotics, and AI with a better quality of life.

Your POV.

Where do you see the future of jobs? Should we aim for decreasing populations to improve quality per capita? What are your questions from the report?

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.

The post Event Report: The Future Of Jobs From #Davos16 #WEF appeared first on A Software Insider's Point of View.

Future of Work Innovation & Product-led Growth Tech Optimization Data to Decisions New C-Suite World Economic Forum Event Report SoftwareInsider Leadership Innovation AI ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Generative AI Analytics Automation B2B B2C CX EX Employee Experience HR HCM business Marketing SaaS PaaS IaaS Supply Chain Growth Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology eCommerce Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP finance Customer Service Content Management Collaboration M&A Enterprise Service Metaverse developer Quantum Computing Social Healthcare VR CCaaS UCaaS Executive Events Chief People Officer 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 Chief Experience Officer

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Event Report: The @Wipro @FT Dinner, Man vs Machine, Does It Have To Be Either/Or? #Davos2016 #WEF #WEFTalks

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

One of the big topics at Davos has been the role of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robots. Discussions focus less on the technological advancements but more on the role humans and robots will play. At the Financial Times – Wipro Dinner, that topic was put to debate with six prominent guests including:

David Cheesewright, President and CEO of Walmart International
Erik Brynjolfsoon, Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and co-author of best-selling book, The Second Machine Age
TK Kurien, Executive Vice-Chairman and Member of the Board of Wipro Ltd
Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, Chairman of Nestle Group
Illah R. Nourbaksh, Professor of Robotics at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University
Tim Brown, CEO and President of IDEO

@FT @Wipro Executive Forum AI

Where Will Man vs Machine Take Us In This Era?

The discussion included answers to key topics such as:

What are the effects of digital disintermediation, advanced robotics and the sharing economy on productivity growth, job creation and purchasing power?
How are businesses harnessing AI and other technologies to lead the way in re-imagining the economics and dynamics of a machine age society
Redundancy vs. creation

The Hype Is Ahead Of The Science

Key points from the discussion include:

Jobs displacement by AI is not that simple a debate. If one job is taken, another is created. The question is will that be a 1:1 pairing and what skill levels are required?
TK Kurien made a good point as to whether or not Neocortal intelligence would come too soon?
It doesn’t have to be either /or in the man v machine debate. We have to find how technology can help humans.
AI is changing the food industry & the value chain becoming more transparent

The Bottom Line: The Era Of Cognitive Computing Will Change How We Augment Humanity

Cognitive computing is more than a new category. Cognitive systems represent a convergence of artificial intelligence, natural language processing, dynamic learning, and hypothesis generation to render vast quantities of data intelligible to help humans make better decisions. The ability to self-learn enables continuously reprogramming. These advancements represent a new class of technology to enable human and machine-guided decisions. Cognitive computing drives augmented humanity, where the sum of our collective insights and data can be served up at the right time in the right context. Technologies include facial recognition, human APIs, machine learning, natural language processing and self-learning algorithms. Moreover, a set of global digital ethics must be developed in parallel if we are to put forth machines that mimic humanity.

Your POV.

Who will win man or machine or will we coexist? Will we have a set of digital ethics in time? What are your thoughts from this session?

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.

The post Event Report: The @Wipro @FT Dinner, Man vs Machine, Does It Have To Be Either/Or? #Davos2016 #WEF #WEFTalks appeared first on A Software Insider's Point of View.

Tech Optimization Innovation & Product-led Growth Future of Work Data to Decisions Next-Generation Customer Experience Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity World Economic Forum wipro SoftwareInsider Leadership Innovation AI ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Generative AI Analytics Automation B2B B2C CX EX Employee Experience HR HCM business Marketing SaaS PaaS IaaS Supply Chain Growth Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology eCommerce Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP finance Customer Service Content Management Collaboration M&A Enterprise Service Metaverse developer Quantum Computing Social Healthcare VR CCaaS UCaaS 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 Chief AI Officer Chief Product Officer Chief Experience Officer

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IOT-A for Architecture, a journey through the possibilities Arriving at a clear outcome with a recommendation

Insights, Inc

Insights ...

Enterprise Architecture is pretty well understood as to what it means in respect of IT application integration, and even has some industry wide methodologies like TOGAF. Talk about Architecture and the Web and there are more variations, but there are some strong underlying principles that are respected. Now reflect on IoT, supposedly a ‘any to any’ Internet environment of event driven connections and insightful outcomes. So where is the commonly stood architecture to support this?

The IoT problem is not a lack of standards, even for Architectural approaches, its too many ‘standards’, as the ubiquitous nature of IoT has led to all standards bodies believing that they must extend their existing work to include IoT.

The result is the proverbial story of the person asking directions to a specific destination. Each successive person states that they don’t know the way from where they are both currently standing, and can only provide directions from another starting point. Currently with IoT standards generally and Architecture in particular each standards body is defining their new standard from the direction of their non-IoT existing focus. There is little, if anything that connects these efforts, currently.

The IEEE started well with an excellent definition of the requirement for an industry wide Architecture rather than the fragmentation of industry sector focus activities. The resulting working group contains many important players such as the Industrial Internet Consortium, security experts Kaspersky, as well as significant Enterprises such as Schneider Electric. Undoubtedly in time this will prove an important contribution, but reading the report from the last Working Parties meeting suggests there will be little to help those planning deployments in the next year.

Fortunately there are some more practical short-term reference definitions of the technology stacks being suggested, and that includes two presentations on Slideshare. A November 2014 presentation by the API solution director of the MuleSoft Open Source API project has some excellent technology stack diagrams that help to grasp conceptual level principles. The proposal there should be a ‘hub of hubs’ connecting everything makes sense to MuleSoft as an API hub provider. For immediate deployments API centric integration is necessary, but it will introduce longer term scaling questions.

As a side comment; It’s necessary to check dates on any paper, blog, or presentation, as the rapid development of IoT technology and products is quickly making anything over a year old potentially out of date.

An alternative, and frankly a thought provoking approach, as it focuses on an IoT architecture for services and distribution by invoking the BSS model popular in the telecoms industry comes from Charles Gibbon in December 2014. However the question that this presentation raises is should IoT be a Server side driven architecture? Certainly in the context of Mobility and Mobile phones this makes sense, but that assume all IoT devices are firmly ‘owned’ and ‘managed’ centrally.

Public service IoT devices as an example may need to be both promiscuous and allow ‘operational management’ by the event process. This suggests that the Event Service will be more important as the focal point in the architectural model.

There are plenty of initiatives working on Industry sector architectures that could be included in a general list of architectural developments. Oddly the focus always seems to be either the Network, or the Protocol, but not on the overall architecture. Any mention of integration architecture is always referred to as needing a Gateway or an API Hub.

Reading through the various Working Groups leaves the impression that every current approach to IoT architecture starts with a proposed technology answer and works backwards to define the necessary architecture. Strangely absence is any reference to the business requirement definition. What has happened to Enterprise Architecture methods such as TOGAF that start with a conceptual architecture related to the business requirements?

The basic challenge for IoT Architecture arises from its loose coupled, stateless and decentralized nature as befits an Internet based technology. Enterprise Architecture as used in the client-server IT environment reverses these statements being; close coupled, state-full and centralized. The two environments simply don’t resemble each other enough for any easy transfer of methods as the last few years of arguments about REST alone testify.

If you are currently contemplating a significant IoT deployment then none of the above offers very much help so just adopting a good basic architectural approach to work methodically seems best. The Bredemeyer ‘Visual Architecting Process’ for Software Architecting defines the stages of Architecting a solution with no dogma about technology or products. Populating the stage one Bredemeyer Meta Architecture with the technology stacks mentioned above from the SlideShare is a useful start.

Now comes the question of the Business Requirement and that’s the difficult part! Does the conceptual architecture work from an event or from the resulting insight service outcome? This hits the real question of IOT – defining what is a beneficial outcome!

The notion that future Enterprise architects will focus on outcomes was current this last summer, but unfortunately its not so easy to take this statement into reality.

The nearest approach to this was Service Oriented Architecture not new, but those who were most involved in SOA seem to be least involved in IoT. Back in 2007 Stefan Tilkov wrote a much-applauded article entitled ‘The Ten Principles of SOA’ in which he stressed the principles of Loose Coupled Services. Some eight years later and facing the challenges of a loose-coupled IoT architecture there are some strong similarities.

There is also one big difference that hits almost anything that was said before 2010 and lies right at the heart of the IoT architecture problem. IoT is about ‘Interactions’ more than Transactions, and most Architectural principles concentrate on Transactional data.

That’s a challenging statement and really should provoke some comment! Yes, the value from IoT comes from a Business valuable outcome, but no that’s doesn’t make it a Transaction. But what changed around 2010 that makes this a turning point? The answer was arrival of Social Customer Relationship Management as the new Internet based Social Tools arrived supporting interactions with customers. Before this Customer Relationship Management was/is a traditional IT Enterprise Application focused on Transactional Data. The difference is hugely important and in 2010 the rise of Social CRM was causing similar challenges to those of IOT today.

Read the following from an article published in August 2010 entitled Interactions with Transactions; Understanding Social CRM and try substituting Enterprise IT for CRM and IoT for Social CRM.

CRM was focused on transactions; social CRM is focused on interactions with transactions oftentimes being a byproduct. Social CRM didn't come about because of technology, but as a result of cultural and behavioral shifts, technology simply allowed customers to have a much louder voice

Social CRM was as radical a change five years ago as IoT is today in it’s competitive impact on business models and of course technology. The result was the rise of Salesforce based on completely different principles and products. As Internet/Cloud based capabilities have become well established for a wider range of ‘new’ business valuable activities Salesforce has become a well recognized Enterprise enabler.

There are very strong similarities between deploying and operating Social CRM for Business Value, and at this stage of the development, deploying IoT for its Business Value.

Social CRM provided enterprises with an external visibility into their markets via actual and perspective customers using the ubiquitous connectivity and technologies of the Internet. IoT is in effect completing the external visibility of an enterprise by adding machine and event inputs to complete the view.

At this point the conclusion of this article must be obvious, if you use Salesforce for your Social CRM and other Internet/cloud based initiatives then use Salesforce for your IoT initiatives too. That’s a pretty major statement to make so the importance of this blog was to highlight exactly why this is the conclusion. In time standards will undoubtedly arrive, but it’s going to take a long time, and a large market presence of a defacto approach usually results in a role in the resulting standard.

Right now in some sectors there isn’t time to wait, a decision needs to be made as to the deployment approach in more than a few enterprises. Understanding the similarities as well as the ‘smart’ integration possibilities between Social CRM and IoT clarifies the options. Quietly, and effectively, Salesforce have been building a strong set of IoT capabilities complete with integration with their ‘action’ suites. It’s a good time to take advantage and quick business value from IoT.

A further article in this series on understanding and using IOT will introduce the topic of Business Requirement capture and definition for IoT Business value.

New C-Suite

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