News Analysis - AWS learns Hindi - Amazon Web Services announces 2016 India Expansion

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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Amazon AWS surprised markets with its announcement to put an AWS region into India in 2016. AWS has been relatively slow to roll out data center regions in the past, partly because they are massive pieces of infrastructure, always have a redundancy site etc.

 

The press release can be found here – let’s analyze in custom Constellation style:

India-based AWS Infrastructure Region will enable customers to run workloads in India and serve Indian end-users with even lower latency

MyPOV – AWS until now said that locality did not matter given the massive number of Edge locations (50+) AWS operates. [Update July 7th: AWS correctly points out that there is a difference between Edge locations and regions, and that it has a world wide rollout schedule for regions. Fair enough, we agree that both are not the same.]

The case of India shows that ultimately Edge locations do not help when the latency to the server is too long. And Indian customers have to deal with slow and high latency networks already. Anyone who has downloaded corporate email in Mumbai or Bangalore knows speed is an issue. So good to see Amazon acknowledge this.

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun. 30, 2015-- Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced that it will open an AWS infrastructure region in India for its cloud computing platform in 2016.

MyPOV – 2015 sees a departure from the so far practiced policy of AWS to announce regions only when they were going GA, as practice last in Germany (read the launch news analysis here).

"Tens of thousands of customers in India are using AWS from one of AWS's eleven global infrastructure regions outside of India. Several of these customers, along with many prospective new customers, have asked us to locate infrastructure in India so they can enjoy even lower latency to their end users in India and satisfy any data sovereignty requirements they may have,” said Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President, AWS. “We're excited to share that Indian customers will be able to use the world’s leading cloud computing platform (AWS) in India in 2016 – and we believe India will be one of AWS's largest regions over the long term."

MyPOV – Jassy nails the issue of data center location, speed and sovereignty requirements. Interesting that he mentions India will ultimately be the largest AWS region in the long term. India certainly has a lot of potential, but one could also interpret that (at this point) AWS does not play any data centers between e.g. Germany and Australia on the Eurasian route between the two locations. Not surprisingly traditional secretive AWS does not mention the location, but we expect it to be in Northern India to reduce not only latency inside of India, but also adjacent geographies.

Customers in India such as Hike, PayTM, ZEDO, Freshdesk, Inmobi, Capillary Technologies, HackerEarth, Getit, Ferns N Petals, redBus, Druva, Vserv, Hungama, Tata Motors, Jubilant Food Works, STAR India, Future Group, Manipal Global Education, Classle, NDTV, Dalmia Bharat Sugar, Usha International, Macmillan India, Apeejay Stya and Svran Group are already using AWS to drive cost savings, accelerate innovation, speed time-to-market, and expand geographic reach in minutes.

MyPOV – That is impressive load, and possible a longer customer list (at least what AWS mentioned publicly) then when they opened the German region recently.

Tata Motors Limited is a leading Indian multinational automotive manufacturing company headquartered in Mumbai, and is part of Tata Group. The company’s customer portals and its Telematics systems, which lets fleet owners monitor all the vehicles in their fleet on a real-time basis, are running on the AWS Cloud. Tata Motors has recently built a parts planning system to forecast spares demand by using ordering and inventory patterns. They use AWS for development landscapes immediately after the project kicks off, which shaves four to six weeks of setup time in a typical project cycle. “Whenever we plan on rolling out a new project or experimenting with a new technology, AWS helps us in quickly provisioning the required infrastructure and enables us in getting up and running at a fast pace,” said Jagdish Belwal, Chief Information Officer of Tata Motors. “AWS has helped us become more agile and has drastically increased our speed of experimentation and therefore, innovation.”

MyPOV – Good to hear from an Indian marquee brand like Tata Motors. What is not mentioned is that Tata (like all other Indian customers) will be more productive in their new development and test systems thanks to lower latency to the new Indian region. From own experience of switching data centers into India, this can be a substantial and often dramatic performance improvement.

NDTV is India's leading media house with TV channels watched by millions of people across the world. NDTV has been using AWS since 2009 to run their video platform and all their web properties on AWS. During the May 2014 general election, NDTV using AWS was able to handle the unprecedented web traffic that scaled 26 times from 500 million hits on a normal day to 13 billion hits during election day, and regularly peaked at 400,000 hits per second. “We have been an early adopter of AWS and the benefits that we experience is beyond just cost savings, it is the agility that enables us to move fast with new projects that makes a positive impact and real difference to our business,” said Kawaljit Singh, CTO of NDTV Convergence. “We are very impressed with the staff and tech support teams of AWS, who have been most helpful in providing support and guidance throughout our cloud journey. They worked hand-in-hand with our team so that we are able to handle the massive scale and unpredictability of workloads for the general election event last year, and as a result, the entire process took place without any hitch at all.”

MyPOV – Another great showcase for benefits of a local Indian region – streaming and media house NDTV. Again a bandwidth hungry and performance critical use case.

Ferns N Petals is a leading flower and retailer in India with 194 outlets in 74 cities and delivery across 156 countries worldwide. Prior to using AWS, Ferns N Petals was running its IT infrastructure in a traditional datacenter. They turned to AWS in the year 2014 when their business grew rapidly and decided to move their entire online business to AWS. Since moving to AWS, they are able to manage rapid growth of their users’ traffic that peaks at 80 percent during the festive seasons. “Our experience with AWS over the past year has been excellent. AWS is now the cornerstone in our growth strategy, “ said Manish Saini, Vice President of online business for Ferns N Petals. “We have recently launched two new businesses that include new overseas expansion that are all running on AWS. We are now able to spend more time and resources in areas that matter to our customers such as new mobile app development that will enhance their buying experience.”

MyPOV – Another well picked reference by AWS, Ferns N Petals. Bringing a region to India will not only serve local customers, but also – like in this case – sway them more to the AWS platform as it allows to standardize platforms for global expansion.

Novi Digital is a wholly owned subsidiary of STAR India, one of the largest media and entertainment companies in India. The company uses AWS to run hotstar, a flagship OTT platform for drama, movies and live sporting events. With more than 20 million downloads in four months, hotstar has seen one of the fastest adoptions of any new digital service anywhere in the world. In fact, during one of the Cricket World Cup matches, hotstar and starsports.com combined reached a record total of over 2.3 million concurrent streams and more than 50 million video views. “The reliability of the highly scalable AWS cloud platform has enabled hotstar to break many records in the last four months,” said Ajit Mohan, Head of Digital, STAR India. “AWS has been a key partner in helping us deliver a compelling and seamless experience for millions of users.”

MyPOV – Another media company, always good showcases.

AWS also has a vibrant ecosystem in India, including partners that have built cloud practices and innovative technology solutions on the platform. The AWS Consulting Partners in Indiainclude Accenture, Blazeclan, Frontier, Intelligrape, Minjar, Progressive, PWC, SaaSforce, SD2labs, Team Computers, Wipro, and many others. Among the AWS Technology Partners inIndia are Adobe, Druva, Freshdesk, Indusface, Microsoft, Newgen, RAMCO, SAP, Seclore and many others. For the full list of the members of the AWS Partner Network, please visit:https://aws.amazon.com/partners/

MyPOV – Good to see that the services side is equally engaged in India. And India is always a technology partner / ISV play as we can see. More importantly to be in India.



 

Overall MyPOV

A good move by Amazon, as India is a key location both from a high tech vendor presence, a market and future potential perspective. Additionally latency aspect can be addressed, which play a role in the geographic regions, not to mention data residency and sovereignty implications. From the other major cloud IaaS vendors, only IBM already had a datacenter there. It will be interesting if and how Google and Microsoft will respond. Both have significant load in India. And Oracle and SAP have large ecosystem and development teams in the country, so don’t be surprised they will stake a flag in the ground there, too.

On the concern side the question is where else should Amazon have invested earlier or is not investing now? Given the vendor departed from announcing a region when up and running (last practiced in Germany), we can probably safely assume no other regions will overtake the India region announcement / go live wise. But you never know. Notable is no Latin American, Mexican, South African and Chinese presence. Russia’s recent data privacy and residency requests make it a more popular location, too.

Finally curious the announcement was made on the same day as Amazon had the AWS Summit in Berlin. I don't think CTO Werner Vogels spent more than 10 seconds on the announcement. The German audience seemed to care less or at all. Why both overlapped, not clear to me, but 6/30 - last day of the quarter may be a hint for someone financially more astute then me. But overall a good move by Amazon, hitting all the right cords on why to put an instances into India from latency, over data residency and sovereignty as well as a growing and attractive market.
More on AWS

 

• Event Report - AWS Summit San Francisco - AWS pushes the platform with Analytics and Storage [From the Fences] read here
• Event Report - AWS re:invent - AWS becomes more about PaaS on inhouse IP - read here
• AWS gives infrastructure insights - and it is very passionate about it - read here
• News Analysis - AWS spricht Deutsch - the cloud wars reach Germany - read here
• Market Move - Infor runs CloudSuite on AWS - Inflection Point or hot air balloon? Read here
• Event Report - AWS Summit in SFO - AWS keeps doing what has been working in the last 8 years - read here
• AWS  moves the yardstick - Day 2 reinvent takeaways - read here.
• AWS powers on, into new markets - Day 1 reinvent takeaways - read here.
• The Cloud is growing up - three signs in the News - read here.
• Amazon AWS powers on - read here.

Other cloud related:

• Musings - Are we witnessing the rise of the enterprise cloud? Read here

Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here.

 

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

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Genpact Brings Data-Driven Decision-Making To Scale

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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How do you get to repeatable, analytical decision making? IT services and outsourcing firm Genpact helps companies bring automated, predictive systems into production so they can sense, act and respond in real-time.

“I've heard consultants suggest that business problems are an equation that can be solved, but it’s not as simple as doing the math,” said Paul Burton, senior VP of analytics and research, speaking at Genpact’s Analyst & Advisor Forum earlier this month. “I would go so far as to say, if all you’re doing is math, you’re probably not going to solve the problem, because point-in-time analyses don’t age very well.”

This is an important perspective to consider for any company striving to get to data-driven decision making. Amid all the talk about the new data sources, new big data platforms and new analytic tools and frameworks, we hear far too little about operationalizing these new types of analyses.

Burton uses the analogy of a simple straight ladder, akin to the tools and manual analyses companies might first try to get to the next level of insight. A next step might be to the stepladder stage, with, perhaps, a portfolio or predictive models and embedding of decision services into applications.

Genpact, a global IT services, outsourcing and strategy advisory and consulting firm, advocates an industrialized approach. Think of an escalator offering continuous operation and capable of bringing an end-to-end business system to the next level with stability, speed and scale. Genpact calls it Intelligent Operations. Key components include an automated layer that takes care of the managing and positioning of data and algorithmic analysis across multiple systems and disparate data sets. In a data-to-decisions context, the approach spans data capture, cleansing, analysis, model management, decision services, and round-trip feedback of operational performance data back into the next round of sensing and responding to the dynamic operational environment.

Genpact touts its Intelligent Operations approach, pictured above, as reimagining business processes with analytics and technology so they can be operationalized at scale.

Genpact applies this Intelligent Operations approach in nine industries: life sciences, retail and commercial banking, insurance, capital markets, consumer goods, healthcare, high-tech, and manufacturing. One of the fastest-growing areas of interest for the approach is in Internet of Things (IoT) applications, where there are built-in expectations for real-time operation at scale.

Duke Energy Renewables (Duke), one of Genpact’s IoT customers, is getting help moving beyond labor-intensive, manual methods to support predictive analysis. The company has wind and solar energy projects in 12 states, and Duke and Genpact are collaborating on optimizing power output and cutting long-term maintenance costs at 15 wind farms in the U.S. In all Duke Energy Renewables wind farms have 1,600 megawatts of capacity – enough to power half a million homes.

Most of Duke’s wind farms have dozens of turbines. The largest, in Sweetwater, TX, has 392 turbines. The equipment is supplied by seven different manufacturers, including GE, Siemens and Vestus. Most of these manufacturers offer monitoring software of their own, but because Duke uses a variety of turbines and because the equipment ranges in age, with many turbines coming off warranty, Duke is building its own, centralized monitoring systems for power optimization and predictive maintenance.

“We have good relationships with all of our suppliers, but we want our own view of the data so we can save money on parts replacement and maintenance,” said Duke Energy Renewables President, Greg Wolf, speaking at Genpact’s analyst event. “Our system gives us our own perspective on the data, operational conditions, and maintenance and parts planning.”

Rather than relying on a hodgepodge of OEM software, Duke is working with Genpact to build its own operational decisions into a centralized management system, working with the turbine manufacturers, wind farm operators, and weather experts. Duke is collecting more data than manufacturers call for on heat and vibration across its fleet of turbines because replacing gear boxes is expensive. By balancing power output against long-term wear and tear, Wolf says Duke is confident it can save as much as tens of thousands of dollars per year, per turbine by keeping units in service longer, avoiding unanticipated breakdowns, and reducing part and maintenance costs.

Taking a centralized approach, where the focus is on entire wind farms, rather than one turbine at a time, Duke wants to move to an automated, production-oriented approach, so it could no longer sustain what Wolf described as a “quasi-manual approach.” That’s where Genpact came in.

“We started the discussions with Genpact around data capture, data cleanup and how we're going to use the information,” said Wolf. “For us it was getting our engineers and operational folks out of the business of managing and scrubbing the data and into the role of analyzing and driving decisions.”

Genpact's take on potential value drivers in Internet of Things application scenarios.

MyPOV On The Need For Strategic Thinking

The IoT and SMAC (social, mobile, analytics, and cloud) trends and interest in innovation are driving many firms to become software companies. Duke Energy Renewables took the first step toward predictive maintenance, but it needed to scale up. Using a baseball analogy, Wolf says Duke is “in the fourth inning” of its wind farm project, and “Genpact is helping us to think through those next-level analytics we need to do drive better decisions,” he said.

When you talk to software vendors, whether database, big data platform, middleware, application, analytics, cloud, or, in Duke’s case, OEM equipment suppliers, you often get a piece-part view of what ultimately must be part of a larger, operational system spanning multiple systems and data sources. It’s in these cases where outfits like Genpact -- and competitors such as Accenture, TCS, Infosys, CapGemini and Wipro -- bring a broader view to the business problem.

In Genpact’s case about 60% of its work is in business process outsourcing, 20% in technology implementation services, 10% in business-process and systems design, and another 10% in data and analytics. This holistic capability and perspective comes into play in cases where business process need to be resigned and when systems need to be developed from scratch.

And when business process scale, scope, costs, and compensation models don’t make sense internally, Genpact can help companies run selected process as shared services, outsourced services or in a hybrid model. That, too, is beyond the scope of most tech vendors, but it’s an important option to consider when innovation and a reassessment of core competencies call for a change in approach.

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

Partnering, Integrating, To Make the Complex Simple

Terri Griffith

Professor/Author/Speaker
Simon Fraser University

Terri Griffith holds the Keith Beedie Chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business. She spent two decades in the Silicon Valley and, in 2012 was honored as a Woman of Influence by the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Terri helps her students and their organizations accelerate performance and prepare for the futures of work. Through her speaking, writing, teaching, and research, she brings evidence-based leadership and innovation to high-tech, education, and global agribusiness organizations. She inspires and coaches groups on negotiating change and uniquely mixing existing and new capabilities. Her most recent work uses a “bottom-up” approach to automation, including artificial intelligence. Her award-winning book, The Plugged-In Manager:…...

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In the recent top rated book, Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World , Donald Sull and Kathleen Eisenhardt offer that, “When many parties must work together, simple trumps complex” (p. 44). This is a beautiful fit for the future of work, a future made up of complex work, performed in complex ways. Freelancers, contractors, and global project work, all intermingle with traditional organizational forms. Rather than try and understand all the complexities yourself, partner with those who do -- and do it in a simple way. By simple in this instance I mean push decision-making to where the information is, close to the work itself.

Complex Work and Partnerships Require Simple Rules and Direct Connections to Feedback

This is such a strong idea that Sull and Eisenhardt use it as the conclusion of their book:

..simple rules work because they provide a threshold level of structure while leaving ample scope to exercise discretion....

Close to the facts on the ground, individuals can draw on their judgment and creativity to manage risks and seize unexpected opportunities. The latitude to exercise discretion not only makes simple rules effective, it makes them attractive. People [and organizations, my addition here, but also covered in the book] thrive when given the opportunity to apply their judgment and creativity to the situations they face from day to day. And if they benefit from simple rules, they are more likely to use them and use them well" (p. 228).

The “threshold level of structure” is what keeps the ground-level decision making from just being tactical. Key is that the structure is understood and committed to across all actors. Nilofer Merchant talks about the value of co-creating strategy so that the vision and the tactics are tied across all levels of the work from inception. Co-creation can support commitment and innovation. Sull and Eisenhardt provide detailed notes on the value of working throughout the organization as rules are created -- and are clear that strategy and execution cannot be separated.

The Future of Work Is Complex, But the Underlying Technologies Can Help

Internet enabled collaboration, product development supported by real-time data, The Internet of Things. These all mean we spend more time and effort checking and connecting with data and others throughout our days, and nights. The process is not simple, but it could be simpler. Some organizations have found ways to leverage the complexity of data in ways that simplify the work.

Pulse Mining Systems

Pulse Mining Systems provides integrated business management tools to mining companies. (I’m looking forward to writing a more historical piece remarking on how much mining has taught us about management.) They offer resources for operations, human resources, marketing, and more. The key is that they don’t do it alone -- and their tools aren’t meant just for executives or data scientists.

I spoke with Rob Parvin, then their visualization and analytics manager. I was looking for an example of the value of offering access to operational data to people doing the work, but I found much more. Yes, he described examples where mines with five kilometer conveyors are progressing from manual reporting to real time, sensor-based, feedback to the shift managers. Yes, maintenance and staffing decisions are made with better data. (More on those soon.) But what surprised me was how they were creating these opportunities.

Pulse Partners to Co-Innovate

Pulse partners to simplify both their strategic decision making and how they then take action on that strategy. They co-innovate -- work with their strategic clients -- to identify the specific information needed by the client for decision making (going for simple rather than complex), key metrics, and prototyping. The product is eventually rolled out as a general offering -- but with the knowledge that it’s a tool that’s valuable in the industry and works. The implicit rule is that products are co-developed rather than created away from the work itself. They’ve been able to create early versions in as little as three weeks.

Pulse is able to move this quickly because they’ve partnered with two analytics companies rather than trying to build out their own capabilities (implicit rule: Don’t reinvent the wheel). They work with Birst (see an earlier mention here) and Tableau to provide analytics and visualization building blocks that are rapidly prototyped and tested in the field. The complexity is managed by focusing on pre-built, reusable capabilities. The partners are bound by a common interest in answering operational questions.

In prior posts I’ve written about how we can lead by letting go (of old school management techniques), but that creates an image of chaos for some. Instead, let’s think about a structured handoff of responsibility. We are unlikely expert in all the areas where we need expertise. Pulse has found like-minded partners. SAP has done the same with their co-innovation labs. Each seems to have developed simple rules of organization to handoff pieces of the innovation process to partners with appropriate skills.

My Own Simple Rules

Rereading Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World, and considering the issues in the context of our quickly changing work environment, has inspired me to think about my own simple rules. I work with a variety of audiences interested in designing organizations for innovation and offer a process for creating designs unique to their settings (I’m in full agreement that the local creation of the rules is an important piece of the process). That said, I think there are a few rules many can work with and I share them here in hope that you will help me improve them.

• Base decisions on data, with decision makers as close to the work as possible.

• Build teams with diverse skills, but common interests - highlight the interest.

• Bundle similar work, and where possible, pass off to automation.

• Be transparent and pay attention to what others are sharing with you.

Sull and Eisenhardt use the second half of their book to discuss how to refine and improve your rules. The above are just a start for me, are they also an interesting start for you?

 

 

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

Two Must-Attend Sports Business Conferences in July

Russell Scibetti

Founding Editor, The Business of Sports
The Business of Sports

My name is Russell Scibetti and I have an extensive background in sports business, including CRM and database marketing, interactive and digital marketing, social media, corporate sponsorships and activation, and applied market research. From 2007 to 2014, I worked for Arizona State Athletics, Comcast-Spectacor (Philadelphia Flyers) and the New York Jets to manage and implement CRM, database marketing, market research and other technology-based sales and marketing initiatives. In 2014, I joined KORE Software as their VP of Product Strategy, where I am responsible for the strategic vision, planning and development of the KORE ProSports Ticketing, Sponsorship and Suites/Premium software products. I earned my MBA in Sports Business from the W.P. Carey…...

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I know I should have posted this weeks ago, but better late than never. Two of my favorite events of the year are coming up next month, both in San Francisco. Sign up now before they close registration!

ALSD (Association of Luxury Suite Directors) – July 6-9

This is the 25th anniversary of the premium event for the premium industry, and this year it also includes:

• Sports Sales Boot Camp (July 6)
• Sports Venue Design & Build Forum (July 7-8)
• Corporate Ticket Impact Conference (July 9)

For more information and to register, visit www.alsd.com.

SEAT (Sports & Entertainment Alliance in Technology) – July 19-22

The 9th Annual SEAT Conference features in-depth, actionable case studies and discussion panels across six different technology-centric tracks:

• CIO Venue Technology
• Collegiate Industry Leaders
• CRM/Database Marketing, Loyalty & Analytics
• CXO Strategy
• Digital Marketing, Social Media, Analytics & Mobile
• Game Day Presentation/Broadcast & Fan Engagement

For more information and to register, visit www.seatconsortium.com.

That’s it for today. I will be speaking at both of these events, so I hope to see many of you there!

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Is It Time for a Chief Brand Storyteller?

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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This great presentation on content marketing and storytelling by Jonathan Crossfield got me thinking. What is it about brands, storytelling and technology that we continue to struggle with – and why is this struggle so pervasive?

Now, I see a lot of content marketing every day. There are newsletters, infographics and blog posts. Sometimes there are videos. Podcasts. Quizzes. Surveys. The variety is rich … but the quality? Well, often the quality leaves much to be desired.

Who can we blame?

Content marketing – like all marketing – has many masters. There are the internal subject matter experts to please. The brand and reputation folks to appease. And let’s not even bring up compliance/corporate affairs. Or Legal. Imagine having to include them!? Then there are the representatives from sales, product, engineering and finance – after all, someone has to pay for this.

Eventually, someone will create the brief and the creative process will kick in. It could be internally created or pushed out to an agency. There will be drafts, revisions and feedback. There will be interpretation.

And then one day there will be an approval … and your content marketing baby will be pushed out into the world. Will it work? Will it deliver a bounty?

Too often our marketing efforts end up a pale imitation of the original idea. After review upon review, interpretation upon interpretation, much of the spark and energy is lost.

It makes me think that we need a new custodian. A Chief Brand Storyteller (CBS). Someone who ensures that the story we want, need and should tell, remains intact. The CBS would:

• Prioritise our audiences over our processes
• Reclaim our business narratives from the tyrannies of product form and function
• Remind us that our purpose is to serve customers, guide them, delight and surprise them.

And the CBS would also have an important technology role. So many of our brand and business narratives are generated, delivered and amplified through technology – and this impacts the story and the storytelling. The CBS needs to help brands re-imagine storytelling for our times. And this may, perhaps, be the most important aspect.

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Technology and Business Intelligence – Not Always Good Partners

Partner, Sensei Marketing
Partner, Sensei Marketing

Sales & marketing veteran with almost 30 years’ experience and now 1800 digital projects to his credit for clients including Morgan Stanley, AOL, Hyatt Gaming Management, Snyder's of Hanover, Hitachi, the Home Depot, Kraft Foods, Drees Homes, American Idol, and hundreds more, including leading agencies around the North America.     ...

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There’s no question that the Internet, social media, and digital technologies have changed the business landscape and the manner in which it operates. From the way business communicates with – and advertises to – consumers to how it conducts market research, and from the manner in which it hires new employees to how those employees are managed, today’s business blueprint is significantly different that it was just 15 years ago.

But is change always a good thing?  The Internet has provided smaller businesses the opportunity to compete with larger brands and has certainly provided a more direct and meaningful exchange with a business’s audience. But are we becoming too focused on the technology of the day? Are we forgetting the basics of marketing?

Creativity Often Hindered by Technology

Gannon Jones, the head of brand marketing at MillerCoors, offered this warning: “Technology can act as a barrier to creativity and will never replace great ideas.  As reported by Marketing Magazine, Jones, in speaking to a group of business executives, stated that, “Technology is actually starting to get in the way of creativity. It’s causing us as marketers to fixate on the technology and the data.”

Here at Sensei, we’ve seen customers follow either Big Data or social media viral trends only to be questioned by their CFOs when the results have to be justified. Be it amassing vast amounts of consumer data or attempting to repurpose the Ice Bucket Challenge model, too many marketing teams are fixated on technology and social media trends and forgetting what makes marketing truly work.

We know that online reviews on sites like Yelp and Google can have a positive effect on sales but businesses are resorting to buying positive reviews instead of earning them. Marketers are keen to surf the Internet for clues on optimizing their search engine results and forget that greater organic traffic can be earned by simply delivering creative, informative, and useful content to consumers. Marketers are quick to push us to build Facebook pages for their businesses without first understanding if their consumers want to engage with them on the social media network or if their purchase decisions may be influenced by their presence on that site.

Recently, we encountered a business whose head of social media was a statistician, not a marketer. Not that we have anything against statisticians; they’re an important part of the marketing team. However, ideas driven by numbers and stats often fail to inspire long-term attention from consumers and less often drive any form of real innovation.

Mr. Jones suggested that the basis of effective marketing is content, not technology, but I think that’s an oversimplification. Content can be driven by technology and consumer data as much as it can from innovative ideas crafted by artistic directors. Marketing success is not found in content but in knowing what type of content sways the purchase decision of consumers.

Consumer Data vs. Consumer Engagement

“What tends to happen and what we have seen in recent years, is that there’s a fundamental disconnect in the way business leaders think about data, and how technology leaders think about it,” suggests business analyst Fatemah Khatibloo in an interview with CMO.  “We see lots of lost opportunities. There has been a focus on big data projects and platforms and solutions by technology teams, or vendors are wooing marketing leaders, but they’re not so good at solving business problems. Business and technology are not working together towards a common purpose, which is using that data for customer engagement. We see lots of lost opportunities. There has been a focus on big data projects and platforms and solutions by technology teams, or vendors are wooing marketing leaders, but they’re not so good at solving business problems. Business and technology are not working together towards a common purpose, which is using that data for customer engagement.”

In our push to use technology to gain a larger market share and lower costs, we’ve begun to rely too heavily on technology and marketing automation.  Sharing a story from his past experience while employed by Kraft Foods, Mr. Jones referenced the “reams of [consumer] data” that Kraft had collected, which it failed to convert into true business opportunities.

What Kraft needed to know was simple: Did its consumers have children and was the process of cooking an enjoyable experience or not? Knowing the answer to these two questions was central to understanding what motivated purchase decisions but the data scientists collected so much information that answering these simple questions was nearly impossible.

Sensei Debates

Is the growing reliance on technology creating a generation of ineffective or less creative marketers?

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

 

The post Technology and Business Intelligence – Not Always Good Partners appeared first on Sensei Marketing.

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Lifesciences IoT opportunity – will privacy issues slow it down?

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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…...

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This week I met with an executive from Biogen. We spent time discussing their business, the usual areas where covered: how they were dealing with the patent cliff, their diversification of offerings, how they were working internationally to name a few. But the one area I found intriguing was how IoT impacts the pharmaceutical space. IoT presents two interesting opportunities for pharmaceuticals.

The first opportunity for pharmaceuticals with IoT is in the supply chain. ?From manufacturing, to storage and distribution, IoT holds great promise. No surprise as we see a large majority of manufacturers leaning on IoT to provide data that leads to greater efficiencies within their supply chains. For heavily regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals, IoT promises greater visibility and enhanced track and trace, key operating issues facing companies with sensitive inventory. ?

Unlike a clothing manufacturer where a defect lot can lead to lost sales or a public relations nightmare (think Lululemon’s recall with transparent yoga pants), the fallout from pharmaceutical defects is potentially much more serious. Patients may suffer serious medical consequences, and manufacturers or distributors may face heavy fines and even arrest. Pharmaceutical companies, if they aren’t already, should evaluate IoT solutions that enable secure handling of their products. For example, sensors that monitor how a product is handled through the transportation nodes. These sensors can relay back to the manufacturer if the product was transported at the proper temperature and if the container properly handled. Pharmaceutical companies may also leverage sensors to detect and reduce product tampering. Of course sensors can also be used in the manufacturing process to measure and optimize the factory process.

The second opportunity for pharmaceuticals with IoT is baking IoT capabilities directly into pharma products. This is an area where there is enormous potential for insights, but also presents an ethics and privacy red flag. Companies like Merck are already talking about and exploring the development of “digestables.” That is right, IoT enabled drugs or devices that consumers would eat. The hope is that the data that we can extract from these products revolves around how the drugs interact with our bodies, how are they truly interacting and simply if they are being taken properly (read as doctors tell us to!). From a medical devices perspective we already see companies like Boston Scientific who make pace makers that are IoT enabled. Anyone who is a fan of the HBO show, Homeland, knows the potential risk that poses!

Much of this is only being tested in the labs or thought about in development meetings, but it does bring up the question about privacy. An enormity that might hold back IoT is how is the data going to be handled and protected? There are already rumblings around simple data that our iPhones or Fitbits collect about how many steps we took today, our heart rates or how many calories we burned. What happens when there are devices that are throwing off data about the health of our intestines, how often we go to the bathroom or if we are showing early signs of diabetes? Richie Etwaru has a wonderful model for IoT where as the IoT enabled product gets physically closer to a person’s heart, the greater the possible issues, especially around privacy. Digestables might be just a few inches away from the heart…from the inside.

Pharmaceutical companies should absolutely explore IoT. When it comes to managing their supply chains, they are a prime candidate to take advantage of the visibility and monitoring IoT offers. The more contentious issue is when pharmaceuticals start to productize IoT, how will they handle personal information collected from these IoT medical devices? We may see regulations akin to HIPAA emerge to protect personal information collected via biomedical IoT devices. Pharmaceutical companies should start preparing for these issues today.

 

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55% of Enterprises Predict Cloud Computing Will Enable New Business Models In Three Years

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• 69% of enterprises expect to make moderate-to-heavy cloud investments over the next three years as they migrate core business functions to the cloud.
• 44% of enterprises are relying on cloud computing to launch new business models today, predicting this will increase to 55% in three years.
• 32% are using cloud computing to streamline their supply chains today. Senior executives predict this figure will increase to 56% in three years, a 24% increase.
• 59% say they use cloud-based applications and platforms to better manage and analyze data today, reflecting the increasing importance of analytics and big data enterprise-wide.

These and other insights are from a recent Oxford Economics and SAP study of cloud computing adoption, The Cloud Grows Up. You can find the study here (no opt-in). In late 2014, Oxford Economics and SAP collaborated on a survey of 200 senior business and IT executives globally regarding the adoption and use of cloud technology. Oxford Economics’ analysts compared the latest survey with one completed in 2012 looking for leading indicators of cloud adoption in enterprises. They found many C- and VP-level executives are taking a more pragmatic, realistic view of what cloud technologies can contribute. Enterprises are moving beyond the hype of cloud computing, putting in the hard work of launching new business models while driving top-line revenue growth.

Oxford Economics has made two interactive infographics available from the study here. The first details cloud adoption, and the second, on how enterprises see cloud computing changing their business models over the next three years.  As cloud platforms and applications become a scalable, secure and for the most part reliable, once-elusive enterprise goals and new business models become attainable.

Key take-aways from the study include the following:

• Top–line growth (58%), collaboration among employees (58%), and supply chain (56%) are the three areas enterprises expect cloud computing to impact most in three years. The greatest gains will be in the areas of supply chain (a 24% jump), collaboration among employees (20%) and increased agility and responsiveness to customers (17%). The following graphic compares where enterprises are seeing cloud computing’s impact today and a prediction of each areas’ impact in three years.

• Developing new products & services (61%), new lines of business (51%) and entering new markets (40%) are three key areas cloud computing is transforming enterprises.  With a 35% increase, developing new products and services is the most dominant strategy enterprises are relying on to grow their businesses. See the comparison below for further details.       

• 58% of enterprises predict their use of cloud computing will increase top-line revenue growth in three years. 67% see the cloud changing skill sets and transforming the role of HR. The following graphic illustrates the first of two interactive infographics Oxford Economics and SAP are providing with the report. You can access the infographic here.

• 74% of enterprises say innovation and R&D is somewhat or mostly cloud-based. 61% say they will have developed new products and services in three years as a result of adopting cloud technologies.  The following graphic illustrates the second of two interactive infographics Oxford Economics and SAP are providing with the report. You can access the infographic here.

• Enterprise cloud security strategies are maturing rapidly. From 2012 to 2014, strategies for ensuring the security of API and interfaces increased 24%, from 20% to 44%. Additional concerns that increased include virus attacks (up 19%), and identity theft (up 16%).  The following figure compares the top concerns enterprises have in the area of cloud security.

• 31% of respondents say the cloud computing has had a transformative impact on their business.  48%, nearly half, state that cloud computing has had a moderate impact on business performance. The majority believe cloud computing will have a significant impact on top-line revenue growth in three years.

• 67% of enterprises say that marketing, purchasing, and supply chain are somewhat and mostly cloud-based as of today. Cloud-based adoption has reached an inflection point in enterprises, with functional areas having the largest percentage of workloads running on cloud-based apps. Enterprise senior executives see the potential to improve innovation, R&D, and time-to-market via greater collaboration using cloud technologies.

 

Filed under: Cloud Computing, Enterprise Cloud Computing, Louis Columbus' blog, SaaS, SaaS Economics, SaaS Forecasts Tagged: Cloud Computing, cloud computing landscape, Louis Columbus' blog, SaaS, Software-as-a-Service

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6 Pillars of Ecommerce Customer Experience - Video

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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Did you know that most brands are not achieving their ecommerce goals? In fact, only 37% of ecommerce professionals surveyed by Constellation Research evaluated their brands as 'effective' at reaching their ecommerce goals. 

Brands that do not effectively engage customers face dissolution as customers migrate to more engaging alternatives. 

Ensure your brand effectively engages customers and builds loyalty by following these six best practices.  

Continuity of Customer Experiences Drives The Future of Commerce

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Next-Generation Customer Experience B2C CX Chief Customer Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Supply Chain Officer Chief People Officer Chief Human Resources Officer