Stop Talking About Digital Transformation

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What?

I mean, what????

Seriously?  Just last year two of my seven posts (yeah, didn’t do that well writing in my blog last year – but been working to remedy that by posting links to my other writings around the world – but I digress) were about digital transformation.

I have been talking about digital transformation for nearly four years now and began to write about the transformative power of data (what digital refers to) over 15 years ago (when I began to cover EFM at Gartner ‘member?).  Why on earth would I want to stop talking about it now – when its finally reached the peak of the hype cycle and is beginning to be adopted?

Because its too limiting.

In my (now) business transformation model data has a key place right in the middle of it (see figure below).

In conversations and work I’ve done these past 6-8 months with organizations and vendors data remains the main focus.  Top  investments for 2015 are focused around data and analytics.  Talk of Big Data and related concepts are taking over the world – and my colleagues (analysts, influencers, and pundits) are all super-busy around the topic of Data.

Data has taken front-and-center positioning among organizations’ plans and strategies for 2015 – and it is too limiting.

We need to amplify the conversation.

If we are going to talk about transformation we need to talk about more than just digital.  Data is but one piece of the pie.  Data, together with content and knowledge, become part of the information layer (see figure below).

If we are to talk about a complete transformation of the business we need to also talk about content beyond marketing and about knowledge beyond service as well as we talk about data.  We need to understand that the three work together to create information and that the flow of the information, freely via public clouds, is what will transform the business.  We also need to understand how new, old, and still-unknown data is going to be used to push business forward.

Data and digital are still part of the transformation, but we cannot forget the remaining pieces — and talking about digital simply limits the conversation to a small piece of it.

Let’s stop talking about digital transformation.

Let’s talk about business transformation.

What do you think?

Marketing Transformation Next-Generation Customer Experience Innovation & Product-led Growth Tech Optimization Future of Work AI ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Generative AI Analytics Automation B2B B2C CX EX Employee Experience HR HCM business Marketing Metaverse developer SaaS PaaS IaaS Supply Chain Quantum Computing Growth Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology eCommerce Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP Leadership finance Social Healthcare VR CCaaS UCaaS Customer Service Content Management Collaboration M&A Enterprise Service Chief Customer Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Operating Officer

News Analysis - VMware makes progress towards the (hybrid) cloud - now let's watch the adoption

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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VMware seems to have made February the month of the cloud and is promising 28 days of Cloud Insight (see more here). VMware execs must be pretty confident that they have enough material – as they did not even include the recently (well last week) announced partnership with Google (more here).

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - February 02, 2015) - VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) today announced VMware vSphere® 6, the newest edition of the industry-defining virtualization solution for the hybrid cloud and foundation for the software-defined data center. With more than 650 new features and innovations, VMware vSphere 6 will provide customers with a highly available, resilient, on-demand cloud infrastructure to run, protect and manage any application. VMware vSphere 6 will be complemented by the newest releases of VMware vCloud® Suite 6, VMware vSphere with Operations Management™ 6, and VMware Virtual SAN™ 6.

MyPOV – Basically VMware is following through on the announcements made at VMWorld in summer of 2014 (my takeaways here) – and delivering the ‘6’ product family in Q1 2015 as announced back then.

[Update Feb 3rd 2015 - VMware points out correctly these products were not announced back at VMworld - but general features and capabilities not slotted to a specific release. They now ship as part of the '6' product family.]

VMware today also re-enforced its support of open frameworks for building and managing clouds with its new VMware Integrated OpenStack distribution. This first-ever OpenStack distribution from VMware will empower IT to provide developers with open API access to enterprise-class VMware infrastructure. Additionally, VMware revealed a technology preview that will enable customers to bridge the public and private cloud through the combination of VMware NSX™ network virtualization and VMware vCloud® Air™, VMware's public cloud service, to enable a single, secure network domain.

MyPOV – True to the announcements VMware is also delivering OpenStack capabilities, who are badly demanded by their customers. The concern is that in this case, with its own distribution, VMware may do (or hopefully not) the one or other things to break OpenStack or make it only work with its products (of course I speculate here). But customers may be ready to accept that for the pure benefit to run more of VMware with OpenStack tools. We still need to understand the timeline of the ‘technology preview’ mentioned above.

"As our customers accelerate growth, their IT organizations are expected to drive transformation, enhance efficiency and bring more value to the business than ever before," said Ben Fathi, chief technology officer, VMware, Inc. "We are helping them achieve these goals through continued innovation in VMware vSphere as the platform for their hybrid cloud strategy. VMware vSphere is the gold standard by which all other virtualization technologies are measured, and vSphere 6 raises the bar even higher."

MyPOV – Fair ambition for VMware, but it is time to be able to understand local data center load and move it to the cloud. VSphere still does (too) little for that. We may to wait for (hopefully) later in the month VCloud Air announcements.

In other news today, VMware announced the industry's first unified platform of virtualized compute, networking and storage for the hybrid cloud (read the news announcement), as well as new innovations for software-defined storage including VMware Virtual SAN 6 and vSphere Virtual Volumes™ (read the news announcement).

MyPOV – Key announcements for VMware customers, who should check them out if they have upcoming storage products.
 

VMware products announced February 2nd 2015 (from Webcast)

VMware vSphere 6 - The Foundation for Hybrid Cloud

Unveiled today, VMware vSphere 6 will deliver breakthrough new capabilities to address the unique needs of business-critical and cloud-native applications, and drive higher performance, scale and consolidation ratios. VMware vSphere 6 will also re-define infrastructure and application service-levels and availability. New capabilities and features include:

Broad Application Support - VMware vSphere 6 will address the specific challenges of cloud-native applications, including agile development cycles and multiple application instances. With VMware vSphere 6, organizations will be able to manage thousands of component instances of a single cloud-native application. New scale, performance and availability capabilities also make vSphere 6 the platform of choice for virtualizing scale-up applications such as SAP HANA, scale-out workloads such as Hadoop, and business-critical applications such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, and SAP ERP.

>> MyPOV – Working well with a number if ISVs has always been VMware’s strength. That VMware can keep these relationships going in the cloud age will be a key development to keep an eye on – as most of the current partners have made commitments to their own cloud infrastructures. At some point e.g. SAP customers will think SAP will run better on the SAP cloud, Oracle products will run better in the Oracle cloud etc. – even if de-facto not a true development.

New Long-Distance Live Migration Capabilities - VMware vSphere 6 introduces Long-Distance motion®, which will enable zero downtime live migration of workloads over long distances such as New York to London. With multi-processor fault tolerance, another industry first, customers will benefit from continuous availability for larger virtual machines up to four virtual-CPUs.

MyPOV – This is a key (and long overdue) feature for VMware. Probably the best received and equally badly needed feature at VMWorld 2014 in San Francisco. With the long distance capability VMware takes away a lot of overhead and headache for its customers. A very good move in my view, now VMware needs to make sure the pricing is so attractive that customers will shelve the workarounds they have in place for this today.

Instant Clone Technology - Introduced as Project Fargo, a technology preview at VMworld® 2014 San Francisco, VMware's Instant Clone technology will make it possible to rapidly clone and provision thousands of container instances and virtual machines to make new virtual infrastructure available in sub-second timeframes.

MyPOV – A key feature added by VMware which keeps VMware relevant as infrastructure player even for more advanced organizations that run, build and have to maintain next generation applications that heavily rely on container infrastructures.

3D Graphics for Desktop Virtualization - VMware vSphere 6 will enable enterprises to deliver high-end workstation and graphics-intensive applications to virtual desktops such as VMware Horizon® 6 for industries such as engineering, automotive, education and architecture. Using NVIDIA GRID vGPU technology, immersive 3D graphics can be delivered from the cloud enabling greater density, scalable performance and increased cost-savings. Read the NVIDIA and VMware joint announcement.

MyPOV – It’s good to see the VMware efforts from its traditional portfolio and the EUC portfolio coming together. It will also make it real for VMware run EUC on VMware – which is always a great showcase for vendors.

Enterprise-Class Hypervisor-Converged Storage - VMware's flagship will provide enterprise-class scale, performance and new data services making it the ideal storage platform for virtual machines including business-critical applications. Read more about VMware Virtual SAN 6.

MyPOV – Good progress by VMware, storage is inherently non elastic, but bringing software defined storage to VSphere is a key capability to reduce maintenance and operational overhead.

Virtual Machine-Awareness for Third-Party Storage - VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes is the industry's first solution that will enable native virtual machine awareness on a wide range of third-party storage systems, extending VMware's software-defined storage control plane to the ecosystem. Read more about VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes.

MyPOV – Depending how it pans out this could be the most important storage announcement today – as it would allow customers of VMware to control 3rd party storage products. If this is in the interest of these vendors remains to be seen, but kudos for VMware to try brining these together.

Customers can optimize the performance, capacity and configuration health of VMware vSphere 6 with the newly introduced VMware vSphere with Operations Management 6. An integrated platform and management solution, VMware vSphere with Operations Management 6 simplifies infrastructure management with predictive analytics as well as automated recommendation and remediation capabilities. The solution delivers value from day one by helping customers proactively identify and remediate emerging performance and configuration issues and to reclaim any overprovisioned virtual machines along with associated compute, memory and storage resources.

MyPOV – Always good to see the operations / admin console ship with the new feature and not later. Speaks for solid engineering, quality assurance and realistic product delivery timelines.

Also announced today, VMware vCloud Suite 6 will integrate VMware vSphere 6 with the latest releases of its cloud management solutions -- VMware vRealize™ Automation 6.2 and VMware vRealize Operations 6 -- to deliver a private cloud based on a software-defined data center architecture. The latest release will also introduce showback/chargeback and budgeting capabilities via the addition of VMware vRealize Business 6 Standard to further empower infrastructure and operations teams to manage private clouds.

MyPOV – Key capabilities for hybrid cloud and long demanded / expected by VMware customers.

VMware Integrated OpenStack - A Simpler Path to OpenStack

VMware Integrated OpenStack is an OpenStack distribution that will enable organizations to quickly and cost-effectively provide developers with open, cloud-style APIs to access VMware's enterprise-class infrastructure. VMware will package, test and support all components of the distribution, including the open source OpenStack code.

MyPOV – So VMware decides to have its own OpenStack distribution, nothing to be too much afraid of. See my above concerns (and speculation) of VMware being the first to break OpenStack interoperability standards – but VMware will not be the only provider tempted to break the interoperability promise for the sake of better uptake of existing features and capabilities.

With VMware Integrated OpenStack, even IT shops with little or no OpenStack or Linux experience can be up and running with an OpenStack cloud in minutes. The solution will provide full integration with VMware's cloud management platform, enabling customers to leverage existing VMware expertise to manage and troubleshoot an OpenStack cloud.

MyPOV – And here we go – let’s help the SMBs first. As long as decision makers at these SMBs know what they are doing and make decisions with open eyes – good for them.

VMware is also announcing set of new professional services that will provide customers ready access to software development best practices to help implement OpenStack and DevOps projects successfully. VMware added a wealth of experience in designing, implementing and auto-deploying any size OpenStack cloud through its acquisition of MomentumSI, which closed in Q4 2014. Read more about what MomentumSI brought to VMware.

MyPOV – Good to see VMware ramping up the services needed.
 

Implications, Implications

Implications for VMware customers

Good news for VMware customers, always good to see a vendor deliver. The remote instance creation capabilities can become a real option for HA strategies. The container performance should encourage customers with next generation application projects to take note and potentially evaluate the new capabilities. Overall customers need to weigh benefits vs license and implementation costs of the new VMware products.

Implications for VMware partners

Equally good news when the main ecosystem anchor delivers. While some longer term opportunities may vanish (e.g. around HA) others may arise (e.g. OpenStack). Partners need to revisit their service and product portfolio in the light of thee substantial product announcements and chart their value adding strategy for the next years, potentially from anew.

Implications for VMware competitors

It is clear that VMware is making true on its feartures and capabilities parrtially discussed at VMworld 2014. If a competitor was counting on VMware not delivering, it is bad news for them now. The next months will have to show what impact the new products will have on the market and competitors need to chart their product and marketing strategies accordingly to achieve differentiation.
 

Overall MyPOV

Always good for a vendor to make true for their announcements. Many of the new capabilities VMware announced and now delivered are not ‘low hanging fruit’ – so congrats to the VMware R&D teams to bring it here. Now it’s back to customers to evaluate the benefit / cost relationship of the new VMware products, where some areas look favorable, others look more difficult. Customers should be aware of alternatives and weigh their options accordingly. On the flipside VMware offers one integrated data center platform that is engineered and tested together – so when VMware delivers on that with good quality – it is a very valuable platform for customers.

The main act for VMware – around vCloud Air – is still to come. It will be key to understand VMware’s progress and status on that crucial product before making ultimate decisions around VMware product adoption and rollout.

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More on VMWare by me

• Speed Briefings at VMworld - read here
• Event Report - VMware makes a lot of progress - but the holy grail is still missing - read here.
• First Take - VMware's VMworld Day 1 Keynote - Top 3 Takeaways - read here.
• Progress Report - Good start for VMware EUC - time for 2nd inning - read here.
• Speed Briefings at VMworld - inside and outside the VMware ecosystem - read here.
• VMware defies conventional destiny - SDDC to the rescue - read here.

Tech Optimization Innovation & Product-led Growth Data to Decisions Future of Work HP softlayer vmware IBM Oracle Chief Information Officer

Big Budget Commercials are Poor Customer Acquisition Tools Thanks to Audience Fragmentation

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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This is not a Super Bowl commercial post; it will not rank the best/worst commercials. I made a promise to myself that I would never write another one of those; God knows there are way too many already being published. However, this post, on the day after the 2015 Super owl, is certainly inspired by the continued frenzy over these commercials.

Super Bowl commercials have become an event in their own right, inspiring blog fodder and YouTube-watching frenzies all around the world. The demand for Super Bowl commercials is so high that Canadians, tired of having broadcasters substitute their own ads for the popular ones shown in the US, successfully lobbied telecommunication regulators to put an end to the practice.

Clearly, there’s a big demand for these commercials, which – along with the impressive real-time audience the big game receives – is the reason television networks can demand such a high price. However, is the investment worth the return when audience fragmentation is so high?

Big Budget Commercials are Poor Customer Acquisition Tools Thanks to Audience Fragmentation  

There’s no question that television continues to command large audience attention; however, there has been a ten-fold increase in the number of channels available. Combine that with the hundred-fold increase in the number of programs and episodes available on those channels, and we begin to see the audience erosion marketers must address. And that doesn’t include the effect of that media shared across the Internet, YouTube channels, or made-for-Internet television (Eg. Netflix original programming).

According to audience research firm Simulmedia, “Compared to the 67.3 rating received by the highest rated show in 1953 (CBS’s I Love Lucy), the highest rated show for the 2013–2014 season earned only a 12.8 rating (NBC’s Sunday Night Football). So while big TV networks can deliver audiences, fragmentation requires advertisers to look deeper into the data to find their best target audience and optimize their media investment.”

Are You Reaching The Right Audience?

With the audience so fragmented, is this an achievable goal? Advertisers today are more challenged than ever before to be both strategic and reactive in their efforts to reach, engage, and drive action among their audiences.

To understand the effect of audience fragmentation in television, Simulmedia looked at three television networks that ranked high in their concentration of adults 18 to 34 for the month of May, 2014. They then delved deeper into that database to pinpoint the concentration of 18- to 34-year-old pizza buyers. The study determined that while those networks reached the largest number of adults in the target age range, the desired sub-set (18- to 34-year-old pizza buyers) were largely missed. In fact, one-third of the target group of pizza-buyers were enjoying television programs on smaller niche networks not tracked by Nielsen.

If marketing has one goal, it’s to reach consumers at the moments that most influence their decisions.

Reaching the right consumers is difficult enough; reaching target consumers at the moment most likely to influence their purchase decisions requires data. Big data.

More importantly, to acquire new customers in this fragmented media world, marketers must rethink  traditional advertising strategies and metrics. The media landscape has become impossibly large and convoluted by time-shifting, DVRs, and mobile devices. The go-to “reach” metric is no longer sufficient to justify big-dollar ad campaigns. Local and niche campaigns require more investment in data infrastructure and analysis, but when combined with an understanding of the customer journey, will generate greater return on investment (ROI) than big-budget commercials.

Sensei Debates

Are big-budget television commercials, like those created for the Super Bowl, effective for customer acquisition?

Marketing Transformation Next-Generation Customer Experience Chief Customer Officer Chief Marketing Officer

Oracle discovers the power of the two socket server - or: A pivot that wasn't one, TCO still rules

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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Last week Oracle provided an update on its engineered systems – mainly the launch of the new X-5 line. When Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison took the stage – he had a surprise in the bag that few counted on – that Oracle would now start to compete in the space of two socket servers.

So let’s look at the implications:

It is worth to understand why this was a surprise – as in the past Oracle had focused on large, high end and high price engineered systems. The Exa line of products was a compilation of only the best that Oracle had in store after the acquisition of Sun. In numerous earnings calls Oracle’s executive team defended the strategy, while Oracle’s overall hardware revenue and profitability was suffering from lower end and cheaper servers that Oracle by now has gotten rid of.
 

Oracle's new view of the datacenter - Core (2 socket systems) and Engineered Systems (Source - Webcast)

For the first time Oracle and Ellison acknowledged, that next to the high end Exa machines, there are other needs in data center purchases, specifically around the two socket server aka low cost server demand. These machines are popular as they can handle any kind of load an enterprise may have, are cheap to procure, easy to operate etc. In contrast to that buying an Exa machine is significant CAPEX for even the largest enterprises – a decision that needs to be vetted, often employees need to get trained to operate the machines, sometimes application have to be re-written to take full advantage of them etc. Throughout this Oracle maintained that its Exa machines have always offered the best performance for the lowest cost. Turns out to get the machine was a pretty high hurdle price tag wise for enterprises.

So not surprisingly Oracle now announced a new product line, a two socket server, but true to Oracle’s corporate DNA - at a lower TCO. It looked like Cisco’s servers are the prime target and market leader that Oracle wants to challenge. True to long time tradition Oracle was not shy to compare purchase costs of its new machines compared to the machines of competitors.
 

Oracle compared VCA X5 with Cisco UCS and claimed significant TCO advantages (Source - Webcast)

But what we really have seen for first time is Oracle flexing its muscle around its ability to own the complete stack. While main competitor target Cisco has to partner with EMC and more vendors to get their machine to the market, Oracle has all the necessary pieces available in house (Storage – SSD of course, Networking – Infiniband (even Ellison joked how often he said that, Processors (surprisingly little said about that), Oracle Linux, Database (of course) and more higher level software). Reshaping the design of an engineered system to a different load profile and price point is easy when you have all the pieces available in house. The value proposition remains the same – one integrated and tested system by Oracle – just at a very different usage and a much lower price point.

Not surprisingly Oracle maintains that ultimately the large Exa machines are still better performance at a lower price. But the entry point for the new two socket server line is lower, and if customers ultimately may pay more to Oracle when buying a lot of two socket machines over time, nothing that Oracle has to complain about. Think renting vs buying a house. Plenty of people cannot afford a house, so they rent, but over time pay more for rent than for owning a house.

The question really is – what took Oracle so long? We can only speculate on the reasons and motivation – but here are a few:

• Oracle was still operating under the ‘big server for RDBMS, small machines for web tier’ paradigm of the 200x years. 
• Oracle has listened to customers (and sales reps) that selling large machines only, will not give Oracle the growth it wants to see in data centers.
• Oracle did not see it share of wallet on server / data center spending really growing.
• Oracle had to finish commitments and work on the high end side of the Exa machines, e.g. finish the 4 series. 
• Oracle had to get software components ready for the two socket market, 12c comes to mind as a candidate. 
• Oracle is serious about cloud, but needs two socket servers for its own cloud build out and did not want to buy them from the competition – but buy and built by itself. Ellison stressing the same architecture and versions in a side note of his presentation made this pretty clear. 

We will probably never know – but above seems to be plausible reasons to me.

MyPOV

A good move by Oracle, which will expand its data center footprint. Oracle will have to overcome some positioning with customers, but if Oracle can deliver and prove the very attractive TCO numbers it shared at the launch event, then CIOs will quickly forget ‘old’ positioning and look at Oracle’s brand new two socket server line. And more competition for servers is a good thing for IT budgets that are under stress every year.

But the real question remains – what took Oracle so long?

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Also worth a look for the full picture

• 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)

 

Tech Optimization cisco systems Oracle Chief Information Officer

2015 Event Schedule

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…...

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Below is a list of the events I will be attending in 2015.
The information will change frequently, so please check back for the most up to date information.

Future of Work Chief People Officer

The State of Customer Service and Support in 2015

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

Role: Vice President and Principal Analyst focusing on the IOT of Customer Experience and how the cloud is driving more flexible, agile, and robust customer service and customer experiences. In-app or in device customer service is the future. Coverage Areas: Next Generation Customer, Digital Marketing Transformation Bio: As a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, Inc, Petouhoff works with Fortune 100 and 500’s Senior Leadership teams to create strategic customer experience (marketing, sales and service) solutions which engage customers, build brands and grow businesses. Combining her experience as a former Forrester software analyst, PWC systems integrator and change management consultant, Petouhoff leads executive workshops to discuss to not only…...

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This report is about how Customer Service and Support is evolving into Customer Success Management as top differentiator by companies and brands that understand the importance of the digital disruption and how it is affecting their business and their customers.

This is one of Constellation’s reports on the State of Enterprise Technology in which we assess the state of technologies Constellation has identified as essential to digital transformation. This research report explores a key area – customer service and support.

Next-Generation Customer Experience Guides Organizations toward Customer Segments of One

The theme of Next-Generation Customer Experience analyzes how organizations are making the shift from systems of engagement to systems of experience and mass personalization at scale.  Traditional viewpoints of the customer via marketing, sales, service and support, and commerce are collapsing. In fact, customers don’t care what department they talk to for marketing, sales, and service. Customers expect an organization to act as one entity and their front office experiences to match other experiences regardless of touch point.

This customer-centric cohesion requires new paradigms in user experience fueled by the backbone of digital business, including social, mobile, cloud, Big Data, and unified communications. Technology provides a catalyst for new experiences as organizations move from selling products and delivering on brand promise via customer experiences which require a change in organizational DNA and leadership from both the top and from the empowered bottom.

The themes of the paper are:

• Everything that needs to be said about customer service and support has been said
• Customer service is still the new marketing
• Customer service evolves into customer success management
• Customers deserve the bad service they receive today
• From multi-channel to ubiquitous channels, the death of omni-channel has happened
• Hype trumps reality in ubiquitous channel capabiliites among the vendors
• Vendors continue to co-opt each other’s messaging

Get ready to make the shift as the front office becomes the back office, and marketing, sales, customer service, and loyalty form the basis of the new engagement strategy.  Will you be ready for the next generation of customer experience?

You can find a snapshot of the paper here:

@drnatalie

VP and Principal Analyst

Covering Customer Service and Customer Success Management

Next-Generation Customer Experience New C-Suite Data to Decisions Marketing Transformation Chief Customer Officer

Public Speaking Excellence: Deliver Compelling Presentations in 5 Steps

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The ability to speak confidently and deliver a clear, concise and engaging presentation is what every presenter aims for. I had the privilege to share practical tips and techniques at Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2014 on  how to develop your public speaking abilities so you can create and confidently deliver compelling speeches and presentations.

In this presentation, you will learn basic principles of public speaking as well as professional techniques for keeping the audience focused on you and your message.

Related Resources:

• Presentation deck on slideshare
• Interactive Jeopardy PPT
• Social Media scheduling tools:
  • Socialoomph
  • Buffer
• Twitter plugin for PowerPoint
• Bing Pulse

Future of Work Chief Executive Officer

How Rackspace Creates the Next-Generation Customer Experience

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

Role: Vice President and Principal Analyst focusing on the IOT of Customer Experience and how the cloud is driving more flexible, agile, and robust customer service and customer experiences. In-app or in device customer service is the future. Coverage Areas: Next Generation Customer, Digital Marketing Transformation Bio: As a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, Inc, Petouhoff works with Fortune 100 and 500’s Senior Leadership teams to create strategic customer experience (marketing, sales and service) solutions which engage customers, build brands and grow businesses. Combining her experience as a former Forrester software analyst, PWC systems integrator and change management consultant, Petouhoff leads executive workshops to discuss to not only…...

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Rackspace chose to implement a global online community powered by Zimbra to provide its customers with a central place to share questions, discuss challenges, rate content and provide feedback about Rackspace’s products. This community focuses on scalable delivery of Rackspace’s signature customer service, educating core customers, increasing customer engagement, and sharing Racker knowledge.

This case study examines Ian White’s implementation and deployment of Zimbra. Ian White won the 2014 SuperNova Award in Next Generation Customer Experience for his leadership of this project.

For more information on the paper, you can find it here.

@drnatalie

VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research, Covering Customer Service and Online Communities

Next-Generation Customer Experience Innovation & Product-led Growth AR Executive Events Chief Customer Officer

First Take - SAP's IoT Strategy becomes clearer....

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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Like many industry observers, I was also surprised when SAP started to prominently feature IoT as a key message by mid of 2014. Not that IoT is not an important trend and a key strategy to transform the way how enterprises and their customers deal with ‘things’ – so the revenue potential is there – the question is what can SAP really contribute to the immense technological challenges that encompass IoT. The questions started to pile up as conversation with customers almost never pointed to SAP as a solution in the space, so getting (finally) briefed by SAP on the IoT strategy was very welcome.
 

First of all it is clear that SAP is committed to the space, announcing 500 (incremental?) developers to be dedicated to IoT, not a small change numbers. And it is also good to see that SAP will use the HANA Cloud Platform (HCP), its PaaS product for the effort (more here). So let’s take a look at the first three use cases that SAP wants to tackle:

• SAP Predictive Maintenance and Service – SAP wants to help enterprises be better at maintenance and servicing ‘things’. Combined with the augmented reality (AR) capabilities for the service technician certainly a compelling scenario.
   
• SAP Connected Logistics – In this use case SAP wants to connect logistical ‘things’ (e.g. trucks, containers, railcars etc.), combine them with 3rd party data (e.g. weather, traffic etc.) and tie them with its existing logistics and transportation management solutions. Again there is an AR angle with the support of smart glass devices for warehouse pickers.
   
• SAP Connected Manufacturing – Here SAP uses its next version of Manufacturing Execution (15.0), puts it on HANA and with that allows for typical IoT data as from sensors, beacons and RFID chips to be part of the manufacturing execution puzzle.

Next let’s look at the technologies SAP has at its disposal and SAP wants to use in these IoT use cases:
 

• Hana Cloud Platform (HCP) Today’s IoT projects are inherently custom development projects built on top of components that are more or less tuned or built for the unique challenges of IoT. Modern software gets built with the help of a PaaS and SAP has a solid option with HCP. But HCP will have to add the capabilities to deploy HCP built applications easily to standard cloud platforms, AWS most prominently. Certainly an overall good feature for HCP.
   
• HANA with all things SAP these days, HANA features prominently. And HANA’s fast in memory analysis capabilities bring a certain level of attraction to IoT challenges, but fast in memory analysis is only a subset of all the ingredients needed for IoT projects. Unfortunately for SAP, for many IoT uses cases requiring fast in memory analysis capabilities are optional or nice to have. The ‘bread and butter’ of IoT are cheapest storage and unstructured retrieval databases – to cope with data volume as well as unforeseeable analysis questions.

SAP Response - HANA has addressed this concern with Dynamic Tiering, using a columnar disk technology integrated with HANA that supports unstructured data storage and retrieval (and is integrated with the textual capabilities of HANA in-memory).  This address the cheaper storage and analysis of unstructured data and is in market with HANA SPS09. In addition, HANA has integrated the Sybase ESP streaming data analytics (CEP) engine into core HANA functionality (HANA Smart Data Streaming), so now lightweight analysis and correlations from streams like sensor data can be accomplished in HANA Smart Data Streaming, and additional data can be passed from Smart Data Streaming to HANA for deeper realtime analysis.  With Smart Data Streaming, streams of data (filtered or unfiltered) can be passed to multiple tiers of data for storage and analysis, including SAP  HANA, SAP IQ, and Hadoop.    

My response -  Fair enough to raise that unstructured data analysis can be done on cheaper storage with dynamic tiering, certainly a key feature in HANA SPS 09. But the queries will run separate, not on the same data and need to be combined, which makes the engineering process more complex (something I am sure SAP will take care of) - but may ultimately exclude customers from some insights. Running two separate queries and combining the results may but must not lead to the same result as running one query on the combined data. Material for a separate blog post. 
And fair to point out the SAP has used the Sybase ESP / CEP capabilities and added them to the HANA core, always good and great to see re-use of working and proven software. CEP certainly has its space in IoT applications. 

• SQL Anywhere The venerable and proven SQL Anywhere is a viable player for IoT. Not all ‘things’ will be connected to the internet, for a number of power, health and practical network coverage reasons. The ability to store vast amounts of data reliably, low cost on a HDD or SSD chip over prolonged times is a must have for a number of ‘things’. The Sybase built replication capabilities at a time of connection are an extra bonus.
   
• Sybase Data Management With Sybase SAP has acquired also a sizeable number and decently capable number of data management tools. And shuffling data around is an inherent nature and characteristic of IoT projects. The Sybase tools are good for e.g. moving data from Hadoop or Amazon S3 storage into e.g. HANA or Sybase IQ. The question of course to be addressed – why not process data where the information occurs in the first place.
   
• Business Applications There can be no question SAP has the relevant business applications in CRM, SCM and PLM that are essential for IoT. The key area to watch will be though, if the gravity of these applications can pull the IoT data ‘in’ or if it is more likely that a subset of that ERP data will be moved to the ‘rest of the IoT’ data for in situ analysis where most of the data is. Too early to see a trend but a key area to watch. 

In summary SAP certainly brings some interesting and valuable scenarios for IoT in the first wave of offerings. On the technology side SAP also brings some interesting products to the table, but we will have to see how they all will play together and how they can enable the next set of customer use cases in the area of IoT.

MyPOV

Learning more about a vendor’s offering is always valuable and creates a better understanding for the angle the vendor has. In SAP’s situation the angle is the one of the business application vendor with a very fast analytical in memory database. And there are certainly a number of challenging IoT scenarios that require real time capabilities, closely intertwined with business applications. Think off real time manufacturing, mass customization, individualized service and real world traffic situations. Not really SAP’s core competence (so far), but certainly scenarios that command a premium price in the IoT world, something SAP certainly wants (and has to) zero in on.

But if this slice of the IoT market is large enough for SAP in the medium run, is something that remains to be seen. Entering the IoT market with none direct offering for Hadoop style BigData and HDD / SDD based cloud storage excludes SAP from the most common IoT projects we see with customers. But what isn’t possible today – can happen tomorrow. Rest assured we will be watching. 

• 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.

 

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The State of Collaboration in 2015 - Collaboration Goals and Plans For the Future

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…...

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Constellation recently published our "State of Enterprise Technology" series of research reports. These reports assess the current state of the enterprise technologies Constellation has deemed significant to digital transformation. These reports also describe the future usage and evolution of these technologies. Constellation will continue to publish reports in our State of Enterprise Technology series throughout Q1.

The State of Collaboration in 2015 is my first contribution to this series of reports.  This report is designed to help you set benchmarks and prepare for your collaboration future. 

Here's an excerpt from the report: 

The State of Collaboration in 2015 Shows Maturity in Market and User Adoption

2014 will be remembered as an inflection point where stand-alone tools began to give way to enterprise software with integrated collaboration features. Constellation defines this as Purposeful Collaboration, where social features are native features of the tools people use to get their jobs done. For 2015, the most significant improvement in these tools will be how they leverage vast amounts of information to help people make more informed decisions. Itâ??s this intersection of collaboration and analytics that will propel the next level of employee productivity. 

You can download the report snapshot and table of contents 

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