Anaplan Scales Up, Adds More Apps

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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AnaplanHub15 Event Report: Is your business headed for disruption, or are you going to be a disruptor? That’s the question Frederic Laluyaux, CEO of Anaplan, put to the more than 1,000 attendees of the company’s AnaplanHub15 event this week in San Francisco.

Laluyaux, leader of this fast-growing, cloud-based planning, analysis and optimization vendor, said the difference between the disruptors and the disrupted gets down to agility and corporate culture. “Are you harvesting the collective intelligence in your organization, or are you making decisions far from the point of impact?” he asked. It’s great if you know that disruption is coming, he said, but without agile, connected planning, “you’ won’t be able to do anything about it.”

Constellation Research CEO R “Ray” Wang joined Laluyaux onstage to talk about disruption, the topic of his new book, Disrupting Digital Business. That conversation led into panel discussions with Anaplan customers including Aviva, Diageo, Hewlett-Packard, McAfee, Tribune Media, and VMware. One surprise was just how many of these big companies turned to Anaplan to replace spreadsheet-based planning processes.

Executives from HP and VMware, two of Anaplan’s largest customers, explained global rollouts that replaced spreadsheet-intensive processes that were “breaking Excel.” HP now has 3,500 “Anaplanners” doing sales planning involving more than 150,000 partners. VMware started “Anaplanning” in sales forecasting and its next move is into territory and quota planning.

Anaplan is going after large ($1 billion-plus) companies and young companies experiencing hyper growth. Companies that fit either description are likely facing hyper change and need lots of help with planning. The company’s strength is landing and expanding into multiple planning roles, often expanding from financials or sales into HR and operational areas.

Spreadsheets notwithstanding, there are plenty of aging on-premises systems that are ripe for replacement. Partners and consultants I spoke to at the event talked about displacing Cognos TM1 and Oracle Hyperion deployments. Laluyaux mentioned “saving customers from monolithic modeling, planning and consolidation systems from that big German company” more than once. There are cloud competitors too — Adaptive Insights, Host Analytics, and Tidemark, in that order of impact – but they were scarcely mentioned here. SAP recently introduced a Cloud for Planning app built on SAP’s Hana Cloud, but it’s very new.

Upgrades: From Integration To Interfaces

New and soon-to-be released functionality introduced at Hub15 included integration, scalability and usability improvements. The list of upgrades included new or deeper technical ties with Boomi, Informatica, and MuleSoft, among integration partners, and Salesforce and Workday, among apps partners. Anaplan has an Excel add-in, but it announced deeper, two-way integration with Excel workbooks. In beta is a two-way integration with PowerPoint through which you can embed tables, charts, text, item names and values into PowerPoint Decks and later refresh the underlying data. Microsoft Word integration is coming later this year.

Anaplan is scaling up behind the scenes of its cloud platform so customers can build really big models while supporting hundreds of concurrent collaborators on those models. Right now the company supports models with more than 10 billion data points, but the goal is to support 100-billion-cell models. As these containers gets bigger, the company is splitting task requests into smaller, granular blocks of processing power and memory for better performance.

To improve usability, Anaplan introduced a slick new user interface with a sliding left-hand navigation pane. The navigation links populated in this pane are dynamic, so they change as you move in and out of models. You can also slide the pane out of the way to gain screen real estate. The look and feel is clean and modern, and Anaplan says it has cut down on clicks and restyled to put the data at the forefront, not the technology.

It’s About the Apps

The big push for Anaplan is offering as many prebuilt planning apps as possible, and it’s doing this through a restyled Anaplan App Hub with more than 66 apps available at this writing. Many are from partners and integrators, but the company itself now has a staff of 16 developers focused exclusively on developing new apps. Anaplan showed analysts app roadmaps for the next 12 months, and execs stressed that these apps are rich with functionality and nearly ready to run with customer-specific tweaking — not just lightweight templates for apps.

For now all these apps are free, and Laluyaux stressed that they can be quickly tested, tweaked and deployed. VMware, for example, was able to do a sales forecasting proof-of-concept within two days and it was fully deployed in production within three months.

As customers roll out more and more apps, the need for model management is intensifying. The vendor is working on richer app, data and user management through the Anaplan Enterprise Architecture. App lifecycle management, for example, will bring test-and-development features that will make it easier to push data and changes from one model to another.

A promised data-management console is being developed to control how data flows from one model to another. The company demonstrated the ability to visualize data connections among models, and the ability to collaborate on models down to individual cells. Authentication and access controls already exist at the model level, but they’ll be introduced at the higher model-management level.

MyPOV: Evolution and Growing Pains

Anaplan is clearly on a roll, annually tripling in size on dimensions including revenue, bookings and number of employees over the last two years, according to Laluyaux. The customer list is impressive, and customer executives here were openly effusive about the agility and flexibility of planning capabilities.

Fast growth has brought growing pains, but Anaplan is responding with its internal scalability improvements and enterprise architecture plans for model- and app-lifecycle management capabilities.

Also impressive was Anaplan’s commitment to delivering visibility into model logic, dependencies, and data- and process-flow visibility. This visibility is available both within models and across models, and the system is built for change, with alterations documented and made visible immediately.

Anaplan had a lot to say about being an apps company, but a systems integrator here put it best when he said this is the vendor to choose when you ultimately have multiple planning applications in mind. The company has a use-case subscription option, so you can start with just one app. But the growing strength of Anaplan is the platform, which lets you take advantage of an agile, consistent planning approach across finance, sales, HR, operations and a growing number of industry- and task-specific use cases.

 

Data to Decisions Innovation & Product-led Growth Event Report Executive Events ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Generative AI AI Analytics Automation business Marketing SaaS PaaS IaaS Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP finance Healthcare Customer Service Content Management Collaboration Chief Information Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Data Officer

X1’s Microsoft Enterprise Search Strategy: Better Than Microsoft’s?

X1

Barry Murphy is the Senior Vice President of Product Marketing and Strategy at X1.  In this role, Barry leads X1's product marketing function, aligning X1's offerings to market needs for search and information access, eDiscovery, cloud and virtual search, and social discovery. Barry joins X1 from eDJ Group, where he was an analyst and thought leader in information governance, eDiscovery, records management, and content archiving. Previously, Barry was Director of Product Marketing at Mimosa Systems, a leading content archiving and eDiscovery software provider. He joined Mimosa after a highly successful stint as Principal Analyst for eDiscovery, records management, and content archiving at Forrester Research. Barry received a B.S. from the State University of New York at…...

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By John Patzakis

It seems obvious to say, but Microsoft is furthering its dominance in the enterprise. While Microsoft has always dominated with is ubiquitous OS, it is dramatically consolidating its presence in terms of data sources. Outlook is only increasing in market share with corporate Gmail largely a flop and Lotus Notes in full retreat. SharePoint continues to spread across enterprises large and small, dominating the ECM landscape. OneDrive for business, with its tight integration with the Windows 10 OS, essentially zero cost, and built-in active directory security, looks to eventually capture the enterprise file synch and sharing space. And Office 365 combines Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive into an integrated cloud offering (but not search – more on that in a bit). Finally, Skype for Business and OneNote round out the data sources that we believe will soon constitute up to 90 percent of enterprise data relevant for business productivity. So I would argue that we are entering a new era of Microsoft dominance.

And actually, this good news for X1 users, and we believe a key reason for the resurgent high growth we are seeing here at X1. Why? Each of those mentioned Microsoft data sources are either currently supported by X1 or will be supported within 12 months’ time, and X1 provides a much better user search experience than even Microsoft does. As an example, any X1 user will tell you X1 provides a much better search of Outlook and Exchange email than Outlook itself, and the simple viewing of this SharePoint video will convince anyone that our SharePoint search experience is far superior than that of native SharePoint. The same is true of local and network documents and very soon OneDrive (September 2015), and after that Skype for Business.

But even more important than having a better search experience for individual Microsoft data sources, what X1 uniquely provides is a popular and intuitive unified interface or a “single pane of glass” from which to search all of these various data sources. To be able to search your emails, your files, your SharePoint, your OneDrive, and all the other Microsoft data sources from that single interface is extremely compelling. In fact, Microsoft itself does not really have a single pane of glass capability. You cannot effectively search your SharePoint or OneDrive from Outlook, just as you cannot search your emails, Skypes or your local documents from SharePoint.

This new era of Microsoft data source dominance presents important considerations for organizations when selecting enterprise search solutions. Many enterprise search solutions are simply not architected to effectively support this new paradigm and thus are fighting against the Microsoft current, instead of providing a unified search platform, such as X1, that augments and strengthens a companies Microsoft strategy. To summarize, here are five key reasons X1 excels in this new Microsoft era:

1. X1 Starts with End User’s email and files. Most enterprise search solutions address enterprise data sources on Intranets, databases, and file shares, but ignore the end users email and local documents. This is missing about 80 percent of the end users key business data, while focusing on the data in the margins. To be successful in this new Microsoft era, a true productivity search solution should begin with the end users’ local emails, attachments and documents and extend to SharePoint, File shares and other key enterprise sources, all in a single pane of glass.
2. No or Minimal Data Migration. Other enterprise search tools uniformly provide web portals for employees to search for their content. This is fine for some Intranet sites and other web-based data, but is not where you want search your day-to-day emails and working documents. And when it comes to SharePoint, any suggestion that such data should be migrated out of SharePoint just so another enterprise search vendor can search it on a similar website is a non-starter. For a successful Microsoft strategy, the indexes must be on a local physical or virtual desktop or laptops, indexed in place, or federate to the built-in native Fast indexes. Data migration out of Microsoft data sources no longer make any sense and should be a thing of the past.
3. X1 Supports Virtualization and Cloud. The next generation enterprise is virtual, whether cloud or on premise. With Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Microsoft data sources being able to be deployed in these and on-premise virtual environments, enterprise search, including desktop search (VDI and DaaS) platforms need to do so as well. This is a significant challenge for most enterprise search tools that are either hardware appliances or require intricate and labor intensive installation onto physical hardware.
4. X1 provides a better search experience than Microsoft does. Good enough is not good enough when it comes to search. It does not make sense to invest in an enterprise search solution for business productivity search, unless there is a significant improvement in the end-users search experience for emails, files and SharePoint data. The main reason enterprise search initiatives fail is because the stakeholders do not appreciate that business productivity search is all about end-user experience. Without the end-users embracing your search platform in practice, as X1 users do, the project will fail, no matter how cool the analytics and advanced algorithms sound in theory.
5. Unified Single Pane of Glass. Providing one single pane of glass to a business worker’s most critical information assets is key. Requiring end-users to search Outlook for email in one interface, then log into another to search SharePoint, and then another to search for document and OneDrive is a non-starter. A single interface to search for information, no matter where it lives fits the workflow that business workers require.

These are all very important factors for buyers of enterprise search solutions to consider in the new Microsoft era, and we of course believe X1 is uniquely up to the task.

New C-Suite Tech Optimization Microsoft Chief Information Officer

News Analysis - Google does it again (lower prices for Google Cloud Platform), enterprises take notice

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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This morning’s Google release the news about more price reductions for Google Cloud Platform, with the catchy tag line ‘pay less, compute Moore’. Yes Moore (and not more) as Google has promised to pass on the savings from Moore’s Law to customers. That’s what Google did and said at their Google Cloud platform launch end of March 2014 (my News Analysis here). Google also mentioned the intention to keep repeating the exercise in the future. But every intention is only as good as its real word follow up, and 13.5+ months later Google has followed up on the intention with today’s action.

So let’s dissect the blog, as Google does not do press release – you can find the blog here.

We know you have a choice of public cloud providers – and choosing the best fit for your application or workload can be a daunting task. Customers like Avaya, Snapchat, Ocado and Wix have selected Google Cloud Platform because of our innovation and proven performance, combined with flexible pricing models. We’ve recently made headlines for our latest product introductions like Google Cloud Storage Nearline and Google Cloud Bigtable, and today, we’re also raising the bar with our pricing options. 

MyPOV – Always good to lead with customers – so good move by Google to mention some notable brand names using Google Cloud Platform (GCP going forward) already. And good to mention that with the launch of Google Cloud Storage Nearline and Google Cloud Bigtable (a press piece with a quote from me here) were also coupled with price reductions.

Compared to other public cloud providers, Google Cloud Platform is now 40% less expensive for many workloads. Starting today, we are reducing prices of all Google Compute Engine Instance types as well as introducing a new class of preemptible virtual machines that delivers short-term capacity for a very low, fixed cost. When combined with our automatic discounts, per-minute billing, no penalties for changing machine types, and no need to enter into long-term fixed-price commitments, it’s easy to see why we’re leading the industry in price/performance.

MyPOV – Last year’s announcements already rippled significant shockwaves across private cloud deployments. The best practice was to use the Amazon AWS cost curve, bend it a little more and – plan the private cloud roll out if an enterprise was able to stay under that curve. With Google’s price cut last year that exercise needed to be restarted and it put a number of private cloud roll outs on hold. Later in 2014 the Google move was dismissed as a onetime move to get into the market. But all the sceptics of a Google repeat now need to review their position. If the same outcome happens as of last year, a number of very large (and prominent) private cloud roll outs are on hold – for good.

On the public cloud side Google equally gains credibility, but the effect will be lesser, as enterprises developing software for the cloud move slowly. But we know already that a number of next gen app projects in enterprises have taken note and are re-crunching the numbers.


Price Reductions

Last year, we committed that Google Cloud Platform prices will follow Moore’s Law, and effective today we’re reducing prices of virtual machines by up to 30%.

Configuration	US Price Reduction
Standard High Memory High CPU Small Micro	20% 15% 5% 15% 30%

 

MyPOV – Good to see that Google created consistency with last year’s announcements, citing Moore’s Law again, and basically saying that Google will give these savings away, or back to customers.

The price reductions in Europe and Asia are similar. Complete details on our compute pricing is available at our Compute Engine pricing page.

MyPOV – Somebody very hardware savvy should try to deduct different buying and relative age cycles in Google’s data centers. But then the cost to operate data centers differs significantly across the world.

 

 

 

We have continued to lower our pricing since Google Compute Engine was launched in November of 2013; together, these price cuts have reduced VM prices by more than half.

 

MyPOV – Kudos to Google to be transparent on prices, but also on typical seen prices. One can debate if the curve is ‘real’ but we know that GCP customers have seen further price savings post April 2014. So not only a drastic one time drop, but continued savings for customers over time. This announcement of course means another price drop.

Introducing Google Compute Engine Preemptible VMs

For some applications we can do even better: if your workload is flexible, our new Preemptible VMs will run your short-duration batch jobs 70% cheaper than regular VMs. Preemptible VMs are identical to regular VMs, except availability is subject to system supply and demand. Since we run Preemptible VMs on resources that would otherwise be idle, we can offer them at substantially reduced costs. Customers such as Descartes Labs have already found them to be a great option for workloads like Hadoop MapReduce, visual effects rendering, financial analytics, and other computationally expensive workloads.
 

Importantly, unlike other clouds’ Spot Instances, the price of Preemptible VMs is fixed - making their costs predictable.

 

MyPOV – Basically Google offering ‘spot priced’ instances for VMs. A good move for non-critical but massive compute loads. A nice showcase with Descartes Labs. Of course Google will deny that it monetizes spare capacity from other (internal) use cases, but at the end of the day there is nothing wrong with monetizing spare capacity. As long as the customer of the spare capacity know what they get, and that’s the case here.

Regular n1-standard-1	Preemptible n1-standard-1	Savings
$0.050 /hour	$0.015 /hour	70%

 

For further information about Preemptible VM pricing, please visit our website.

Google Cloud Platform costs 40% less for many workloads vs. other public cloud providers

Our continued price/performance leadership goes well beyond list prices. Our combination of sustained use discounting, no prepaid lock-in and per-minute billing offers users a structural price advantage which becomes apparent when we consider real-world applications. Consider a typical web application or mobile backend. Its development environment supports software builds and tests, presenting a bursty, daytime load on cloud computing resources. The production environment handles actual user traffic, with a diurnal cycle of demand, aggregate growth over time, and a larger overall footprint than the development environment. The developer environment would benefit from per-minute billing because it can be turned on and off more quickly and you only pay for what you use. The production environment would benefit from sustained use discounting, up to 30% additional discount with no upfront fee or commitment, because it always needs to be on. 

MyPOV – Google has shown a lot of innovation on the pricing side, the market has not followed and reacted to that (yet). Changing pricing and with that billing is complex, but Google is doing the right thing for Google by keeping pressure on the subject. On the flipside it shows that Google has not yet gotten so much uptake that enterprises demanded – for like for like comparison – the same pricing mechanisms from competitors. We are in the early phase of the internet – and already load is ‘sticky’. But that should not stop Google from pushing the topic and innovating in the area. Usually in the long run, persistence pays off.

Our customer-friendly billing, discounting, and lack of prepaid lock-in, combined with lower list prices, leads to a 40% lower price on Google Cloud Platform for many real-world workloads. Our TCO Tool lets you explore how different combinations of development and production instances, as well as environmental assumptions, change the total cost of a real-world application hosted in the cloud.

MyPOV – Kudos for Google to create a TCO tool, one of the few vendor provided ones in the cloud. A key sales tool for Google to get to the enterprises it is aiming for. We have seen more uptake of the TCO tool in the last two quarters, it has moved from a ‘gimmick’ to a veritable calculation tool. It would be great other IaaS vendors following suite.

Many factors influence the total cost of a real-world application, including the likelihood of design changes, the rate of decrease of compute prices, and whether you’ve been locked into price contracts which are now above market rates, or on instances that don’t fit your current needs anymore. With Google Cloud Platform’s customer-friendly pricing model, you're not required to make a long-term commitment to a price, machine class, or region ahead of time.

MyPOV – Important disclaimer, each app in the cloud is different. Enterprises may not see the same savings.

This graphic illustrates how our lower list prices and customer-friendly pricing practices can combine to produce a 40% total savings.

 

Your exact savings depend on your specific application, and may be even greater than what is shown here. To see the impact of our customer-friendly pricing on your specific workload, explore our TCO Tool.-

MyPOV – The gloves are off – there will be pros and cons to Google’s calculation – it will be interesting how the foes respond.
 

Overall MyPOV

The consistency and the cost leadership are areas that enterprises look for. Google is right to stress the pricing models, as not only the total amount matters, but also the way how it was calculated. More dynamic pricing models will be user friendly. They also permit some interpretation of the elasticity of resource for each vendor. That’s where GCP is looking pretty good right now.

What Google now needs to achieve is getting the load of the enterprise and work hard to get more next generation applications being built for its cloud. Migration aids may be a good strategy, though we are in the early phase of the cloud. It will be interesting to keep observing and commenting in Google’s march into corporate IT. We will be watching.
 

More about Google:

• News Analyse - Google I/O Takeaways Value Propositions for the enterprise - read here 
• Google gets serious about the cloud and it is different - read here
• A tale of two clouds - Google and HP - read here
• Why Google acquired Talaria - efficiency matters - read here

 

Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here.

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

Tech Optimization Google amazon Microsoft 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

Five Reasons to Apply for a SuperNova Award

The SuperNova Awards honor leaders that demonstrate excellence in the application and adoption of new and emerging technologies. 

Deadline for applications is August 7, 2015. 

5 reasons to apply for a SuperNova Award:

1. Exposure to the SuperNova Award judges, comprised of the top influencers in enterprise technology
2. Case study highlighting the achievements of the winners written by Constellation analysts
3. Complimentary admission to the SuperNova Award Gala Dinner and Constellation's Connected Enterprise for all finalists*
   *(November 4-6, 2015) lodging and travel not included
4. One year unlimited access to Constellation's research library
5. Winners featured on Constellation's blog and weekly newsletter

Timeline

• August 7, 2015 last day for submissions
• September 2, 2015 finalists announced and invited to Connected Enterprise.
• September 14, 2015 voting opens to the public
• October 2, 2015 polls close
• November 4, 2015 Winners announced, SuperNova Awards Gala Dinner at Connected Enterprise 

In its fifth year, the Constellation SuperNova Awards will recognize eight individuals who demonstrate true leadership in digital business through their application and adoption of new and emerging technologies. We’re searching for leaders and teams who have innovatively applied disruptive technolgies to their business models as a means of adapting to the rapidly-changing digital business environment. Special emphasis will be given to projects that seek to redefine how the enterprise uses technology on a large scale.

We’re searching for the boldest, most transformative technology projects out there. Submit your clients for a SuperNova Award by filling out the application here: 

Learn more about the SuperNova Awards. 

What to expect when applying for a SuperNova Award. Tips and sample application.  

 

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Sell The Smallest Unit You Can Lesson 3 From Disrupting Digital Business

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

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

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Get All 10 Lessons Learned From Disrupting Digital Business

As with the beginning of every revolution, those in the midst of it can feel it, sense it, and realize that something big is happening. Yet it’s hard to quantify the shift. The data isn’t clear. It’s hard to measure. Pace of change is accelerating. Old rules seem not to apply.

Sometimes when you are in the thick of it, it’s hard to describe what’s happening.  In the case of digital business, these models have progressed over the past 20 years.  However, non-traditional competitors have each exploited a few patterns with massive success. However, as the models evolved, winners realize there are more than a handful of patterns.

Lesson 1 – Transform Business Models And Engagement

Lesson 2 – Keep The Brand Promise

Lesson 3 – Sell The Smallest Unit You Can

In fact, the impact is significant and now quantifiable with 52% of the Fortune 500 gone since 2000 and the average age of the S&P 500 company in 1960 is down from 60 years to a little more than 12 projected in 2020.  That is a 500% compression that has changed the market landscape forever in almost every industry.

Over the course of the next 10 weeks, I’ll be sharing one lesson per week.  For traditional businesses to succeed, they will have to apply all 10 lessons from Disrupting Digital Business in order to not only survive, but also relearn how to thrive.

Unit Cost Pricing Models Transform What You Sell

The digital age requires brands and organizations to figure out what the smallest increment of a product or service can be sold.  The traditional adage of not selling the razor but selling the blade holds true as we disrupt digital business models.  We just have to take that model to the smallest increment.

For example, instead of selling large volumes such as a case of coke, we shift to selling you smaller and smaller units.  So let’s go from selling you a 2-liter of coke, to a can of coke, to ultimately a sip of coke.  It may sound absurd but, how much would you pay for a sip of coke?  For the services industry, let’s take professional services.  As an analyst, what’s the smallest unit I could sell you of a service.  Can I go from selling you a day of consulting, to an hour of advisory, to a minute of inquiry?

Once you can imagine this smallest increment of a product or service sold, you now have the ability to deliver new experiences and outcomes to create new brand promises.  This is the key to deconstructing your existing unit cost pricing models and breaking free to the digital level.

Homework

Time to break out your pricing models.  Take your top personas and re think what’s the smallest unit of a product and/or service that can be delivered.  Once you can imagine that smallest unit cost of delivery, think of how you can create new bundles that deliver on that promise

The Complete 10 Lessons Learned From Disrupting Digital Business

For those attending the full keynotes and book tours, you’ll get the complete session and in many cases a copied of a signed booked.   For those following virtually, I’ve provided the slimmed down slide share deck for your use.

You now have the 10 lessons learned to disrupt digital business in your hands. You can take this information and change the world in front of you or choose to sit on the knowledge as the world passes you by and digital darwinism consumes your organization.

I trust you will do the right thing. And when you want some company, come join us as a client at Constellation Research where we’re not afraid of the future and the art of the possible.

Get The Book Now. Remember: Digital Darwinism is Unkind to Those Who Wait 

Purchase on Amazon
Bulk Orders: contact [email protected]
About Disrupting Digital Business

Join the Digital Disruption Tour. Events in London, and Amsterdam!

Your POV.

Are you ready to disrupt digital business?  Have you ordered the book?

Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationR (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) org.

 

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Social: The Present is Mobile. The Future is Wearable

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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There was a time when the battle for social media was simply one of recognition. For some time, brands and businesses held out. Restricting firewall access to social networks. Directing marketing spend to broadcast. Ignoring the trending shift to digital across a range of categories – from marketing to HR, supply chain to finance.

Now, this pent up force has been loosed and it is transforming the way that we work, why we work and how we work faster than we could have anticipated. As a result, we are seeing disruption almost everywhere we look:

• Who – this is not just about “digital natives” or “digital immigrants”. We now have no choice but to adopt a “digital nomad” perspective. We need to move with the digital times, building and refining skills, networks, and connections. It’s touching every one of us in profound ways.
• What – we used to be able to cordon off “home” and “work”. These days, there is only what Nina Simosko calls a life continuum. What we consider work is no longer restricted to what we do and is becoming more closely aligned to “what and who we are”. This is having an enormous impact on the nature of work, the workplace and what it means to have “purposeful work”.
• Where – the disruption began at home, in our palms and quickly spread through the networks.  But as we know, culture eats location, and that means our “where of working” is infinitely more mobile, flexible and time-shifted. This is challenging workplace structure, services and cohesion.
• Why – We are paid to work but businesses continue to struggle with motivation, morale, and engagement. As our Baby Boomer generations retire, we will be left with a massive experience and capability gap within our organisations. To attract the best talent, we’ll need a much better understanding of the needs and expectations of our employees.
• How – this is where the most obvious disruption and transformation is taking place. The “tools of our trades” are increasingly digital, data driven and mobile.

Kate Carruthers brings this together elegantly in this presentation made at the recent CeBIT conference in Sydney. She makes the point that we need to keep looking towards the horizon – for while the present of social is mobile. The future is wearable and the internet of things. And that future is not far away. In fact, it’s already in your pocket.

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Infographic Friday: The Customer Experience

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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It’s time for another edition of Infographic Friday. Today’s content comes to us from Revel Foundry regarding customer experience and loyalty. While this specific infographic is not sports-specific, I feel there are several key lessons that apply to the industry, especially around the live event experience as compared to at-home viewing.

• 40% of customers what holistic, omni-channel improvements. We can’t think of the elements of a fan experience in silos. True experience improvements takes coordination across many departments.
• More than 50% of online purchasing decisions are customer-controlled. With more and more ticket purchasing happening online without direct fan conversations, these elements of reputation and word of mouth are more critical than ever.
• 70% of customers stopped doing business with a brand following a poor experience. There are many things that can lead to a poor experience at a stadium, from long lines to unruly patrons, so even small changes here could have large impacts on retaining fans.
• 81% of customers are willing to pay more for a better experience. Teams wants ways to justify more expensive tickets, and outside of the on-field product, this should be the best way to do it.

My last point to add is that the optimal customer experience will vary across your customer base. What a 25-year old, tech-savvy, single-game buyer wants compared to a 50-year old, long-time season ticket holder wants in their live experience are usually not the same. As you work on your live experience strategy, use research to make sure an improvement for one group doesn’t turn into a detractor for another group.

Check out the full infographic below or click here to see the original PDF and article at revelfoundry.com.

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Progress Report - Acumatica shows good progress on its unique path

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

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We were invited to the first Acumatica analyst summit in Boston this week. For a vendor’s first event of this type, the summit was very well attended with key analysts in the audience, certainly kudos for a first event.

 

So here are my Top3 takeaways from the meetings:

A unique strategy – Acumatica is probably the only vendor in the enterprise software space that does not have a direct sales force, but exclusively sells through channels. That has happened before, but the products were standardized with little need to no demand for customization. For an ERP suite it is unique. The consequences are twofold in my view


 

• Acumatica can focus CAPEX on product and does not have to invest precious funding dollars on expensive sales people, who need time to ramp up and learn how to sell the product, before they get into the ‘black’ for their employers.

• Acumatica needs to focus on a very flexible, standard based product. As Acumatica does not know where partners will take the product, it needs to create value to attract them and at the same time make it easy to adopt its platform / product. 

With over 1000 customers and only 120 employees, Acumatica has a pretty unique employee population and cost structure. The bulk of the employee population works in R&D, Acumatica did not disclose specific numbers, but we think this is a safe assumption. In the go to market Acumatica needs to spare no effort to get partners up to speed quickly. The ramp up, training and marketing / sales options are attractive, with executives in charge who understand partner enablement well from their previous work experience.
 

Acumatica Marketecture

Standards and Flexibility rule – For the longest time SaaS providers have maintained that SaaS cannot be customized. Ironic as early SaaS pioneers NetSuite and Salesforce always offered customization options from the very start. Acumatica is no different and has created a powerful customization framework that allows the addition and insertions of fields, screens and control elements. Nothing teaches better than practice, and when Acumatica signed up Visma (largest Nordic ISV) to build their new product on its platform, it had to learn a more flexible and multi-tiered approach to extension and customization. The original one level for customer customization was taken by Visma, so nothing was left for its customers. But by now Acumatica has addressed this in a pretty elegant extension framework, which for a number of extensions does not even require a restart of the application, as it used dynamic and declarative (late) binding. 

 

Acumatica Deployment Options

At the same tune, standards are key - Hitting on an innuendo from Microsoft’s Build conference (my takeaways here), Acumatica made the point with ‘who wants to learn ObjectiveC’ (for those reader who don’t know that is Apple’s proprietary apps programming language). So for Acumatica it is support for C# and Microsoft SQL Server / Azure DB as well as MySQL. Using the powerful OData protocol Acumatica makes it easy for customers and partners to export, view and manipulate data. And it opens partnerships with e.g. Microsoft for Office365 and PowerBi. Acumatica is also flexible in terms of tenancy, as it supports a shared all, share apps / dedicated DB and shared nothing deployment arcitecture. And the vendor also sees deployments across different architecture, private partner clouds as well as public cloud, where (for now) fellow Seattle neighbor Amazon AWS is the most popular option. Finally Acumatica has invested in a mobile platform that allows a tech savvy user to build and deploy self-built mobile applications. A key step accounting for the trend of enabling the departmental, business end user.

On the roadmap Acumatica plans more capabilities to enrich the platform, e.g. more advanced workflow functionality, more pre-built mobile applets to aid partners to build mobile applications and deeper insights on what is happening inside of the Acumatica system in real time (BAM). 

 

Acumatica UI

xRP – a cloud ERP for late comers – Moreover we had the chance to sit down with the xRP team and talk to some early adopting partners. There are a lot of service providers and ISVs out there who are being caught in the transformation of enterprise software to become cloud based. For service providers the move to cloud is both a threat and an opportunity. A threat as implementation budgets shrink dramatically, an opportunity as the deep understanding of best practices garnered from many implementations opens the chance to become a product provider. And then there are still a lot of ISVs who for whatever reason have missed moving their core offering to the cloud. An alternative scenario has been that they only offer complimentary functionality to other enterprise automation areas. As a side note this happens even with successful vendors – see the recent NetSuite and Ultimate and SAP and IBM partnerships (see here and here). And as a testament of the market need, Acumatica has seen over 60 xRP signing up for the offering, which is only available since barely 9 months. The first ones of these partners are live, another proof point of the Acumatica platform.
 

MyPOV

The enterprise software value chain has been a traditional one stop shop for marketing, sales, implementation and support for the longest time. Digital disruption will come to the enterprise model sooner or later, with viral selling, flush marketing, almost no sales teams, partner enablement and business user empowerment as the key trends. It is good to see a vendor practicing a lot of that today, which should make Acumatica pretty disruption proof for things happening in enterprise software sooner, than later.

On the concern side Acumatica is still very small. It needs to make sure its core offering is modern and in tune with 21st century practices. Partnering with Magento for commerce is a good move, but Acumatica cannot do similar partnership for more modern best practices too many times, otherwise it risks to become a ‘backbone’ for other partners. And then its days will be counted, so the vendor not only needs to make sure the product has a modern and attractive architecture (we give Acumatica good grades here) but its core automation capabilities need to stand the test of time as well. Lastly the user interface is short before looking dated, a common challenge, as consumerization of IT is moving user interface best practices faster than ever.

But for now it is good news for Acumatica and its customers, a good platform, flexible deployment and fast ramp up times are what enterprises and partners need. It will be interesting to see Acumatica grow in the years to come, you can count on us to observer.

 

Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here.

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

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