Microsoft SQL Server 2016: First Take

Doug Henschen

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Monday announced the next major release of the company’s flagship database management system, Microsoft SQL Server 2016. It's a significant milestone for a product has grown into a $5-billion-per-year business for Microsoft, second only to Oracle Database in revenue.

Introduced at this week’s Ignite Conference in Chicago, the new database will be released as a public preview this summer. As the name suggests, Microsoft SQL Server 2016 won’t see general availability until next year, but Microsoft offered plenty of feature tidbits to stoke anticipation. Here are a few highlights:

Stretch Database: A tie to the Microsoft Azure that lets you push warm database data or cold data into the cloud. Think cloud- or mobile-integrated apps with warm data or archiving of cold data.

In-memory enhancements: Last year Microsoft introduced in-memory OLTP for transactional application performance improvements. SQL Server 2016 will deliver in-memory analytics.

In-database analytics: The headline here is R integration, which certainly isn’t new in the industry. But given Microsoft’s recent Revolution Analytics acquisition, the company could do give Oracle and Teradata stiffer in-database analytics competition.

Always Encrypted. This feature will please the security crowd, as it will protect data at rest and in motion.

Diving deeper, the Stretch Database feature is about supporting hybrid scenarios. For example, as transactional tables grow in size, Stretch gives you a way to archive historical (cold) data. This reduced the size and cost of the core database deployment while maintaining fast performance. In a different hybrid scenario, operational (warm) data could be “stretched” to Azure to bring fresh data to a cloud- and/or mobile-integrated app.

In-Memory Analytics

Oracle promises both analytical and transactional performance gains through the Oracle In-Memory Database option introduced last year. Microsoft introduced in-memory analytics with its in-memory columnstore with SQL Server 2012. If focused purely on transaction processing gains with its In-Memory OLTP option for SQL Server 2014. With SQL Server 2016, Microsoft says in-memory columnstore enhancements will deliver up to 100X faster query performance for “real-time” operational analytics by running on data that is already benefitting from in-memory OLTP. This is a step up on the analytical side where Microsoft needed to show more in-memory performance improvement.

This in-memory option will become even more important when it’s made available as part of the Azure SQL Data Warehouse service announced last week at Microsoft’s Build Conference (see Holger Mueller’s complete coverage). This Azure cloud-based version of Microsoft SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse, due as a preview in June, will compete with Amazon Redshift and other followers in that category including IBM DashDB and HP Vertica OnDemand. All are columnar databases that can take advantage of memory, but I suspect Microsoft’s in-memory option could give it better memory capacity and control.

Of course, SAP has been touting both transactional and analytic performance benefits for years because its Hana platform is entirely in memory. The Oracle and Microsoft features are just that – add-ons to conventional databases that rely mostly on disk-based storage. The upside with this approach is that existing applications don’t have to be rebuilt to run on the new database. To take advantage of the in-memory feature (which is an extra-cost option on Oracle versus a build-in feature of Microsoft SQL Server), you use administrative features to place selected indexes in memory or to query against in-memory columns.

Built-in Advanced Analytics

For years now, data scientists have been pushing advanced analytic workloads into databases because they offer much more processing horsepower than dedicated analytic servers. What’s more, you save time because you don’t have to move data to a separate server for computation and then move result sets back to a data warehouse. The idea is to bring the analytics to the data instead of the other way around.

So in-database analysis is nothing new, but given that Microsoft now owns Revolution Analytics, it only makes sense to make the most of this vendor’s curated portfolio of R-language-based analytics into SQL Server. Revolution has had an in-database alliance in place with Teradata since 2013, and Microsoft says that's not going away in the wake of the acquisition. 

Microsoft will also build the Hadoop-access-tool PolyBase into SQL Server 2016, so you’ll be able to access unstructured data from Hadoop as well structured data within the database using T-SQL skills. Teradata and Oracle also offer Hadoop-data-access options, so we’ll need to see more details on the advantages of having PolyBase built into the database to understand just how it stands out.

First Take: Evolutionary, Not Revolutionary

All of these moves make sense, but they’re not industry firsts. Teradata has had the ability to move hot and cold data to speed- and cost-appropriate storage options for years. The novel twist with Stretch is that it’s moving data into the cloud. If it’s easy, or better still, automated, it could power novel hybrid apps, performance gains and real database license savings. We’ll see if Oracle tries to match a feature that could diminish database revenue.

The in-memory and in-database analytics features and Hadoop data access promised in SQL Server 2016 look like they’ll deliver state-of-the-industry rather than state-of-the-art capabilities. But these aren’t the only new features in store for the new database. Microsoft is also promising row-level security and dynamic data masking, native JSON support, faster backups, high-availability improvements and more. I’ll reserve final judgement until Microsoft takes the wraps off the preview release later this summer.

Data to Decisions Chief Information Officer Chief Digital Officer

Event Report - Microsoft Build - Microsoft really wants to make developers' lives easy

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

We had the opportunity to attend Microsoft’s Build conference in San Francisco. The conference is targeted at developers and development managers using Microsoft tools and technology stack. As traditional the conference sold out quickly and was as well attended as last year. Comparing it with other events held at Moscone (West), we can say that Microsoft attracts probably the biggest developer audience, especially considering international aspects…. In less than half a day I could hear all 5 other languages I speak on many occasions. But San Francisco was just the kickoff to an impressive 25 city world tour.

 

 

The leitmotiv of the conference was all about developer enablement on innovative platforms. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella went all the way back invoking the first Microsoft product – Basic – to exemplify that making developers productive is in the Microsoft DNA. But developers only build on platforms that are popular and that can monetize their work. So Nadella shared that Microsoft wants to see 1B Windows 10 devices 3-4 years after the launch.

Microsoft announced a ton of really interesting things, so very tough to select the Top 3 – but here you go:

Azure becomes the intelligence cloud – Microsoft has built out Azure to 19 regions, Guthrie said that over 1M servers now make up Azure and Microsoft will keep investing billions into the platform. Almost no surprise – Docker runs on Azure now – demonstrated by Russinovich. ‘salvaging’ a .Net application running in Docker on a Windows machine. And the same runs on Docker on Linux. So the formerly exclusive to Windows .Net runs now on Linux and Mac (preview for now). The benefit for developers is that they don’t need to rewrite .Net apps, of who often code and details are no longer as present. Instead of that Microsoft wants them to build new applications. For instance using the new Azure App Service, an improved SQL Server and more.

 

Azure stats shared at Build 2013-2015

SQL Server (or is it Azure DB?) grows up – Good to see Microsoft not forgetting that most enterprise applications need a RDBMS at some point, and Microsoft keeps investing into SQL Server. Guthrie shared that SQL Server DBs are created (and taken down) at a rate of 160k DB a day. Among many innovations the SQL Server elastic pool was the most exciting enhancement from my perspective. Azure uses an elastic data base pool, Microsoft said it uses machine learning to create a resource pool to pick the right resources, a huge de-mystification of the resource pool creation. Sizing is no longer a critical design step, but Azure will size database up and down. That elasticity is key for cost savings and performance and makes the capability critical for next generation applications. Elastic Database query across databases in the resource pool is shipping as a beta in a few weeks from now. 

 

The Azure Data Lake

 

 

 

 

 

On the BI / Analytics side Microsoft announced SQL Data Warehouse, creating the foundation for more advanced analytical services. SQL Datawarehouse can scale up and down dynamically, and it is easy to integrate all sorts of data (Guthrie mentioned SAP and Dynamics). Valuable code creating insights gleaned from machine learning can be wrapped as an API and made available via the Azure App Service. And Microsoft is certain that SQL Data Warehouse is more elastic than its major competitor, AWS Redshift. 

 

All Azure Analyic Services

And of course no conference without IoT – the coolest example was the NFL. Microsoft also announced the Azure Data Lake service, a feature rich version 1 to create the base for IoT projects. It exposes data via HDFS, opening itself to standard Hadoop jobs. It also supports Hadoop clusters built with Cloudera, Hortonworks and Pivotal. 
 

The Windows Universal App

Windows 10 makes Windows different – Nadella was clearly proud of the latest version of Windows, which also is now becoming one single platform, updated and run as a service with a unified access and delivery to platform features and code constructs build on top of Windows 10. The appeal to developers per Myerson was to make Windows 10 the most innovative platform to build applications on, mentioning Cortana intelligent voice recognition service, and e.g. the new Hololens experience. And the Universal Windows App that delivers the same binary across all the different Windows powered devices. Microsoft has thought this through, as it announced carrier billing, already integrated with 90 carriers. Enterprises will appreciate the creation of a Windows Store for Business. And Microsoft thinks that 3-4 years after the launch of Windows 10 there will be more than 1 B Windows 10 devices out there – eclipsing both the Apple (iOS) and Google (Android) ecosystems as Microsoft shared its ambitions. Microsoft created 4 new types of Windows applications: The first being web sites, with the capability to re-use existing code. And Win32 and .Net code will run on Windows 10 too. The coup is that Android applications can also run on Windows 10, using (my guess) and Android player, but also Java and C++ applications. And finally ObjectiveC applications can run (re-compiled) on Windows 10, too.

 

The 4 Applications that will power Microsoft to 1B Windows 10 devices

 

Analyst Tidbits

• Office goes standard to become a platform – Office gets easier to integrate and to add integrations, as Microsoft exposes unified APIs to Office, including group and security access. The Me-token is a powerful concept to get data out of Office in an easy way. My guess is that Microsoft is opening up APIs it has built for the Office Graph (aka Delve, aka Oslo). . It was a positive surprise that the Graph can now be extended by 3rd parties, one of them being Skype.

An improved Windows Store for Business

 

• Windows 10 - it is Windows but it is different – The Start menu is back, tiles are becoming livelier, translucency from Windows 7 is back and more features are showing that Microsoft is working hard to undo errors from the past. Dynamic app aging is a nice feature, lock screens become more personal. And Microsoft re-uses what works, Bing quality like pictures come to the Windows lock screen, with personalization. Continuum is a powerful new technology that allows to extend e.g. Windows Phone to HDMI connected displays. Thanks to the Windows Universal App technology, the same functionality as on a PC is available on the display, but only powered by the phone. The goal as Belfiore shared is that any display can become as powerful as a PC, but powered by a phone. 

 

 

The Start Menu is back

 

 

 

 

• Project Spartan becomes Edge – It was the honor to Belfiore to share the official name of the new browser in Windows10, now called Edge (bye bye Explorer). It is pretty cool that Microsoft writes Edge as a Universal Windows App – talking about drinking your own champagne. Belfiore shared that Explorer is being currently opened more than one billion times a day. And again along the lines of re-using other platforms code, Edge can leverage web extensions, e.g. Chrome extension, with only ‘minimal’ modifications. 

The Edge differntiators

 

 

• Hololens changes the way we work – Mixing digital content into the real world is a very powerful concept, and the demos were convincing. The biggest advantage I thought is that every application in side of Windows can be pinned somewhere in the visual perimeter of a user. And yes – there is a holographic start menu. Read more on the Hololens in this separate blog post. 

 

The Hololens demo

 

 

MyPOV

The Microsoft strategy to remain relevant and maybe win in the fight of the platform of the future is becoming clear, it is built on three pillars:

Openness – Microsoft knows that it has for now lost the mobile race. It wants to attract developers by making it easy to bring non Microsoft code to the new Microsoft platforms, e.g. iOS and Android applications, Java code etc.

Value creation – Microsoft wants to make it easy to re-use code and the Windows Universal Platform is the tool for it – build your code once, port it once and deploy it on any Windows device. Platform capabilities like the ones added to Azure, like Edge, like Continuum, like Hololens allow for platform differentiation that is intended to attract more developers and customers.

Investment protection – There are platform changes ahead for Microsoft, but the vendor has understood well that it will be more successful when it can free as much developer’s capacity to build new applications on the new platforms. So not forcing existing Windows developers to go back to re-build applications is key and hence .Net applications keep running not just on Windows but other platforms, too. Nothing allows developers more to build new applications than giving them the most valuable resource of our age, time to build new things.

Overall good progress by Microsoft and a good mix between organic platform innovation and growth, as well as a more aggressive stance towards competitors in order to win over developers. But Microsoft knows that ultimately money rules and needs to attract a larger platform that attracts developers through better monetization. But Microsoft has been playing catch up mode for most of the platform capabilities. It is only now catching up, but has created differentiators that are systemic, and allow for an optimistic outlook on Microsoft's future. The absence of a PaaS message and product is remarkable though.

 

Finally the ambition to 1B devices is a lofty one, we will all be there to see if Microsoft will be reaching that goal 3-4 years from today. 


More about Microsoft:

• First Hand with Microsoft Hololens - read here
• Event Report - Microsoft TechEd - Top 3 Enterprise takeaways - read here
• First Take - Microsoft discovers data ambience and delivers an organic approach to in memory database - read here
• Event Report - Microsoft Build - Azure grows and blossoms - enough for enterprises (yet)? Read here.
• Event Report - Microsoft Build Day 1 Keynote - Top Enterprise Takeaways - read here.
• Microsoft gets even more serious about devices - acquire Nokia - read here.
• Microsoft does not need one new CEO - but six - read here.
• Microsoft makes the cloud a platform play - Or: Azure and her 7 friends - read here.
• How the Cloud can make the unlikeliest bedfellows - read here.
• How hard is multi-channel CRM in 2013? - Read here.
• How hard is it to install Office 365? Or: The harsh reality of customer support - read here.

Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here.

And finally some of the key tweets from the conference:

 

 

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

New C-Suite Tech Optimization Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Data to Decisions Future of Work Innovation & Product-led Growth Next-Generation Customer Experience Microsoft developer PaaS SaaS IaaS Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP CCaaS UCaaS Collaboration Enterprise Service Chief Information Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Executive Officer

Event Report - Microsoft Build - Microsoft really wants to make developers life easy

We had the opportunity to attend Microsoft’s Build conference in San Francisco. The conference is targeted at developers and development managers using Microsoft tools and technology stack. As traditional the conference sold out quickly and was as well attended as last year. Comparing it with other events held at Moscone (West), we can say that Microsoft attracts probably the biggest developer audience, especially considering international aspects…. In less than half a day I could hear all 5 other languages I speak on many occasions. But San Francisco was just the kickoff to an impressive 25 city world tour.

 

 

The leitmotiv of the conference was all about developer enablement on innovative platforms. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella went all the way back invoking the first Microsoft product – Basic – to exemplify that making developers productive is in the Microsoft DNA. But developers only build on platforms that are popular and that can monetize their work. So Nadella shared that Microsoft wants to see 1B Windows 10 devices 3-4 years after the launch.

Microsoft announced a ton of really interesting things, so very tough to select the Top 3 – but here you go:

Azure becomes the intelligence cloud – Microsoft has built out Azure to 19 regions, Guthrie said that over 1M servers now make up Azure and Microsoft will keep investing billions into the platform. Almost no surprise – Docker runs on Azure now – demonstrated by Russinovich. ‘salvaging’ a .Net application running in Docker on a Windows machine. And the same runs on Docker on Linux. So the formerly exclusive to Windows .Net runs now on Linux and Mac (preview for now). The benefit for developers is that they don’t need to rewrite .Net apps, of who often code and details are no longer as present. Instead of that Microsoft wants them to build new applications. For instance using the new Azure App Service, an improved SQL Server and more.

 

Azure stats shared at Build 2013-2015

SQL Server (or is it Azure DB?) grows up – Good to see Microsoft not forgetting that most enterprise applications need a RDBMS at some point, and Microsoft keeps investing into SQL Server. Guthrie shared that SQL Server DBs are created (and taken down) at a rate of 160k DB a day. Among many innovations the SQL Server elastic pool was the most exciting enhancement from my perspective. Azure uses an elastic data base pool, Microsoft said it uses machine learning to create a resource pool to pick the right resources, a huge de-mystification of the resource pool creation. Sizing is no longer a critical design step, but Azure will size database up and down. That elasticity is key for cost savings and performance and makes the capability critical for next generation applications. Elastic Database query across databases in the resource pool is shipping as a beta in a few weeks from now. 

 

The Azure Data Lake

 

 

 

 

 

On the BI / Analytics side Microsoft announced SQL Data Warehouse, creating the foundation for more advanced analytical services. SQL Datawarehouse can scale up and down dynamically, and it is easy to integrate all sorts of data (Guthrie mentioned SAP and Dynamics). Valuable code creating insights gleaned from machine learning can be wrapped as an API and made available via the Azure App Service. And Microsoft is certain that SQL Data Warehouse is more elastic than its major competitor, AWS Redshift. 

 

All Azure Analyic Services

And of course no conference without IoT – the coolest example was the NFL. Microsoft also announced the Azure Data Lake service, a feature rich version 1 to create the base for IoT projects. It exposes data via HDFS, opening itself to standard Hadoop jobs. It also supports Hadoop clusters built with Cloudera, Hortonworks and Pivotal. 
 

The Windows Universal App

Windows 10 makes Windows different – Nadella was clearly proud of the latest version of Windows, which also is now becoming one single platform, updated and run as a service with a unified access and delivery to platform features and code constructs build on top of Windows 10. The appeal to developers per Myerson was to make Windows 10 the most innovative platform to build applications on, mentioning Cortana intelligent voice recognition service, and e.g. the new Hololens experience. And the Universal Windows App that delivers the same binary across all the different Windows powered devices. Microsoft has thought this through, as it announced carrier billing, already integrated with 90 carriers. Enterprises will appreciate the creation of a Windows Store for Business. And Microsoft thinks that 3-4 years after the launch of Windows 10 there will be more than 1 B Windows 10 devices out there – eclipsing both the Apple (iOS) and Google (Android) ecosystems as Microsoft shared its ambitions. Microsoft created 4 new types of Windows applications: The first being web sites, with the capability to re-use existing code. And Win32 and .Net code will run on Windows 10 too. The coup is that Android applications can also run on Windows 10, using (my guess) and Android player, but also Java and C++ applications. And finally ObjectiveC applications can run (re-compiled) on Windows 10, too.

 

The 4 Applications that will power Microsoft to 1B Windows 10 devices

 

Analyst Tidbits

• Office goes standard to become a platform – Office gets easier to integrate and to add integrations, as Microsoft exposes unified APIs to Office, including group and security access. The Me-token is a powerful concept to get data out of Office in an easy way. My guess is that Microsoft is opening up APIs it has built for the Office Graph (aka Delve, aka Oslo). . It was a positive surprise that the Graph can now be extended by 3rd parties, one of them being Skype.

An improved Windows Store for Business

 

• Windows 10 - it is Windows but it is different – The Start menu is back, tiles are becoming livelier, translucency from Windows 7 is back and more features are showing that Microsoft is working hard to undo errors from the past. Dynamic app aging is a nice feature, lock screens become more personal. And Microsoft re-uses what works, Bing quality like pictures come to the Windows lock screen, with personalization. Continuum is a powerful new technology that allows to extend e.g. Windows Phone to HDMI connected displays. Thanks to the Windows Universal App technology, the same functionality as on a PC is available on the display, but only powered by the phone. The goal as Belfiore shared is that any display can become as powerful as a PC, but powered by a phone. 

 

The Start Menu is back!

 

 

• Project Spartan becomes Edge – It was the honor to Belfiore to share the official name of the new browser in Windows10, now called Edge (bye bye Explorer). It is pretty cool that Microsoft writes Edge as a Universal Windows App – talking about drinking your own champagne. Belfiore shared that Explorer is being currently opened more than one billion times a day. And again along the lines of re-using other platforms code, Edge can leverage web extensions, e.g. Chrome extension, with only ‘minimal’ modifications. 

The Edge differntiators

 

 

• Hololens changes the way we work – Mixing digital content into the real world is a very powerful concept, and the demos were convincing. The biggest advantage I thought is that every application in side of Windows can be pinned somewhere in the visual perimeter of a user. And yes – there is a holographic start menu. Read more on the Hololens in this separate blog post. 

 

The Hololens demo

 

 

MyPOV

The Microsoft strategy to remain relevant and maybe win in the fight of the platform of the future is becoming clear, it is built on three pillars:

Openness – Microsoft knows that it has for now lost the mobile race. It wants to attract developers by making it easy to bring non Microsoft code to the new Microsoft platforms, e.g. iOS and Android applications, Java code etc.

Value creation – Microsoft wants to make it easy to re-use code and the Windows Universal Platform is the tool for it – build your code once, port it once and deploy it on any Windows device. Platform capabilities like the ones added to Azure, like Edge, like Continuum, like Hololens allow for platform differentiation that is intended to attract more developers and customers.

Investment protection – There are platform changes ahead for Microsoft, but the vendor has understood well that it will be more successful when it can free as much developer’s capacity to build new applications on the new platforms. So not forcing existing Windows developers to go back to re-build applications is key and hence .Net applications keep running not just on Windows but other platforms, too. Nothing allows developers more to build new applications than giving them the most valuable resource of our age, time to build new things.

Overall good progress by Microsoft and a good mix between organic platform innovation and growth, as well as a more aggressive stance towards competitors in order to win over developers. But Microsoft knows that ultimately money rules and needs to attract a larger platform that attracts developers through better monetization. But Microsoft has been playing catch up mode for most of the platform capabilities. It is only now catching up, but has created differentiators that are systemic, and allow for an optimistic outlook on Microsoft's future. The absence of a PaaS message and product is remarkable though.

 

Finally the ambition to 1B devices is a lofty one, we will all be there to see if Microsoft will be reaching that goal 3-4 years from today. 


More about Microsoft:

• First Hand with Microsoft Hololens - read here
• Event Report - Microsoft TechEd - Top 3 Enterprise takeaways - read here
• First Take - Microsoft discovers data ambience and delivers an organic approach to in memory database - read here
• Event Report - Microsoft Build - Azure grows and blossoms - enough for enterprises (yet)? Read here.
• Event Report - Microsoft Build Day 1 Keynote - Top Enterprise Takeaways - read here.
• Microsoft gets even more serious about devices - acquire Nokia - read here.
• Microsoft does not need one new CEO - but six - read here.
• Microsoft makes the cloud a platform play - Or: Azure and her 7 friends - read here.
• How the Cloud can make the unlikeliest bedfellows - read here.
• How hard is multi-channel CRM in 2013? - Read here.
• How hard is it to install Office 365? Or: The harsh reality of customer support - read here.

Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here.

 

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

Tech Optimization Chief Information Officer

Microsoft really wants to make developers' lives easy

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

We had the opportunity to attend Microsoft’s Build conference in San Francisco. The conference is targeted at developers and development managers using Microsoft tools and technology stack. As traditional the conference sold out quickly and was as well attended as last year. Comparing it with other events held at Moscone (West), we can say that Microsoft attracts probably the biggest developer audience, especially considering international aspects…. In less than half a day I could hear all 5 other languages I speak on many occasions. But San Francisco was just the kickoff to an impressive 25 city world tour.

 

 

The leitmotiv of the conference was all about developer enablement on innovative platforms. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella went all the way back invoking the first Microsoft product – Basic – to exemplify that making developers productive is in the Microsoft DNA. But developers only build on platforms that are popular and that can monetize their work. So Nadella shared that Microsoft wants to see 1B Windows 10 devices 3-4 years after the launch.

Microsoft announced a ton of really interesting things, so very tough to select the Top 3 – but here you go:

Azure becomes the intelligence cloud – Microsoft has built out Azure to 19 regions, Guthrie said that over 1M servers now make up Azure and Microsoft will keep investing billions into the platform. Almost no surprise – Docker runs on Azure now – demonstrated by Russinovich. ‘salvaging’ a .Net application running in Docker on a Windows machine. And the same runs on Docker on Linux. So the formerly exclusive to Windows .Net runs now on Linux and Mac (preview for now). The benefit for developers is that they don’t need to rewrite .Net apps, of who often code and details are no longer as present. Instead of that Microsoft wants them to build new applications. For instance using the new Azure App Service, an improved SQL Server and more.

 

Azure stats shared at Build 2013-2015

SQL Server (or is it Azure DB?) grows up – Good to see Microsoft not forgetting that most enterprise applications need a RDBMS at some point, and Microsoft keeps investing into SQL Server. Guthrie shared that SQL Server DBs are created (and taken down) at a rate of 160k DB a day. Among many innovations the SQL Server elastic pool was the most exciting enhancement from my perspective. Azure uses an elastic data base pool, Microsoft said it uses machine learning to create a resource pool to pick the right resources, a huge de-mystification of the resource pool creation. Sizing is no longer a critical design step, but Azure will size database up and down. That elasticity is key for cost savings and performance and makes the capability critical for next generation applications. Elastic Database query across databases in the resource pool is shipping as a beta in a few weeks from now. 

 

The Azure Data Lake

On the BI / Analytics side Microsoft announced SQL Data Warehouse, creating the foundation for more advanced analytical services. SQL Datawarehouse can scale up and down dynamically, and it is easy to integrate all sorts of data (Guthrie mentioned SAP and Dynamics). Valuable code creating insights gleaned from machine learning can be wrapped as an API and made available via the Azure App Service. And Microsoft is certain that SQL Data Warehouse is more elastic than its major competitor, AWS Redshift. 
 

All Azure Analyic Services

And of course no conference without IoT – the coolest example was the NFL. Microsoft also announced the Azure Data Lake service, a feature rich version 1 to create the base for IoT projects. It exposes data via HDFS, opening itself to standard Hadoop jobs. It also supports Hadoop clusters built with Cloudera, Hortonworks and Pivotal. 
 

The Windows Universal App

Windows 10 makes Windows different – Nadella was clearly proud of the latest version of Windows, which also is now becoming one single platform, updated and run as a service with a unified access and delivery to platform features and code constructs build on top of Windows 10. The appeal to developers per Myerson was to make Windows 10 the most innovative platform to build applications on, mentioning Cortana intelligent voice recognition service, and e.g. the new Hololens experience. And the Universal Windows App that delivers the same binary across all the different Windows powered devices. Microsoft has thought this through, as it announced carrier billing, already integrated with 90 carriers. Enterprises will appreciate the creation of a Windows Store for Business. And Microsoft thinks that 3-4 years after the launch of Windows 10 there will be more than 1 B Windows 10 devices out there – eclipsing both the Apple (iOS) and Google (Android) ecosystems as Microsoft shared its ambitions. Microsoft created 4 new types of Windows applications: The first being web sites, with the capability to re-use existing code. And Win32 and .Net code will run on Windows 10 too. The coup is that Android applications can also run on Windows 10, using (my guess) and Android player, but also Java and C++ applications. And finally ObjectiveC applications can run (re-compiled) on Windows 10, too.
 

The 4 Applications that will power Microsoft to 1B Windows 10 devices

Analyst Tidbits

• Office goes standard to become a platform – Office gets easier to integrate and to add integrations, as Microsoft exposes unified APIs to Office, including group and security access. The Me-token is a powerful concept to get data out of Office in an easy way. My guess is that Microsoft is opening up APIs it has built for the Office Graph (aka Delve, aka Oslo). . It was a positive surprise that the Graph can now be extended by 3rd parties, one of them being Skype.

An improved Windows Store for Business

• Windows 10 - it is Windows but it is different – The Start menu is back, tiles are becoming livelier, translucency from Windows 7 is back and more features are showing that Microsoft is working hard to undo errors from the past. Dynamic app aging is a nice feature, lock screens become more personal. And Microsoft re-uses what works, Bing quality like pictures come to the Windows lock screen, with personalization. Continuum is a powerful new technology that allows to extend e.g. Windows Phone to HDMI connected displays. Thanks to the Windows Universal App technology, the same functionality as on a PC is available on the display, but only powered by the phone. The goal as Belfiore shared is that any display can become as powerful as a PC, but powered by a phone. 

 

The Start Menu is back!

• Project Spartan becomes Edge – It was the honor to Belfiore to share the official name of the new browser in Windows10, now called Edge (bye bye Explorer). It is pretty cool that Microsoft writes Edge as a Universal Windows App – talking about drinking your own champagne. Belfiore shared that Explorer is being currently opened more than one billion times a day. And again along the lines of re-using other platforms code, Edge can leverage web extensions, e.g. Chrome extension, with only ‘minimal’ modifications. 

The Edge differntiators

 

 

• Hololens changes the way we work – Mixing digital content into the real world is a very powerful concept, and the demos were convincing. The biggest advantage I thought is that every application in side of Windows can be pinned somewhere in the visual perimeter of a user. And yes – there is a holographic start menu. Read more on the Hololens in this separate blog post. 

 

The Hololens demo

 

MyPOV

The Microsoft strategy to remain relevant and maybe win in the fight of the platform of the future is becoming clear, it is built on three pillars:

Openness – Microsoft knows that it has for now lost the mobile race. It wants to attract developers by making it easy to bring non Microsoft code to the new Microsoft platforms, e.g. iOS and Android applications, Java code etc.

Value creation – Microsoft wants to make it easy to re-use code and the Windows Universal Platform is the tool for it – build your code once, port it once and deploy it on any Windows device. Platform capabilities like the ones added to Azure, like Edge, like Continuum, like Hololens allow for platform differentiation that is intended to attract more developers and customers.

Investment protection – There are platform changes ahead for Microsoft, but the vendor has understood well that it will be more successful when it can free as much developer’s capacity to build new applications on the new platforms. So not forcing existing Windows developers to go back to re-build applications is key and hence .Net applications keep running not just on Windows but other platforms, too. Nothing allows developers more to build new applications than giving them the most valuable resource of our age, time to build new things.

Overall good progress by Microsoft and a good mix between organic platform innovation and growth, as well as a more aggressive stance towards competitors in order to win over developers. But Microsoft knows that ultimately money rules and needs to attract a larger platform that attracts developers through better monetization. But Microsoft has been playing catch up mode for most of the platform capabilities. It is only now catching up, but has created differentiators that are systemic, and allow for an optimistic outlook on Microsoft's future. The absence of a PaaS message and product is remarkable though.

 

Finally the ambition to 1B devices is a lofty one, we will all be there to see if Microsoft will be reaching that goal 3-4 years from today. 


More about Microsoft:

• First Hand with Microsoft Hololens - read here
• Event Report - Microsoft TechEd - Top 3 Enterprise takeaways - read here
• First Take - Microsoft discovers data ambience and delivers an organic approach to in memory database - read here
• Event Report - Microsoft Build - Azure grows and blossoms - enough for enterprises (yet)? Read here.
• Event Report - Microsoft Build Day 1 Keynote - Top Enterprise Takeaways - read here.
• Microsoft gets even more serious about devices - acquire Nokia - read here.
• Microsoft does not need one new CEO - but six - read here.
• Microsoft makes the cloud a platform play - Or: Azure and her 7 friends - read here.
• How the Cloud can make the unlikeliest bedfellows - read here.
• How hard is multi-channel CRM in 2013? - Read here.
• How hard is it to install Office 365? Or: The harsh reality of customer support - read here.

Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here.

 

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

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Tech Optimization Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Data to Decisions Future of Work Innovation & Product-led Growth New C-Suite Next-Generation Customer Experience Microsoft developer PaaS SaaS IaaS Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP CCaaS UCaaS Collaboration Enterprise Service Chief Information Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Executive Officer

Customer Loyalty Does Not Equal Customer Advocacy

Partner, Sensei Marketing
Partner, Sensei Marketing

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

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“We have very loyal customers; we don’t need a customer advocacy campaign.” I’ve been in a senior sales and/or marketing position for more than 20 years and the one constant mistake I still see and hear is a lack of understanding in the difference between customer loyalty and customer advocacy.

Making the distinction is not difficult.

Customer loyalty is earned through consistently positive experiences with the brand’s product, customer service, value for price, etc. The net result is that customers are more likely to look to you first when in need of additional products and/or services, which increases the likelihood that they’ll purchase again.

Customer advocacy is an action taken by existing loyal customers to promote a business or product to their colleagues and, more importantly, to encourage those colleagues to purchase as well.

The key differentiation here is that strong customer loyalty will certainly increase repeat purchases from those customers but it does not guarantee an increase in qualified leads in the sales funnel.

We’ve often heard the platitude: “It costs five times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing customer.” This is a long-held belief by business executives and as a result, much effort is placed into keeping customers happy and loyal, and rightly so. But is it being done for the right reasons?

Customer Retention Isn’t Less Costly Than Customer Acquisition

The Ipsos Loyalty group has debunked the theory that customer retention is less costly than customer acquisition.

For this rule to be true, we must assume that existing customers will: (a) increase their level of spending at an increasing rate; (b) purchase at full-margin rather than discounted prices; and (3) create operating efficiencies for the business.  Their studies have proved these not to be universal truths.

Further, the assumption that the advertising costs to earn a new customer are greater than those to keep existing customers happy is not accurate.  The problem is that advertising isn’t just about acquiring new customers anymore. Digital and social media marketing may have changed that forever; advertising and marketing is no longer just about lead acquisition, it’s about community building, online customer service, brand reputation management, etc. The marketing costs that are most often allocated to customer acquisition are, in reality, used to manage and encourage existing customers.

Customer Loyalty Does Not Equal Customer Advocacy

This blending of customer loyalty and customer acquisition further highlights the need to separate customer loyalty from customer advocacy campaigns but also to understand how they’re linked.

Customer advocacy is the next stage in the customer lifecycle and one that too few businesses invest in. Loyal customers may be less swayed by competitive offers and may be less likely to abandon their brand-love when small customer service issues arise.However, that does not mean they will actively promote your business in order to improve the quality of your sales funnel.

Customer loyalty can be earned by providing consistently positive customer experiences but for advocacy to thrive, the business must invest in what is best for the customer. Often this means that the corporate culture must change in order to change the customers’ view of their relationship with the brand.  Customers must no longer see and think “value for price” or “good customer experience” when they engage with the brand, they must feel that their patronage of your business is improving their lives and that the relationship forged with your business is a personal choice, not one of necessity.

Exceeding Customer Expectations

For brands with lower marketing budgets, a simple way of achieving customer advocacy is to understand that customer loyalty can be earned by meeting the customer’s expectations, whereas customer advocacy is earned by exceeding them.  What would it take to exceed those expectations? What campaigns and budgets are in place to understand what that really means to the customer? What efforts are being exerted to exceed those expectations once identified? How are they being measured?

Referencing the Ipsos Loyalty study, we understand that that customer retention, while important, is not a business maker in and of itself.  It is, however, the best investment toward filling the new customer pipeline with more qualified and more convertible leads. Countless studies have proven that prospects referred by customers from a business with a high NPS or Net Promoter Score (those where the majority of existing customers rate their likelihood to recommend the business 9 or 10 out of 10), are more profitable and generate a higher lifetime value.

Achieving a high NPS requires an investment in converting loyal customers to advocates and that means ensuring your marketing team understands the difference. Keeping customers happy and loyal is a good strategy, but not because they’re cheaper to keep than new customers are to acquire. Loyal customers must be managed along the customer lifecycle to the point of advocacy, at which point they ARE your new customer acquisition campaign.

Sensei Debates

Do customer loyalty and customer advocacy require independent campaigns and budgets?

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

 

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Next-Generation Customer Experience B2C CX Chief Customer Officer

Book Summary: Lesson 1 From Disrupting Digital Business

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

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

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Kicking Off The Lessons Learned From Disrupting Digital Business

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

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

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

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

Start By Transforming Business Models And How We Engage

Digital disruption is more than just a technology shift. It’s about transforming business models and how we engage.  To succeed, we can’t just look at the latest cool set of technologies of the day.  We have to think bolder about transforming business models. This means understanding the one or two key metrics that a business must measure to ensure their success.

For airlines, the key metric is revenue per passenger per kilometer not safety, customer satisfaction, nor on-time performance.  For professional services firms, the key metric is profit per employee, not average deal sizes nor certified professionals.

This shift to understanding the business model is the heart of digital transformation.  However, success requires leaders to move beyond incremental innovation, which is what organizations normally do to push the next set of product improvements.   Transformational business models require out of the box thinking and the creative destruction of multiple business models.  I often use the iPhone as an example of a device that destroyed 27 business models. These are industries that will never recover from $400 digital camera makers, one-hour photo development, record stores, book stores, navigation GPS devices, thermometer manufacturers, watches, and yes, even the flashlight.

Homework

So, your homework for this lesson is to think about your core business model.  What metrics matter the most?  Once you’ve spent time prioritizing the one or two metrics that matter, focus on transformational innovation.  Keep in mind, the goal is to sketch out transformational business models and then find the supporting technologies.   Technology for technology’s sake is just plain stupid.  Now go off and take the time to think.  We’ll catch you next week!

The Complete 10 Lessons Learned From Disrupting Digital Business

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

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

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

Get The Book Now Before Digital Darwinism Impacts You

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

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

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

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

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SAP S/4HANA Qualities by Plattner - play by play

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

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Earlier this year I had the opportunity to attend SAP’s S/4HANA launch in New York. It is always a privilege to be part of a new product launch and see how much thought, time and energy vendors put into their next generation of products.
 
 

It reminded me of Larry Ellison launching the Fusion effort at Oracle (I think 2004) – and he was radical in its commitment to standard back then – e.g. admitting and calling venerable Oracle PL/SQL proprietary, not the future of enterprise software and that Oracle would commit to build Fusion on standards.

So equally kudos to Hasso Plattner to put down the thoughts and design principles for S/4HANA – even more in detail than Ellison did back with Fusion (at least as I recall).
 

The SAP Product Eveolution

So let’s look at SAP’s S/4HANA launch – the video recording is here and after a 10 minute intro by CEO Bill McDermott Plattner takes stage.

The #1 Rule Plattner put out was to have a DB with 0 response time – and what is possible to innovate business applications with that design paradigm. Of course this means in memory, columnar, combination of OLTP and OLAP aka analytics today etc. Plattner gives a short run up how SAP got to S/4HANA from via research at the HPI in Potsdam and so on.

But let’s jump in when Plattner walks us through the qualities – about 18 minutes in:
 

S/4HANA qualities as discussed in this blog

Built on HANA

MyPOV – Central to the S/4HANA DNA is HANA – with all the rationale on why SAP built HANA in the first place and the related benefits. But DNAs have strong and weak parts, and the weak part that concerns me is that the in memory nature of HANA will not allow SAP to address all business relevant data. SAP counters that with compression and falling memory prices it can is by itself rebutted by business relevant data growing faster than memory prices fall – so SAP needs to be careful not to be at the losing end of this trend.

 

New UI (with Fiori)

MyPOV – SAP has long time been criticized on the quality of its UI. While supporting power users well, it was never a great UI for casual users. Kudos to Plattner to admit that SAP was afraid to change the UI. But now Fiori provides a good new alternative and the project is the largest UI innovation SAP has done since ‘enjoy SAP’ – sometimes 15 years ago. Many questions remain but it’s a good start.

 

Guided Configuration

MyPOV – This is the more fundamental change than even HANA in my view. Business is accelerating and people in business need to move faster than ever before. And that will not change, so empowering business users to setup business applications is one of the strong points of S/4HANA. Kudos to Plattner again for admitting that SAP now has ‘what everybody else has’ – but I think Plattner is a little too tough on SAP here – as self-service setup (as I like to label it) is not (yet) pervasive in enterprise software.

 

Subscription

MyPOV – The right move no question, challenges for SAP’s traditional licensing model and revenue streams but that is another story.

 

1/10 of data footprint

MyPOV – SAP’s efforts and breakthroughs of reducing storage are impressive, but SAP risks at optimizing what was a cost and issue of the past – high memory costs. Memory costs are falling, SSD costs are falling even more and HDD cost is close to 0 cost. So the benefits of compression are commercially less and less relevant, but with SAP monopolizing HANA to run on the most expensive storage medium (RAM) it has to focus and optimize on this aspect more than its competitors. Providing subscription / SaaS it of course becomes even more relevant for SAP as it determines the TCO to operate S/4HANA. Again kudos for Plattner to raise that openly.

 

3-7 higher throughput

MyPOV – Performance is always good for business. So well done by SAP, nobody does not like speed and doing the same faster. It actually becomes a mandate in the 21st century.

 

Up to 1800x faster analytics

MyPOV – No question a columnar, in memory design beats tables on HDD aka spinning rost, but fair of course for SAP to raise the performance advantage. What SAP still needs to do and do more is how that performance advantage helps their customer run their business better. SAP had done good work on this, but still needs to do more to make the business case for HANA clear and tangible.

 

ERP, CRM, SRM, SCM, PLM in one system

MyPOV – Plattner stated because of compression all these former ‘satellite’ systems can now come together in S/4HANA. Kudos to share that 40% of the SAP install base IT load is data exchange between SAP ERP and SAP CRM. What Plattner does not mentions is, that it was an explicit design decision to separate these system at the time, in order not to disrupt customers. But certainly one single system is the right approach. SAPs needs to explain though if it means a single database system (something SAP has achieved as (almost) all SAP products run on HANA) or a single enterprise system (S4HANA?) which is a little more out.

 

No locking, parallelism for throughput

MyPOV – Definitively a strongpoint of HANA – the insert only paradigm has massive advantages and is a key design technique for modern next generation applications, good for S/4HANA to have it.

 

Actual data vs historical data

MyPOV – Plattner cites co-founder Wellenreuther as the one responsible for a schema separation efforts in the early SAP days between actual and historical data. SAP did the same for S/4HANA – seeing performance gains between 2x and 5x. Definitively a good design paradigm that has come over from the old enterprise world.

 

Unlimited workload capacity

MyPOV – By replicating between actual primary system and read only system(s), throughput goes up, a good design principle. What Plattner did not address is – what are the design / scale limitations of the primary (data entry) system. I am sure SAP has thought of that, but I don’t know the answer yet.

 

Predict, recommend, simulate

MyPOV – A new technology platform like HANA enables new ways of doing business like simulation, prediction of outcomes and recommendations. Again kudos to Plattner for openness and historic tidbit, that former CEO Kagermann (while being a development leader) tried to do simulation in the 90ies, but technology would not allow to do pull that off. In 2015 SAP needs to show more how predict, recommend and simulate enable next generation best practices.

 

HCP Extensions

MyPOV – Not sure why Plattner skipped over this – but a PaaS (HCP) is a key quality for a modern business application. Not only for hard core developers, but also for customers – ideally business users – who need to be able to change certain qualities of the system to adapt and differentiate the business process they need to run. No trivial feat to find the right mix between enablement and closure, but SAP with its vast experience of enterprise applications should be in a unique position to get this balance right. More to learn about this would be great.

 

HANA multi tenancy

MyPOV –Kudos for Plattner to share that multi-tenancy is not that crucial for SAP with ERP than it is for the smaller footprint network applications. With that Plattner shared that SAP maybe operating with 2 ‘to be’ tenancy paradigms which is good to hear from a pragmatic standpoint, but more complex to operate and engineer for.

 

All data, social, text, geo, graph, processing

MyPOV – A key aspect to raise that HANA can store and process all these data types for better insights, but if we e.g. pick social, we don’t see enterprises using HANA as their exclusive social data storage and processing platform. Back to the argument of cost of the storage medium.

 

Overall MyPOV

SAP deserves credit for building (finally) its next generation application and sharing qualities openly. My concerns remain on cost to operate, limitations on use cases given super large amounts of data e.g. in social, IoT, BigData in general cannot be held in memory, in HANA as the platform for S/4HANA.

SAP has done well on the roadmap side for Financials, but enterprises need much more than Financials (HCM, CRM, SCM etc.) and SAP owes customers, prospects and the ecosystem a roadmap how and when it will get to bring all these together with the S/4HANA qualities. Sapphire May 4-9th 2015 in Orlando will be the next stop to find out.
 

 

And more on overall SAP strategy and products:

 

• 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.

 

 

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Tech Optimization Data to Decisions Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Innovation & Product-led Growth Future of Work Next-Generation Customer Experience SAP SaaS PaaS IaaS Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP CCaaS UCaaS Collaboration Enterprise Service Chief Information Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Executive Officer

The security joke is on us all

Steve Wilson

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Steve Wilson is former VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, leading the business theme Digital Safety and Privacy. His coverage includes digital identity, data protection, data privacy, cryptography, and trust. His advisory services to CIOs, CISOs, CPOs and IT architects include identity product strategy, security practice benchmarking, Privacy by Design (PbD), privacy engineering and Privacy [or Data Protection] Impact Assessments (PIA, DPIA). Coverage Areas: -  Identity management, frameworks & governance-  Digital identity technologies-  Privacy by Design -  Big Data; “Big Privacy”-  Identity & privacy innovation Previous experience: Wilson has worked in ICT innovation, research, development and analysis for over 25 years. With double…...

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Every now and then, a large organisation in the media spotlight will experience the special pain of having a password accidentally revealed in the background of a photograph or TV spot. Security commentator Graham Cluley has recorded a lot of these misadventures, most recently at a British national rail control room, and before that, in the Superbowl nerve centre and an emergency response agency.

Security folks love their schadenfreude but what are we to make of these SNAFUs? Of course, nobody is perfect. And some plumbers have leaky taps.

 

But these cases hold much deeper lessons. These are often critical infrastructure providers (consider that on financial grounds, there may be more at stake in Superbowl operations than the railways). The outfits making kindergarten security mistakes will have been audited many times over. So how on earth do they pass?

Posting passwords on the wall is not a random error - it's systemic. Some administrators do it out of habit, or desperation. They know it's wrong, but they do it anyway, and they do it with such regularity it gets caught on TV.

I really want to know if none of the security auditors at any of these organisations ever noticed the passwords in plain view? Or do the personnel do a quick clean up on the morning of each audit, only to revert to reality in between audits? Either way, here's yet more proof that security audit, frankly, is a sick joke. And that security practices aren't worth the paper they're printed on.

Security orthodoxy holds that people and process are more fundamental than technology, and that people are the weakest link. That's why we have security management processes and security audits. It's why whole industries have been built around security process standards like ISO 27000. So it's unfathomable to me that companies with passwords caught on camera can have have ever passed their audits.

Security isn't what people think it is. Instead of meticulous procedures and hawk-eyed inspections, too often it's just simple people going through the motions. Security isn't intellectually secure. The things we do in the name of "security" don't make us secure.

Let's not dismiss password flashing as a temporary embarrassment for some poor unfortunates. This should be humiliating for the whole information security industry. We need another way.

Picture credits: Graham Cluley.

Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Security Zero Trust Chief Information Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Privacy Officer

Oracle Cloud makes progress - but key work remains in the cellar

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

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We were invited to attend the Oracle Cloud Summit held recently at the beautiful Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay. A year ago the analyst summit was in Indian Wells, and what was a ‘cozy’ event back then with maybe 20 analysts attending, has turned into a much larger 40 or so analyst event 12 months later. Certainly proof that Oracle has made progress and is getting more attention in cloud matters by the influencer community.

 

Oracle CEO Mark Hurd made an appearance and talked about Oracle’s progress in his unique, numbers-driven style, stressing the value of cloud. It was good to see his view and to get some insights into Oracle’s cloud strategy straight from the top. His example of e.g. IBM shrinking revenue by $10B and how much of that revenue is going to be Oracle’s resonated well. 

 

 

Also interesting that Hurd sees HCM and Customer Service as the most important applications of the 21st century – as taking care of employees and customers is essential for enterprises to tapp into faster and sustainable growth. At the end of the day Hurd asks CxOs to accept the reality of the cloud that is simple(r), more innovative, enables disruption, creates speed and has the better economic operation advantage. 

MyPOV – Hurd has a unique personality that is clearly data and numbers driven, and his pitch for cloud will resonate well with equally number driven CxOs. It is also well aligned with Oracle’s organizational DNA of TCO reduction – which manifested itself through the product demonstrations, too. How well that approach works in less rational buying decision environments will be interesting to observe in the next quarters. 

Earlier Oracle President Thomas Kurian kicked off the day – walking through the complete Oracle cloud portfolio in very short order. At a 30k feet level Oracle kept the format with its 4 ‘as a Service’ offerings – with IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and DaaS (Data as a Service). 

 

Oracle is the only cloud vendor prominently featuring DaaS, which plays well to Oracle’s database heritage but is equally forward looking, as enterprises become software companies and data being the key equity for next generation business processes. We will break this down next, but let’s note that Oracle has made progress in its datacenter infrastructure, too – with 19 (soon to be 21) Tier 4 data centers operating the Oracle Cloud, the newest additions being Toronto, Frankfurt, Calgary and Munich. This makes Oracle one of the few cloud providers with multiple data center locations in Canada and to our knowledge the only provider with two data centers in Germany. Data center locations matters for cloud, not only from a data sovereignty but also from a performance perspective.

MyPOV – Very few product leaders can walk across such a vast portfolio of products like Kurian. Amazingly he seems to be up to speed into much detail of all these offerings, which he has to be on the flipside too – as it all comes together with him. Oracle is probably undertaking the largest engineering project for cloud in the industry (not even to mention its engineered systems and OS projects) and to make sure that it all works together must be a huge challenge. The good news on this is, that at this point we have no indication of products not working together.

 

 

For comparison and consistency reasons I will keep this blog in the same format as last year’s Progress Report (you can find it here).

 

The State of IaaS

The Oracle IaaS offering comprises Storage (Elastic Object & Elastic Block Storage), Compute – and new – Software Defined Networking (SDN). A year ago queues, notifications and Identity ran under IaaS, but have now been promoted to PaaS. Oracle now supports a single global namespace across Storage – a huge simplification and value over some competitors, geographic replication and a shared file cloud service (in beta). Oracle will (and has to) expand these services in the next 18 months substantially. On the Compute side, Oracle now offers a general purpose, high performance, dedicated and engineered compute service, giving customers a wide range of compute offers to choose from. Major functionality for Compute is being delivered this year – but the roadmap was only shared under NDA. New compared to last year was the Software Defined Network product offering, where Oracle offers Software VPN Layer 2 and 3, Hardware VPN IPSec Tunneling, a Direct Connect offering to its Public Cloud and Network Bonding. Effectively Oracle offers to connect through the Equinix Cloud Exchange, AT&T Netbond and hardware VPN based InterConnect.

 

 

MyPOV – Good progress by Oracle on the IaaS side. 2015 is the key year for Oracle to deliver some critical IaaS features that will make the offering competitive to other offerings in the marketplace. Regardless there is good customer traction for Oracle IaaS today as customer panel and reference slides showed.


 

The State of PaaS

Oracle PaaS is taking a persona centric view on using the Oracle middleware and database stack: Oracle has always courted developers, and the middleware DNA goes back to integration, so these personas stay, what’s new (debut was at OpenWorld) is the departmental user and analytics user. For developers the rapid deployment and the polyglot language capabilities of Oracle PaaS stick out as differentiators. On the integration (aka iPaaS) side Oracle has done progress on click integration / 0 coding options, which are actually an enabler for the departmental user area. Oracle here delivers on the PaaS side a comprehensive integration platform for different styles of integration (applications, data, process, events and identity) designed with each persona in mind (developer, architect and departmental User). With PaaS Oracle is delivering on the extension and integration promise from OpenWorld for its SaaS products, but also complements it with LOB capabilities like document, storage, mobile, collaboration and social options. For the analytics user Oracle PaaS offers all discovery and analysis options for data residing in (Oracle) RDBMS, OLAP and BigData. The visual analysis of complex data for the departmental user is one of the differentiators.
 

MyPOV –  Good move by Orcle to more roles beyond the the common 2014 PaaS roles of developers, IT users and LOB users.. Defining more specific and interesting forward looking roles as for analytics is the right move, especially because Oracle can offer some very valuable functionalities in this space and can draw on a large (BI) user community that is thirsty for the next step. But the most impressive move is the focus on the departmental user. Empowering business users to do their job with no / little IT involvement is what business user want and need in the fast paced 21st century. Whichever vendor will get to the business user first will create a new ‘higher ground’ that is key for long time market leadership in enterprise software. 

 

The State of SaaS

As a year ago it was back to Chris Leone to give the overall SaaS overview as it was this year– and it makes sense as Oracle HCM is the most advanced of the Oracle SaaS offerings in terms of customer adoption. The value proposition of Oracle’s SaaS offering has not changed – build an integrated suite of enterprise software with a common horizontal foundation, which enables technology offerings such as analytics and vital next generation application capabilities like social and collaboration. The main progress compared to 12 months ago has been made in Financial and ERP, where Oracle now has good customer momentum, and even the (at Oracle) traditionally lagging SCM area is catching up. Main focus going forward for the SaaS Suite will be in CX, EPM, ERP, HCM and SCM, with an overall focus and enablement of analytics.
 

MyPOV – For the longest time Oracle SaaS products have been lagging in functionality as Oracle took the long path to re-write these applications. 10+ years after the Fusion announcements almost all products (with the exception of SCM) are at par or more advanced than the previous suites that Oracle still sells (Oracle e-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel). The strong platform capabilities and benefits show in e.g. mobile, BI, and PaaS. Along the way Oracle has also created a CX product family and is the only vendor to break out and focus stand alone on Social Relationship Management (SRM). So overall good progress – but for most business around the world orders are still the path to revenue and here Oracle needs to invest to make the overall SaaS suite fire on all cylinders and for all industries. 

 

The State of DaaS

That Oracle is serious about DaaS is underlined by the fact that this is the only ‘aaS’ area that operates as its own independent GBU. The DaaS offering evolves around the Oracle ID graph, which describes individuals as completely as positively, collecting social and real world assets to compose an actionable set of data to execute value adding activities on the individual’s data. The DaaS offerings can be used standalone, but they also shore up capabilities for other Oracle SaaS properties, e.g. DaaS for Sales and DaaS for Customer Intelligence. 

 

MyPOV – This is newest ‘aaS’ offering for Oracle, and it still sees acquisition activities (see my take on the Datalogix acquisition here). Oracle competitors don’t have similar offerings, so Oracle will do well to use DaaS as a further differentiator in other product areas – e.g. in HCM (Recruiting comes to mind), SCM (Transportation Management) etc. Oracle also needs to strike (or be more public about it) more content deals, taking e.g. a page from IBM’s playbook.

 

Analyst Tidbits

• One of the many new products was Oracle Process Cloud – and this one caught my attention. The product's goal is to automate business processes by enabling business users to design and implement them. It has all the characteristics of a next generation application (cloud, analytics, social, collaboration) and changing the Future of Work (no setup, fast iterations, no code). Definitely a product to watch.

• On the more mature products Oracle Integration Platform Cloud Services are interesting. Leveraging the long history of Oracle middleware is a good starting point – but adding adapters to standard business applications as pre-integration offerings will be an interesting capability to watch. 

 

 

Overall MyPOV

No questions Oracle is making a lot of progress with its cloud products. And Oracle is doing a great job at making them leverage each other (I would love to see the dependency diagrams) – while making sure they have a standalone business benefit as a singular product. Oracle is also more granular than other vendors with an enterprise software or hardware background moving to the cloud, but Oracle has to make sure the offerings don’t get too complex and remain easy to understand, market, sell, and later implement and operate. It is good to see that a number of the products are gaining good customer traction and have passed the critical path of being strong standalone offerings in the marketplace. But a few other (key) products need more work this year to come to the same level – and most of that should happen this year. Last year Kurian described the Oracle cloud strategy as a two step program – getting to the critical functionality level and then differentiate the offering. A year later Oracle has reached the critical line with a number of offerings, but a lot of more work remains. The differentiation and vision remains clear – one integrated suite of as a Service products that work and operate better together – as they were built by the same vendor. The pitch that Oracle can also operate their cloud operations better than anyone else (or customers can operate them on premise, too) will be an easy one. This year’s OpenWorld should be a big one, and we will be there to analyze.

 

Future of Work / HCM / SaaS research:

• Event Report - Oracle HCM World - Full Steam ahead, a Learning surprise and potential growth challenges - read here
• First Take - Oracle HCM World Day #1 Keynote - off to a good start - read here
• Progress Report - Oracle HCM gathers momentum - now it needs to build on that - read here
• Oracle pushes modern HR - there is more than technology - read here. (Takeaways from the recent HCMWorld conference).
• Why Applications Unlimited is good a good strategy for Oracle customers and Oracle - read here.

Also worth a look for the full picture

• News Analysis - Oracle discovers the power of the two socket server - or: A pivot that wasn't one - TCO still rules - read here
• Market Move - Oracle buys Datalogix - moves more into DaaS - read here
• Event Report - Oracle Openworld - Oracle's vision and remaining work become clear - they are both big - read here
• Constellation Research Video Takeaways of Oracle Openworld 2014 - watch here
• Is it all coming together for Oracle in 2014? Read here. 
• From the fences - Oracle AR Meeting takeaways - read here (this was the last analyst meeting in spring 2013)
• Takeaways from Oracle CloudWorld LA - read here (this was one of the first cloud world events overall, in January 2013)

And if you want to read more of my findings on Oracle technology - I suggest:

• Progress Report - Good cloud progress at Oracle and a two step program - read here.
• Oracle integrates products to create its Foundation for Cloud Applications - read here.
• Java grows up to the enterprise - read here.
• 1st take - Oracle in memory option for its database - very organic - read here.
• Oracle 12c makes the database elastic - read here.
• How the cloud can make the unlikeliest bedfellows - read here.
• Act I - Oracle and Microsoft partner for the cloud - read here.
• Act II - The cloud changes everything - Oracle and Salesforce.com - read here.
• Act III - The cloud changes everything - Oracle and Netsuite with a touch of Deloitte - read here. 

Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here.

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And here are my notes in tweets from the event: 
 

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

Tech Optimization Data to Decisions Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Innovation & Product-led Growth Future of Work New C-Suite Oracle softlayer Google IBM SaaS PaaS IaaS Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP CCaaS UCaaS Collaboration Enterprise Service Chief Information Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Operating Officer

Digital Disruption Tour Event Recap: Melbourne, Australia

Steve Wilson

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Steve Wilson is former VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, leading the business theme Digital Safety and Privacy. His coverage includes digital identity, data protection, data privacy, cryptography, and trust. His advisory services to CIOs, CISOs, CPOs and IT architects include identity product strategy, security practice benchmarking, Privacy by Design (PbD), privacy engineering and Privacy [or Data Protection] Impact Assessments (PIA, DPIA). Coverage Areas: -  Identity management, frameworks & governance-  Digital identity technologies-  Privacy by Design -  Big Data; “Big Privacy”-  Identity & privacy innovation Previous experience: Wilson has worked in ICT innovation, research, development and analysis for over 25 years. With double…...

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Ray Wang tells us now that writing a book and launching a company are incredibly fulfilling things to do - but ideally, not at the same time. He thought it would take a year to write "Disrupting Digital Business", but since it overlapped with building Constellation Research it took three! But at the same time, his book is all the richer for that experience.

Ray is on a worldwide book tour (tweeting under the hash tag #cxotour). I was thrilled to participate in the Melbourne leg last week. We convened a dinner at Melbourne restaurant The Deck" and were joined by a cross section of Australian private and public sector businesses. There were current and recent executives from Energy Australia, Rio Tinto, the Victorian Government and Australia Post among others, plus the founders of several exciting local start-ups. And we were lucky to have special guests Brian Katz and Ben Robbins - two renowned mobility gurus.

The format for all the launch events has one or two topical short speeches from Constellation analysts and Associates, and a fireside chat by Ray. In Melbourne, we were joined by two of Australia's deep digital economy experts, Gavin Heaton and Joanne Jacobs. Gavin got us going on the night, surveying the importance of innovation, and the double-edged opportunities and threats of digital disruption.

Then Ray spoke off-the-cuff about his book, summarising years of technology research and analysis, and the a great many cases of business disruption, old and new. Ray has an encyclopedic grasp of tech-driven successes and failures going back decades, yet his presentations are always up-to-the-minute and full of practical can-do calls to action. He's hugely engaging and having him on a small stage for a change lets him have a real conversation with the audience.

Speaking with no notes and PowerPoint-free, Ray ranged across all sorts of disruptions in all sorts of sectors, including:

• Sony's double cassette Walkman (which Ray argues playfully was their "last innovation")
• Coca Cola going digital, and the speculative "ten cent sip"
• the real lesson of the iPhone: geeks spend time arguing about whether Apple's technology is original or appropriated, when the point is their phone disrupted 20 or more other business models
• the contrasting Boeing 787 Dreamliner and Airbus A380 mega jumbo - radically different ways to maximise the one thing that matters to airlines: dollars per passenger-miles, and
• Uber, which observers don't always fully comprehend as a rich mix of mobility, cloud and Big Data.

And I closed the scheduled part of the evening with a provocation on privacy. I asked the group to think about what it means to call any online business practice "creepy". Have community norms and standards really changed in the move online? What's worse: government surveillance for political ends, or private sector surveillance for profit? If we pay for free online services with our personal information, do regular consumers understand the bargain? And if cynics have been asking "Is Privacy Dead?" for over 100 years, doesn't it mean the question is purely rhetorical? Who amongst us truly wants privacy to be over?!

The discussion quickly attained a life of its own - muscular, but civilized. And it provided ample proof that whatever you think about privacy, it is complicated and surprising, and definitely disruptive! (For people who want to dig further into the paradoxes of modern digital privacy, Ray and I recently recorded a nice long chat about it).

The Digital Disruption tour dates are just around the corner, so you're welcome to RSVP, if you haven't already.

• San Francisco May 4th - sponsored by Wipro Digital
• Atlanta May 14th - sponsored by Adobe & Wipro Digital
• London June 18th - sponsored by Financial Force
• Amsterdam June 22nd

Enjoy!

Data to Decisions Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Future of Work Marketing Transformation Matrix Commerce New C-Suite Next-Generation Customer Experience Tech Optimization Innovation & Product-led Growth Distillation Aftershots Security Zero Trust AI ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Generative AI Analytics Automation B2B B2C CX EX Employee Experience HR HCM business Marketing SaaS PaaS IaaS Supply Chain Growth Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology eCommerce Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP Leadership finance Customer Service Content Management Collaboration M&A Enterprise Service Chief Customer Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Financial Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief People Officer Chief Procurement Officer Chief Supply Chain Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Privacy Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Operating Officer