Australian Social Media Cheat Sheet

Founder
Disruptors Co

Gavin is the Founder of Disruptors Co, one of Australia’s leading independent strategy and innovation companies. Gavin advises firms on strategy, marketing, product development and innovation. He is also a member of the Orbits program, the influencer network of award winning analyst and advisory firm, Constellation Research. Gavin advises boards and leadership on innovation strategy, marketing, data-driven product development and corporate venturing. Gavin is on the board of Vibewire, a youth-led social enterprise based in Sydney, Australia and on the Technology Advisory Group for Good2Give – the workplace giving platform. ...

Detailed statistics and information on social media in Australia continues to be a challenge. While there are pockets of data here and there – we rarely see a side-by-side comparison of user data and benchmarking information. So it is great to see this cheat sheet available. Shared by the folks from Reinventure (over on LinkedIn), it compiles (mostly) Australian data from Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter – with Pinterest data pulled from global data.

The infographic provides some great high level stats, pros and cons for each of the platforms and some useful comparison benchmark data. The data appears to be current as at February 2015 and includes sources like Social Media News, YouTube press statistics and DirectTarget.

Marketing Transformation Next-Generation Customer Experience Innovation & Product-led Growth Revenue & Growth Effectiveness Marketing B2B B2C CX Customer Experience EX Employee Experience AI ML Generative AI Analytics Automation Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Growth eCommerce Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps Social Customer Service Content Management Collaboration Chief Marketing Officer Chief People Officer Chief Revenue Officer

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News Analysis - Workday supports UK Payroll - now speaks (British English) Payroll

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…...

Payroll and related services are somewhere beyond 80 to 90% of HCM enterprise spend, and making sure that an enterprises is compliant with legal and statutory updates, as well as it can pay its employees correctly and on time is a ‘must have’ for HR Leaders. So big news today comes from Workday – as the vendor is adding Payroll support for the UK in Workday 24, its 3rd vendor supported country (Workday supports USA and Canada already).

Let’s dissect the press release (you can find it here) in our customary style:

Workday, Inc. (NYSE: WDAY), a leader in enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources, today announced the general availability of Workday Payroll for the UK. Organically built as part of Workday Financial Management and Workday Human Capital Management (HCM), the new payroll application enables customers with UK employees to address the full spectrum of enterprise payroll needs, providing administrators with the flexibility, control, and insight required to support the unique aspects of their organizations.

MyPOV – Good move, from our customer interactions, enterprises want native / organic payroll support as they need this area of automation to work 99.999% of the time. Less vendors involved, less manual work, less moving parts are always good news to get to that uptime.

Workday also announced momentum for Workday Global Payroll Cloud, a partner program that helps customers reduce the costs associated with deploying, integrating, and managing third-party payroll solutions. Partners offer certified, bi-directional, pre-built integrations between Workday HCM and other payroll systems to provide a comprehensive view of global payroll data. With 85 countries now certified in Workday Global Payroll Cloud, customers including Groupon, Johnson & Johnson, PineBridge Investments, and Zoetis have achieved greater visibility into global payroll actuals, payroll process automation, and streamlined integration between payroll and other HR systems.

MyPOV – Key for Workday to balance organic vs. partner provided payroll out. Customers and partners need / want to know where Workday will build its own ‘organic’ payroll and where it will be partner business. Workday has done a good job enabling a modern bi-directional interface for 85+ country payrolls via 16 partners, enabling customers to see a global view of its payroll actuals in Workday (technology tidbit: brought in-memory), while still being able to use local payroll providers in each country that offer the desired level of service.

iPad User Interface

Workday Payroll for the UK
Payroll has traditionally been a complex undertaking for global organizations, particularly due to the various regulations and laws for each country. Workdays flexible and intuitive payroll applications delivered in the cloud have alleviated many of these challenges with functionality that addresses regulatory and legislative changes. Workday Payroll for the UK follows on the success of the company's payroll applications for the U.S. and Canada, with Workday Payroll for France expected in 2016.

MyPOV – Workday is right to point out, that payroll is a large challenge for enterprises. Thanks to the cloud a lot of the need to implement and test legal and statutory changes has now shifted to the cloud providers, away from the enterprises. A significant relief for payroll practitioners, especially on the technical / IT side.

Customers using Workday Payroll for the UK benefit from:

Automatic tax updates - New tax updates are automatically applied through a cloud delivery model, eliminating the need for regular upgrades and patches required by on-premise payroll systems.

MyPOV – Good to point out the inherent value of cloud (and BPO) based Payrolls.

Powerful and flexible calculation tool - Workday's robust calculation engine makes it easy to handle complex requirements. Users can run payroll calculations as often as needed and payroll-processing time is drastically reduced from hours to minutes.

MyPOV – Good to see – ad-hoc payroll calculation (not sure if supported) for single workers / employees to see over time and take away home pay are key modern capabilities of payrolls today.

High configurability - Unlimited earnings, deductions, pay groups, and pay frequencies can be easily configured by payroll administrators to support calculation and reporting needs. Accumulations, balance periods, and pay balances, as well as complex processes such as off-cycle and retroactive payment processing, are also supported.
MyPOV – Good to see Workday supporting these key payroll features.
Support for UK-specific statutory requirements

Workday Payroll for the UK offers a modern system with support for pay-as-you-earn (PAYE) statutory taxes including National Insurance, student loans, statutory absence payments, and court orders. It also provides an exception reporting capability, audits, and alerts to prompt users, ensuring improved accuracy with payroll calculations as well as real-time information (RTI) reporting.
MyPOV – Key for payroll to work – and good move by Workday to mention support of more recent legislative changes in the YK around PAYE and RTI support.

Anytime mobile access - With one self-service application, employees can check pay slips and payment elections -- any time, on any device. The flexibility of the cloud also gives administrators the ability to process payroll from anywhere at any time.

MyPOV – Now a ‘must have’ feature for payroll, good for Workday and customers that the vendor ships mobile access in the first release.

Real-time analytics and reporting - Organizations can now see what they are actually spending on workers via pre-built reports and analytics for payroll insights. With the same reporting format used throughout Workday HCM, users can combine datasets to increase the context for decision making.
MyPOV – Also a ‘good to have’ feature – enabled by the technology platform a modern payroll is built on – and good for Workday to have this capability in the first version of the UK Payroll.

iPhone User Interface

Workday Global Payroll Cloud
Workday Global Payroll Cloud is the foundation of the company's global yet local approach to payroll, where customers benefit from a unified view of HR and payroll data in a central HCM system while leveraging local payroll providers that meet the specific requirements of individual countries. With Workday Global Payroll Cloud and Workday's country-specific payroll applications, business leaders have greater visibility into the true cost of the global workforce with real-time analytics on global payroll actuals in a single currency or country-specific analytics in a local currency.

MyPOV – The definition of ‘cloud’ has been stretched by many vendors, and if this is a ‘cloud’ one could argue. What matters is that Workday goes to great lengths to certify 3rd party payroll providers interfaces, giving customers peace of mind. At the end all payroll vendors in the global space rely on partners to complement their native / ‘organic’ payroll platform support.
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Comments on the News
"With companies moving to the cloud faster than ever, we are excited to deliver UK payroll to alleviate a huge piece of the complexity faced by these organizations," said Leighanne Levensaler, senior vice president, products, Workday. "As our customers continue to grow their operations around the world, we will keep advancing the breadth and depth of our payroll solutions to ensure they can achieve a unified view of HR and payroll."

"Workday has made it possible for us to standardize and streamline our payroll integrations across 60 countries," said Usman Afzal, director of HR operations, Zoetis. "Workday Global Payroll Cloud has helped us create a common interface with one central source of HR data. That has simplified our lives with respect to global reporting, vendor management, and ongoing maintenance."

MyPOV – Notable that the gentleman from Zoetis refers to Workday Global Payroll cloud – not the UK payroll. But UK customers will take their time to test and validate the UK payroll – and it is not clear from the press release when they got to use the payroll and could validate it in test runs. It may be with them only with Workday 24.

Availability
Workday Payroll for the UK is now available as part of the company's latest release, Workday 24.

MyPOV – So if customers only got their hands on the real code with the last week release of Workday 24 – we should not see live customers in 3 (simple) to 6 months (moderate complex scenarios) live on the Workday UK Payroll.

Overall MyPOV

As mentioned in the introduction, a working payroll solution is key for enterprises's people strategies, as it gives the peace of mind and freedom to pursue more strategic people related projects. All too often we see that payroll (and compliance) challenges put more strategic people projects on time out in the best case. In the worst case, executive teams lose confidence in the HR leadership, and will be more conservative when asked for budget for strategic HR transformation projects.

So it’s good news for Workday customers that Workday has added support for the UK payroll. Now we will have to see how quickly and well customers can get to the benefits and be live on the UK payroll. It will also be a good test for the Workday compliance teams and product architecture, as payroll implementations often take so long, that new legal and statutory changes happen during the client implementation. But that is the same for all vendors in the payroll business.

From a payroll complexity, the UK ranks relatively low in the world, we expect the France payroll (planned by Workday for 2016) to be a more formidable challenge.

And finally Workday has done well extending its country support via the Workday Global Payroll Cloud to 85 countries. But we know from enterprises that decision makers see a difference between partner based and vendor based payroll support. As Workday lags the ERP Top 3 (SAP, Oracle and Infor) as well as its co-opetitors ADP and Ceridian in vendor supported countries – it will be interesting to see how decision makers will weigh the importance of vendor based payroll support going forward. As for Workday it looks that partner strategy is set – as Workday highlights its recent partnership with Payroll Inc. in Japan (see here).

In my view large customers in large markets (Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, Brazil etc.) will over time force Workday to provide vendor based payroll support for these markets. But that is speculation and only the future (and maybe some people in Pleasanton) could tell.

Water shortage – supply chain disruption that isn’t easily avoided

pending

Guy Courtin was formerly Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research covering Matrix Commerce and how the Internet of Things drives the evolution of commerce.  Guy has over 15 years experience in the technology space and specifically in the supply chain space. Most recently he was the Vice President of Research at SCM World. Where he focused on the service providers that empowered supply chains. Prior to SCM World, Guy held numerous senior positions. He was responsible for product marketing at RSi, a retail supply chain solution provider. There managed RSi’s go to market strategy around their leading cloud based supply chain solutions. He also spear headed Progress Software’s supply chain group. Where he was responsible for driving revenue and market share as well…...

The headlines about the California drought have been a constant drum beat about the issues we face with this most vital of global resources. Of course when you look at what we here in New England suffered through this winter, it is hard to fathom a water shortage! Sometimes it is also surprising to read about water issues when over 70% of the planet is covered by water. But much of that water is not fresh water, only 2.5% of the global water is fresh water, and of that 70% is trapped in the icecaps of Antarctica and Greenland. Access to fresh water will continue to be a major global issue. And an underlying one for our supply chains.

Agriculture – no surprise here. The numbers from California demonstrate the heavy reliance on water usage. With the Golden State’s farms using a whopping 80% of the state’s water – it is clear this industry remains a leader when it comes to water consumption. Couple this with a growing global population, the agriculture supply chain will find itself under greater strain to meet this demand while controlling their usage of water. It will be interesting to see if this supply chain starts employing tactics that we are seeing in manufacturing – near shoring. When states like California supply 80% of the global almond supply, yet that crop consumes 10% of California’s water – or 1.1 gallons per almond. Granted it is easier said than done since crops require much more than just water – soil and weather play major factors in crop growth. But moving crops to different location is not that easy.
Manufacturing – industries such as chemical, beverage, steel, paper production to name a few are heavily reliant on water. By some estimates it takes 80,000 gallons of water to produce on automobile, 700 gallons on water for one cotton shirt and 24 gallons of water for 1lb of plastic. Supply chains have become more efficient when it comes to the manufacturing process, reducing some of the water strain from that angle. However, as our product supply chains are introducing products at a faster pace, and therefore taking out goods from the supply chain at an increased pace – the strain on the water usage is under pressure from that perspective.
Future of work – these water issues are not simply about how we produce goods, but the workers within the supply chain are also impacted. It goes beyond Californians’ not being able to water their lawns and their quality of life. But in regions such as northern China, parts of India, the Middle East and sub Saharan Africa the issue of water directly impacts the work force. While some of these regions might offer affordable labor and new markets, if that population is more concerned about securing water that will impact their roles as workers as well as consumers.

The bottom line is the latest water shortage in California is a reminder that natural disruptions are omnipresent within our supply chains. Of course our supply chains cannot control natural occurrences such as droughts. But when it comes to simulating our supply chain networks, determining our planning and sourcing we must factor the possibility of these disruptions. Our supply chains function in a system that is still driven by natural forces. Those are variables we are the mercy of…understand how they can impact your supply chain. Ignore them at your own peril.

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GetSatisfaction: The Controversy Cannot Hide The Facts

If you follow the news you know that GetSatisfaction was acquired by Sprinklr last week (link to press coverage).

Almost immediately the press and analysts went into congratulatory overdrive. However, shortly after the acquisition was announced, less than flattering news about the transaction trickled out – including this piece on Business Insider today (grain of salt: its business insider – the yellow press of business journalism) where one of the founders complain.

It is not, as you likely know by now, my place to take sides on fights that don’t involve me. Ask my daughters – broken bones (sticking out) and blood are the only two reasons I get involved (thankfully never got to that). Let the parties figure out the reasons for the fight and better yet – the reasons not to.

There are two issues though, that bear analyzing:

the role of communities in marketplaces and workplaces
the proper way to fund and support a startup

I’ll make it easy – I cannot contribute something worthwhile to the second one in a blog post; it is a very customized-personalized thing that changes from one to the next and whoever says different is just selling you a — well, their services.

I will gladly contribute to the first one – because i’ve been saying this for far longer than i remember: Michael Maoz (of Gartner fame and a good friend and former colleague while I was there) and I talked about this in 2002-2004 and then had to give it up since no one cared.

I wrote plenty about it before, including a difference between the many ways communities are shaping up to be. Still, no one cared.

Now, y’all do. Sort of – at least starting to.

Communities are (should’ve been) the only reason we started social networks and why social matters to organizations. And they are the (renewable) power source for business transformation going forward. Communities is something you, Mr/s. business person, should care about deeply – and yet, more than 85% of “youz” don’t.

I don’t have sufficient visibility into the dealings behind the acquisition, but I can tell you one thing: this is not the last. If you look at the “communities providers” vendors they are all in the same: working through the resistance of 85% of the market that doesn’t get what communities are and what they do – and using the other 15% to propel them forward.

We will see more acquisitions like this very soon, in the next few months. We will see more vendors with great technologies being folded into more complete social and even CRM suites. We will see more dreams shattered (likely) and some realized. We will see the beginning of the rise of communities to become mainstream (rule of thumb: 30% adoption in the marketplace) and to realize their potential.

One more thing: I am not talking about community managers and purposefully built communities. That’s training wheels stuff when it comes to communities.

I am talking about the model that GetSatisfaction embraced and was unable to sustain in the market: ad-hoc, open, freely moldable and shapeable communities where people come to share power and knowledge – and no one controls or brands.

If you are interested in forums and structured communities you still don’t get the concept of communities for business. This is not your grandpa communities – that was just more “training wheels” stuff. This is about providing an infrastructure and let interested parties build and power communities. Very different model than what you are thinking (and I know this because i talked to many of “you” every week).

What do you think? (comments below, use them)

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

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Decyphering Bitcoin and the Blockchain

Gavin Heaton

Founder
Disruptors Co

No doubt you’ll have heard about Bitcoin by now. It’s that disruptive technology that is keeping Financial Services CEOs awake at night. JP Morgan CEO, Jamie Dimon, in his annual letter to shareholders warned investors and the banking industry that “Silicon Valley is coming” – suggesting that there are hundreds of startups focusing on the financial services technology space (“fintech”) and that traditional banking will need to double down on its innovation efforts.

[Startups] … are very good at reducing the ‘pain points’ in that they can make loans in minutes, which might take banks weeks. We are going to work hard to make our services as seamless and competitive as theirs. And we also are completely comfortable with partnering where it makes sense.

But his particular focus on next generation payments systems like PayPal and Bitcoin were called out for special attention.

Here in Australia, these new systems have been the subject of a Senate Hearing Committee investigating digital currencies.

But how does Bitcoin work? Sean Carmody, Head of Credit Risk at Westpac put together this presentation that explains the technical underpinnings of Bitcoin – the blockchain. It explains:

Why virtual currencies are a happening thing – the perfect match for a virtual world
The problem with virtual currencies – how to prevent people simply “copying” a digital currency
The innovation in the “blockchain”

And while the presentation does get technical, it is also eye-opening. Technology may be transforming the way that currencies can operate (now and into the future) – but TRUST remains a vital ingredient in currency transactions. And as Sean suggests, Bitcoin may not be the winner in the digital currency race – but it has fired the starter’s gun.

Bitcoin, Banking and the Blockchain from seancarmody

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Email In Real Life

Alan Lepofsky

Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Alan Lepofsky - VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research. With almost two decades of experience in the collaboration software industry, Lepofsky helps organizations improve the way their employees work together to get their jobs done. Lepofsky’s primary research area The Future of Work, focuses on: integrating collaboration and business processes (Purposeful Collaboration), structuring work via Social Task Management, leveraging analytics and digital assistants to work more productively, the strategic impact of mobile computing on business transformation, and measuring workforce culture based on Digital Proficiency instead of age. Twitter: @alanlepoLinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/alanlepo     , Title: Big IdeasIntelligent Collaboration: The Intersection of…...

Kudos to my friends at Workfront for putting together this great parody on email.

Future of Work Marketing Transformation Next-Generation Customer Experience Revenue & Growth Effectiveness Data to Decisions Innovation & Product-led Growth New C-Suite Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Chief People Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief Revenue Officer

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Will LinkedIn & lynda.com Help Us Race With The Machines?

Terri Griffith

Professor/Author/Speaker
Simon Fraser University

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

Last year, 1,896 experts responded to questions from the Pew Research Center around how artificial intelligence and robotics will affect our work and lives by 2025. The group was about evenly split on whether more jobs would be created or destroyed, but they also gave more nuanced comments on the different themes underlying their thinking. One theme tightly related to my own research is summarized as, “Technology will free us from day-to-day drudgery, and allow us to define our relationship with “work” in a more positive and socially beneficial way.” Technology will change the nature of work. Technology can also help us cope with these changes.

LinkedIn and lynda.com

Think about LinkedIn. With 107 Million users in the United States and 347 Million worldwide, many of us have already gone to the effort of providing LinkedIn’s machines with our work history. Combine this with LinkedIn's recent announcement that they will pay $1.5 Billion for professional education company lynda.com.

Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s CEO is quoted in a press release:

The mission of LinkedIn and the mission of lynda.com are highly aligned. Both companies seek to help professionals be better at what they do…lynda.com’s extensive library of premium video content helps empower people to develop the skills needed to accelerate their careers. When integrated with the hundreds of millions of members and millions of jobs on LinkedIn, lynda.com can change the way in which people connect to opportunity.

Lifelong Learning Demanded by the Shrinking “Half-Life” of our Job Knowledge -- But Machines Can Help

Jobs evolve more quickly than they have in the past. For example, half the knowledge in some fields of psychology is expected to be obsolete in less than six years. For information technology professionals, the pace is even faster.

My version of the best outcome of the LinkedIn/lynda.com acquisition is that the deep integration of our LinkedIn work histories and LinkedIn’s broad perspective on available jobs, and the skills needed to do them, will help us prepare for a world where work is constantly changing and we have to race to stay current. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee call this racing with the machines instead of against them.

LinkedIn may be able to combine what it knows about the kinds of jobs that are available (via its recruiting services), the kinds of skills we have (via our LinkedIn profiles), and predictive analytics (data crunching focused on testing what might happen next) to direct us towards the most valuable educational opportunities offered by the lynda.com content. Ideally, we’d have enough time to prepare for the jobs of the future and stay ahead of the curve. The machine becomes our partner in career planning at exactly the time that we need it.

Do you feel like the pace of change in your work is increasing? For career success, what’s the right mix of staying up to date on factual knowledge (book learning), the technologies (tools) of your work, and your professional (human) networks?

New C-Suite Future of Work Chief Executive Officer

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Event Report - AWS pushes the platform with Analytics and Storage [From the Fences]

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

AWS is holding their kickoff to the, by now, traditional worldwide AWS Summit conference tour. And similar to last year's tour, Amazon kicked the event series off in San Francisco. Given that the April timing is almost half a year away from AWS’s yearly re-invent conference in Las Vegas, it is a key update time for AWS. And a key update time it was – with almost as many press release and blog posts as re-invent, quite a challenge to sort through the news.

So here are my top 3 takeaways

Amazon Machine Learning – ‘True’ analytics are a key characteristic of modern, next generation applications (more here) that developers are looking at cloud providers to enable them to build. Google had an early lead in this area, but Microsoft and now Amazon are catching up. The Analytics space has been transformed fundamentally in the last 3-5 years in the aftermath of the Netflix competition. Instead of using the same analytical model for their professional life time – as it was pretty much practice in the age of constraint based computing – data scientists now need to ‘thrash’ models with as much compute as the next generation application can get hold on, on as much data one can afford to store. And the most affordable storage and compute capacities – right in the cloud. So really no surprise that Amazon is propagating machine learning. The vendor shared that over 50B predictions are already being made in AWS today – before all the new help Amazon is now providing to developers to build analytical applications. And analytic application are a great complimentary product for cloud providers – use spot pricing for special modelling needs and it equally motivates to store and keep more data stored in the cloud. Who knows if some data that looks discard able today may be key tomorrow? As long as it is affordable, the data will be kept around and analytical models will go back to and leverage the data over and over again. Amazon has done well at understanding this trend and is a in a very good position to leverage a large number of these next generation applications.

The Amazon platform emerges – My key takeaways from re-invent 2014 was that AWS is becoming a platform – and it has to become a platform to long term compete with IBM’s, Microsoft’s and Oracle’s cloud platforms. Amazon needs to attract and keep developers, as whenever the traditional platform vendors are ready with their respective cloud based platforms, they will attract a large number of applications that have been built on their on-premise platforms. So Amazon becomes a platform for next generation applications, and is in the process with that creating the usual and customary platform tie in all platforms have. Something to be aware of when making cloud platform decisions, but something we see most vendors and enterprises happily take as a tradeoff. And along the Amazon platform product strategy there were a number of key announcements:

Amazon Elastic File (EFS) System – A modern platform needs access to files and storage. If the platform is in the cloud and modern applications are being built on it – it needs the ability to bring the data to the applications. EFS is a key step by Amazon to allow enterprise to store all the data they want and need in the cloud, with all the benefits of the cloud – pay for use, scale up and down etc. It is SSD based – so will be fast, and replicates across AZs – so it is likely to be better than many storage solutions that run onsite, and probably cheaper (Amazon said it would be 30 cents / GB / month). Storage is a key component for a next generation platform and good to see Amazon adding this to the product family.

Amazon EC2 Container Service – And when you have the data, you need to run services on it, ideally micro services and of course Docker. Amazon’s container services allows the next step of controlling and scaling those services easier for developers, a key challenge and on the flipside when solved – a value creation point.

Lambda becomes broadly available - Lambda was the most exciting announcement back at re-invent in my view, and Amazon undersold it to a certain point, so it is good to see that more use cases, especially IoT were raised in San Francisco. And with adding support for lambda in CloudFormation and Mobile development Amazon is doing the steady work of making lambda more available across the Amazon platform. Good to see.

ISV Traction - To keep growing Amazon must attract not only enterprises and ISVs that want to build next generation platforms, but also ISVs that will bring either net new customer load to Amazon or move their on premise load to the AWS cloud. Last year Infor was front and center of this trend, with Infor CEO Charles Philips presenting in San Francisco, this year the trend continues with announcements by MicroStrategy, Software AG, TIBCO and more joining IMS Health, Infor, PegaSystems, Splunk et al making Amazon the platform for their next generation products. As Infor has laid out many times, the advantages are compelling – instead of putting precious investment $s into infrastructure and data centers, vendors can focus on product and let Amazon sort out the infrastructure side. That they also create a certain level of dependence on Amazon seems not bother their customers these days. And with e.g. IBM, Oracle and SAP not showing yet material advantages of a vendor running SaaS, PaaS and IaaS all in one hand, this may not change soon either.

MyPOV

An announcement and feature rich kickoff event for Amazon in the capitol of Silicon Valley (sorry San Jose). Amazon is doing the hard work to integrate their offerings and making them available across administrative and developer services and platforms. The result is a more congruent, efficient and ultimately more appealing platform for enterprises and developers. Amazon needs to keep executing along that strategy and cannot count on its competitors not getting their act together. 2015 will be an exciting year for the cloud and Amazon came out of the gates strong. Stronger than I frankly expected – but that all is good news for customers and the market.

[Comment – the [From the fences] add on to the post title means that I was not attending the event in person, but used the briefings, material Amazon provided and feedback from various industry and influence sources as well as our Constellation customer views to form my opinion and takeaways of the event. Take it with a grain of salt.]

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More on AWS

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

Other cloud related:

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

Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here.

Tech Optimization Data to Decisions Innovation & Product-led Growth Future of Work Next-Generation Customer Experience Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity softlayer infor Google IBM amazon Microsoft SaaS PaaS IaaS Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP CCaaS UCaaS Collaboration Enterprise Service ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Generative AI AI Analytics Automation business Marketing finance Healthcare Customer Service Content Management Chief Information Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief AI Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Product Officer

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Workday 24 - ‘True’ Analytics, a Vertical and more - now needs customer proof points

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

This morning Workday unveiled Workday 24 as part of their twice yearly release cycle. All customers are live and the vendor is (rightfully) proud that the overall application of the release took little more than 4 hours – showing that Workday has done some additional housekeeping on its overall cloud infrastructure.

What are my top 3 takeaways of the release?

‘True’ Analytics (more here) see the light of day – Last year Workday committed pretty much all of their roadmap of new announcements from their Rising conference to (‘true’) analytics. The vendor announced 3 Finance and 3 HCM analytical applications, that Workday calls Insight Applications. With Workday 24 the vendor makes good on its roadmap, tackling the very common area of Retention / Flight Risk. Pretty much all major HCM vendors now have analytical models to predict flight risk – so it is good to see that Workday has equally released / shipped that capability. Now it is all up to hearing from the first customer how well these retention analytics work. Looking forward to hear more. Moreover it is good to see that Workday now strikes the right balance between visualization, reporting, analysis and analytics – as all have their place in a modern 21st century application, but it is good to see Workday getting the definitions right and helping to reduce the confusion too many vendor marketers have created around the ‘analytics’ term.

Screenshot showing Retention Analytics

Professional Service Automation – PSA – sees the light of day, too – So far vertical offerings at Workday – apart from Workday Student – have not been broken out into separate products – PSA is now the first complete vertical offering that combines key capabilities of HCM and Finance in a new offering that looks functional rich and attractive for a first version. It is good to see that Workday re-uses and leverages assets and creates more value for its (numerous) professional services customers. Anyone having run a professional services team knows that Microsoft Excel is the band-aid that keeps these organizations going – so it is good to see a vendor offering putting (hopefully) and end to tedious and error prone workarounds.

Screenshot of PSA Dashboard

A function-rich release – I have been critical of Workday for – what it looks from the outside – slowing down the functional richness of its releases over time. Workday 22 and now Workday 24 are a departure from that trend, so it is good to see that with Recruiting, Insight Applications and the new PSA product, Workday is delivering major new functionality beyond architecture and user interface. As mentioned earlier – tough to measure from the outside what really a number of x enhancements means.

Update 15	Update 16	Update 17	Update 18	Update 19	Update 20	Update 21	Worday 22	Workday 24
October 2011	April 2012	August 2012	November 2012	April 2013	September 2013	January 2014	May 2014	April 2015
User Experience - Outlook Integration - Chatter Integration	Mobility HTML5 Support for non IOS devices	Mobility - New modules - Global Support	Workforce Engagement: Team Profile Professional Profile	Headcount Planning	Big Data Analytics	New User Interface for browser	New Process Framework	An Intelligent Foundation for Analytics 1st Insight App New Android Look & Feel
Talent Management - Talent Reviews - Career Interests - Cornerstone Integration	Onboarding	Time Tracking	Performance Management Enhancements	Android Native Support & iOS Mobile Enhancements	User Experience - Configurable Grids for Compensation	Performance Management across browser and mobile	Recruiting Travel Connector rids for Compensation	Retention Insight App Talent Insights Professional Services Automation (PSA)
Payroll - Payroll for Canada - Payroll Connector		Usability Enhancements	Custom Fields	More custom fields	Mobility - Notbooks for iPad	Legislative support - Report for ACA / RUP	Collective Bargain Agreements	Improved Time Tracking
Higher Education Functionality				170 Enhancements	207 Features / 80 Brainstorm Items	246 Features / 67 Brainstorm Items	347 Features / 68 Customer Requests	30% of Features from Brainstorm Items

P.S. Need to add Workday 23 some time.

MyPOV

Always good to see vendors making good on their roadmap announcements and good to see Workday delivering a function-rich Workday 24 release. There is also a commercial aspect with the release – as it marks the end of the ‘all included’ era for Workday – remarkably, the vendor has been able to keep this up for its first 10 years. And the Insight Applications can create enough value for enterprises to justify this – but it is a first for customers and a first for the Workday salesforce, so an area to watch.

2015 is also the year the Workday Payroll for the UK is released. It wasn’t part of the Workday 24 announcements this week – but there are still plenty of days left in this year for Workday to make that milestone – in my view a key one to track.

And on the adoption side of new functionality, as customers are live on the software, now it comes to see how well they are using the new functionalities and how successful they are with them. The very nature of analytical applications makes the ‘does it work’ question harder for all players involved – as you need to have historic data – or start collecting data to see if the predictions, recommendations and actions really move the needle for enterprises as desired, designed and expected. We will be watching closely.

Former InformationWeek Editor Doug Henschen Joins Constellation to Cover Big Data Analytics

Veteran enterprise technology editor joins research team as Principal Analyst

New York City, Silicon Valley – Constellation Research, Inc., the Silicon Valley-based disruptive technology research and advisory firm announced today the appointment of Doug Henschen to the research team as Vice President and Principal Analyst covering big data analytics. Henschen, whose research focuses on information and orchestration technologies, business intelligence, data-visualization, analytics, NoSQL and big-data analysis, expands Constellation’s ability to provide data-to-decisions research to its early adopter clients worldwide.

The addition of Doug Henschen, a leading observer of trends in data-driven insight and innovation, signals Constellation’s commitment to comprehensive analysis of the impact of disruptive technologies on business today. Henschen examines how brands and organizations uncover product and service opportunities through near-real-time insight, spatial analysis, and blending of vast quantities and varieties of data -- including sensor data and third-party-enrichment data – to gain a deep, contextual understanding of customer, partner, employee, and supplier needs, preferences, and intensions.

"I'm honored to join Constellation Research as I've long admired its focus on forward-looking, technology-enabled business innovation," said Henschen. "I'm used to asking vendors tough questions and exploring breakthrough uses of technology. My new role at Constellation Research gives me an opportunity to share deeper and more detailed insights to help guide technology purchases and digital-transformation initiatives."

Doug Henschen most recently led analytics, big data, business intelligence, optimization, and smart applications research and news-analysis as Executive Editor at InformationWeek. He was previously led Intelligent Enterprise and Transform Magazine, which focused on business process management.

“We are excited to have someone as experienced as Doug join us helping our clients navigate how data to decisions transforms business models. Doug is a leading authority in this space and in enterprise applications,” said R “Ray “Wang, Principal Analyst and CEO, “As the influencer landscape changes, our clients expect to work with experienced professionals with extensive buy side points of view. Doug’s passion for critical analysis is what our Executive Network members expect us to deliver”

COORDINATES

Profile: https://www.constellationr.com/users/doug-henschen
Twitter: @dhenschen
Website: Constellationr.com
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/doughenschen
Geo: New York City Metro

Doug Henschen Biographical Information

Doug Henschen is a Vice President and Principal Analyst focusing 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. 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, chief financial officers, chief marketing officers, chief information officers, chief customer officers, and manufacturing and supply chain leaders.

Previous experience: Doug led analytics, big data, business intelligence, optimization, and smart applications research and news coverage at InformationWeek. His experiences include leadership in analytics, business intelligence, database, data warehousing, and decision-support research and analysis for Intelligent Enterprise. Further, Doug led business process management and enterprise content management research and analysis at Transform magazine. At DM News he led the coverage of database marketing and digital marketing trends and news.

Professional background

InformationWeek, Executive Editor, 5 Years
Intelligent Enterprise, Editor In Chief, Editor 6 years
Transform/Imaging, Editor in Chief, 6 years
DMNews, Executive Editor, 1 year

Education

Bachelor of Arts, Syracuse University

Coverage Areas

Analytics, big data platforms and NoSQL technologies, business intelligence, data exploration and visualization, data integration and orchestration, decision support and management, decision-management and real-time analysis technologies

About Constellation Research

Constellation Research is an award winning, Silicon Valley-based research and advisory firm that helps clients navigate tumultuous business environments with disruptive technologies and progressive transformation strategies. Constellation enables forward-thinking visionaries to harness the transformative power of digital technologies to solve tough business problems and advance their careers.

***

Constellation Research, Constellation SuperNova Awards, Constellation Orbits, Connected Enterprise, Constellation Cosmos, and the Constellation Research logo are trademarks of Constellation Research, Org. All other products and services listed herein are trademarks of their respective companies.

Press Contacts:
Contact the Media and Influencers relations team at [email protected] for interviews with analysts.

Sales Contacts:
Contact our sales team at [email protected].

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