Bluenose: Customer Success Management for a Post-Sale, On-Demand, Attention Economy(Part 2)

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

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

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Welcome back to part two of my vendor profile on Bluenose. Bluenose Analytics offers a customer success platform that allows SaaS businesses to manage customers with complete visibility, a robust early warning system, and built-in playbooks.

Product/Solution Footprint

Competitive Positioning

Bluenose specializes in providing SaaS businesses a customer success platform to manage their customers with all-encompassing visibility through a comprehensive early warning system, intelligent marketing campaigns built to instill loyalty, and integrated playbooks (see Figure 2). Bluenose helps companies spot opportunities to deepen engagement with customers and maximize revenue through renewals and upsells. The CSM software offers a customizable and comprehensive customer health analytics system that can:

• Highlight users that need more product training
• Identify the most engaged users
• Get warnings when an account is a churn risk
• Determine which customers are falling behind in onboarding
• Know if executive champions are no longer engaging with others
• Suggest accounts that are ready for an upgrade

Figure 2. Overview of Bluenose’s Customer Success Management System

Source: Bluenose

The core of Bluenose is the analytics engine. Data on customer engagement, purchases, system usage, customer demographics, and customer sentiment in the form of Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and surveys all feed into the Bluenose engine. The result of the analysis is the ability to proactively manage accounts and end user campaigns. The key capabilities of Bluenose’s account management system include:

• 360-degree view of the customer account
• Early warning system
• Playbooks
• Account-based reports

The key capabilities of Bluenose’s end user campaigns system include:

• Marketing campaigns
• User-based reports
• 360-degree user view
• Actionable queries

The 360-degree view provides Bluenose’s customers with access to every touch point across their business. The early warning system allows Bluenose’s customers to go from being reactive to proactive in detecting issues and heading them off before they become problems. Bluenose’s playbooks allow customers to establish consistent and structured customer success processes to make sure all customers are receiving top-tier customer success management. Bluenose has a customer success community where clients (members) can share and connect with other customer success professionals.

• Constellation’s Analysis of the Competitive Positioning: Early adopters of customer success management didn’t have a cloud platform that provided instant data like the CSM systems that are available today. CSM platforms now provide the capabilities and graphical representation of data in such a useful way that it is imperative that serious businesses adopt customer success management as a top priority. Bluenose’s analytics engine brings customer relationship management (CRM), service desk, marketing, usage data and financial systems into a single centralized view, providing a company with a data stream on its customers. With this data, Bluenose provides its clients with an accurate measurement of the stability of each customer and whether the customer is in jeopardy of churn or is ready to expand its capabilities. Customer scoring is accurate since it draws from structured data sources like CRM and billing systems and unstructured insights, like the intelligence of account managers. This technology system has many of the attributes a company would need to do great customer success management. However, Bluenose would benefit from developing relationships with integration partners and resellers.

Next-Generation Customer Experience Chief Customer Officer

IT’s Big Secret – Platforming: Bringing IT and Marketing Together

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. ...

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The big IT companies have a secret. And it’s a secret that can radically transform your business. For the last decade or so, technology has been converging – with different technology stacks coming into alignment, sharing interfaces, connecting data and improving the process of software development and deployment. As a result, we have seen huge improvements in the capability of software to impact business. Just think about:

• The rise and role of data in business decision making
• The importance and focus on dashboards and data visualisation
• The growth of mobile and location based information
• The abundance of “internet of things” devices and sensors
• The near ubiquitous adoption of smartphones.

Behind the scenes, technology companies have been “platforming” – turning their business processes and models into digital systems. They do this across four key business dimensions:

• Social: The Social dimension has the potential to deliver powerful, personal yet scalable CONNECTION. It offers a single conversational channel, builds trust and offers a way to accelerate a resolution or conversion process
• Mobile: The Mobile dimension delivers LOCATION. With a connected device in your pocket (close to your beating heart), a mobile phone is the convergence point where the digital and the “real” worlds collide
• Analytics: The power of big data is not in crunching everything known about a customer. The real value is in delivering AWARENESS to a network. This effectively means creating USER context from the social, mobile and business data signals available
• Cloud: And the cloud provides the mechanism for SERVICE. To remain relevant to customers, brands must re-acquaint themselves with the value of service. And Cloud provides the mechanism to do so.

But the challenge for marketers is that these dimensions are largely unconnected to marketing. They rightly belong to the company’s technology teams. Right?

Combining marketing and IT capabilities

The greatest opportunity for business is to combine the expertise of marketing and IT. Marketers usually view their customers through the lens of media – combining paid, owned and earned media to reach and engage them. We have shifted, however, beyond this broadcast approach – and this is increasingly being enabled by the SMAC platforms.

To more effectively bridge the marketing and IT fields, we need new ways of thinking, collaborating and conceptualising what it is that we do. We need a shared language, shared measurements and cross-line-of-business visibility into key performance indicators, pressures, deadlines and processes. And this means digital transformation.

Is it possible? It has to be. For only through this kind of alignment will we be able to deeply impact our customer’s brand experience.

I spoke in more detail on this subject recently. See my slides and the presentation here.

 

Marketing Transformation Chief Marketing Officer

SAP Unveils New Cloud Platform Services and In-Memory Innovation on Hadoop

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

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Developments Accelerate Digital Transformation 

This week SAP released information about new capabilities for Hadoop (the major news in my view) and HCP (interesting, less relevant). SAP deemed it an important enough event to invite analysts and our press colleagues to an event in San Francisco, where CTO Quentin Clark and President Platform Solutions Steve Lucas walked us through the announcements.

So let’s dissect the press release (you can find it here) in our customary style, in order to comment and read between the lines:

SAN FRANCISCO — To help companies transform their businesses in today’s digital economy, SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced SAP HANA Vora software, a new in-memory computing innovation for Hadoop and new capabilities planned for SAP HANA Cloud Platform. These new offerings from SAP intend to help companies simplify how their businesses will run in the digital world.

MyPOV – This brings to light what SAP hinted in both Q&A with chairman Plattner and CTO Clark , as well as Member of the Board Leukert’s keynote. For the longest time Hadoop was a ‘bad word’ at SAP – so good to see what looked more like a dinosaur codename has now come out as Vora. Think ‘Data Divorer’ phonetically to come to the naming. And for the insiders, keep in mind the ancestry of HANA goes back to TRex, so the original code name back then of Velociraptor (many smaller, predators) depicts perfectly what Vora is supposed to do: Spark based extensions and capabilities to utilize Hadoop for next generation application scenarios.


“Our mission at SAP is to empower businesses to lead the digital transformation in their industry,” said Quentin Clark, chief technology officer and member of the Global Managing Board of SAP SE. “In order to succeed in this digital transformation, companies need a platform that enables real-time business, delivers business agility, is able to scale and provides contextual awareness in a hyper-connected world. With the introduction of SAP HANA Vora and the planned new capabilities in SAP HANA Cloud Platform, we aim to enable our customers to become leaders in the digital economy.”

MyPOV – Good quote by Clark, hitting all the key areas that matter today for enterprise vendors, enable the creation of strategic, important applications with a PaaS platform, utilizing cloud, BigData, analytics etc. – we know now that this will be HCP, HANA and Vora. Coming as a SAP message – that was traditionally all about the capability of the packaged applications – quite remarkable.

Creating Contextual Awareness with SAP HANA Vora

SAP HANA Vora is a new in-memory query engine that leverages and extends the Apache Spark execution framework to provide enriched interactive analytics on Hadoop. As companies take part in their digital transformation journey, they face complex hurdles in dealing with distributed Big Data everywhere, compounded by the lack of business process awareness across enterprise apps, analytics, Big Data and Internet of Things (IoT) sources.

MyPOV – So we learn more about Vora –that runs on Spark. Good match for the in memory DNA for HANA on the Hadoop side. SAP needs to be careful and respect both perspectives – from the business application side it is ‘context’ – but from the BigData perspective the business application is the context. And as data volumes and gravity favor the BigData side – I think the context question will be solved in the favor of BigData quickly. Important for SAP to realize and key for its customers to benefit from.

SAP HANA Vora helps to extend in-memory computing innovation from SAP to distributed data and provides OLAP-like analytics with a business semantic understanding of data in and around the Hadoop ecosystem. Companies can enhance their decision-making with full understanding of their business activities in context with SAP HANA Vora. Data access also can become democratized for data scientists and developers, making it easier to mashup corporate and Hadoop data together to discover answers to unknown questions.

MyPOV – Good to see SAP bringing the enterprise application DNA to the table. For now it looks like it is Hierarchy capabilities, an important concept for enterprise applications, traditionally missing on the Hadoop side. Personally I am not a fan of the democratization message, enterprises are not run as democracies, so data access is not democratic either (the employees assumed to be the people, the demos). But what is correct is that access to data empowers people, and giving access to more people, including Hadoop empowers them more.

SAP HANA Vora is planned to help benefit customers in various industries where highly interactive Big Data analytics in business process context is paramount, such as financial services, telecommunications, healthcare and manufacturing. Use case examples where SAP HANA Vora can potentially benefit customers include:

Mitigate risk and fraud by detecting new anomalies in financial transactions and customer history data

Optimize telecommunication bandwidth by analyzing traffic patterns to help avoid network bottlenecks and improve network quality of service (QoS).

Deliver preventive maintenance and improve product re-call process by analyzing bill-of-material, services records and sensor data together
MyPOV – Not sure why SAP mentions verticals (a hint of things to come?) – the examples are good ones, as usual there are more. It will be good for customers to see this more as technology capability press release than a specific showcase or even application announcement.

“As part of our Big Data initiative, we currently have Hadoop and SAP HANA deployed in our enterprise IT landscape to help manage large unstructured data sets,” said Aziz Safa, VP and GM, Intel IT Enterprise Applications and Application Strategy. “One of the key requirements for us is to have better analyses of Big Data, but mining these large data sets for contextual information in Hadoop is a challenge. SAP HANA Vora will provide us with the capability to conduct OLAP processing directly on these large, rich data sets all in-memory and stored in Hadoop. This will allow us to extract contextual information and then push those valuable insights back to our business.”

MyPOV – Always good to have a customer quote, and Intel is both a SAP customer and partner. The key is that enterprises have both HANA (and other databases) and Hadoop deployed and need to make sense of data in these systems. The key message from the quote is that SAP has become more relevant as a vendor to Intel than before. And that’s of course a valid argument for the whole SAP ecosystem.

SAP HANA Vora is planned to be released to customers in late September; a cloud-based developer edition is planned to be available at the same time.
MyPOV – Always good to have a near time delivery date. It also means before TechED / dCode – so it will be interesting how SAP can expand on that. We learnt that Vora will be free for developers, always a good start for new (and yet to be proven technology). And then a yearly subscription by node – but we need to learn more about pricing in detail.

Simplifying Open, Agile Business Application Development with SAP HANA Cloud Platform

SAP HANA Cloud Platform enables rapid application development and extensibility for Software as a Service (SaaS) as well as on-premise applications. SAP also plans to expand SAP HANA Cloud Platform’s ability to power digital transformation, collaboration and application development while improving time to value with more pre-delivered business apps. […]
MyPOV – And whoops – we are off to a second press release. Good to see / be reminded that it’s the HANA Cloud Platform (HCP) that is the tool – but everything else would have been big news. With SAP being usually light on PaaS messaging (I think PaaS as word was not mentioned during the presentations) it is key for SAP customers to extend their SAP assets and build new applications.

Highlights include:

Enhanced digital connectivity: Companies can go from sensor to action with SAP HANA Cloud Platform for the IoT, generally available starting in late September. With the services, customers and partners can add device management, device data connectivity and bi-directional device data synchronization capabilities. Additionally, SAP API Management technology powers and manages secure, enterprise-grade API connections to any SAP or non-SAP application. Leveraging both with SAP HANA Cloud Platform, customers can connect edge devices to business action, build extended business networks and share digital assets.

MyPOV – Key capabilities for the IoT use case of next generation applications. Not clear enough though how it works –let’s see at TechEd.[Update September 8th - SAP AR points rightfully out that there are a number of SAP IoT capabilities - they can be found here.]

Enhanced collaboration: New work patterns for the SAP Jam social software platform, available now, enable developers to build better, more collaborative apps quickly and easily with in-context information to get work done. Additionally, the new cloud trial of SAP HANA Cloud Platform gamification services aims to allow developers to quickly incorporate game concepts into new and existing applications with a workbench, software development kits (SDKs) and widgets.

MyPOV – Ok – it now looks like a press release to make up all the ‘sins of the past’ – the SAP messaging has been light on social in the past – shortchanging capabilities of the SAP Jam platform in my view – so it is good to see t mentioned here – but why in the same paragraph with gamification is not clear to me. [Update September 8th - SAP claries that gamification is a social capability at SAP - so then it makes sense to mention here.] SAP needs to make a better message (and maybe product integration) around social to match what the competition has done. And good to see gamification being enabled – as a trial – new for traditional enterprise software release.

Enhanced mobile security: With the addition of SAP Mobile Secure solutions and mobile app protection, enterprises can now deploy a more secure mobile environment. These capabilities help enterprises simplify the security and management of mobile devices and applications, including application management and remote locking, as well as wiping of managed devices. Additionally, customers can easily build, configure and distribute mobile apps to end-users in a streamlined workflow.

MyPOV – Ok – looks like we are getting to all technology disruptors – so mobile can’t be missing. And security is a message all around the industry, so good to see more MDM capabilities at SAP.

Pre-delivered applications: With the new cloud trial of the SAP Fiori user experience (UX), cloud edition, it is planned that users can leverage a set of SAP Fiori apps to connect with their own systems to try the new SAP Fiori UX or extend an existing SAP Fiori app or create a new SAP Fiori-like app.

MyPOV – Usability has been a sore spot for most of SAP’s history, Fiori is the latest remedy to address this and is showing some good promise, so making it easier for non Fiori shops to test and consume Fiori via cloud trial is a good move.

Business services: SAP is providing cloud trial access to business services, which aims to encapsulate best-practice business functions and expose these functions as APIs. These business services are intended to be quickly combined to create powerful, personalized cloud and mobile apps using SAP HANA Cloud Platform.

MyPOV – Probably next to Vora the most important part of the announcement, SAP opening up critical functionality that can be consumed by new custom apps build on HCP – and maybe even 3rd party apps – though that is not clear. A very important move as enterprises don’t want to and often even cannot consume enterprise software in the way it was built, packaged and made consumable by their vendors. But getting to APIs – err – services remains very valuable. Traditionally this has been a hot spot on the monetization side –so key to keep an eye on it. [Update September 8th - SAP AR points out that SAP provides both APIs and services, good point.]

SAP hybris as a Service on SAP HANA Cloud Platform (public beta) plans to offer a wide range of diverse business developer services, starting with a new set of services that augment and enhance the SAP hybris front office, which aims to include products such as the SAP hybris Commerce and SAP hybris Marketing solutions and others. SAP hybris as a Service on SAP HANA Cloud Platform is planned to be open to developers, solution providers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and IT organizations for building their own business services and then offering them to customers or other developers.

MyPOV – hybris is probably the SAP product that due to its very nature needs the most custom development options. Customer experience is a key differentiation tool and in the battle for the customer’s money no off the shelf solution can provide that. It was to be expected that this work would be carried out in HCP – but this is a key conformation that it will happen in HCP. Given that much hybris work happens on Pivotal CloudFoundry a key area to watch.

SAP tax calculation service (limited trial) intends to provide a tax determination and computation services as an API. This service also plans to offer global tax compliance by covering the legal aspects of tax computation for over 75 countries. Read more here.

MyPOV – Good move by SAP – you may even ask what took the vendor so long – to leverage complex, proven and pretty unique assets as the tax calculation service. On the flip side this was (or had to be) on the hybris roadmap anyway – as hybris and SAP customers would expect this to be integrated. And it will be interesting for hybris customers with non-SAP backends. But that’s a question for later (we know the answer already –– you can plug in other services).

“As the provider of choice for real-time communications solutions for many of the world’s largest companies, GENBAND has achieved rapid growth organically and through acquisition as well as through aggressive sales and marketing, so ensuring the ease of interaction with our customers is a major priority,” said Darrin Whitney, CIO, GENBAND. “To continually improve customer experience and our own internal productivity processes, GENBAND chose SAP HANA Cloud Platform to help personalize our customer and partner experience. With SAP HANA Cloud Platform we improved service desk operations to meet and exceed service level agreements, reduced licensing fees and operational costs. SAP HANA Cloud Platform has definitely met our expectations.”

MyPOV – Always good to see a customer quote and interesting to learn what GENBAND has been able to build.

SAP has an established partner ecosystem that is ready to resell and provide services for customers as they transform their businesses in today’s digital economy with new capabilities planned for SAP HANA Cloud Platform and SAP HANA Vora. Read what SAP partners, including Arvato Systems, Bluefin Solutions Inc, Capgemini, Cisco, Cloudera, CSC, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Hortonworks, In Mind, MapR Technologies and Sprinklr have to say: “Partner Quotes: SAP Accelerates Digital Transformation of Business with New Cloud Platform Services and In-Memory Innovation on Hadoop.”

MyPOV – Good to see the overall excitement in the ecosystem on Vora. Notable absences are Databricks, the main commercial body for Spark, and given its recent investments and announcements SAP co-opetitor IBM.  [Update September 8th – SAP points out they will be a sponsor of Databrick’s Spark Summit, so all seems well on the relationship side.]

Overall MyPOV

Delivering on hints, statements and codenames from Sapphire around Hadoop is good for SAP. In my view the Vora announcement and with that the certainty that SAP will build commercial software both from a technology and application perspective utilizing Hadoop is a very important landmark in SAP’s history. It eclipses easily HANA in my view (ok let the storm begin) – because the use cases for Hadoop support are well understood and known. Customers and industry pundits (moi aussi) have been pounding SAP for not having a Hadoop story for the longest time – which effectively excluded SAP from almost all modern software, next generation application scenarios. If you doubt that – re-read the Intel quote with that in mind. SAP cannot deliver on IoT without Hadoop support, so Vora is key for the whole IoT ambition that SAP has been articulating since 12+ months. Ruling social data, understanding machine exhaust, getting a grasp of what is happening on the internet etc. are all use cases that enterprises need to address… and they are doing that with PaaS platforms – and as much progress as HCP has made – it was not a first class citizen amongst PaaS platforms without Hadoop support. So not only does SAP’s future commercial success and overall market relevance depend on Hadoop support on the applications side, it does on the technology side, too.

On the concern side, SAP is late to the game. For too long SAP has hoped for Moore’s law to make HANA viable for BigData scenarios but the combination of falling memory prices and sophisticated compression cannot keep up with the growth of business relevant (that can only be addressed by Hadoop). SAP now needs to develop roadmaps on Vora capabilities so HCP customers and prospects can understand what they can build and when. The same is valid for the new business services – which will be key for these applications. These cannot just be the ‘fallout’ of the SAP application roadmap (which the current ones are) – but need to be more to help customers build the applications that disrupt markets. It would be good for SAP to listen to its customers for the priorities on business services as key input for the first phases of the roadmap. Last but not least SAP needs to price these innovations attractively. ‘Free’ for developers is the right tune these days, but SAP customers are astute enough to understand that they need to know what operating costs for their next generation application built on HCP, leveraging Vora, will cost. Past experiences with HANA pricing and licensing have shown that this is not trivial, but ultimately SAP will make pricing not the obstacle to remain relevant with customers.

But for now congrats and welcome SAP to the Hadoop games, better late than never. SAP has a lot to contribute from both an enterprise vendor DNA and pure capability side as well as from qualities learnt and operated with HANA on the technology side, if executed right both should make SAP more relevant to SAP customers and with the right momentum, relevant in the overall PaaS market.

Next stop is likely SAP TechEd in a few weeks – stay tuned.

 

 

 

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

McDonald’s all day breakfast – the empowered consumer drives the bus

pending

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…...

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Yesterday McDonald’s took the bold move in announcing the availability of breakfast all day across their 14,300+ North American locations, starting on October 6th. Click here for the press release. Now patrons will be able to order hash browns with their McRib sandwiches or get a tasty McGriddle for dinner…all those calories and saturated fats are sure to help anyone fall asleep faster. By some estimates this move could increase the breakfast goods sales by 4%. It is also a reaction to customer demand as well as an attempt also to reinvigorate the fast food giant who has been slumping as of late.

With the hamburger market shifting towards more fast casual offerings such as Five Guys, Whataburger, Shake Shack and In-N-Out Burger. As well as facing competitors focused on just selling chicken related fast food, such as Chick-fil-A, and the fact that Mexican and Asian based fast foods are outpacing the burger chain – McDonalds has to figure out how to turn the tide. While time will tell how the customers and the market reacts to this move, there are some lessons to be drawn from it:

• The empowered consumer strikes again. One of the major shifts we have seen with the digital economy is the increased power in the voice of the consumer. The customer has a voice – social, they have the reach – mobile, greater choice – the internet and thanks to folks like Amazon, have high expectations with regards to product variation. Consumers are no longer willing to accept a limited number of choices, rather they have been trained to expect and demand a large array of choice. With regards to the food industry this is no exception. Consumers don’t accept being limited by arbitrary time limitations on menu items or even not being able to customize their orders. All one has to do is listen to the orders that are throw about in Starbucks – grande skinny vanilla latte with an extra shot or venti soy latte with extra foam…it seems at times the options are endless. Consumers have been trained, in part by the likes of Amazon and Alibaba, to expect a high degree of choice. And by the likes of Dell to expect greater control in customization. The genie is out of that bottle, it will be up to retailers and consumer facing businesses to react accordingly.
• Supply chains get none of the glory but all of the work. It is easy for consumers to expect companies like McDonalds to “flip” a switch and add breakfast items to the all day menu. Consumers at times can grow frustrated as they see a lack of action on something that appears so “simple” to the outside. The reality is the supply chains are the ones that have to keep up, and that is not a simple endeavor. McDonalds will now have to rethink their replenishment and inventory strategies – ensure that they increase their stock of breakfast foods so sustain all day demand. McDonalds and their franchises will have to keep a eye on how their demand patterns shift as well. When they offered specific menus at set times, they could at least contain demand patterns to specific times. Starting in early October demand patterns could be turned upside down. It will be crucial for McDonalds to quickly understand how these shifts will impact their distribution models within the supply chain.
• Don’t forget the process changes to your supply chain. How about the manufacturing process, aka cooking? Each McDonalds kitchen is optimized to be able to cook breakfast and lunch/dinner using the same machines, but not at the same time. Stores will have to determine how to cook egg based products at the same time as hamburgers. Oh and you have to ensure raw eggs don’t come into contact with other food products. By some estimates it will cost individual stores up to $5000 to re-kit some of their kitchens to meet these new processes. Not a huge sum when you consider McDonalds corporate, but not a trivial amount at the franchise level. This will also change the business processes within the stores. Staff will be asked to mix and match breakfast and lunch/dinner items. New processes will have to be implemented and training will have to accompany those processes.
• Will this be successful? These types of strategic moves can, at times, appear simple and “no brainers” but the reality hits when the numbers are digested. McDonalds must ensure they have a keen eye on the metrics. Does this drive increased in store sales? Does it provide a lift for breakfast items? How does it measure up with other McDoanalds’ products? Are there complimentary relationships that emerge? Do Big Macs paired with hash browns become a big selling item? What is the impact on margin? I am sure that McDonalds has done some extensive testing and model building to make this move, but as with all plans, most rarely survive first contact with the consumer. McDonalds must have the systems in place to monitor and measure how this impacts the financials.

McDonalds’ breakfast all day…smells like a winner. Well at least for the consumer. Question is, like with any NPI (new product introduction), can the underlying supply chain sustain success and has the new offering addressed a need that was otherwise unmet? Only time will tell. But some valuable lessons non the less.

Hmmmm, maybe I will go get an Egg McMuffin and a 6 piece Chicken McNugget for dinner…

 

Matrix Commerce Next-Generation Customer Experience Sales Marketing 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 Information Officer Chief Customer 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 Chief Supply Chain Officer

Hadoop Progress Report: 3 Emerging Use Cases

Doug Henschen

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

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Hadoop is gaining acceptance as an essential enterprise data platform. Here’s a look at  three emerging, business-driving use cases that go beyond IT cost savings.

It has been nearly six years since I attended my first Hadoop World conference in 2009, and, oh my, how the platform has progressed.

What I’m most excited about, as Strata-Hadoop World 2015 approaches, is growing adoption and rapidly maturing use of the platform. Hortonworks, for one, recently described “transformational, next-generation” data-discovery, single-view-of the-customer and predictive-analytics uses of Hadoop, as depicted below.

 

Before we get to these emerging use cases, it’s helpful to consider how quickly the platform has matured. Back in 2009, Cloudera was the only company that offered enterprises commercially supported Hadoop software. Today, Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR, in that order, are the big three providers, and collectively they have nearly 2,000 customers.

Back then, Internet giants including Facebook, Yahoo and Amazon accounted for the vast majority of Hadoop adoption while enterprises like JP Morgan Chase were in the minority. Today, Hadoop is routinely showing up in the enterprise, and it’s a given at big banks, big retailers, big telecommunications companies and other data-intensive organizations.

Hortonworks became the first Hadoop software distributor to go public late last year, so now we get regular updates on the growth of the Hadoop market as the company reports its quarterly results. In August, for example, the company reported second quarter revenues of $30.7 million, up 154% from $12.1 a year earlier. That performance put Hortonworks on track to exceed $100 million in annual revenue, a milestone privately held Cloudera says it surpassed last year on the strength of 100% year-over-year growth.

In the scheme of the software business, $100 million doesn’t sound like much compared to the $38 billion in revenue Oracle recorded last year. But keep in mind that we’re talking about open source software here, so the bulk of subscription fees go toward support.

In the case of Hortonworks it’s 100% open source software, and the subscription costs sound quite modest. Support costs for an entry-level deployment, for example, are in the mid-five-figure range, according to Hortonworks. Hardward costs are additional, but keep in mind that a modest, four-node starter cluster typically offers tens of terabytes of usable capacity (allowing for Hadoop's triple replication of data). Hadoop offers linear scalability, so the larger the deployment, the bigger the cost advantage over traditional (relational database) infrastructure.

In the early days of Hadoop, there was much more talk about cost savings related to data warehouse optimization. Data warehouses aren’t going away, but there’s an opportunity to move data out of the comparatively expensive relational database environment and into a Hadoop-based data lake/hub for things like archival storage and ETL processing. Independent data-integration vendors like Informatica, Syncsort and Talend have jumped all over this opportunity, porting their software to run inside Hadoop so it can handle data-parsing and data-transformation workloads.

A second wave of the optimization story started breaking last year with the SQL-on-Hadoop movement. Started by Pivotal with HAWQ and Cloudera with its Impala engine, the wave grew larger as database vendors and Hadoop distributors alike joined in. In the database category, Actian offers its Vortex engine, HP runs Vertica on Hadoop, Oracle introduced Oracle Big Data SQL, and Teradata backs the Presto engine. Among Hadoop distributors, MapR backs open-source Apache Drill and Hortonworks is focused on improving the performance of Hive, which is the original and still-most-widely used SQL-on-Hadoop option.

Familiarity with SQL and compatibility with existing BI and analysis tools have fueled interest in SQL-on-Hadoop options. Executives at Tableau Software, for one, tell me many of that company’s joint customers with Cloudera are getting snappy query performance from Impala, which is used in combination with Tableau’s SQL-savvy software.

MyPOV On Next-Gen Use of Hadoop

To my mind, SQL-on-Hadoop is more of an incremental optimization play. It lowers the cost of querying at scale with the added advantage of having more data accessible all in one place. But SQL has been around a long time, and it was never terribly effective at cracking high-scale data types like clickstreams, log files, sensor data, mobile app data, social data and so on. These data types aren’t really new; it’s Hadoop’s ability to handle myriad, multi-structured data types that has changed the game.

But what’s really driving these new big-data-discovery, single-customer-view, and predictive-analytics breakthroughs is the ability to find correlations across data sets using Hadoop and various analytical frameworks that run on top of the platform. Merck, for example, uses time-series analysis, clustering and other non-SQL analytic techniques to look across dozens of disparate sources and years’ worth of data from its manufacturing plants stored in a Hortonworks cloud deployment. This data-discovery application has enabled Merck to optimize production yields of vaccines that are incredibly expensive to produce, lowering drug costs, broadening distribution and literally saving lives.

In a single-customer-view application, St. Louis-based Mercy, the fifth largest Catholic health care system in the U.S., captures electronic health record (EHR) data, sensor data, transactional ERP data, third-party enrichment data and even social data in a Hortonworks-based data lake. Mercy now stores 900 times more detailed data from intensive care units, ingesting patient vital signs every second rather than every 15 minutes, according to Paul Boal, Director of Data Management & Analytics at Mercy. Patient queries across disparate sources that previously took two weeks now take half a day. And finally, Mercy Labs research can now search through terabytes of free-text lab notes that were previously inaccessible.

A third Hortonworks customer, Progressive Insurance, is pursuing the predictive analytics use case, capturing high-scale driving data using its in-car snapshot devices. It uses that data to better predict risk and offer more competitive policies. The company is also analyzing claims to spot potentially fraudulent ones as well as larger patterns of insurance fraud.

These three examples scratch the surface, but other recent customer wins speak volumes about Hadoop acceptance in the enterprise. Cloudera’s recent wins include BT (British Telecom), wealth-management firm Northern Trust, and a predictive analytics deployment at retailer Marks & Spencer. At MapR the list of namable enterprise customers includes Cisco, Harte Hanks, Machine Zone (the outfit behind Game of War), and Zion’s Bank.

The long story short on Hadoop’s progress in the enterprise is that it’s here to stay. Yes, it’s also going through teenage growing pains in the area of security and data governance, as I wrote earlier this year. But this phase will pass, adoption will continue to grow, and all users will be able to focus on the sorts of business-driving, transformational outcomes that the few pioneers are proving today.

Data to Decisions Chief Customer Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief Digital Officer

Is Email Dead Or Very Much Alive in Our Work and Play?

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

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

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Some people say email is dead. Other’s know it’s not because they spend over half their day checking and responding to email. To find out how prevalent email is in our work and play life, Adobe did a study to explore how present email is in our “always on” world and to understand the opportunity their is to take this proven channel to the next level with digital marketing. To read more about the study, click here. Who Did Adobe Survey? Adobe surveyed of 400 U.S. white-collar workers and asked about their use of personal and work email. They complemented this by surveying marketers and using Adobe Digital Index (ADI) resources to answer questions about email marketing and its impact in the cross-channel environment. Adobe surveyed marketers to answer the question about email marketing and its impact in the cross-channel environment, the following reveals some of those preliminary findings.

What Did the Study Reveal?

• 9 out of 10 consumers constantly check their personal email from work and their work email at home; on average they spend nearly six and a half hours each weekday on email.
• Respondents reported commonly checking their email while engaging in other tasks such as watching TV/movies (70%), while in bed (52%), vacationing (50%), talking on the phone (43%), using the bathroom (42%), while driving (18%).
• 58% of respondents say that email is their preferred way to be contacted by a brand, however, consumers want fewer emails (39%) and fewer repetitive emails from brands to make email offers less annoying/intrusive (32%).  This suggests the customer experiences – especially on mobile – ought to be top-of-mind for marketers.
• More than one-third of respondents (34%) said they have created new email addresses to get away from spam messages, so relevance and personalization are increasingly important.
• Almost half of the respondents said they think their use of email in both work and personal communications will increase over the next two years.
• Surprisingly, Millennial consumers are even more email-dependent than the average adult. This is likely due to their mobile use; 88% of Millennials check email on smartphones, compared to 76% who use desktop or laptop computers.

MY POV: eMail is not dead. These results suggest that there is an opportunity for email as a key channel in a cross channel strategy – with relevance and personalization as guiding principles for effective email marketers.  Email marketing is at its maximum effectiveness when it’s fully integrated across all phases of the campaign strategy.

It may seem as though marketers generally play down the significance of email early in the campaigns, but the data needed to mount an effective email campaign is being collected during research and consideration phases of customer engagement. Then, as marketers follow the customer through acquisition, conversion and retention, email can kick into action to exercise its impact and power. While it can be very confusing to keep up with all the various channels, email still seems to be a very relevant one, when used wisely.

@DrNatalie Petouhoff, VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research

 

Next-Generation Customer Experience Chief Customer Officer

IOT: Salesforce Introduces Lightning Console and Wave Analytics App for Service Cloud

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

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

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By 2020 it is estimated that there will be over 50 billion connected devices. And that means that consumers will be more connected than ever before, across mobile phones, wearables and other devices and the field of IOT will continue to expand. So if consumers are more connected, what does this mean for companies? If customers expect to be able to interact, engage, purchase and get service through any channel, companies need to step up to this challenge.

What Companies Need To Consider With the Expansion of IOT:  While we have been talking about a seamless customer experience for years, companies that want to keep their business and gain market share will have to really examine their ability to deliver a seamless experience to these ultra-connected consumers during each and every interaction, across every channel. That’s the case for customers interacting with the company. But what about when customer wants to get help from an customer service agent?

IOT and Customer Service Agents: For customer service agents to be able to support all the new channels as well as make sense of all the data being generated from all these channels, they need new, smarter solutions that allow them to better respond to customers. Customer Service agents need to know the history of the customer’s visits to various channels, purchases, customer service requests, etc.. However, often time agents don’t have access to any of that historical data or consumer behavior data to predict the next best actions.

Why Are Companies Struggling with The Seamless Customer Experience? Companies struggle to deliver on these expectations because their company and contact centers are filled with technology from 20 years ago. These legacy technologies are not connected to the products they sell or the channels their customers are now interacting win.

Bottom-line, many companies are well not equipped with the tools they need to deliver answers quickly. So when companies come to me and ask, “How do I succeed in this world where the seamless customer experience can no longer be ignored?” My simple answer (which is really a complex answer when you look under the hood) is that companies need to transform their customer service strategy, and enable agents to deliver smart and fast customer service across every channel. And we all know it is easier said than done. The great thing is the technology can deliver on these promises, but it takes people to lead and integrate the strategy and technology into their organization.

Agent Productivity Gains: New Service Cloud Lightning Console Sets a New Standard for Agent Productivity  As part of helping to solve the issues companies are facing, Salesforce’s Service Cloud is bringing to market the new Service Cloud Lightning Console. It has been reimagined with a modern, efficient and intelligent experience for agents. And the the Lightning Console is built on the Salesforce1 Platform. Lightning Console includes:

• Optimized Lightning Console: The new Lightning Console gives agents a highly-productive experience that provides everything they need at their fingertips. Agents can dramatically speed up common actions like creating new contacts, registering products and processing returns—all without losing the context of the interaction or needing to switch screens.

• Smart Productivity Tools: The new Lightning Console also enables agents to be more productive by allowing them to apply more intelligence to every case to resolve them quickly. Recommended Tools use algorithms to help agents by suggesting relevant knowledge articles, macros and recommended actions from similar cases, and are presented proactively right in the console.

• Intelligent Routing and Presence: The Lightning Console includes omni-channel routing and presence so the right work is dynamically routed to the right agent at the right time, resolving customer issues faster. Managers have transparency into what work has been assigned to which agents, each agent’s capacity and can push specific work to the most appropriate agents.

• Service Lightning Components and the Lightning Design System: With Salesforce Lightning, service teams have a platform for innovation that enables agents to connect with customers in entirely new ways. Salesforce Lightning combines Lightning Experience, Design System, Components and App Builder, extending the Salesforce1 Platform to empower anyone to easily create modern, service-specific apps. And companies can use Salesforce Lightning and Components from the AppExchange to extend Service Cloud with any app.

If you remember, (I know it’s difficult to keep up with all the new software!) last year, Salesforce launched Analytics Cloud, powered by the Wave Platform, to reimagine the entire analytics process end-to-end, and empower business users to explore any data and uncover new insights on any device. And earlier this year, Salesforce expanded its Analytics Cloud portfolio with Wave Analytics Apps. So what’s new?

Today, Salesforce is announcing its latest Wave Analytics App—Service Wave Analytics: It is the first analytics app built for Service Cloud. It arms service teams with deeper, more actionable insights that help service agents and leaders instantly optimize channels, improve agent efficiency and spot or address emerging trends. Service Wave Analytics will deliver:

• Analytics for Service Leaders: Key performance indicators—including average handling time, customer satisfaction and first call resolution—can be instantly explored through pre-configured templates developed to give service leaders with the metrics they need to take the pulse of their team’s performance. The insights can lead to a decisions so service leaders will be able to act instantly. Service Wave seamlessly connects to Service Cloud workflows and records, so managers can instantly assign a task, escalate a case, update a ticket or share best practices—right within the Service Wave App. For example, a service team leader can conduct a real-time review of each agent’s performance metrics across channels or against service cases across products to instantly improve case management, agent efficiency and channel optimization—from anywhere, on any device.

• Analytics for Service Agents: Analytics dashboards from Service Wave can be embedded directly into the Lightning Console, giving every service agent an instant 360 degree view of the customer right where they work, taking agent productivity to new heights. For example, an agent who is talking to a customer and reviewing their service case in the Lightning Console will have both traditional customer and case history data alongside Wave insights on similar cases right at their fingertips, enabling them to deliver smarter service faster than ever. In addition, each agent can have a personal scorecard to track their performance in comparison to their peers, as well as identify top performing colleagues who can share best practices.

• Native to Service Cloud: Service Wave’s native integration with Salesforce enables every service professional to be up and running in minutes to instantly explore Service Cloud data. In addition, operational data from other customer service systems​ such as call logs, chat history, CTI data and web clicks can be surfaced. Now, teams can create custom dashboards and lenses to explore this data alongside traditional performance metrics to quickly diagnose problems, alleviate bottlenecks or proactively re-allocate service resources. For example, a service leader no longer has to wait for an analyst to deliver insights on operational data, or spend time cross-referencing static spreadsheets to determine the correlation between an outdated knowledge article and lengthy case resolution times for a specific product.

To learn more about this announcement, you can find more information here:

• Service Cloud at http://www.salesforce.com/service-cloud/overview/

• Salesforce SOS at http://www.salesforce.com/service-cloud/features/sos/

• Service Wave Analytics at http://www.salesforce.com/form/analytics/service-wave-overview.jsp

• Service Wave Analytics demo at http://www.salesforce.com/form/analytics/service-wave-demo.jsp

Your Next Steps: Every individual has to take a hard look at whether they and their organization is prepared for a seamless, customer experience, especially in Customer Service. It’s even more important now than ever, because, Customer Service IS THE NEW MARKETING.

Brands can’t sell to customers that are mad. Customer Service issues have to be dealt with and studies show that a customer with a problem that got solved is more loyal than a customer who never had an issue with a company.

Why is this the case? Because the customer knows the brand has their back. And that’s pretty much all customers want. They don’t want brands to be perfect, they want them to be human, responsive, relevant, helpful, concerned and fix their issues. That’s what creates loyalty.

You have to ask yourself, if your company’s Customer Service capabilities are up to speed or will your brand be left behind? And if it’s not up to spend, what can you do to change that paradigm?

@Drnatalie, VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research

Next-Generation Customer Experience Chief Customer Officer

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

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

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

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In the next part of my series, I’d like to feature Bluenose. Bluenose Analytics offers a customer success platform that allows SaaS businesses to manage customers with complete visibility, a robust early warning system, and built-in playbooks.

Bluenose’s co-founders were both born in Halifax, Canada. They named the company for something they had in common. The Bluenose is a well-known racing sailboat from Halifax, a schooner with three masts that competed around 1900. The Bluenose was virtually undefeated in competition.

Before the opt-in economy, many businesses focused on the initial sale. Organizations spent a significant amount of money on advertising and marketing to potential prospects. The goal – enticing them to convert from a lead to a sale. Despite decades of research showing that after-sales service directly affects the financial stability of a company, organizations paid little attention the after-sale experience and financial longevity of the client. Consequently, organizations never should have spent millions, or in some cases, billions of dollars in advertising, marketing and sales to then drive the customer to a competitor when the after-sales service experience was horrible. Yet, poor after-sales service occurs every single day in many, many companies.

Customer Success Management (CSM) is based on the ability to deliver a consistent customer experience process – before, during, and in particular, after the sale – which results in maximized customer lifetime value and enhanced revenue that leads to increased margins and profits. A shift to CSM happened because we live in a continuous, opt-in economy, where the value of customers is determined by how long they stay customers and if they continue to increase their purchase amounts over time. Because of our opt-in economy, companies must prepare themselves to deliver great, continuous and consistent customer experiences.

This seismic shift to a post-sale, on demand, attention economy transforms the value exchange among customers, partners, suppliers, and brands. And as organizations move to digital business models, CSM plays a critical role in enabling brands and organizations to keep and deliver their brand promise as well as enhance their bottom line.

When choosing the best option for CSM software for your organization, the choice will depend on the business goals of CSM initiatives, the degree to which CSM has been integrated into your culture and how well employees have adopted this mindset. It may be that some organizations will be further along the adoption cycle, while others will need internal champions to encourage and enforce the use of customer success software, processes and best practices.

Data to Decisions Drives the Democratization of Insight

The CSM field has been spurred on by the need to provide after-sales service intelligence that can be turned into actionable insights and decisions. Holistic, data-driven decisions require a multi-disciplinary approach that incorporates performance monitoring with traditional business intelligence technologies.

A multitude of data sources can be transformed into information streams guided by business process. As context is applied to information streams, patterns emerge that provide nuggets of insight. That insight then drives the ability to take action and make better decisions. This shift to using insight not only can serve high-margin, “luxury” brands, but also should be considered for all businesses through an investment in CSM. By transforming business models to include processes that immediately turn data into decisions, brands and organizations gain the ability to provide great, loyalty inspiring experiences that reduce churn and increase revenue.

Customer Success Management Field Sees Tremendous Growth

Through conversations with clients, prospective buyers, system integrators, partners, and vendors, Constellation sees five big themes in customer success management (see Figure 1)[1]:

1. Delivering a brand promise instead of a product or service requires new approaches. The onus of delivering on the brand promise – providing great experiences with a company no matter when the customer interacts with it – is putting new pressures on brands and software vendors. This means the business model of both must shift. A company’s business model must move post-sales care to a more mature level. This evolution requires a different mindset and approach to customer lifetime value.

Figure 1. Five Areas Needed to Master Customer Success Management

2. Companies who believe in customer experience build CSM organizations. Not all CSM organizations are created equally. In an opt-in economy, the economic value of a customer is realized over time, instead of in the upfront sale. This means that organizations that want to become CSM-oriented are looking at three main areas:

• Hiring, training and rewards for employees
• Becoming a center of excellence for CSM
• Strategy combined with data

3. CSM cultivates more customers, lowers churn, and improves margins. The reason many companies have adopted the opt-in business model is that they realize, when they consistently deliver great experiences, they have loyal customers who advocate for the brand and often will make referrals. Advocating for the brand can be in the form of a post in a social network or offline in telling friends or family of their experiences.
4. Predictive analytics identify known attributes and reveal previously unknown attributes that drive customer success. The only way to preserve a company’s revenue stream is to keep customers opting in. To become a CSM organization, a company has to actively manage customer relationships to ensure the customer is getting value. This critical step requires data in the form of real-time and predictive analytics.
5. Integration of the Internet of Things and predictive analytics improves precision of decisions. The amount of data and analytics that CSM platforms provide is important, especially when data from sensors and other sources (that make up the Internet of Things) is integrated into the solution to provide a company with predictive analytics and actionable insights that drive better and more precise decision making throughout an organization.

[1] See “The State of Customer Success Management 2015” by Natalie Petouhoff, Constellation Research, December 22, 2014.

Next-Generation Customer Experience Chief Customer Officer

Cisco and Apple Partner to Drive Enterprise Sales

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

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

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Partnership with Cisco Signals Apple's Seriousness About Growing Enterprise Sales 

On August 31st, 2015 at the annual Cisco sales kick-off, Global Sales Experience (#GSX), 20,000 attendees witnessed a surprise appearance by Apple CEO Tim Cook with Cisco’s Chairman, John Chambers.  The surprise announcement brought forth a new alliance designed to boost sales for both organizations in the enterprise.

Key insights:

• Improved experiences.  Apple and Cisco are partnering to improve the experience for iPhone and iPad in the enterprise.
• Creating a technology differentiation.  By reducing redundancy and improving caching, enterprise users will experience better performance from iOS devices and Cisco Networks.
• Driving reliability.  Cisco networks will be optimized for easy connections for Apple devices to improve reliability.

Here’s the quick video analysis of the deal (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Video Analysis Of The Cisco – Apple Announcement

20150831 Apple Cisco announcement from Constellation Research on Vimeo.

The Bottom Line: Apple Is Serious About Partnering To Grow Enterprise Sales

From the IBM deal last year, to this Cisco deal, Apple shows its commitment to growing in the enterprise.  More importantly, Apple could have tried to enter the market by itself, howver, it realizes that good partnerships are key to success.  In fact, Apple knows who they are and what they are good at.  As with future partnerships, expect Apple to identify alliances where they can deliver complimentary skill sets and of course drive iPad and other iOS device sales.  Based on the rumors of a Tim Cook appearance at #BoxWorks, one can expect another announcement some time soon.

Your POV.

What do you think of the partnership? Do you think Apple has the right strategy?  Will Cisco sell more networking with the Apple partnership? Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationR (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) org.

Resources

• Event Report: Oracle Open World 2014 – Day 1 #OOW14
• Event Report: Day 1 At Oracle Open World 2013: The Quest For Innovation #oow13
• 20130629 News Analysis: Oracle’s Cloud Disruption Webinar Recording
• 20130625 News Analysis: Oracle’s Cloud Strategy – Revisionist History or Cloud Genius?
• 20121231 Market Maker 1:1: Steve Miranda, Oracle Fusion Applications Update – The Inside Story
• 20121001 Event Report: The Day 0 And Day 1 Tweet Stream From OOW12

• News Analysis: Infosys One-Year After Vishal Sikka August 4, 2015
• Event Report: Sage Summit 2015 Shows A Refocus On The Future Of The SMB Customer July 29, 2015
• News Analysis: Inside The Rationale Behind @LinkedIn Turning Off Its CSV Connections Download Tool July 25, 2015
• News Analysis: How @LinkedIn Is Creating A Personal Data Hostage Crisis For Its Users July 25, 2015
• Tuesday’s Tip: Apply For A SuperNova Award – Recognize Leaders In Digital Business July 21, 2015
• Book Summary: Lesson 10 From Disrupting Digital Business – Segment By Digital Proficiency Not Age July 12, 2015
• Book Summary: Lesson 9 From Disrupting Digital Business – Deliver Intention Driven, Mass Personalization At Scale July 2, 2015
• Book Summary: Lesson 8 From Disrupting Digital Business – Democratize Distribution With P2P Networks June 22, 2015
• Webinar Invite: Delivering on Continuity – The Future of Marketing June 15, 2015
• Book Summary: Lesson 7 From Disrupting Digital Business – Humanize Digital With Digital Artisans June 14, 2015
• Book Summary: Lesson 6 From Disrupting Digital Business – Win With Network Economies June 10, 2015
• Product Review: Two Apple Watch Enterprise Apps Launched With IMS Health Life Sciences Wearable Platform June 7, 2015
• Event Report: Zuora’s #Subscribed15 Shows How Organizations Can Power Their Digital Transformation Initiatives May 31, 2015
• Book Summary: Lesson 5 From Disrupting Digital Business – Build For Insight Streams May 31, 2015
• Book Summary: Lesson 4 From Disrupting Digital Business – Know That Data Is The Foundation May 25, 2015
• Book Summary: Lesson 3 From Disrupting Digital Business – Sell The Smallest Unit You Can May 17, 2015
• Webinar Invite: Disrupting Digital Business – The Customer Experience Imperative May 16, 2015
• Quips: Networked Economy Models Emerge Should Verizon Gain Approval To Acquire AOL May 12, 2015
• Book Summary: Lesson 2 From Disrupting Digital Business – Keep Brand Promises In An Attention Economy May 10, 2015
• Research Summary: The Correct Way to Use Customer Data May 6, 2015
• Event Report: Insights Into The New NetSuite At SuiteWorld 2015 May 9, 2015
• Book Summary: Lesson 1 From Disrupting Digital Business May 3, 2015
• Personal Log: Read Chapter One of Disrupting Digital Business April 22, 2015
• Press Release: Registration Opens for Inaugural Constellation Digital Disruption Tour April 16, 2015

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

Disclosure

Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us. For the full disclosure policy,stay tuned for the full client list on the Constellation Research website. * Not responsible for any factual errors or omissions.  However, happy to correct any errors upon email receipt. Copyright © 2001 -2015 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC All rights reserved. Contact the Sales team to purchase this report on a a la carte basis or join the Constellation Customer Experience.

 

The post News Analysis: @Cisco and @Apple Team Up At #GSX appeared first on A Software Insider's Point of View.

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Can VMWare Compete in the Public Cloud? A Pre-VMWorld 2015 Analysis

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

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En route to VMWorld 2015. This will be my third VMWorld as an analyst, and it has been truly interesting to watch VMWare grapple with its biggest challenge--competing for marketshare in the public cloud.  

First of all – let’s understand the challenge. VMWare is the uncontested leader when it comes to on-premise virtualization of computing loads of enterprises. But as enterprises look for public cloud and SaaS loads – VMWare needs to change to remain relevant.

 

Coming into VMWorld 2013 – two years ago – my un-briefed understanding was that VMWare ‘did not get public cloud’. Presentations, Briefings, Q&A with Paul Maritz and the new CEO Pat Gelsinger dispelled this. It was clear that executives understood both challenge and opportunity of the public cloud.

 

Leaving VMWorld 2013 my understanding then was that it was the commercials. Similar to many on premise vendors, I thought VMWare not to be motivated to a quick acceleration of enterprise loads to the public cloud, as the switch from perpetual to subscription licensing would not be advantageous financially. Coming into VMWorld 2014 with that understanding I was convinced by strategy czar Ayyar that actually subscription revenues are better (heard that before) but that also VMWare would ultimately extract more revenue from customers in the subscription business model.

 

During VMWorld 2014 it became clear to me that VMWare had a product issues. It had to build infrastructure and products for public cloud. A very high developer number to be hired / working in the division of public cloud exec Fathers was in play.

 

But before VMWorld 2015 we have not heard much on product announcements / roadmaps. But maybe VMWare was holding back for VMWorld this year.

Anyway – we will know in a few hours …. 

 

But I wanted to share how my understanding of what VMWare is struggling with in my view – and what is holding the vendor (and thus customers) back. Stay tuned for updates from VMWorld this week. 

2012, 2013, 2014 & 2015 (C) Holger Mueller - All Rights Reserved

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