Cisco announces intent to acquire Piston Cloud

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…...

Continuing the trend toward managed cloud services Cisco announced its intent to acquire Piston Cloud. This announcement comes after the announcements that EMC acquired Virtustream (my take here), and IBM acquired Blue Box (my take here).

Let’s dissect the Cisco blog (it can be found here) about the announcement:

Cloud computing has fundamentally altered the IT landscape: dramatically boosting IT agility, while lowering costs. To realize the business advantages of cloud, organizations are shifting to a hybrid IT model—blending private cloud, public cloud, and on-premise applications.

MyPOV – It looks like the demand for hybrid cloud has gotten much stronger, considering this announcement.

To help customers maintain control and compliance in this hyper-connected, hyper-distributed IT environment, Cisco and its partners are building the Intercloud—a globally connected network of clouds. Today, Cisco is taking another important step towards realizing our ambitious Intercloud vision.

MyPOV – Good for Cisco to connect the intended acquisition with Intercloud – my analysis of the original announcement is here.

We are pleased to announce our intent to acquire Piston Cloud Computing, which will help accelerate the product, delivery, and operational capabilities of Cisco Intercloud Services.

Paired with our recent acquisition of Metacloud, Piston’s distributed systems engineering and OpenStack talent will further enhance our capabilities around cloud automation, availability, and scale.

MyPOV – Piston Cloud’s product delivers a ‘cloud os’ that can ‘plug in’ a number of cloud services. As such Piston Cloud gives a large number of using different technologies, something that enterprises care about as they do not know for sure which technologies they want to use for their next generation application projects. Being able to run these from the same platform is a significant value proposition that Piston Cloud has delivered. Given the heterogeneous nature of the environments traditional Cisco customers operate, certainly a good move. My analysis of the mentioned Metacloud acquisition is here.

The acquisition of Piston will complement our Intercloud strategy by bringing additional operational experience on the underlying infrastructure that powers Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud.

MyPOV – So Piston Cloud will become part of the Cisco OpenStack offering – no surprise here. Good to have the clarity.

Additionally, Piston’s deep knowledge of distributed systems and automated deployment will help further enhance our delivery capabilities for customers and partners.

MyPOV – Fair for Cisco to admit that Piston Cloud has some serious chops bringing together such diverse technologies like e.g. Docker or Spark.

To bring the world of standalone clouds together, Cisco and our partners are building the Intercloud. The Intercloud is designed to deliver secure cloud services everywhere in the world. Our enterprise-class portfolio of technology and cloud services gives customers the choice to build their own private clouds or consume cloud services from a trusted Intercloud Provider. The Intercloud provides choice of services, all with compliance and control. In a nutshell: we’re delivering cloud the way our customers need it.

MyPOV – The marketing line for Cisco Intercloud. But the intended acquisition of Piston Cloud certainly gives more credibility and more crucially more capability into this direction. One can only speculate why only now these two have come together.

Piston will join our Cloud Services team under the leadership of Faiyaz Shahpurwala, senior vice president, Cloud Infrastructure and Managed Services Organization.

MyPOV – Always good to hear where acquisitions are going to be anchored organizationally. I have shared my concerns in regards of services leadership building products, but that is a general concern and happy to give Shapurwala and the team the benefit of the doubt. The future will tell.

Overall POV

It can’t be coincidence of EMC, IBM and Cisco are all completing acquisitions in the managed cloud / hybrid cloud space. It makes sense for all three vendors to push the hybrid agenda, as all three of them have existing sales channels into local data centers. To a certain point this movement indicates a failure of the ‘public only' cloud vendors (e.g. AWS and Google).

Nothing that can be held e.g. against Cisco, who by itself tries to differentiate itself by ‘playing nice’ to the demands, needs (and maybe angst) of CIOs in regards of the public cloud. The interesting development is, that CIOs seem to be comfortable letting 3rd parties do the management of their private cloud infrastructure, but still want to see their data center being utilized. Write down time frames may play a role here, but overall an interesting development that I will spend more time analyzing going forward.

On the concern side, it is another acquisition and Cisco will have to hold on to the Piston Cloud team talent. But Cisco is an experienced acquirer and knows how to make sure that the key people stay around.

So overall a good move by Cisco, the flexibility of Piston Cloud is something that has the potential to be a differentiator for Cisco InterCloud. Congratulations.

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Market Move - IBM gets into private cloud (services) with Blue Box acqusition

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

The need to manage private clouds seems to be really heating up on the demand side – last week EMC announced plans to acquire Virtustream (see analysis here), today both IBM and Cisco announced the respective purchases / intent to purchase of BlueBox and PistonCloud.

Let’s dissect the IBM press release (it can be found here):

ARMONK, N.Y - 03 Jun 2015: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it has acquired Blue Box Group, Inc., a managed private cloud provider built on OpenStack.
Blue Box is a privately held company based in Seattle that provides businesses with a simple, private cloud as a service platform, based on OpenStack. Customers benefit from the ability to more easily deploy workloads across hybrid cloud environments. Financial details were not disclosed.
MyPOV – Another acquisition in Seattle, Blue Box originally started as a website hosting provider and has evolved to a OpenStack managed private cloud provider.

Enterprises are seeking ways to embrace all types of cloud to address a wide range of workloads. Today’s announcement reinforces IBM’s commitment to deliver flexible cloud computing models that make it easier for customers to move to data and applications across clouds and meets their needs across public, private and hybrid cloud environments. With Gartner forecasting that 72 percent of enterprises will be pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy this year [1], it is increasingly important for companies to leverage multiple models while maintaining consistent management across their cloud platforms.
MyPOV – For the longest time the race was about getting public cloud capabilities going. It looks like by mid of 2015 enterprises are ready to move to cloud, albeit in a more conservative fashion, with more private cloud aspects than ever before. With the bare metal of SoftLayer IBM is able to give customers more confidence levels than most competitors, but it seems that this was not enough, hence the Blue Box acquisition.

Through Blue Box, IBM will help businesses rapidly integrate their cloud-based applications and on-premises systems into OpenStack-based managed cloud. Blue Box also strengthens IBM Cloud’s existing OpenStack portfolio, with the introduction of a remotely managed OpenStack offering to provide clients with a local cloud and increased visibility, control and security.
MyPOV – This paragraph unveils the ‘crown jewels’ – the capability to manage a Openstack system deployed remotely. Enterprises may still want to utilize their data centers and see their servers, but are more open to have them managed remotely.

This move further accelerates IBM’s commitment to open technologies and OpenStack. IBM has 500 developers dedicated to working on open cloud projects to bring new cloud innovations to market. With Forrester Research recently finding that more than twice as many firms use or plan to use IBM Cloud as their primary hosted private cloud platform than the next closest vendor [2], Blue Box is a strategic fit into the IBM Cloud portfolio.
MyPOV – No surprise – OpenStack compatibility is important and makes Blue Box a good fit.

Blue Box can enhance and complement developer productivity by:

· Speeding delivery of applications and data through simplified and consistent access to public, dedicated and local cloud infrastructures

· Supporting managed infrastructure services across hybrid cloud environments and IBM’s digital innovation platform, Bluemix

· Offering a single management tool for OpenStack-based private clouds regardless of location
MyPOV – Good summary of the BlueBox capabilities. Blue Box partnered with small PaaS vendor Mendix, the mention here of Bluemix may make those deployments uncertain – but we are not aware of a statement in these regards. In our view it maybe well worth for IBM to look at the Mendix capabilities.

This acquisition will enable IBM to deliver a public cloud-like experience within the client’s own data center, relieving organizations of the burden of traditional private cloud deployments.
MyPOV – Underlines the value prop – the customer keeps the data center the management goes to IBM. The acquisition reminds me of Cisco’s recent acquisition of MetaCloud (see here), which also had a significant service aspect.

“IBM is dedicated to helping our clients migrate to the cloud in an open, secure, data rich environment that meet their current and future business needs,” said IBM General Manager of Cloud Services Jim Comfort. “The acquisition of Blue Box accelerates IBM’s open cloud strategy making it easier for our clients to move to data and applications across clouds and adopt hybrid cloud environments."

“No brand is more respected in IT than IBM,” said Blue Box Founder and CTO Jesse Proudman. “Blue Box is building a similarly respected brand in OpenStack. Together, we will deliver the technology and products businesses need to give their application developers an agile, responsive infrastructure across public and private clouds. This acquisition signals the beginning of new OpenStack options delivered by IBM. Now is the time to arm customers with more efficient development, delivery and lower cost solutions than they've seen thus far in the market.”
MyPOV – The usual quotes – no comment needed.

IBM currently plans to continue to support Blue Box clients and enhance their technologies while allowing these organizations to take advantage of the broader IBM portfolio. […]
MyPOV – Key statement. Blue Box customers should contact IBM asap to make sure they can keep the services that matter to them.

Overall MyPOV

A good move for IBM, opens new service offerings to the IBM Cloud portfolio. Given the recent acquisition at EMC and Cisco, it looks like the private cloud is alive and well. To a certain point that is a failure of ‘pure’ public cloud players like AWS and Google, it looks like they have not been able to convince CIOs to move all their load to a public cloud setup. Will be interesting how the mix of private cloud – e.g. the ones managed with BlueBox – vs public cloud will end up in a few years. And IBM listens to customers, wants more cloud revenue, so as much as it can get that running private clouds, IBM will of course do that…

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Couchbase unveils N1QL and updates the NoSQL Performance Wars

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

A number of press releases by Couchbase crossed the wires and the may have a deep impact on the No SQL / BigData market – so let’s look at them quickly.

The press releases can be found here

A new programming language – N1QL – I have been critical on attempts to create new programming languages in the past (see e.g. on SAP River here). In general the world does not need more programming languages, unless they can clearly produce benefits to programmers and application architecture. In the case of N1QL (pronounced Nickel), Couchbase tries to bring SQL to document /JSON formats. That is new and addresses a pain point / tradeoff that had to be made in the past when choosing a database for a next generation application. As N1QL is SQL compatible, Couchbase wants to tap into the large SQL developer ecosystem. The question will be how much understanding of document formats will the SQL developer need to acquire to build performing applications, and how much of that can be automated by the Couchbase framework for the programming language. From the endorsements that Couchbase has garnered in the press release it is clear that there is certainly value being created by N1QL.

I should learn later in San Jose today how Couchbase can show efficiency gains with N1QL and will keep you posted.

Performance Wars – Round 2 – Earlier this week MongoDB published a performance report done by a 3rd party that showed superior performance of MongoDB over Cassandra and Couchbase (see Event Report here). No surprise Couchbase has shot back claiming that performance report is not fully transparent on all aspects of the test and more importantly, that tests show superior performance and TCO for Couchbase. We will be at Couchbase’s user conference later today and certainly learn more on the topic.

From these spats we can learn that performance really matters for NoSQL databases, which again shows that enterprises are moving their next generation applications into more mission and performance critical use cases than before. And that’s a good sign for enterprises and the industry.

And finally: As useful and important performance tests are – they always struggle on the comparison side. And every customer situation is different, so we recommend to take them as one measurement point, but strongly recommend customers to run their own benchmarks for critical performance pieces.

MyPOV

A good start for Couchbase Connect, Couchbase also unveiled the preview of its 4.0 server – so there will be lots of things to talk about at the 49ers stadium in Santa Clara for the next days. Stay tuned.

Resources

Inside the 9 Cloud Trends Every CXO Needs to Know in 2015

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

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Updates to HP Helion Portfolio - a commentary

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

HP is having its yearly HP Discover conference right now in Las Vegas, and (finally - we have been waiting for some time) has clarified its cloud plans.

The press release can be found here - let's dissect the press release in our usual commentary style:

LAS VEGAS – June 2, 2015 – Today at HP Discover 2015, HP announced updates to the HP Helion portfolio that will help enterprises realize the benefits of transitioning to a hybrid infrastructure. HP introduced HP Helion CloudSystem 9.0, the next release of its flagship integrated enterprise cloud solution, and enhancements to HP Helion Managed Cloud Services to manage enterprise workloads in a secure hosted cloud environment.

MyPOV – It has been quiet around HP Helion for a while – so it is good to more activity, right in time for HP Discover 2015. The wording with ‘help to transition to a hybrid infrastructure’ is interesting – as most enterprises already live and breathe in one today. But certainly there are a number of (HP customer?) enterprises left that are only looking at this.

Enterprises today spend the majority of IT budgets – by some estimates as high as 90 percent – on maintaining existing systems. HP estimates enterprises can reduce IT maintenance costs by approximately 40 percent by migrating existing systems to a cloud-based architecture. This can free-up the capital enterprise IT departments need to modernize application development and pursue new revenue generating opportunities.

MyPOV – A very good pitch for cloud in general, let’s read on if HP can make it tangible / unique why customers should use Helion.

“Enterprise customers have a range of needs in moving to the cloud—some need to cloud-enable traditional workloads, while others seek to build next generation ‘cloud native’ apps using modern technologies like OpenStack®, Cloud Foundry® and Docker,” said Bill Hilf, senior vice president, HP Helion Product and Service Management. “The expanded support for multiple hypervisors and cloud environments in HP Helion CloudSystem 9.0 gives enterprises and service providers added flexibility to gain cloud benefits for their existing and new applications.”

MyPOV – Hilf mentions what is making this announcement unique – support for multiple hypervisors and cloud environments (aka IaaS providers).

A single, flexible cloud solution for diverse cloud requirements
HP Helion CloudSystem is an integrated, end-to-end, private cloud solution, built to help customers realize the benefits of a hybrid infrastructure—designed for traditional and cloud native workloads, enabling automation, orchestration and control across multiple heterogeneous clouds, workloads and technologies.

MyPOV – First time it comes across to me that HP Helion Cloudsystem is a private cloud solution (only). But then HP says it is more allowing cross cloud orchestration. So it is actually a hybrid cloud management system.

HP Helion CloudSystem 9.0 expands support for multiple hypervisors and multiple clouds to provide enterprises and service providers with maximum flexibility. Additionally,

HP Helion CloudSystem 9.0 integrates HP Helion OpenStack and the HP Helion Development Platform to provide customers an enterprise grade open source platform for cloud native application development and infrastructure. […]

MyPOV – So CloudSystem 9.0 will orchestrate loads across IaaS providers, hypervisors, can use OpenStack and finally integrates with the HP PaaS. Hope got it right.

HP Helion CloudSystem 9.0 features/benefits include:

· Simultaneous support for multiple cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, HP Helion Public Cloud, OpenStack technology and VMware, with the ability to fully control where workloads reside

MyPOV – When HP will deliver this, it will be very attractive to enterprises.

· The latest release of HP Helion OpenStack, exposing OpenStack software APIs to simplify and speed development and integration with other clouds and offering developer-friendly add-ons with the HP Helion Development Platform based on Cloud Foundry

MyPOV – So we have support for OpenStack environment and for the HP PaaS, which uses Cloud Foundry (note that CloudFoundry itself is also bringing cross cloud capabilities, just last week it announced support for Microsoft Azure).

· Support for multiple hypervisors, now including Microsoft Hyper-V, Red Hat KVM, VMware vSphere, as well as bare metal deployments, offering customers additional choice and avoiding vendor lock-in

MyPOV – Equally a good move – allowing support for a number of leading hypervisors. For now we notice the absence of AWS XEN hypervisor.

· Support for AWS-compatible private clouds through integration with HP Helion Eucalyptus, giving customers the flexibility to deploy existing AWS workloads onto clouds they control

MyPOV – That should take care of AWS XEN support.

· Support for unstructured data through the Swift OpenStack Object Storage project

MyPOV – Good to integrate another OpenStack initiative. Underlines HP’s commitment to OpenStack.

· The latest version of HP Cloud Service Automation, providing the management capabilities to control hybrid cloud environments and a built-in path to support distributed compute, efficient object storage and rapid cloud native application development

MyPOV – Good to see an automation offering to tie this all together, this is an offering with substantial complexity and enterprises will need at least a good automation tool to pull this hybrid cloud offering off.

· An intuitive setup model delivered as a virtual appliance, allowing for installation in hours

MyPOV – Good move, let’s not forget HP sells hardware, customer buy hardware from HP – so appliances make adoption and setup significantly easier.

HP Helion CloudSystem 9.0 is available as standalone software supporting a multiple vendor hardware environment or as a fully-integrated blade-based or hyper-converged infrastructure with HP ConvergedSystem. Availability is planned for later this year. […]

MyPOV – Interesting – would be good for HP to name the ‘other’ hardware environments and what kind of support customers can expect, compared with running CloudSystem with HP hardware. This is the ‘seam’ for hardware vendor based OpenStack offerings, and it will be key to see how far HP goes here.

HP Financial Services’ IT investment and consumption offerings are available to help enterprises acquire HP Helion CloudSystem 9.0, in line with their hybrid IT transformation strategy.

MyPOV – Always a good move and a substantial part of HP hardware sales.

“The digital age is disrupting the entertainment industry. Consumers want entertainment on demand, where they want it, on any device. To address this challenge, IT must take the lead on the digital journey,” said John Herbert, executive vice president and CIO, 20th Century Fox. “The Fox Media Cloud is built on HP Helion CloudSystem, supporting the distribution of broadcast quality TV episodes and full length feature films. HP Helion CloudSystem has helped our transition to an internal service provider model, enabling the delivery of hybrid cloud services while maintaining control, to provide new services faster, while ensuring high reliability and performance. This has provided us the ability to support the tremendous growth of our digital businesses while saving millions.”

MyPOV – A nice and good quote from a blue chip customer, but (sorry 20th Century Fox) not the A+ player in the streaming media space. Interesting how media companies and IaaS / Cloud providers search and find each other. The media companies need to rebuild their IT infrastructure for the new streaming and on demand business model, and the cloud elasticity is a great solution towards this. A great challenge, too – so will be good to get some live stats from 20th century Fox and HP in a few quarters.

Customers increasingly rely on experienced channel partners to help guide them on their cloud implementations. With 56 percent of enterprise and mid-market customers working through a partner to build their private clouds, HP CloudSystem 9.0 presents a significant opportunity for HP partners.

“Comport is automating many operations required to support hospital IT infrastructure,” said Jack Margossian, president and CEO, Comport Healthcare Solutions. “It’s the beginning of an important transition in the data center, from a cost center to an efficient service center. IT can spin up and manage applications and data that support patient care in minutes instead of months, using toolsets they know. Using HP Helion CloudSystem, we are able to free up IT resources and reduce costs, enabling us to build new services while still providing for public cloud or SaaS resources. We look forward to introducing HP Helion CloudSystem 9.0 to our customers, with its additional flexibility and manageability.”

MyPOV – It is clear that HP needs (and wants) partners to support Helion. The business of many of the traditional hardware partners is in turmoil and most of them are getting into some kind of cloud business. As such they are looking for cloud operating systems that are widely connected and enable to run on many different IaaS platforms. That’s where Helion certainly is an attractive value proposition. But it does not allow HP by itself to compete e.g. with AWSCloud, Azure, Google Cloud Platform as it will be a partner offering and levels of service and economies of scale on the purchasing side are challenging in this go to market approach.

An enhanced enterprise-grade virtual cloud environment
HP Helion Managed Cloud Services provides enterprise security and high availability capabilities needed to run mission critical business applications, while meeting customers’ data sovereignty, regulatory and compliance requirements, and backed by enterprise grade service level agreements.

MyPOV – Data residency is a key aspect and consideration, HP needs to show which locations and jurisdictions it will support when. IBM has thrown down the challenge to all IaaS providers here with the goal to be present in 48 locations by end of 2015.

To broaden this offering and deliver greater value and flexibility to customers, HP Helion Managed Cloud Services will launch into beta HP Helion OpenStack Managed Private Cloud and HP Helion Eucalyptus Managed Private Cloud, both of which will be consumable as a service via an easy access portal.

In addition to these new beta offerings, HP Helion Managed Cloud Services will support the development of cloud native applications within a managed cloud service via the HP Helion Development Platform and automation of select virtual private cloud services.

MyPOV – Seems repetitive on the press release – and HP will have to explain when to use which Managed Private Cloud offering. Especially when Eucalyptus capabilities are also desired, and how to combine the two offerings. I am not sure why HP has not combined them already.

HP Helion Managed Cloud Services features/benefits include:

· New automated provisioning capabilities through a self-service portal based on HP Cloud Service Automation, enabling clouds to be deployed more quickly

· Support for multiple platforms to enable hybrid cloud proof-of-concepts using HP Helion OpenStack and HP Helion Eucalyptus

· Cloud native application development capabilities through integration with the HP Helion Development Platform, allowing enterprises to rapidly develop, deploy and deliver cloud native apps

HP Helion Managed Cloud enhancements are planned for availability later this year.

MyPOV – Another good recap what can be down across HP Helion OpenStack and / Eucalyptus and what you can build on HP’s PaaS.

Global enterprise support when it counts
HP offers Global Datacenter Care and Support in over 130 countries. Customers can call 24x7x365 and receive support in more than 30 languages, for any hardware platform, OS or hypervisor.

MyPOV – This is an important service that enterprises clearly value. It is not clear if this extend to partner data centers and which countries are covered by this service by HP owned data centers. That is what HP competes on and it will be key to clarify sooner than later.

Overall MyPOV

A very functional reach and ambitious plan by HP to make Helion a ‘Switzerland’ for cloud services – from a support of competitor IaaS, different data center deployment options all the way down to the hypervisor. But it is an announcement and we look forward to HP deliver all of this, which certainly can’t be easy, but will make HP an attractive player for cloud. Enterprises that have been slow to adopt cloud will certainly take notice as the offering seems low risk as it keeps many deployment doors open.

On the concern side – HP will need to deliver and reach similar economies of scale like its competitors. By being open to 3rd party IaaS HP creates value for customers, but loses load, which is critical to reach economies of scale in the cloud market. The partner bases approach is key for HP, too – but has its challenges when it comes to consistent level of service and delivery.

On the bright side it looks like HP has found its running shoes and is racing towards an attractive goal / location. But it needs to get there, get partners on board, get customers to adopt and build next generation application on its cloud. It’s a long way, but good for HP getting there.

Resources

Inside the 9 Cloud Trends Every CXO Needs to Know in 2015

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Announcement: Lithium And Microsoft Form Strategic Alliance

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…...

Lithium Technologies and Microsoft Corporation have signed a strategic alliance agreement to integrate Lithium social interactions and community data into Microsoft Dynamics CRM. So finally we can integrate customer records with community and social… there’s an ROI model in there! The agreement extends Lithium’s industry-leading community platform to customers who rely on Microsoft Dynamics and offers enterprises more capabilities and choice in their customer relationship management (CRM) needs. Lithium provides a community platform with more than 100 million members participating in Lithium-powered community every month. Microsoft Dynamics has distinguished itself as the leading customer engagement solution for delivering business insights that help companies of all sizes grow and delight customers. The close integration of Lithium community data within Microsoft Dynamics offers businesses greater insights from the wealth of customer signals embedded in communities that can drive better customer experiences. Will be looking for case studies of how the integration works with real customers and how they benefit.]

Rob Tarkoff, president and CEO of Lithium Technologies said, “We are proud to be a strategic community partner for Microsoft Dynamics. Our customers want to extend the power of Total Community across their intelligence and data infrastructures. Working closely with Microsoft, we now make both possible for a much broader set of our customers—and bring the power of our platform to businesses who rely on Microsoft Dynamics every day.”

Bob Stutz, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Dynamics CRM added, “As an established leader in social interactions and community data, Lithium is an ideal community partner for Microsoft Dynamics. Our customers rely on Dynamics CRM for insights and capabilities to help them better engage with their customers. Through this strategic alliance, we can now offer access to the rich customer data available in Lithium communities to enable organizations to take their digital and social efforts to the next level—and better inform other marketing and service efforts throughout the enterprise.”

MY POV: Connecting social, digital, CRM and community are key to delivering a great customer experience. These two companies are forging a great partnership. Exactly how it works and seeing it deployed will something I will look forward to. While announcements are great, its really when customers are getting an ROI from the integration that counts with me. We need a way to give attribution to digital and social and connecting these types of technologies is a great step in the right direction.

@drnatalie, Constellation Research Covering Marketing, Sales and Customer Service using CRM and Customer Analytics to Drive Amazing Customer Experiences.

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MongoDB Adds BI Tie, Gears Up For Growth

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,…...

MongoDB World 2015 Event Report: NoSQL database vendor previews connector for BI and data-visualization options like Tableau, Qlik, IBM Cognos, and SAP BusinessObject. The bigger story is behind-the-scenes preparation for growth.

MongoDB highlighted lots of new product features at this week’s MongoDB World 2015 event in New York, and it also made a point of sharing lots of code with the many developers among the 2,000 or so attendees at the event.

What was more remarkable was just how much time, effort and, clearly, money the company is pouring into the development of the business itself. The scope and scale of change was clear during analyst briefings by MongoDB’s new top-management team, led by Dev Ittycheria, who joined the company as president & CEO last August. The company has built a state-of-art, integrated sales and marketing machine to help MongoDB evolve from “a compelling alternative into the new default choice,” as Ittycheria put it.

Dev Ittycheria, MongoDB’s president & CEO, promises faster innovation and a stronger company at MongoDB World 2015.

More on MongoDB’s bigger ambitions in a moment, but first here’s the lowdown on the new product enhancements, which are set for beta release this summer and general availability in MongoDB 3.2 by the end of the year:

Connector for BI. This SQL-access option will open up MongoDB data for visualization and analysis within Tableau, Qlik, IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects and other BI products. It’s read-only (not read/write) querying through MongoDB’s Aggregation Framework feature, so it’s strictly for analysis, not SQL-based database development.
Dynamic lookups. Another BI-minded feature, this feature will support joins across MongoDB collections, and it’s also supported by the MongoDB Aggregation Framework.

Encryption for data at rest. Aimed at healthcare, financial services, retail, and government organizations, this feature will encrypt data at rest, with keys secured via the Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP).
Document validation. This feature lets you apply rules to verify data types, values, mandatory fields and so on. It’s strictly an option, so you don’t have to validate data, but you can apply this feature to one or more fields to enforce data quality and consistency.
Schema visualization. This graphical interface, code named mongoScout, will give developers and DBAs a view into the structure of documents and entire collections so they can see what fields of data are available and what percentage of documents contain those fields.

Customers heard all about these new features during Tuesday’s opening keynote by Eliot Horowitz, co-founder and CTO. On Monday, Ittycheria focused mainly on the company itself. Ittycheria came to MongoDB by way of venture capital firm OpenView Partners, but he was previously president of BMC Software and, before that, CEO of BladeLogic, a company that BMC acquired.

MongoDB raised a whopping $150 million in venture capital in 2013 and another $80 million early this year. It’s Ittycheria’s job to make sure that money is put to good use. During the analyst briefings, Ittycheria hires including Carlos Delatorre, a BMC veteran who’s now chief revenue officer, and Meagen Eisenberg, CMO, recently recruited from fast-growing DocuSign, detailed MongoDB’s sophisticated new sales-and-marketing machine.

MongoDB knows it has plenty of fans among developers, between 10 million software downloads and 35,000-plus MongoDB User Group members. The company’s paid-customer count stands at about 2,000 firms. Executives admit the biggest competitor is the company’s own, unsupported open-source software.

In recent months, MongoDB has hired armies of new salespeople to tap into scaled-up content-marketing, lead-gen and lead-nurturing efforts. The plan for converting more customers to supported MongoDB Enterprise software is roughly this:

Identify and nurture the many MongoDB users and apps sprouting up, grassroots style, within companies.
Spot the CIOs, CTOs and other IT managers within these companies and connect the dots among the many proof points of adoption. This naturally opens eyes to the need for support and enterprise-grade management features.
Raise the level of the discussion up to the C-level, moving away from features and functions and toward agility, innovation and goals around transforming the business.

MongoDB won’t displace Oracle or any other relational database if the app is about conventional structured-data apps, Ittycheria acknowledged. MongoDB is going after next-gen apps that are about digital and mobile transformation and driving new business models. In that world, speed-to-market is everything and “slow is the new down,” as Ittycheria quipped.

MyPOV: Growing Fast Versus Growing Up

When I attended my first MongoDB World (then called MongoDB New York) back in 2012, there were only 900 or so attendees and the crowds was even more heavily skewed to developers. There were more startups and fewer Fortune 500 customers. It’s an apt metaphor for a company that moved up in the corporate and world.

On the technology front, MongoDB put a big emphasis here on its acquired WiredTiger storage engine and new ability to scale – an area where competitors including DataStax (the Cassandra developer and support firm) and Couchbase have been vocal critics. MongoDB is clearly trying to put distance between itself and these competitors, and the pluggable storage engine introduced in MongoDB 3.0 is giving the company and its customers more options to deal with scale. For example, Facebook was here demonstrating the use of its RocksDB and a storage engine teamed with Mongo to handle super-high-scale, low-latency, write-intensive applications.

The buzz, the packed sessions and the developer enthusiasm at MongoDB World 2015 were much the same as they were back in 2012. But the top executive ranks have changed, with Ittycheria bringing in new people to drive a scaled-up, more sophisticated approach as a vendor. It’s probably too early to say whether the new team has accelerated MongoDB’s already strong momentum – though they cited robust pipeline figures — but it’s clear the company is making strides mature the company, as well as the technology, to meet enterprise-grade demands at scale.

Have a question about your big data/analytics strategy? Let's talk! Contact me here.

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From the Vault: “AAA” Rated Prospects

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…...

As time goes on, there is more and more content buried deep in the archives of this blog, so every now and then, I like to reach into “the vault” and revisit an old post. So this week while I’m on vacation, I thought I’d bring back this piece on my system of identifying your top sales prospects. Enjoy!

—–

One of the most fundamental aspects of selling tickets is identifying the people that are most likely to purchase (the “Glengarry” leads, for those Glengarry Glen Ross fans out there). You want your sales staff to have the best leads possible in order to increase the chance that they will be able to close sales. This seems pretty straightforward, but making sure you have the best leads is not as simple as it seems. In many situations, your list of current and former customers isn’t large enough to reach your sales goals, and purchased lead lists can be a mixed bag in terms of quality, accuracy and relevance. So what does it take for an individual to be a top sales prospect?

To make this easy to remember, I’m taking a page from “bond ratings.” If you’re familiar with finance, you probably know that AAA is the highest rating that a bond can have. Well, in order to identify the best leads, you also want to shoot for an “AAA” rating. In our case, the three A’s you need to focus on are:

AFFINITY
ABILITY
ACTION

Let’s break this down one “A” at a time:

Affinity: This is the most fundamental element of the three A’s – clearly, your best sales prospects tend to be consumers that are already fans of your team. The degree of their affinity usually correlates with their purchase behavior. Putting aside the other A’s for a moment, the more affinity you have for a team, the more you tend to spend on tickets, either in quantity, quality or both. A more casual fan with only moderate affinity can still be a customer, but their purchases will be smaller or less frequent.

Ability: Being a fan doesn’t mean you are going to buy tickets. Unfortunately, for many die-hard fans, tickets are simply too expensive to purchase, at least with any regularity. So having the ability to buy, meaning the prospect has the financial resources to afford tickets, is critical to identifying top leads. You can also think of this “A” in terms of “affluence,” especially when selling high-value items such as club seats and premium season tickets.

Action: This third “A” is often overlooked, but is still quite critical in identifying the best leads. Action is all about prospects that have shown a willingness to purchase your product, or a comparable product. For example, you could have a very affluent individual that has been a fan of team X for his entire life. However, he prefers to watch his team on his 80? super-HD TV in his “private theater” room. In this case, he’s missing the third A since he’s never shown an interest in the act of attending a game in-person. In addition, action does not limit you to your own previous customers. Any related purchasing action (concert tickets, merchandise, etc.) can improve their quality as a prospect.

The other nice thing about this “model” is that it breaks down into components very well. We know the best prospects fit into all three categories, but you don’t always have the luxury of knowing about all three A’s. As a rule, three A’s are better than two A’s, which are better than just one A. For example, you might know that someone is a fan and has purchased tickets, but you don’t know what they can truly afford. Or your organization might be able purchase a lead list of high-income individuals who spend money on entertainment, but you don’t know if they are fans of your team. You should always strive to have information on all three A’s, but when that’s not possible, you can try to manage with two of the three. In these scenarios, your conversion rate will be lower, but with more quantity and time, you can still achieve your sales goals.

By the way, technically there is a 4th “A” that I haven’t mentioned, but it should go without saying – AREA. You should always focus on the most logical geographic area, usually a 50 to 75 mile radius around your stadium location. It is not worth the time and financial resources to extend your sales efforts beyond this area, as the likelihood of sales drops dramatically. I’ve written a bit about this before when reviewing a team’s direct mail campaign.

If you keep these three A’s in mind as you are building your lead generation and data modeling strategy, I’m confident you will see the results in your conversion rates, and in turn, in the satisfaction of your sales staff!

Next-Generation Customer Experience Chief Customer Officer

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HireVue Secures $45 Million in Funding to Fuel Team Acceleration Software

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Right in time for its yearly Digital Disruption user conference taking part in Park City, HireVue announced a new round of funding.

Let’s dissect the press release in our usual commentary style:

SILICON SLOPES, UTAH (June 2, 2015) – Team Acceleration software provider HireVue, today announced it has closed $45 million in Series E funding led by Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV), a leading provider of growth equity for premier technology companies and investors in Zillow, Netflix, ExactTarget and Facebook. HireVue’s previous investors, including Sequoia Capital, Granite Ventures, Investor Growth Capital, Peterson Ventures and Rose Park Advisors’ Disruptive Innovation Fund also participated in the round. Nari Ansari, a principal at TCV, will join HireVue’s board of directors.

MyPOV – A great list of VC investors is putting in more money into HireVue. Good VCs are not a guarantee for success, but increase the likeliness of success. So a good sign that HireVue keeps attracting capital from successful investors.

Today, HireVue also announced the launch of its Team Acceleration Software, which puts the power to build and coach great teams, fueled by digital video and predictive data analytics, directly in the hands of business managers everywhere.

MyPOV – So HireVue is going beyond its traditional scope of video recruiting, where the vendor originally started 10+ years ago, into a larger automation space, the overall productivity of teams. And in the twenty-first century that means that teams need to accelerate, do more with less and faster. So Team Acceleration is a good name for a new category it looks like HireVue is trying to create.

“The new world is about empowering managers and teams - not slowing them down with administrative tasks like time tracking, compliance, benefits and payroll,” said Mark Newman, founder and CEO, HireVue. “Team Acceleration is the way and philosophy that today’s most successful companies are built on. The market opportunity is even bigger than talent management. HireVue customers grow faster, are more profitable, and deliver awesome customer experiences by building and coaching the world’s best teams through our platform. We’re excited to partner with TCV as we push to our next phase of growth and put the power of our Team Acceleration software in the hands of business leaders everywhere.”

MyPOV – Good to hear Newman describing that space. And he is likely right with the Team Acceleration market being bigger than the traditional Talent Management market, which struggles by itself with the failure of the first wave of Talent Management that mostly did not succeed transforming enterprises talent management practices. In the end, more managers care about their team’s productivity than about classic talent management, which in many cases is being perceived as something coming ‘from the top’ and needing to be done ‘for the boss’. Getting done with more work and getting home earlier, or to have more free time in general, are more desirable and attractive for managers.

The funding and Team Acceleration software launch capitalize on other recent company momentum including:
· Named one of the Top “10 Most Promising Companies in America” by Forbes
· Named the fourth fastest-growing cloud app of the first quarter of 2015, alongside mainstream apps including FitBit and Slack.*
· Record fiscal year 2014 growth
· Working with approximately 25 percent of the Fortune 100
· Hosted its second Annual Digital Disruption user conference

MyPOV – Congrats to the HireVue management team and employees to these accolades.

Overall MyPOV

Software vendors are often compelled to create their own category, and then trying to define it to their own advantages. Certainly legitimate and HireVue is no exception, but the more successful attempts to this approach are characterized by a substantial need for the category in the market. And here HireVue is spot on – individuals and teams need to accelerate, both out of their own, self-preserving intrinsic motivation, as well as a demands coming from the outside, from management. Even more importantly, HireVue has a very good record in the recruiting space and even more importantly in using ‘true’ analytics to its advantage (more here).

Congratulations to HireVue on funding and the launch of a new category, we will be watching how well the vendor will be able to fill the vision and then execute to the advantage of its customers.

Resources

Inside the Future of HCM

Ten Trends Chief People Officers Need to Know in a Digital Age

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MongoDB keeps up the momentum in product and go to market

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

I had the opportunity to participate in MongoDB’s user conference MongoDBWorld in New York this week. The conference is well attended with approx. 2000 attendees, remarkably most of them ‘doers’ that are directly involved in bringing MongoDB projects live recently or planning to do so soon.

Here are my Top 3 Takeaways from the event:

MongoDB is growing – Though the vendor is not breaking out numbers, there are some key metrics that show how well the vendor is doing. For instance, MongoDB has broken the 10M download mark. Certainly nothing to guarantee revenue, but it makes a large qualified market for MongoDB to sell its licenses. The vendor shared that it has now 2000+ subscription customers and over 300k people have taken MongoDB education classes. The Opensource project has 35000 MongoDB user groups (MUGs) and MongoDB now has over 1000 partners. All impressive numbers that show that MongoDB is offering an attractive product.

Key product Progress – On the product side MongoDB is making progress, with a focus on the recent addition on the storage layer, something the vendor did not have at its first MongoDBWorld a year ago (more here). All key product advances have been neatly packed into press releases (they are here) – and let’s comment on them:

Performance Wars to re-start - MongoDB claims the performance crown over Cassandra and Couchbase (see here) – In a test performed by United Software Associates using the Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark (YCSB). The test throws the performance challenge out to the two other databases and I am sure both vendors will respond sooner than later (Couchbase also has their user conference this week) – so stayed tuned.

From my perspective: As useful and important performance tests are – they always struggle on the comparison side. And every customer situation is different, so we recommend to take them as one measurement point, but strongly recommend customers to run their own benchmarks for critical performance pieces.

Visualization matters – In the past BI tools / visualization vendors like Tableau, SAP Business Objects, Qlik and IBM Cognos have used MongoDB as a data store for more advanced and more complex content. Now MongoDB turns this around by providing a standard connector for these tools, supported by MongoDB. Certainly a better solution for MongoDB customers as they get their database of choice being able to support a variety of front end tools. For sure this will start another discussion on back end vs. front ends in business data, but it is good to see the backend side to catch up. And showing MongoDB’s market power and customer needs, MongoDB will start with Tableau first, no surprise. But it shows the power of MongoDB, getting Tableau on stage at the Day 2 keynote (similar as having Docker CEO Gollub on Day 1).

More coming in MongoDB 3.2 – With the upcoming release of MongoDB schedule for later this year, MongoDB is pushing the yardstick further out in regards of value creation for customers. Customer want to make sure documents are being useful and valid for their purposes, so document validation is a key new capability. But when you store vital information in documents, you must secure them, so MongoDB adds encryption for data at rest. Providing the above mentioned visualization support certainly required MongoDB to create more view across collections, but why have the capability locked up for visualization only, so MongoDB exposes it as a separate capability to developers, too. And lastly souping up administration tools is never a bad choice for a technology product, the new mongoScout allows administrators and developers to understand better what is going in their MongoDB databases.

Full Sessions at MongoDBWorld

Once again, it is land & expand – The popular go to market and sales approach of open source vendors was part of the briefings (see the Alteryx and Acumatica approach to it here and here). It was good to see both CMO Eisenberg and CRO Delatorre walk us through the go to market in synch on all key topics, such harmony is seldom found between a CMO and CRO / Head of Sales. With 10 million downloads it is clear that MongoDB needs to carefully decide where to invest marketing $s, sales resource follow up, upsell opportunities etc. It looks like the team has a good handle on the process, the investors are investing more in go to market, with the focus being business growth in Europe and Asia, with an overall goal to sell more through partners. After all CEO Ittycheria stated that a working demand side is key for the success of startups, so it is clear there is a focus on this (key) side of the business.

Very MongoDB Green

MyPOV

A very good user conference for MongoDB, that is growing well in both product and go to market capabilities. Given some executive changes, including the CEO, quite a remarkable outcome, not many startups come out strong after management changes. On the product side there has been more continuity with Horowitz at the helm and MongoDB is looking for more scale and growth of its subscription sales potential. By pointing to the popular visualization area, the vendor very likely is betting on a winner. Enterprises struggle often to make visualization tools work and to take them live in general, so making this integration easier creates value for enterprises and on the flipside revenue potential for MongoDB.

On the concern side MongoDB needs to manage growth well. A good problem to have, nonetheless a challenging one. Investors and customers are getting used to growth in market numbers and product capabilities quickly, and delivering on these consistently is not an easy task. MongoDB has shown it can tackle complex engineering projects with its storage plans, but that process is far from over and needs to be managed well with high quality releases, good knowledge dissemination as well as partner uptake and education. A lot of things to orchestrate.

The good news is that MongoDB does not face a competitor with an identical (or very, very similar) value proposition. That means that as long as MongoDB can keep up a differentiating story to the incumbent database vendors that enterprises use, and as long as MongoDB keeps executing - it will do well. We will be watching and analyzing.

Resources

Inside the 9 Cloud Trends Every CXO Needs to Know in 2015

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Lithium LiNC15: Customer Experience Environment and Klout

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

Analyst Day Review of Lithium LiNC15

On this first day, we heard from not only the executives at Lithium but also customers. One study Lithium engaged in showed that while 49% executives thought that bad customer experience would drive customers away, the actual number is 89%. Perhaps the value of customer experience and customer service has finally come into it’s own. For someone who have covered this area for over 20 years, it’s great to see. One of the key issues with respect to this is that CEO’s are realizing that because customers will leave, they are expecting someone in their organization to step up to the plate and lead customer experience. Sometimes it’s the CMO, sometimes its the Customer Service Professionals, sometimes it’s the CIO and sometimes, when it’s not happening, the CEO will hire a Chief Digital Officer or Chief Experience Officer to make sure the customer experience is changing and the company will be around long-term. It’s an opportunity that someone inside a company needs to stand up and take on. But it is not without risk.

Rob Tarkoff (@rtarkoff) CEO of Lithium talked about why Lithium exits and why it’s so key to brands. The reason? Customers have extreme expectations. Buyers have forever changed and they want more, want it now and want it easy and enjoyable. Customers trust their peers; not brands. iGen doesn’t want to hear from brands; they want to hear from their peers they trust. They are ok hearing from and working with experts from brands but they prefer peers. The stats keep showing the same thing: 78% trust their peers, yet 14 trust advertising. Yet there is still a ton more money spent in advertising than customer experience. I hope that changes and soon.

Four Main Problems that Get Resolved in Branded Online Communities

Rob explained that Lithium exits to build trust between brands and people by solving 4 main problems:

Helping brands with conversations happening on multiple digital channels –that many the brands don’t own or control
Brands don’t know “who is who” –they need the identity of who a customer is and their passion and problems that the customer needs addressing. That’s why Klout was acquired and is integrated and it’s not just about one’s influence, but also scored by what people are passionate about
Brands have found it difficult to scale to tame the beast of social media; volume of social customer care is escalating and increasing a preference as a channel – it’s no wonder – the contact center is necessary, but not where you will always get the best service
Brands are wondering where the ROI of social is. Most software companies aren’t proving out the impact of social and digital transformation effectively. They are not answering where’s the ROI and the business impact. Lithium feels it is not about likes and impressions – it’s about dollars saved and dollars earned. What’s exciting is how many brands are making money—becoming a revenue engine- using online, branded communities.

More details on the study conducted:

93% of brands believe they are adapting to digital disruption and transformation. But do those solutions really have scale and lasting impact? That’s what is really needed and more difficult to do without a platform.
82% customer have higher expectations compared to just 3 years ago
65% of brands have unbelievable expectations to innovate
58% of brands feel increased competition from competitors.

So what’s the bottom-line? Lithium feels customer experience is in the power of the platform –a platform that’s build to deal with the customer experience in the digital world. Lithium feels there are 3 parts to this:

Connect on social channels
Engage with branded communities
Understand your most valuable prospects and customers

And customer answers questions and share experiences and brand thus can grow revenue , reduce costs and improve NPS.

What about the acquisition of Klout? Klout provides customer insights that are bases on what people say about themselves and what others say about them. What is important is the people with passion and express that online- it’s what is key to brands and brands need to prioritize customer’s expectations and experiences and the Klout product helps them to do this. Lithium has more than 700 M profiles. Brands need to get to know these folks.

Why Does Lithium Win Deals? Lithium deals with the complete set of stakeholders who participate in a company- everyone who delivers products or service and helps deliver a better overall customer experience. What this means is that customer service is the new marketing and the customer experience and vice versa. The key to creating better customer experiences is a community – peer to peer interactions where internal experts inside a company help customers; external experts (outside a company) also help a customer as well as people inside a brand. This is the total community – branded communities, social networks and third party social networks and what Lithium offers. It’s true that brands that have their own branded communities great better customer experiences.

It’s been a great first day. Looking forward to the actual conference, starting tomorrow! Look for the tweets at #LiNC15

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