Submit Your Application for the 2015 SuperNova Awards

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. If you or someone you know has what it takes to compete in the SuperNova Awards, fill out the application here: 

The Correct Way to Use Customer Data

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…...

Read more

My latest report, Customer Data: The Missing Link to Customer Success explains how successful organizations will utilize customer data to power their business initiatives in the digital era. 

Customer data is your organization's most strategic asset. Use it the right way to rise above your competitors, delight your customers, and create a sustainable digital business. Constellation's seven-step customer data framework will show you how. 

Report Summary

Organizations seeking to grow and differentiate their businesses can no longer afford to mistreat their customer data. In fact, as customers have evolved and in many cases moved on, new strategies require customer data as the foundation for engaging and influencing customers. Information governance and master data management emerge as key competencies in an organization’s successful customer-facing strategies. Organizations must master 10 critical steps across the information supply chain: classify, transform, augment, master, secure, deliver, refresh, relate, archive, and retire.

Those leaders who fail to act on a customer data strategy face lost revenue, decreased customer satisfaction, lower levels of retention, and increased costs in customer acquisition. To achieve business value, organizations can take immediate action by applying Constellation’s seven-step framework for customer data strategy. With these power tools in one’s hands, customer data emerges as the missing link to strategic success. 

Customer Data: The Missing Link to Strategic Success addresses why organizations must embrace master data as an asset for success.

Download a snapshot of this report below. 

Constellation Vendor Profiles Will Help You Select the Right Technology for your Organization

We are pleased to announce our newest research project, Vendor Profiles!

Constellation is on a mission to profile all disruptive technology vendors. These profiles will help buyers understand and evaluate technology companies before entering into contract. Each vendor profile contains a company overview, identifies key differentiators, product offerings, and provides a short list guide for buyers. 

The first set of profiles will focus on Big Data companies.   

Check out our most recent big data vendor profile: Syncsort  

Download a snapshot of the Syncsort profile. 

What To Do If You Have Frustrated Customers: Transform the In-Journey Customer Experience

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…...

Read more

Many brands have been coming to me for years to try and figure out what to do about customer frustration. At the end of the day, it might be that a brand has to completely rethink of the customer experience, from the customer’s point of view. Often what happens if a company looks at the customer journey from the company’s point of view is that they miss why customers are frustrated. It’s often that, even during the experience between a customer and a company, that the company can’t see why a customer is frustrated.

However, that is all about to come to an end. Why? Companies will be able to understand the “in-journey” customer experience, know what a customer has done, where they are in the journey, what is working, what’s not worked and where they are stuck — and get this — offer the right help or content or information or answers — at the right time. That’s right-time, real-time — in-journey customer experience.

If sounds like something you might want to understand more about, I’d love to have you join me as we explore this topic in more detail. Here’s where you can learn more about it: Solving for the “In-journey Customer Experience.”  What you will learn is that — when a customer calls you, texts you, tweets at you… you (as a brand) will know who they are. And even if or when someone from a brand shows up at the customer’s house, the brand will know who that customer is AND generally have available, the context of the conversation because of the relationship we have created using people, process and especially new types of technology. If customer experience is something on your mind, join the conversation! Start making a difference! Stop customer experience frustration by learning about in-journey customer experience intelligence.

@drnatalie

Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research

Dedicated to people, process, technology and data to deliver on amazing customer experiences!

SAP Taps Hadoop & Spark For IoT Innovation

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,…...

Read more

SAP signaled a deeper embrace of big data platforms on Wednesday at SAPPHIRE with the announcement that it will create a deeper integration with Hadoop using Apache Spark as a low-latency, in-memory connector and data-filtering mechanism.

The announcement, made by SAP Executive Board Member Berndt Leukert, signals that SAP is counting on Hadoop as a high-scale storage container in Internet-of-Things (IoT) deployments and other scenarios where data-collection and data-processing needs are geographically distributed. Spark, the open-source, in-memory streaming and analysis platform, will be used as an intelligent processing engine to provide accelerated access to data in Hadoop, said Leukert.

SAP’s Berndt Leukert discusses new uses of Hadoop and Spark at Sapphire.

In an oil & gas and utility IoT deployments, for example, diverse sets of sensors in far-flung locations stream out readings at high scale. Hadoop provides high-scale, low-cost storage. Spark would provide low-latency connectivity to that data. But sensor data is diverse, lacking standardized formats, so Spark would also be used to filter, transform and harmonize the data, sending only the crucial signals on to a core IoT app running on the Hana Cloud Platform.

SAP has long had Hana data connectors for Hadoop, and it also has a Spark connector certified by Databricks, the commercial development-and-support company behind Spark. The architecture announced Wednesday signals a deeper level of integration and a deeper commitment to work with these platforms. Irfan Khan, senior vice president and general manager of SAP Big Data, confirmed that in a briefing with Constellation Research, and he noted that the edge-to-core processing approach could also be applied in non-IoT scenarios such as retail price optimization.

SAP has yet to flesh out the exact details of its new architecture, but David Parker, global VP, SAP Platform Solutions, told Constellation that SAP stream processing and mobile database technologies will also figure in the architecture, with lightweight choices at the edge and SAP Hana at the core.

MyPOV: There’s no shortage of big vendors declaring their intention to support IoT deployments these days, but SAP’s announcement shows that it has thought through the workloads and bottlenecks likely to be encountered in real-world IoT deployments. (Indeed, it’s pretty clear that co-innovation customers such as Siemens have played a significant role in evolving SAP’s thinking.) And what’s good for IoT will surely bring advances in other high-scale, real-time applications. It’s a welcome sign of maturation that points toward interesting and innovative deployments ahead.

Oracle HCM moves from essentials to differentiators - will it work?

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…...

Read more

I recently had the opportunity to attend the Oracle HCM Analyst Summit in Redwood Shores. This was the largest analyst attendance ever for an Oracle HCM Cloud event and it is a proof point for Oracle momentum as well as the vendor’s investment in the HCM space. 

 

There was a lot of information, as usual at analyst summits, not easy to find the Top 3 takeaways, but here you go:

Oracle has the Essentials down now – For quite some time the Oracle HCM products had to focus to get the basics right – not just on the product side, but also on the go to market and services side. Apparently this is now addressed with Oracle HCM, which has doubled the number of Core HR customers and live Core HR customers. Global customers have passed 700+.

For the longest time the consensus in the analyst community was that Oracle HCM would mainly attract existing Oracle customers from the Install Base, but with over 50% of Cloud HCM customers being new to Oracle, that’s not the case either anymore. At the same time we have no account of Oracle HCM implementations going bad, which is quite a feat, given the growth numbers and the related training and scaling issues in the services of both Oracle and partners.

On the product side Oracle practices good housekeeping. For instance its Performance Management module was one of the older members of the Talent Management family and Oracle has recently undertaken user experience improvements and built a new mobile application. Oracle as well keeps adding depth to its products, e.g. the vendor has improved its Workforce Modelling capabilities, its Compensation functionality (e.g. Matrix Planning) and is improving Time and Labor usability. 

Oracle HCM Cloud Momentum

Differentiation Grows – And when you have the basics right, you have time to work on differentiation. A year ago Oracle had created the Competition functionality, and had all HCM World 2014 attendees count steps with Fitbits. What then was a ‘cute’ addition to the core HCM functionality has now grown into a sizeable group of differentiating applications that flank the traditional HCM applications. Oracle calls them the ‘Tools for the Digital Workforce’ and they are

• My Reputation – A product that understands the social reputation and influence of employees.
• My Wellness – A product that motivates employees to do the right thing for their health.

• My Competitions – A product that can align and reward desired behavior with competitions.

• Career Development – A product that balances employee ambitions and manager contributions to employee careers. 
• Learning – A new Learning system (see launch here) that is built for the digital / social age. 

The combination of the above 5 products give Oracle the opportunity to have a different conversation with prospects than the competition and create value for existing Oracle HCM customers. If it is enough differentiation already will be seen by the live customers and references in a few quarters. More advanced products like My Reputation may face a healthy dose of skepticism in some organizations, but you have to build the product first to address them and then ideally overcome them.

On another differentiation track, Oracle has been adding more vertical capabilities to the HCM products, more prominently collective bargaining agreements and seniority management. Deeper industry functionality has been a differentiator for enterprise software since decades, but vendors can only build vertical functionality once the basics are right, that Oracle can deliver more vertical capabilities is an indication for the vendor having the basics right at this point.

Oracle HCM Release 10 Themes

Some concerns remain – Despite the remarkable progress by Oracle in the HCM field there are a few concerns that remain – namely the following ones:

• Oracle has done a lot of work on the UI side, and the scan, glance, commit paradigm is powerful, but needs some new clothes on some screens. UI innovation is in full out gallop, and new UI concepts show their age after 2-3 quarters, not after 2-3 years (as it was in the past).

• Oracle HCM still operated in the bi-modal world of new Oracle HCM products and remaining Taleo functionality. And while the UI harmonization that Oracle has done goes to great length for combined users, our main concern is that Oracle may miss the recruiting revolution that is currently under way. 

• The most fundamental and game changing functionality for enterprise software is (true) analytics (more here). And while Oracle talks a good reporting, visualization and recommendation engine story, it does have little true analytics offerings today. 

But then the Oracle HCM product team recently surprised us with a brand new Learning module, in a team of 2000+ developers you can also build functionality (e.g. addressing some of the above concerns or others) and surprise the analyst community once available. Surprise us once, shame on you, surprise us twice, shame on us. 

 

My POV

Overall great progress by Oracle in the HCM area. Despite the UI comments above, Oracle HCM users are probably enjoying the best Oracle HCM UI ever, with a remarkable consistency across user types, devices and form factors. Functionality is getting deeper and richer, and Oracle even has the resources to work on differentiating products. Go to market activities and services seem to be on track to keep up with the growth, so Oracle is in a good position to grow and gain market share in the very competitive HCM market. The balance between new functionality and good housekeeping will be key in the next release. We will be watching. 

 

The Digital Disruption Tour: A Brand’s Challenges to Meet Customer Experience

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…...

Read more

Fresh off the first of the Digital Disruption Tour events in North America, I am reflecting on the wonderful conversation that Ray Wang lead with his keynote speech, really defining this new era of business. If you want to really understand what he’s talking about, you not only must see him speak — he draws such a clear picture of the future, but to really allow what’s happening to infiltrate your department or functional area or your own leadership, his book, Disrupting Digital Business, is very helpful — with examples and details.

For customer experience professionals, that was my roundtable discussion, we talked about not only this new era of business, but the requirement of company’s to change their business models to be able to deliver on the promise of whatever customer experience they are offering. Doesn’t matter if it’s B2B or B2C or B2B2C- customers have expectations. Why is it so different today than its ever been? For many of us at the roundtable discussion– we’ve been talking about customer experience, customer service, customer success management for most of our professional lives. It’s not new. And it’s not really a new topic inside of companies.

What is new and what does require something different of organizations is the transparency of how the customer experience affects a business’s customers. In the old days, the customer experience might have been between a contact center agent and a customer. And depending on how empowered that agent was (which generally they were not) that empowerment or lack there of, generated a certain customer experience. It was also dependent on technology as well as processes that were either well defined and implemented or not. If it was a bad experience, that customer would often tell 10-20 people within their circle of influence.

Today, customer loyalty and advocacy is different. Why? Because today the world can see, in an instant, what a brand’s customer experience is and because customers can easily speak to other customers, often going around the brand, brand’s have to walk their talk. And while the Directors of Corporate Communication, PR, the CMO and marketing spend tireless hours and hundreds if not millions or more in budget to create a “brand” — whether that “brand” ends up living up to expectations is dependent on so many things; it now requires we change how we do business so nothing falls through the cracks.  It requires collaboration between all functional departments and the back office.

Ultimately, a brand ends up being expressed as the experience a customer has with that brand. And because there are so many people, departments, touch-points — at any point in that customer’s interaction with that brand, the brand may not uphold its promise. And because of the nature of social networks, that “good or bad” experience, can be expressed for millions to see, in a nano-second, often lasting a long time (think of “online posts” like cave paintings – they last millions of years…) The expression of a brand from a customer can be very personal and emotional. And often times the expression from the brand’s side is through content. And the number of people and budget, just for content marketing, has really shifted how we must think about how we do business. Business has changed. Period.

I really want to thank each and every person who participated in the customer experience roundtable. What our roundtable discussion concluded where several things:

1. Good customer experience starts with strategy. It’s not just about implementing the technology. It’s about looking at your business processes from the customer’s point of view and making changes to what does not make sense. It’s about examining the commitment from the senior leadership team to allow for budget so that the people, process and technology required for great customer experiences can be delivered.

2. Good customer experience also requires something new of the internal aspects of a company – culture, leadership, employees, training, attitude… and while most of what I write about is that “external” customer-facing experience, the truth is that – that customer experience can’t be good if the internal capabilities of an organization are not optimized. It is something that is often underestimated and rarely spoken about, but at the end of the day, it’s employees who are driving the customer experience in one shape or form. So it’s my feeling that this part of the conversation can no longer can be ignored. And in some cases, it maybe the first step in generating great, external-facing customer experiences.

The Panel Discussion One of the panels was on the customer experiences created in the financial services area. Financial service companies  often think of themselves at limited to change things because of all the regulations they face. When Ray was asked about this he explained, “While there are many regulations, smart companies are looking at those regulations, often written years ago and asking if they make sense today. If they don’t, smart companies and governments are taking the time to question them and transform whatever it takes to make things work better.”

Wipro (who sponsored this SF part of the tour) talked about the ideas behind banking 1:1. Even in a highly regulated and competitive marketplace, banks must examine every possible idea and strategize about the advantages it can use to meet and to exceed customer expectations. This is truly, for all industries, where companies will differentiate themselves from the pack, now and in the future. Banks can’t offer simple and automated banking services. To build loyalty and drive profitability, banks need to offer a non-stop interactive banking environment and to increase their business agility by anticipating customer needs and offer an engaging user experience.

I vowed to keep writing about customer experience and customer service / success management – the ability to use data to understand our customers better to provide better experiences – as well as technology, people and processes. But I also asked that each one of the people in my roundtable take it upon themselves to hold the torch to generate excellent customer experiences. That’s because transforming businesses today, to provide great customer experiences, takes a village; it’s not a one person job. It takes collaboration across functional departments and strong leadership from all of us.

So as you read this, I ask you to also hold the torch for great customer experiences and for what the “transparency and digital disruption” means and requires of each of us – i.e., that what we are really talking about is that we all have to change our business models (or how we do business.) And together, I believe we can transform business. It’s something that has been a long time in coming. It’s here. It’s now. It’s something I want to see in my lifetime. How about you?

@drnatalie

Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research

Dedicated to the people, process, technology and data, to provide great customer experiences.

IBM Watson Gets Ready 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,…...

Read more

IBM celebrated the 16-month anniversary of its IBM Watson business unit this week with a two-day event at Duggal Greenhouse on edge of the East River in Brooklyn, NY. The event was about showing that within less than two years, the commercial potential of IBM Watson is finally blossoming into reality.

The notion of “scaling up” was thematic at Tuesday’s kickoff. Mike Rhodin, IBM’s senior vice president in charge of Watson, described the cognitive technology as “scaling knowledge” – quickly distilling problem- or question-relevant insight from vast corpuses in any given industry. Given the scale of data today, that’s something no human or even an army of humans could manage. But the point is to advise and assist human decision makers, not replace them.

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty cited evidence that the Watson business is quickly scaling up, attracting “tens of thousands” of developers, hundreds of partners, and growing list of companies deploying Waston apps. She cited Development Bank of Singapore (DBS), which put an investment-advisor application into production in March. Deakin University in Australia has a Watson-powered student-advisor app that’s exposed to some 50,000 current and would-be students, she said. She also mentioned Bumrungrad International Hospital, a million-plus-patient-per-year institution in Thailand that has deployed an oncologist-advisor app.

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty keynotes at the May 5 World of Watson event in Brooklyn, NY.

The number of in-production deployments isn’t vast and we’ve heard some of these references before. But that’s not surprising given that it takes time to train sophisticated cognitive applications. DBS, for example, spent a year training its Watson investment-advisor app on economic metrics in the bank’s 17 Asian markets, on the many investment options it offers, and on customer profiles. The app saves time by quickly combing through up-to-the-minute data to recommend appropriate investment options given the risk appetite, preferences, and past trading behavior of individual customers.

The app was exposed to some 300 customer relationship managers at DBS in March. These advisors can “like” or “dislike” Watson recommendations, social-network style, to help with ongoing training, according to Olivier Crespin, head of digital banking at DBS. The system also shows confidence scores behind recommendations and offers details on why specific investments might make sense.

“It’s not a black box,” Crespin said. “You can see the evidence behind the recommendation.”

Medicine was the first real-world application IBM envisioned for Watson way back when it won the TV game show Jeopardy in 2011. Indeed, that’s the field where the technology is most mature. IBM spun out a dedicated, 2,000-employee IBM Watson Health business unit one month ago, and on Tuesday it announced a Watson Genomics initiative in partnership with more than 14 leading cancer institutes. The goal is to use Watson’s cloud-delivered processing power to speed and scale up the matching of patient- and tumor-specific DNA with best-fit treatments based on prior clinical results.

“Matching the right drug to the right patient is not as simple as finding one or two mutations, so we need to look at vast data sets,” said Norman Sharpless, MD, Director of the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of North Carolina (UNC), an IBM customer attending this week’s event. “It’s a problem that humans can’t do alone.”

UNC’s cancer center has done DNA sequencing on 1,700 patients since 2011, but Sharpless says the institution needs Watson’s help to scale up prediction and delivery of personalized treatments to as many as 4,500 patients per year.

MyPOV: Despite the training factor, IBM did cite examples of new cognitive computing apps that were developed in a matter of weeks. Deakin University, for one, rolled out its student-advisor app in about four months. In another example, IBM recently developed a media-exploration app in partnership with TED Talks within about two months. The app applied Watson’s unstructured-data and natural-language processing power to a collection of more than 1,900 TED Talks videos. Demonstrated on stage at the event, the app accepted natural-language questions about ideas or concepts, and Watson queue up relevant video clips, jumping to the precise moments in the TED Talks in which that concept or idea was discussed.

A novel app for fast media searching won’t “change the face of the industry,” as IBM CEO Rometty said cognitive computing will do in the field of healthcare. But scaling up in any industry or application area will take time. IBM is clearly investing for the long haul, even as it’s under enormous pressure to return to growth and improve its financial performance. Rometty concluded her remarks with a plea, of sorts, for customers to join in the effort to scale up Watson.

“In the future, every decision mankind makes will be informed by a cognitive system like Watson, and our lives will be better for it,” she said. “Stay with us on this; these ideas are transformative, and you have a chance to change the world.”

Recommendation: IBM Watson is at the nexus of companies and industries overwhelmed with information and human decision makers struggling to make smart decisions and to offer well-informed advice to customers. If that description fits your company, you might consider cogntive computing even if you’re not looking to “change the world.” If Watson and cognitive computing is going to become more approachable, we’ll have to see a lot more lightweight apps and uses of Watson such as the TED Talks app. Think of it as scaling up cognitive computing one small app at a time.

SapphireNow - Bernd Leukert & Steve Singh - Day #2 Keynote

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…...

Read more

This morning we had the opportunity to attend the Day #2 keynote at Sapphire in Orlando. It was the traditional product day with both Bernd Leukert and Steve Singh on stage.
 

Here are my Top 3 takeaways:

Decision Support / Simulation for Manufacturing – Leukert did a good job talking about the qualities of S4HANA. Even better to show a demo, and it was about a manufacturing scenario. Not sure how relevant the demo was for the audience, but the capability to simulate and support decisions is a key quality for next generation applications. It is good to see SAP focus on those two aspects and even better to demo them. Now we need to understand how these capabilities can be brought to the broad range of its enterprise offerings.

 

 

The three leitmotivs of the  Leukert Keynote

HANA Cloud Platform (HCP) for IoT – In a bold move Leukert positioned HCP (HANA Cloud Platform) as the platform for IoT, maintaining that the platform is ready and ‘has everything you need ‘ for IoT. The differentiator – no surprise – is the tight integration into the business applications. I have been critical of SAP’s IoT efforts due to HANA in memory cost and inability to address IoT scale BigData (see here) – but read on for the next takeaway

 

Did SAP over promise? 25 Industries - on premise?

Hadoop / Spark to coexist with HANA!? – In about a minute Leukert talked about the most impactful announcement of this Sapphire – that SAP will make HANA work with Hadoop / Spark in the 2nd half of 2015. The impact is huge for SAP customers and SAP as the vendor till this point had a rocky relationship with BigData qualities (think Vs like volume, velocity et.). Yes there are and were the Sybase connectors, but the risk was that HANA would ‘just’ be a fas tcache that slowly but steady was going to be replaced by Spark and other Hadoop native in memory technologies. SAP is – maybe soon was – at the losing end of a trend of customers using BigData technologies for their next generation application projects, especially in the IoT use case. As blogged before none of our customers and other project we are aware off are using HANA (or a similar in memory database system) to run the operational store for IoT scale data. So more details needed – but a BigBreakthrough (spelling pun intended) for SAP, if it gets this right.

 

What - HANA, Hadoop and Spark on one SAP slide?!

 

MyPOV

A good Day #2 keynote that traditionally is focused more on product. At times I thought SAP gave too much room to customers – usually a good thing – but today it was at the cost of missing vital details. Though a geeky topic – only one minute on HANA / Hadoop plans was too short and SAP missed the opportunity to dissuade any viability concerns around e.g. IoT to a wide keynote audience. SAP could /should have also done more around PaaS / HCP in my view – and no word about data center strategy / rollout. Tough to be a cloud company that wants to be in the cloud and not mention anything in these regards.

Lastly I am worried that SAP overstated the scope and capability of S/4HANA – I'm left wondering how all 25 industry codes can be available just 3 months after launch. These are millions of lines of code – and to bring them all to the qualities Plattner postulated at the launch 3 months ago seems… impossible (read my take here). But we hope to learn more in the next two days and promise to keep you posted!

And more on overall SAP strategy and products:

• News Analysis - SAP and IBM join forces ... read here
• First Take - SAP Sapphire Bill McDermott Day #1 Keynote - read here
• In Depth - S/4HANA qualities as presented by Plattner - play for play - read here
• First Take - SAP Cloud for Planning - the next spreadsheet killer is off to a good start - read here
• Progress Report - SAP HCM makes progress and consolidates - a lot of moving parts - read here
• First Take - SAP launches S/4HANA - The good, the challenge and the concern - read here
• First Take - SAP's IoT strategy becomes clearer - read here
• SAP appoints a CTO - some musings - read here
• Event Report - SAP's SAPtd - (Finally) more talk on PaaS, good progress and aligning with IBM and Oracle - read here
• News Analysis - SAP and IBM partner for cloud success - good news - read here
• Market Move - SAP strikes again - this time it is Concur and the spend into spend management - read here
• Event Report - SAP SuccessFactors picks up speed - but there remains work to be done - read here
• First Take - SAP SuccessFactors SuccessConnect - Top 3 Takeaways Day 1 Keynote - read here.
• Event Report - Sapphire - SAP finds its (unique) path to cloud - read here
• What I would like SAP to address this Sapphire - read here
• News Analysis - SAP becomes more about applications - again - read here
• Market Move - SAP acquires Fieldglass - off to the contingent workforce - early move or reaction? Read here.
• SAP's startup program keep rolling – read here.
• Why SAP acquired KXEN? Getting serious about Analytics – read here.
• SAP steamlines organization further – the Danes are leaving – read here.
• Reading between the lines… SAP Q2 Earnings – cloudy with potential structural changes – read here.
• SAP wants to be a technology company, really – read here
• Why SAP acquired hybris software – read here.
• SAP gets serious about the cloud – organizationally – read here.
• Taking stock – what SAP answered and it didn’t answer this Sapphire [2013] – read here.
• Act III & Final Day – A tale of two conference – Sapphire & SuiteWorld13 – read here.
• The middle day – 2 keynotes and press releases – Sapphire & SuiteWorld – read here.
• A tale of 2 keynotes and press releases – Sapphire & SuiteWorld – read here.
• What I would like SAP to address this Sapphire – read here.
• Why 3rd party maintenance is key to SAP’s and Oracle’s success – read here.
• Why SAP acquired Camillion – read here.
• Why SAP acquired SmartOps – read here.
• Next in your mall – SAP and Oracle? Read here.

And more about SAP technology:

• HANA Cloud Platform - Revisited - Improvements ahead and turning into a real PaaS - read here
• News Analysis - SAP commits to CloudFoundry and OpenSource - key steps - but what is the direction? - Read here.
• News Analysis - SAP moves Ariba Spend Visibility to HANA - Interesting first step in a long journey - read here
• Launch Report - When BW 7.4 meets HANA it is like 2 + 2 = 5 - but is 5 enough - read here
• Event Report - BI 2014 and HANA 2014 takeaways - it is all about HANA and Lumira - but is that enough? Read here.
• News Analysis – SAP slices and dices into more Cloud, and of course more HANA – read here.
• SAP gets serious about open source and courts developers – about time – read here.
• My top 3 takeaways from the SAP TechEd keynote – read here.
• SAP discovers elasticity for HANA – kind of – read here.
• Can HANA Cloud be elastic? Tough – read here.
• SAP’s Cloud plans get more cloudy – read here.
• HANA Enterprise Cloud helps SAP discover the cloud (benefits) – read here. 

 

Sports Business Recap: MOKO, Tarkenton Institute and Liberty Mutual

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…...

Read more

One of the benefits of running this blog is finding out about new, creative and effective campaigns and partnerships when they happen. So I will occasionally publish a recap-style post to highlight these deals. As always, thanks to the brands and properties (and their PR agencies) for keeping me up to speed!

MOKO Expands Market to 4,000+ High Schools with BigTeams

MOKO Social Media Limited announced that it has taken a 10 percent equity stake in BigTeams, the largest high school sports software platform in the U.S. BigTeams’ online tools and data help U.S. high schools with sports team administration, event and content management and fundraising. Under the agreement, MOKO will launch a new version of its popular REC*IT app in August 2015, tailored specifically for students and parents of the more than 4,000 U.S. high schools currently serviced by BigTeams.

The U.S. National Center for Education Statistics projects a 2015 enrollment of approximately 16 million students in grades 9 to 12. With approximately 15 percent of the market share of high school sports, BigTeams is the leader in this market. The combined app will give high school students, their parents, and communities with on-the-go tools and access to schedules, announcements, scores, articles and photos from their peers.

“This will give MOKO unprecedented exposure to students in the US, from the moment they enter high school until they graduate college,” said Ian Rodwell, CEO of MOKO. “The exclusivity of the BigTeams agreement, along with the existing exclusivity for REC*IT across its college base, means REC*IT is positioned to be the leading mobile tool for students in the US.”

“Being able to quickly, accurately and seamlessly deliver a first-class mobile product and experience to younger consumers is imperative,” said BigTeams’ CEO Clay Walker. Combining our high school audience with MOKO’s premier mobile product and delivery system allows us to effectively engage our user base.”

Tarkenton Institute & University of Georgia Partner to Launch Certificate in Entrepreneurship

The Tarkenton Institute, in partnership with the University of Georgia Terry College of Business, announced the launch of the Tarkenton Certificate in Entrepreneurship. Driven by the vision of NFL Hall of Famer and veteran entrepreneur Fran Tarkenton (UGA Class of ‘61), the non-degree Certificate program offers an elite learning experience for current and aspiring entrepreneurs who are looking to gain the knowledge and tools needed to start a new business or operate an existing business more effectively.

The Tarkenton Certificate in Entrepreneurship features direct access to the educational expertise of Terry College of Business faculty with the Tarkenton Institute’s network of industry experts, authors and seasoned business practitioners. It consists of a comprehensive online curriculum that prepares enrollees for the world of entrepreneurship through 100 hours of hands-on practical assignments and video lectures compiled from a combination of unique MBA courses taught at the Terry College of Business and practical hands-on instruction from the Tarkenton Institute.

“We are proud to partner with the Tarkenton Institute to launch this digitally innovative, but exceptionally practical tool for aspiring entrepreneurs in the new age of small business,” said Benjamin C. Ayers, Dean of the Terry College of Business. “Terry has a proven tradition of providing cutting-edge business education; and with this certificate program, we can reach a broader set of rising business leaders.”

“We’ve created something that no small business owner has been able to get before. This high-impact educational offering will help any entrepreneur, whether it’s someone who wants to change careers, someone looking to be their own boss after years spent working for somebody else, or a young entrepreneur just getting started,” said Fran Tarkenton, founder & CEO of the Tarkenton Institute. “I’m excited to be able to do this with my own alma mater. Everyone who has participated in this project not only has great knowledge, but they have a visible passion for the small business community.”

Liberty Mutual Insurance Named Official Sponsor of U.S. Soccer Federation

Liberty Mutual Insurance officially announced a multi-year sponsorship of the U.S. Soccer Federation, the national governing body for the sport of soccer in the United States. The sponsorship, which extends through 2018, designates Liberty Mutual as the Official Insurance Partner of the U.S. Men’s and Women’s National Teams, as well as the Youth National Teams and the U.S. Soccer Development Academy.

“We are thrilled about this new partnership with U.S. Soccer. As one of the fastest growing sports in the U.S., we see great value in the platform that it gives Liberty Mutual to positively impact communities across the country,” said John Coombe, vice president of Brand Management and Sponsorships for Liberty Mutual Insurance. “This is an exciting year for soccer, and we are eager to grow our relationship with our national teams as they prepare for the 2015 FIFA Women’s World CupTM and host several premier friendly matches.”

Liberty Mutual’s sponsorship of U.S. Soccer builds upon the company’s long-standing partnership with U.S. Youth Soccer, which began in 2007. This new relationship enables the company to deepen its involvement with the sport and support the U.S. from youth levels through the elite levels. Additionally, Liberty Mutual’s Brazilian affiliate, Liberty Seguros, also has a history in the sport with recent sponsorships of the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the FIFA Confederations Cup in 2013.

“Liberty Mutual has proven to be a fantastic supporter of sports, especially at the youth level, and we’re excited to partner with them during the coming years,” said U.S. Soccer President Sunil Gulati. “We’re confident that soccer will continue to grow in the United States and having the opportunity to work with an industry leader like Liberty Mutual at all levels will allow us to have a positive impact in bringing people closer to the sport.”

As an official sponsor of U.S. Soccer, Liberty Mutual will be the presenting sponsor of one of the National Team’s marquee games during the year and the company will also enjoy a variety of assets including in-stadium and field signage, advertising, marketing and promotional opportunities, social and digital media assets, and on-site event activation. The sponsorship also includes rights to align with U.S. Men’s and Women’s National Team players, coaches and legends of the game.

“The popularity of soccer continues to grow in the U.S. each year, so it is really exciting to have a sponsor like Liberty Mutual Insurance that believes in and recognizes the impact this sport has in communities throughout the country,” said Landon Donovan, U.S. Men’s National Team legend. “As an athlete who has played at every level of the sport – from youth soccer through my national team career – I know the importance of sponsors like Liberty Mutual Insurance in helping our teams and individual players flourish both on and off the field.”