Salesforce Unveils Next Generation Social Studio

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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If you have been wondering what Salesforce has been up to, they have unveiled their next generation social studio, which is now fully integrated into the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It’s got an interesting twist in that it includes next generation social listening, social customer service for service teams and new social lead engagement for sales teams. It seems that the world is finally getting that from the customer’s point of view, that they are not talking to Sales, or Marketing or Customer Service — the customer is talking or interacting or engaging with a company. And to have all of that contained in one application or platform and make the customer information available for all of the various functional departments seems like the best way to make customers feel hear and listened to.

@drnatalie

VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research

Covering Marketing, Sales and Customer Service by Delivering Customer Experiences.

Next-Generation Customer Experience salesforce Chief Customer Officer

Quips: Digital Transformation - Defining The Fundamental Elements For Digital CXOs

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

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

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Before The Hype Hits A Crescendo, Let’s Lock Down The Basic Elements of Digital Transformation

The stage is set for Digital Transformation to be one of the hottest trends for 2015.  Market leaders and early adopters have already embraced the movement.  Yet, massive hype is coming soon as digital transformation hits mainstream awareness by late 2015.  While digital may be applied as an adjective to every movement or trend, Constellation defines digital transformation as the methodology in which organizations transform and create new business models and culture with digital technologies.

“Digital Transformation is the methodology in which organizations transform and create new business models and culture with digital technologies”

To elaborate, transformation arises when organizations apply design thinking to craft new experiences and outcomes.  As organizations move from selling products and services to keeping brand promises, the digital era requires a high degree of trust and transparency that support and augment brand authenticity.  Digital technologies provide rich data sets which can be analyzed to surface up patterns of insight.  That insight enables organization to easily deliver on mass personalization at scale (i.e. segment of one) by improving contextual relevancy.  Contextual relevancy (i.e. right time relevancy) built on roles, relationships, business process, location, time, and sentiment provide a foundation to create intention driven experiences and outcomes.  Success in digital transformation requires organizations to build a culture that supports a digital DNA and development of digital artisans who can navigate between the right brain and left brain world.  The result is the organization’s capacity to create new business models or augment existing business models that disrupt the status quo; and sense and respond in real-time to market shifts among key stakeholders.

Your POV.

Ready to begin your digital transformation? Still looking for a CDO? Want to jump start your digital business efforts? Let us know how you are getting there and what first steps have worked.  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationR (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) org.

Resources

The post Quips: Digital Transformation – Defining The Fundamental Elements For Digital CXOs appeared first on A Software Insider's Point of View.

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IOT; Its not about the millions of Devices, its about the Business Value delivered

Andy Mulholland

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

Andy Mulholland is Vice President and Principal Analyst focusing on cloud business models. Formerly the Global Chief Technology Officer for the Capgemini Group from 2001 to 2011, Mulholland successfully led the organization through a period of mass disruption. Mulholland brings this experience to Constellation’s clients seeking to understand how Digital Business models will be built and deployed in conjunction with existing IT systems. Coverage Areas Consumerization of IT & The New C-Suite: BYOD, Internet of Things, IoT, technology and business use Previous experience: Mulholland co authored four major books that chronicled the change and its impact on Enterprises starting in 2006 with the well-recognised book ‘Mashup Corporations’ with Chris Thomas of Intel. This was followed in…...

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Do we truly understand the economic value that the Internet of Things is able to provide as an Environment as well as to a specific Business Activity? It’s pretty amazing to think what will probably be connected with the resulting amount of data made available, but that’s not a Business argument for making use of the Internet of Things. In fact Business value is created by the context specific, not from the volume… normally. BUT around the late 80s pretty similar arguments were being made about the lack of a Business case for Local Area Network connectivity, and the deployment of email.  Ubiquitous, as in everyone being connected and on email, turned out to play a substantial part in why connect, or why adopt email argument. If everyone else works this way then you, or your Enterprise cant survive dis connected. So what’s happening this time to the Internet of Things, or IOT?

Research report now available: The Foundational Elements for the Internet of Things (IoT)

There has to be a business model for an Enterprise to invest in, and use, the Internet of Things, and that in turn should be driving the Business approach to the Internet of Things, rather than the technology capability.

In respect of Network connectivity then most people know something about Metcalf’s Law that calculates value by the number of connections that in the 1980’s networking boom became a fair justification for email. More recently Reed’s Law updated Metcalf’s law in the context of Social Networking, introducing limitations to the apparent unlimited increase in value through increasing connections that Metcalf proposed. Reed suggesting the people have personal limits to the operational capability to interact with more than certain numbers of ‘friends’ and in fact the value of a network is finite.

Unfortunately neither of these laws fits an economic model that sees vast numbers of interconnected ‘things’ able to publish their data to the open networked architecture of the Internet, particularly based on Machine to Machine, M2M, interactions.

The best answer for this is the very little known Beckstrom’s Law that aims to answer the economic question of ‘how valuable is a Network’ and if that Network is of Devices and Machines transacting. Beckstrom’s Law is under pinned by a complex theorem, and detailed set of academic papers so follow the link to  Wikipedia as a useful starting place.

In summary Beckstrom’s Law states; "The value of a network equals the net value added to each user’s transactions conducted through that network, summed over all users."

Perhaps herein lies the answer to quantifying at least some parts of the difficult issue of investing in Internet of Things in order to acquire seemly useful capabilities. A difficult proposition without any understanding of exactly how to value, or quantify, returns.  Actually there are two distinctive and different paths for investment; In the first is the broad investment necessary to get a ticket to the game of Digital Business where to participate demands a set of capabilities, call it your Digital Business Infrastructure as its more than a traditional Technology definition of the term Infrastructure. The second ideally will be occurring in parallel, but is more likely for many enterprises to have occurred first. To select to invest against specific business opportunities with a narrow focus on what is deployed suiting only the immediate opportunity.

There is nothing wrong with this; it’s just the business metrics are by necessity narrow and linked to obvious traditional measurements of Revenues, etc. and, the short term can lose sight of the longer term with expensive ramifications as scaling up occurs. A previous blog ‘Digital Business in Smart Cities using the Internet of Things’ used Building Management as an excellent example of focused investment coupled with understanding the bigger issues.

In addition a further blog, ‘Digital Business; mastering new financial controls’, addressed the topic of how to achieve a better and wider understanding of new cost allocations versus the revenues/margins for a Digital Business. But that’s deliberately focusing down into the very necessary aspect of good operational management. Together these blogs give a reasonable picture of how to tackle the first path of identified and focused investment for a specific opportunity, but the case for the second path towards bigger picture of Business Infrastructure investment in the Internet of Things is more difficult.

The basis of The Internet of Things, (IoT) is of big picture created by millions of Devices contributing value. It will be necessary to invest in your own Enterprises IoT devices, as well as using the data from other Enterprise IoT devices. Something new is needed to make sense of what and where value is being created from this amazing new and complex environment.

There is a lot of focus on the use of Big Data and turning it into Smart Data, again see a previous blog ‘The Internet of Things requires Big Data to be Turned upside down into Smart Data’, but what about measuring the sources and the transactional value they contribute? Okay that’s about Machine to Machine, M2M, but then so is the Internet of Things, IoT! There is nothing in Beckstrom’s Law and its Theorem that requires ‘the user’ to actually be a person, in fact its arguable that it applies equally well to Internet of Things devices!

The American Marketing Association updated its definition of Marketing in 2013 to be very much more reflective of the Technology based World of today to read as follows; ‘Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large’. That seems to reflect the realities of Digital Business with its massively interconnected Internet based World pretty well, and to be inclusive of Internet of Things devices too.

In conclusion it would seem that Marketing for a Digital Business is going to have to include assessing data obtained from choosing, and using, the right Internet of Things devices. There is a definite need for some serious thought on how the conjunction of new ‘digital’ technologies is going to address this. Better mathematical algorithms such as Beckstrom’s Law are highly important new tools to become aware of and use. Business Value is usually created by Transactions so lets start measuring this!

Research report now available: The Foundational Elements for the Internet of Things (IoT)

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Introducing IBM Verse

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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About a year ago IBM first announced they would be developing their next generation email client, code named MailNext. Today in NYC (and similar satellite events around the world) IBM unveiled the official product, now named IBM Verse. That's verse as in converse, or social interaction, not the shoe company. It's not a play on universe, nor a song or poem, nor related to Lotus "Notes" making up a verse!


One of the most significant things about IBM Verse is the level of attention it has within IBM. Full disclosure, I have been advising IBM on Verse for over a year now, so I have seen this first hand. The resources being put into Verse, from design and development to sales and marketing far exceeds anything I have seen from IBM related to collaboration in a long long time. From the very top down, meaning Ginni Rometty and her entire executive team, the company is viewing the launch of IBM Verse as a critical event. The internal attention to IBM Verse is the type of thing we dreamed about during my time working at Lotus. I say that not to stir up bad feelings, but instead to put into perspective how vastly improved the situation is now.

The codename MailNext does represents a limited part of the vision of this project. The concepts behind IBM Verse are not solely focused on creating a better email client. Instead, IBM has used their reinvigorated focus on Design Thinking to more holistically look at improving the way people deal with communication and collaboration. That said, the first manifestation of IBM Verse is email centric, but it's just the start of IBM's longer term vision.

How Does IBM Verse Compare To the Competition?

The hardest part of that question is defining who the competition is. There are several categories that combine to contribute to the way people work. The market for improving communication and collaboration includes an array of vendors, each delivering a different set of capabilities. Here are a few things various software vendors are doing:
- Google recently launched their new Inbox for Google (currently available only for personal accounts, not Google Apps accounts) and Microsoft launched Clutter for Outlook.
- Startups like Slack , Glip and Convo are providing people with alternative ways of working, more social networking than email.
- Unified Communication vendors are launching new collaboration tools focused on blending social networking with VIOP and web-conferencing, such as Unify Circuit and Cisco Squared.
- Vendors like Contatta and Nimble are focusing on helping people take action on their email, not just respond or file it.
- There are dozens of "mobile email" clients introducing innovative new features, lead by the popular MailBox by DropBox.
- There is an entire industry of social task management tools, including Asana, AtTask, Clarizen, LiquidPlanner, SmartSheet and many many more.
- There are new modern online document editors from Office365 and Google, but also startups like Quip and Evernote.

While IBM Verse offers a vastly improved experience over existing IBM products, it is not yet a major leap forward in changing the way people work. It is not "best of breed" in any of the areas mentioned above. But what it does do is bring many of them together. IBM Verse's first release competently accomplishes its initial goal of improving people's email experience. Features like a dashboard of my email-centric action items, people-centric navigation along the top, the ability to easily filter and search email with facets, share a message to a blog, snoozing and setting reminders on messages, and learning more about recipients all combine to create a compelling user experience.

What IBM Verse accomplishes is placing IBM back into the conversation with companies that are evaluating Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps, especially in the SMB market where they previously would not have considered IBM.

Looking Ahead

As I mentioned above, it's been a long time since I've seen IBM as committed to collaboration as they currently are. Looking across the key areas of IBM:
- IBM Design is making a huge difference in the way products are developed. Instead of product managers prioritising a long list of feature requests from large paying customers, IBM is now developing products based on solving the challenges people face at work.
- IBM's vast analytic capabilities will play a large part in shaping how IBM Verse will help people know what they should be working on.
- IBM BlueMix will provide the application development capabilities for business partners to expand and integrate the features of IBM Verse.

This first release of IBM Verse has set the framework for a new generation of communication and collaboration from IBM. I hope future releases of IBM Verse will seamlessly blend the plethora of tools people use including email, chat, text, and video conferencing with collaboration features like task management, social networking, file sharing and document co-authoring, as well as the core business applications people use to get their jobs done. A tool that combines these features and wraps it with a layer of assistance (powered by analytics) to help people focus on what they should, and should not, be doing is what is needed to change the way people work.

The signup page for IBM Verse is now online, but accounts are not being set up yet. After you register, you'll receive an email saying "as soon as IBM Verse is ready to try, we'll let you know." After months of seeing prototypes and early builds, I look forward to trying out the official release.

By the way, while I am not a fan of IBM's marketing phrase "A New Way To Work", I do like that it brings back memories from our old Lotus advertising!






 

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Weekly Recap - Week ending November 14th 2014

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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Here is my weekly recap of the week of November 7th:

 

Here are the blog posts of the week:

• First Take - Kronos KronosWorks - Day 1 Keynote - R&D Investment, Customer Success and Analytics - read here
• AWS gives infrastructure insights - and it is passionate about it - read here
• News Analysis - SAP appoints a CTO - some musings - read here
• Event Report - Amazon re:invent - AWS becomes more about PaaS on in-house IP - read here

Press quotes

• Times of India - Infosys CEO Sikka renews product focus with cultural mindshift - read here
• Destination CRM - Yahoo! acquires video advertising platform BrightRoll for 640M$ - read here

Fashion Observation of the week: Alan Lepovsky beats me in a sock war at IBM SWGAI.

Catch me next week at IDG Roadmap in Dallas / Ft. Worth, GigaOm Roadmap in San Francisco or Toronto (client advisory).

 

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It’s Like Facebook At Work

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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For the last few years many software vendors in the enterprise social market have explained what their product does by using the analogy "It's like Facebook at work".  Well, now it appears Facebook themselves will be getting into the game by actually offering, Facebook At Work. At the moment there are few official details from Facebook about the product such as when will it be available, what will it cost, what will it do, etc.

Below are a few of my thoughts about the potential Facebook At Work:

1) You can't just move a consumer tool into the enterprise, the requirements are very different. For example, directory support, security, application integration, compliance, auditing, and industry regulations. Many consumer tools are unable to make the transition to enterprise in areas like scalability, language support and accessibility... but given Facebook supports a billion people all across the world, I think they have these aspects covered.

2) Facebook At Work needs to be much more than just a "private Facebook for your company".  To be a successful platform for work, Facebook's business offering will need to integrate with the business tools people use to do their jobs. This includes things like CRM, Customer Service, Marketing and HR. Obviously Facebook can partner with almost every enterprise software vendor, but they may want to acquire one or two to develop robust native offerings. Since Facebook is all about people, CRM vendors like SugarCRM, Nimble or Contatta could be a natural fits.

3) Facebook has massive consumer mind share, but do they know how to sell to CxOs? Do they understand how companies buy software, support it and integrate it into their infrastructure?

4) Security. Security. Security. It's one thing to mistakenly share your cat photos with people you had not intended, it's another to accidentally leak a company secret. Facebook does not have a stellar reputation when it comes to security and privacy so they will have to ease the minds of corporate software purchase decision makers.

5) Enterprise social networking is not a "one-size fits all" business. The successful enterprise collaboration vendors understand the needs of specific vertical industries such as Healthcare, Finance, Manufacturing, Legal, Education, Entertainment and Government.

6) The consumer version of Facebook is missing several standard features of enterprise collaboration platforms, including: document editors, file sync and share, project management and web-conferencing. If Facebook is serious about being a tool people can use to do work, they may want to purchase companies like Slack, Glip, Box, Egnyte, Fuze, BlueJeans, Quip, Evernote... the list goes on and on.


There is nothing wrong with using tools at work that are similar to those you use at home.  People do it every day with Google and Microsoft products, so perhaps Facebook will be next. Would you want to collaborate with your colleagues and customers using a private version of Facebook?


 

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The Prince of Data Mining

Steve Wilson

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

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Facial recognition is digital alchemy. It's the prince of data mining.

Facial recognition takes previously anonymous images and conjures peoples' identities. It's an invaluable capability. Once they can pick out faces in crowds, trawling surreptitiously through anyone and everyone's photos, the social network businesses can work out what we're doing, when and where we're doing it, and who we're doing it with. The companies figure out what we like to do without us having to 'like' or favorite anything.

So Google, Facebook, Apple at al have invested hundreds of megabucks in face recognition R&D and buying technology start-ups. And they spend billions of dollars buying images and especially faces, going back to Google's acquisition of Picasa in 2004, and most recently, Facebook's ill-fated $3 billion offer for Snapchat.

But if most people find face recognition rather too creepy, then there is cause for optimism. The technocrats have gone too far. What many of them still don't get is this: If you take anonymous data (in the form of photos) and attach names to that data (which is what Facebook photo tagging does - it guesses who people are in photos are, attaches putative names to records, and invites users to confirm them) then you Collect Personal Information. Around the world, existing pre-biometrics era black letter Privacy Law says you can't Collect PII even indirectly like that without am express reason and without consent.

When automatic facial recognition converts anonymous data into PII, it crosses a bright line in the law.

New C-Suite Next-Generation Customer Experience Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Security Zero Trust Chief Customer Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Privacy Officer

Event Report - AWS re:Invent - AWS becomes more PaaS on in-house IP

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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AWS' yearly user conference re:Invent winds down, and it was an announcement filled and action packed week in Las Vegas. The conference had over 13k+ attendees, with a huge global contingent, I probably heard more foreign languages than at any other event I attended recently (and even in the same settings at the Venetian, which makes for easy comparisons).  

So here are my top 3 takeaways from the conference:

• Lambda pushes the envelope – The Lambda announcements tops the top 3 pretty easily in my view. Anyone who has ever tried to do anything automated on large volumes of data, while streaming at the same time and not knowing when and how often an action will have to be taken, will be intrigued by Lambda. In the past only database triggers combined with nifty CEP capabilities would come close to what AWS has announced with Lambda. Would love to understand the architecture behind it – not sure if AWS will (ever) share, but basically it must have added a layer to its servers and have a superfast code propagation library for the Lambda code. With Lambda AWS solves a fundamental challenge and problem of 21st century, next generation applications and uptake will be interesting to see.
  
  But the capability comes with a price, it is AWS proprietary, so lock in considerations will be a factor. But in the meantime the capability is pretty unique in the cloud and with that, pure lack of options, don’t raise the proprietary question (yet). To be fair, anything of the scope of Lambda will have to be very much embedded in the cloud architecture of every provider and with that likely becomes proprietary. Notwithstanding the desire of vendors to be proprietary to experience lock in benefits. It will be interesting to see how Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle et al respond (alphabetical order, don’t read anything into it, please). And then maybe the OpenStack community will come up with a new project? It will have to do so very quickly.

• Amazon RDS for Aurora a sweet spot move – Already a day earlier AWS announced Aurora, bringing HA capabilities to MySQL. I call it the sweet spot as the ‘owner’ of MySQL, Oracle left a void between what MySQL can do and where the Oracle RDBMS comes in. AWS now smartly goes after that gap, there are probably a 5 digit number of MySQL based deployments out there that can use this capability (purely my best educated guess). The performance numbers of 5 (or was it 6) million writes a minute and 30 million reads a minute are very, very good for a version 1 product. Adoption of Aurora will be interesting to see in the next quarters. And even more the reaction of entrenched HA RDBMS vendors, let’s start with Oracle and IBM. AWS pointed out that Aurora is engineered to work at 10% of the cost of established HA systems, definitively an attention grabbing fact, but the established vendors can reduce prices, too. And then let’s not forget, RDBMS R&D is not trivial work, as Amazon knows and shared, as it took 3 years to get here. More on Aurora here. 

• More AWS DevOps Capabilities – Largely on Day 1 unveiled already, AWS now gets a leg up on DevOps automation with the productization of the – so far – internal Apollo tool and more. An important move by AWS to increase developer productivity. But also a challenge for the DevOps vendors, as Amazon largely stayed out of that business, till now. Similarly like Lambda it closes AWS a little more. But then it’s probably a logical choice, as AWS probably did not want to share the internal workings of many of its products. The consequence is to provide tools to ease code deployment complexities, offer better automation (like some competitors already do) and on the flipside become a little more a black box. But if one takes into account what AWS has become – probably a better choice by AWS. At the end of the day enterprises want to build, run and maintain applications on AWS, the inner working becomes secondary, as interesting it is for the techies, geeks and pundits. While I give kudos to AWS for sharing more about the basic inner working (read here) – I cannot imagine a CIO, CTO really caring about how e.g. Lambda code is executed and definitively not how to deploy it. More on all the ALM tools here.

Tidbits

• Amazon EC2 Container Service, Docker of course – No cloud conference without containers, and most likely Docker. No difference here, Docker CEO Gollup on stage, and AWS announced the EC2 Container Service, shown in a pretty long demo, as if the audience needed re-assuring that AWS is serious about containers. More here.

• Engineered systems – For the first time AWS has gotten a hardware maker (in this case Intel) to customize key components, in this case the Haswell processor for the new AWS machines. A sign of the sway that AWS has with the hardware suppliers, but then also a necessity for AWS to do, as some of its competitors build their own chips (e.g. IBM and Oracle). In my view a validation point that engineered systems are proving their point all the way to even otherwise very much commodity hardware oriented providers like Amazon. And then some people will point out that AWS was in that business already – see the massive HDD server AWS designed and shared in James Hamilton’s presentations. 

• AWS Service Catalogue provides more control – Long awaited, finally here – the tool for CIOs to enable certain services, on certain resources to control a finite cost budget and satisfy security needs. Both key steps for AWS to become more attractive (and viable) for enterprises to use. More here. 

• Security remains paramount – As the market leader for public cloud, AWS keeps also carrying the security torch. The new AWS Key Management Service was one of the most interesting announcements for security minded (European) customers. With AZs in Frankfurt and AWS Key Management a European CIO / CTO can convince an executive board concerned about security and NSA activities to consider AWS. More on Key Management here.
  
  And as a logical next step AWS Config (in preview) will help to give a certain level of confidence to control the ‘human factor’ on the security side. Even though AWS does not announce roadmaps, it’s good to see the steps it’s taking to become more viable in the enterprise. And then classic ISV, startups and other users will approach the better monitoring, too. 

• Wait – no price cuts? – This marks probably the first re:Invent conference with no announced price cuts. AWS loyalists were quick to point out that there are reasonable cost reductions in many of the new available and announced products – but it’s different than saying we are reducing service x by y%. And if memory doesn’t fool me we also did not hear about this is the xth price cut in AWS history. In my view it means two things: Price cuts are no longer event, but competition driven and AWS is becoming more a value than a cost play. Both are good for the market and cloud customers. 

MyPOV

AWS has certainly moved the yardstick, good move of adding more transparency. And while last year I was surprised that AWS was moving into more higher level services (e.g. Amazon WorkSpaces, Zocalo) it is now clear that behind the scenes it was working hard on building capabilities now shared like Aurora and Lambda. It’s the opposite nature of SaaS vs PaaS apps, that SaaS apps can be built faster than key PaaS capabilities, but then SaaS adoption takes longer than PaaS adoption (once there). We see the same in the industry at Oracle (typed on Wifi free plane so check my OOW14 MyPOV here).

And a good moment to remind ourselves that Amazon is also the retailer, even though the AWS folks are likely to deny it – Lambda is huge for Amazon.com. So always good to spend a moment to think what technological capabilities Amazon.com needs and overlay its AWS product roadmap with that.

Moreover, it’s clear that AWS is more and more becoming a PaaS. In the past AWS was a ‘Welcome everybody’ place and while the Welcome sign has not been taken down, previous products that were and are running on AWS are likely to run in other clouds at some point in the future. Enterprise customers know that likely it will be better to run Microsoft products on Azure, Oracle products on the Oracle cloud, IBM product on the IBM cloud etc. In that sense Aurora is a necessity for AWS, as with no RDBMS offering it’s tough to get enterprise apps load, the NoSQL movement non with standing. Aurora is actually a great proof point that the RDBMS as we know it isn’t dead for quite a while.

And PaaS vendors attract developers and load by unique features, Lambda being the prominent example of re:invent 2014. And in most cases these unique features come with lock-in and the longer the absence of standards to provide the same persists, the more likely market success and no other alternative to do the same. The next quarters will show what the competition will do to respond to Lambda, my best guess is Google being the ‘first responder’ – both from an architecture and mindset perspective.

And lastly – when you have unique feature – you need to be less transparent to enable it – both to protect IP and hide complexity. A tradeoff I expect to be accepted by AWS customers, the more the longer the vendors who are playing catchup in the cloud game take to respond with attractive and viable alternatives.

So in the last consequence AWS must build its own technology stack – it has its own unique demands as e-tailer, most of today’s large technology vendors running on AWS will move to their own clouds, all serious AWS competitors have their own technology stack anyway – so from that perspective Aurora, Lambda (and more) are logical steps. What could come next? 21st century BPM, ‘liquid’ RDBMS / NoSQL capabilities, AWS ‘universal apps’, mobile development kits, electronic ad capabilities, credits and payment, development tools etc. are all areas where AWS can (and likely) will go. But don’t expect a confirmation or a roadmap on this.

In the meantime congrats to AWS for having moved the yardstick once more, and being the vendor enterprises simply must evaluate for public cloud projects and benchmark against for any private cloud plans.

 

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Analytics Is At the Centre Of IBM’s 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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Today was Day 1 of IBM's Analyst Insight Summit. This exclusive event brings together the top industry analysts from around the world to meet with the heads of IBM's software division.  

If I had to sum up the event in one word, it would be analytics.

IBM has a vast software portfolio that covers a variety of topics, but at the centre of all of them is IBM's message around using data to gather insights that can lead to better decision making. While IBM has several technologies in the analytics space, the crown jewel is IBM Watson.



Yes, Watson is best known as the computer that played (and won) the TV game show Jeopardy. But Watson is not just a fast computer that knows a lot of trivia. Watson is culmination of years of IBM research into cognitive computing. Explaining that is beyond the scope of this blog entry, but you can read more about it here. Almost everything we heard today had some link back to Watson. From the Watson Analytics tool that enables anyone to upload data (ex: spreadsheet) and instantly gain insights, to the Watson Services for IBM BlueMix than enable application developers to leverage Watson's capabilities in their own applications.

What can analytics (and Watson's features) do? How about:
- Help doctors make decisions using far more information than they could possibly process themselves. (ex: every clinical trial ever conducted + every medical journal + every patient record in milliseconds)
- Enable airlines to predict engine failures before they happen
- Empower financial analysts to see trading patterns
- Assist law enforcement in solving crimes
- over even help a small business owner figure out the needs of their customers

Think of any use case where there is just too much data for a person to possibly process on their own, that's where analytics and tools like Watson come in.

Those of you that follow my work will know I am doing lots of research on how future generation collaboration tools will be able to help us prioritise what to work on and what to avoid doing. How will they do that? Analytics. We can't possibly look at our email, calendar, contacts, chat messages, text messages, social networks, social media, CRM data, inventory, customer requests, competitive news, and a dozen other sources and process all that information... but Watson just might be able to.

Here is a presentation I recently gave about how analytics could be the key to helping people be more effective at work

Are we there yet? Not even close. But IBM has a lot of the right pieces in place to start building the collaboration tools that I envision for our future.
















 

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