News Analysis - SAP appoints a CTO - some musings

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

Read more

On November 10th SAP announced the hiring of a new CTO, Quentin Clark, joining the product team working for Bernd Leukert immediately.
 

So let’s dissect the press release our usual news analysis style:

WALLDORF — SAP SE today announced that Quentin Clark will join the company as Chief Technology Officer, effective November 10, 2014.

As SAP’s technology ambassador, he will drive direction and vision of SAP’s future technology and shape SAP’s brand as the technology leader. Clark will report to Bernd Leukert, Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, Products & Innovation, and will be based in Palo Alto.
MyPOV – Back when Vishal Sikka decided to leave SAP, we speculated about a new CTO joining SAP. We expected a similar position to report to CEO Bill McDermott, but now we see Clark joining SAP working for the head of product, Leukert. Clark has spent almost 20 years at Microsoft, with a long term tenure around MS SQL Server and the BI products. He reported to Satya Nadella before his recent appointment to CEO and now made a move (Microsoft has not clarified who will succeed him to my knowledge). Interesting is also the addition of ‘shape SAP’s brand as the technology leader’ – brand shaping is usually marketing’s job – so we will have to learn from SAP more about this more unusual addition of responsibilities for a CTO.

Clark joins SAP from Microsoft. In his role as corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Data Platform Group, he was responsible for design and delivery of Microsoft’s data platform products. He also led the development of the transformation of the data platform to the cloud, delivering the first wave of Microsoft Azure’s Data Platform products. Prior to becoming corporate vice president, he held various roles in Microsoft’s development since 1994.
MyPOV – So SAP hired a proven RDBMS veteran. Interesting as with HANA it has a quite unique approach to RDBMS, so hiring an executive coming from the co-existence world of on disk and in memory capabilities is an interesting move. But then the press release is void of any mention of HANA, did the SAP board and Leukert maybe look for an experienced executive to run the former Sybase and Business Objects portfolios? The coming weeks will show.

But it’s also clear that SAP has not looked for an enterprise applications veteran, but a technology veteran – more about that below.

“I am very pleased to have Quentin join SAP,” said Leukert. “He is not only an impressive technologist who thrives on pursuing a meaningful vision but at the same time a passionate leader. He enjoys taking a full view of business, technology, product, team and customers. I am sure that Quentin will significantly contribute to shaping and executing our technology strategy and turning opportunities into innovation — and help our customers to Run Simple.”
MyPOV – My guess is that Clark was handpicked by Leukert and should help him deal with US development activities as well as customers, as such he must have his trust to be his ‘voice’ in the North American market – that is both key for SAP in technology and enterprise aspects. There is a recruiting aspect in one article coveing the news here, according to Personnel Chief Stefan Ries, but I give that little impact, unless we see an exodus of former Microsoft employees follow Clark. I would be surprised if SAP and Microsoft executives did not swap courtesy calls around this Clark’s move.

Overall MyPOV

There is a few takeaways that can derived beyond a dose of speculation:

• McDermott trusts Leukert as the product leader. A CTO hire reporting to him would put McDermott in the decision making field around any (positive and necessary) tension between a forward looking CTO and Product Leader.

• Leukert needed a trusted manager in North America, both as a face to customers, prospects, and SAP employees. With Leukert’s enterprise software background, Clark brings on a technology perspective that wasn’t there before – at least not exposed at senior management level in a CTO position.

• SAP becomes more about applications (as we predicted here) – as the CTO role is now less exposed and report to a more enterprise application minded executive. And the de-facto CTO role (though not nominally called like this) falls anyway to Bjoern Gerke as the executive in charge of the SAP PaaS and SaaS platforms.

• Clark’s relative novelty to the world of enterprise applications will avoid or at least delay any potential directional discussions on technology strategy, which is good short term for SAP as the HANA strategy is set – but long term has the risk that SAP is heading to a ‘unique’ path to the cloud (as blogged here). And a unique path that SAP has taken before when moving to a client server architecture has its risks but also rewards. 

Probably (and hopefully) a good move for SAP, that has not been able to retain senior experienced executives from acquired entities in the past (Schwartz, Chen, Couturier – quick who was Sybase’s CTO?), so now it is time to recruit from the outside. The next quarters will tell – really curious on the brand aspect of Clark’s role.

Footnote: On the Microsoft side the question is of course, why did Clark leave (we may never know) and how his responsibilities will be organized. It is noticeable how briefly Clark is featured in the News Center (see here), last entry in November 2012. Running database and application platform is short tenured position – measured in the otherwise long tenures of the company – with former head of the group Ted Kummer leaving in early 2013. But let’s hear more from Microsoft.

Birst Marketing Analytics Paints a Complete Picture of the Customer Journey

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…...

Read more

Today’s marketing technology landscape represents a whopping 947 different companies that provide software for marketers, focused on specific functions such as marketing automation, web data analysis or customer relationship management. What this means is that the job of the CMO and Marketer has become increasing complex. The other issue is that often the technology decisions in a company used to be made by IT are now being made by the line of business, or in this case in Marketing.

With the role of IT changing, and Marketers choosing their own line-of-business technology themselves, this has shifted the overall landscape of how technology is chosen, implemented and maintained. Another issue is that not enough CEO’s really understanding the strategic value of marketing and analytics to the point that they themselves are engaged in the decision making process – i.e., choosing the right technology for their organization and / or using the information about their customers to transform their products and services. What’s really required as part of doing business in 2015 is a shift in the overall business’s business model to a more digitally transformed business where all levels of executives are involved in not only the selection but also the use of the data and analytics to make better business decisions.

The Birst Marketing Analytics Accelerator simplifies this increasingly complex marketing landscape by bringing in data together from multiple data sources and embedding the insights into every marketing decision — all using a single platform. Birst provides marketing data readily available in user-ready formats so that marketers can intelligently navigate the customer journey.

Marketers not only focus on nurturing new prospects, but also building loyalty and retention strategies. This means that they are not only responsible for acquiring customers, but also keeping them. However, leveraging data to be able to do all that has become increasingly complex with marketers drowning in a sea of technology solutions.

Brad Peters, Chairman and Chief Product Officer of Birst says, “With Birst’s Marketing Analytics Accelerator marketers can link the various contact points along the market journey of their prospects and customers, which often spans multiple applications, to create a complete picture of how customers are found, sold and on-boarded. We are making it easier than ever to put valuable insights into the hands of marketers to not only improve effectiveness, but to quantify value.”

2015 will be the year that companies either make the decision to go forward with the digital transformation or be left behind. It’s a very important decision that should not be overlooked by CEO’s, CIOs, CTO’s, CFO’s and CMO’s as well as Customer Service Professionals. It may even mean that a whole new role, something like a Chief Digital Officer, is created for every brand and that is the person who pulls all the “old” various roles together to help them see how their role should transform as well as how the company or brand should shift their business model to a more digitally oriented business model, where customer data, at every touchpoint is used to make better business decisions. This requires that the senior leadership team recognize this need and step-up to the plate and make it happen within their organization.

@drnatalie

VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research

Covering Marketing, Sales and Customer Service to create Great Customer Experiences

Live Webcast: Can Brands Keep Their Promises?

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…...

Read more

Companies like Apple, REI, Amazon, and Zappos are known for providing exceptional customer experiences. They’ve set the standard, and yet there are still upstarts like Everlane, Birchbox, One King’s Lane, and Zulily, to name just a few that are setting new standards. Since we’re headed into the holiday high season for retailers, I thought it was only fitting to mention a line of businesses clamoring to delight you. What brands come to your mind?

What you’ll learn in our Webcast on: Can Brands Keep Their Promises? 

1. Why it’s important for brands to keep their promise
2. How organizational change is affecting the ability to deliver true transformation digital customer experiences
3. How technology must be integrated with people and process to deliver what customers expect

One of the issues is the whether the CXO level truly understands the digital disruption that is happening. The digital division between businesses that get the value of the digital transformation era and those that don’t is getting bigger and bigger. Those that do get it, will thrive in this new economy. And those that don’t, may just disappear. Many, many businesses have gone out of business for this very reason. Will you be one of them? Please join us to discuss what CXO level professions need to know to be successful in 2015.

By the way, if you were able to join us at Connected Enterprise 2014 in Half Moon Bay this year, you may have heard Bryan MacDonald or Dr. Presser speak, so this is a chance to continue the conversations.  And if you were not there, it will be a great opportunity to hear these two wonderful speakers talk about what its going to take to make a business thrive in 2015.

Here’s who'll be speaking:

Dr. Janice Presser, behavioral scientist and CEO of The Gabriel Institute

and myself, Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research

When: Thursday, November 20, 2014 @ 10:00a.m. PT / 1:00 p.m. ET

You can register to join this webcast dialogue in just 30 seconds. 

@drnatalie

Covering Marketings, Sales, Customer Service to great better customer experiences!

Sharing Control of the Tools with People Doing the Work: Platform as a Service

Terri Griffith

Professor/Author/Speaker
Simon Fraser University

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

Read more

I like to say that I know enough about technology to be dangerous. Back in the day of IBM XTs, I could code, tie devices together in new ways, and generally do a decent job of integrating technology and work without getting my hands too dirty. For a while though, I’ve felt that the world has gone beyond my skills and I let the experts do the tech side while I advocate for those trying to get their work done. Recently, I’m seeing some interesting possibilities for all of us to take back some control of the technologies that make up the tools of our work. While large firms will not be setting aside their CIOs anytime soon, and small firms still need tech experts to do their security audits, we can all still get a better grip on our individual and team tools.

Paul Pluschkell , Kandy Founder and Executive Vice President of Strategy and Cloud Services at GENBAND, helped me see a range of possibilities. At the most sophisticated are the tools that help technical people create business applications without getting into or reinventing the detailed programming that would otherwise be necessary. In the middle are specific services that help all of us do things like share files securely without managing the storage decisions one by one. At the most basic, we have tools that let us use a drag and drop, what you see is what you get, approach that otherwise would take some level of programming capability. While I agree that the basics of coding should be part of business literacy, I do not want to have to code or formally access a file server to do something simple like creating a new blog post or sharing a document with my colleagues. I (we) need platforms that take that on for us while giving us the control to more directly do our work.

(Photo credit: NASA. Image of Ed White, first American space walker -- and an image of a technology platform providing great freedom.)

Platforms as a Service

Ben Kepes gave me a simple definition of platform as a service (PaaS): PaaS is where you have a "computing platform that allows the creation of web applications quickly and easily and without the complexity of buying and maintaining the software and infrastructure underneath it” (click here for more). There are platforms across levels of Internet experience (our personal experience and the depth of the interaction).

Basic -- SquareSpace (Website Design for All of Us)

SquareSpace is a drag and drop platform that lets you build your own beautiful website, without knowing any HTML, the basic language of website design. If you do have skills, customization is only a click away. Templates and consideration of the basic needs for shops, photographers, bloggers, artists, restaurants, musicians, and weddings (and everything in between) mean that the power of the web is available to most through the thoughtfulness of the platform.

Midrange -- Platforms that Help Your Organization Get Work Done

Egynte, co-founded by Vineet Jain, a Santa Clara University alum, is a platform for your files and how you store and share them. Egnyte’s vision is that organizations need more control over where their files reside, but that this needs to be strictly under the control of the organization. Whether the file is behind the company walls, in the cloud, or some combination of employee and customer phones, tablets, and computers, Egnyte provides the choice and flexibility through it’s platform.

Consider a construction company working with large files - files too big to be email attachments and files that need to be a single source of truth. Platforms like Egnyte offer secure and effective collaboration strategies that give flexibility and power to the people doing the work. Balfour Beatty used the platform to enable an $800M renovation, while being paperless and saving $5.1M in the process. So much for blueprints.

Sophisticated -- Platforms for Technology Professionals, or Talented Do-It-Yourselfers

Kandy , for example, is a “platform as a service” for integrating communications into your existing applications and business processes. While the Internet, security and all, is increasingly complex, more modularized approaches wrap deep expertise into reusable nuggets that help us get work done. For Paul Pluschkell’s firm, these are “little pieces of Kandy” offering video shopping assistance, a live customer service button, instant multi-party video, and the like. You (or your web developers) don’t have to start from scratch to build in the communications components for your website. The nuggets are there giving more control with less need for technical sophistication.

Toy Genius uses Kandy to enable their expert clerks (lab coats and all) to communicate in real time with customers, including being able to show videos of the toys in action. Clerks can also help customers put the toys into their virtual shopping cart and move through the check-out process. The Internet shopping experience becomes much closer to the brick-and-mortar one, but the inclusion is powered by the platform, not custom software.

3 “Takeaways”

1. Be sure your IT staff understand that power is to be shared to the point where the work is being done. If there is a way to leverage a platform to let the people doing the work design their own tools, go for it.
2. Look for opportunities to move to platform as a service, but be sure to understand where your information is being held and how safe it is. Your needs will be specific to your organization so have a good mental image of what information is where and who has access to it.
3. Feel free to experiment (having taken points 1 & 2 into account). The beauty of the platform as a service is that you aren’t buying, you're renting. Just like AirBnB can let you try out different neighborhoods, try different platforms until you find the one that best suits your needs.

How have you seen technology enable us to share power? Any specific platforms as a service that let you "lead by letting go?"

Internet of Things; Requires Big Data to be turned upside down to become Smart Data

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…...

Read more

It’s a strange fact that the two of the most common statements about using data are; I don’t have enough data to act, or, I have too much data to make sense of the situation. How can both be true? Obvious answers would include quality versus quantity, relevance versus resources, and of course analyzing big data. These are all answers that come naturally to IT professionals, and of course to many Business Managers well versed in operating their business.

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

But how about asking a different type of question: Can you supply Big Data in graphical formats that people can quickly grasp?  Do you understand creating real time awareness for people?  And how does their personal use of Smart Data relate to Big Data?

Some of the best, and easiest to grasp, answers to these questions come from work driven by Building Management in Smart Cities. Here the Internet of Things really has changed the game with a variety of low cost sensors feeding new real time information to Building Managers. But also the challenges and frustrations of integration with existing IT don’t exist in this environment allowing many challenges and conflicts to be bypassed.  The ‘clean sheet of paper’ approach to deploying new technology in new ways offers an excellent illustration of the people centric use of Smart Data linked to Big Data. Please don’t stop reading if you are not in this market as using it here as a use case illustrates some important general principles that apply.

Building Management has benefited from low cost Internet of Things sensors ranging from literally a dollar upwards allowing mass deployment within a building. A ‘Smart’ Building is a small-scale mimic of a Smart City, or even a Digital Business, as it represents any environment defined by real time flows of data. Further is has the challenge of linking to easy to understand graphical displays navigated by intuition with huge amounts of legacy data about the building, ownership of elements, service manuals, and much more as well.

To grasp just how different and exciting this environment has become with its use of graphic user interfaces combined with linkage of huge amounts of existing data take a look at the demo on the home page of Asset Mapping a player in this market.

If you watched the demo you should feel pretty excited. But consider how much ‘traditional’ data is sitting behind this graphical intuitive display of a human centric quasi-real, virtual environment. The Building Manager has been made ‘aware’ of everything that is happening in real-time through Smart Data that literally makes it seem as if they are everywhere at once ‘experiencing’ everything that is going on supported by all the information they well need to act.

This is ‘Smart Data’; information delivered to extend our human senses with increased inputs that allow our personal experience and knowledge to be applied to evaluate and decide on responses, combined with Big Data to ensure we can act based on full knowledge.

As an aside comment for those who now something of Building Automation there is nothing new in providing sensor protection of high value items to protect against failure, even automate failover responses. The game change is the manner in which low cost Internet of Things instrumentation is radically changing what can be sensed and in what volume. Making an experienced Building Supervisor ‘aware’ of the mass of small changes all across their building allows fine-tuning of day-to-day operations through making better use of their knowledge and experience.

Importantly Smart Data renders the chosen slice of Big Data into GUI formats that a human can immediately grasp, rather than more traditional Big Data reporting in less comprehendible formats.

Smarter People are at the heart of the new Digital Business model interacting with the people externally to increase competitive value by addressing their requirements and opportunities better. It’s true for Building Management as this is usually an outsourced set of services driven by the cost of provisioning versus the quality of service provided. As such its an ultra competitive industry with competitors trying to both cut costs, and differentiate, through better services, hence their early adoption of the Internet of Things capabilities. Making your experienced operators able to really deploy their knowledge across a bigger building estate in a manner that will improve the level of service experienced is a big competitive advantage.

Recognize the point now? To succeed in the competitive Digital Business economy means using the knowledge of an Enterprise’s best people to deliver better service experiences based on excelling at using data. Smart People are made so through Smart Data support.

But behind the graphical interface wow factor in the demo you have just watched is Big Data, assuming you accept the Wikipedia definition; ‘an all-encompassing term for any collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using traditional data processing applications’. The real-time environment, in this case is a building, but rapidly is becoming your Digital Business environment, or your Smart City, whatever! All are environments that are generating new forms of ‘real time’ data, leading to an increase in human ‘awareness’ of key situations. Situations where timely smart intervention will make a competitive difference, but can only occur through blending the Awareness with Big Data resulting in Smart Data.

Smart Data creates empowered people, or smart people, and in so doing makes them equally ‘aware’ of the need for further data from the resources of Big Data.

This is the reasoning for the title of this blog ‘Turning Big Data upside down to become Smart Data’. It’s not enough to just apply the traditional approach of enterprise level analytics of Big Data; we also need to start working on how users will gain from Enterprise Big Data by delivering it as Smart Data in new Graphical formats. The link to Big Data as a core part of Digital Business, and environments, is always stressed, but usually in terms of traditional data management. The all important counter side of delivering Smart Data may be less obvious at this stage of the journey into Digital Business but is equally, perhaps even more, critical.

Building Management is a micro example that makes a good use case, but Smart Cities and Digital Businesses are exploding into rich real time environments with many sources of Smart Data. All of which requires individuals to become highly ‘aware’, and, with the awareness comes the need for good quality answers from our Enterprise’s Big Data.

If your enterprise cannot supply answers from your Big Data to your employees then they will find answers else. It’s likely that some of those answers will not support your enterprise views, messages, or values. Smart People working in real time competitive business need your Enterprise to be able to supply Smart Answers from its Big Data!

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

AWS gives infrastructure insights - and it is very passionate about it

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

Read more

• AWS sees the pace of adoption picking up  – We may see this more today as the keynotes start, but Hamilton shared the above slide – showing the expectation that the latest industry generational change is happening faster than previous one, the move of x86 servers into the cloud. And he is certainly right that the pace of this change is faster than in the past where these transitions (e.g. mainframe to UNIX servers) have taken more than a decade.

• The network is the critical path – Not surprisingly Hamilton shared that networking is the critical path for cloud, but it was interesting to see with what consequence AWS tackles the issue with a simple but compelling logic behind it: With networking being expensive, but only being less than 10% of cloud infrastructure cost, networking should not limit access and utilization of the most expensive resource in the cloud infrastructure, which are at more than 50%. Every loss of server utilization due to networking shortage costs even more as more servers need to be procured. Hamilton e.g. shared that the loss of a single IP packet equates to 0.2s loss of compute capacity…. So AWS builds its own network hardware, has its own protocol stack and runs its own private long haul links. With that the AWS team has been able to reduce network jitter significantly (and impressively).

• Massive scale – Hamilton also shared insights into a single data center (DC), Amazon runs multiple DCs per Availability Zone (AZ), and a single DC is typically over 50k servers, often up to 80k. Making a back of a napkin calculation that makes AWS a 4+ million server cloud. And that would mean that AWS runs a teenage market share number for worldwide virtualized systems (40M+) – so there is room to grow. AWS doesn’t want DCs larger because of blast radius concerns, but like them not more than a quarter mile apart.

• AWS is positively positively ‘obsessed’ – And the obsession is a good one, listen to customers and then squeeze everything out of the infrastructure and go all the extra miles to make the infrastructure better, more resilient. E.g. Hamilton shared that he has seen the very rare event of a data center outage due to a failure in switchgear equipment three times in his career, so AWS now re-writes the firmware of the switchgear in its data centers. AWS also runs custom sub power station because local utilities can’t provide fast enough reliable power infrastructure. Too many other examples to share, but this was a clear red thread through Hamilton’s presentation.

MyPOV

The Big Idea - Can Brands Keep Their Promise?

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…...

Read more

What do you think? Can Brands Keep Their Promise?

If you're ready to discuss this and hear what others have to say, we invite you to join us for a 30-minute webcast followed by Q&A. 

Companies like Apple, REI, Amazon, and Zappos are known for providing exceptional customer experiences. They've set the standard, and yet there are still upstarts like Everlane, Birchbox, One King's Lane, and Zulily, to name just a few. Since we're headed into the holiday high season for retailers, I thought it was only fitting to mention a line of businesses clamoring to delight you. What brands come to your mind?

When: Thursday, November 20, 2014 @ 10:00a.m. PT / 1:00 p.m. ET

You can register to join this webcast dialogue in just 30 seconds. 

Speakers: 

Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research
Dr. Janice Presser, behavioral scientist and CEO of The Gabriel Institute

What you'll learn: 

1. Why it’s important for brands to keep their promise
2. How organizational change is affecting the ability to deliver true transformation digital customer experiences
3. How technology must be integrated with people and process to deliver what customers expect

By the way, if you were able to join us at Connected Enterprise 2014 in Half Moon Bay this year, you may have heard Bryan or Dr. Presser speak, so this is a chance to continue the conversations. 

KronosWorks - R&D Investment, Customer Success and Analytics

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

Read more

Kronos started its yearly KronosWorks user conference at the beautiful Aria Hotel in Las Vegas with 2500+ attendees.

Here are my Top 3 takeaways from the keynote:

• Kronos invests in R&D - Kronos keeps investing into R&D - a good sign but also a table stake in the fast growing and hyper competitive HCM market. And it’s good to see the priority is both on good housekeeping and differentiating new functionality. On the housekeeping side it looks that Kronos will be able to put away the issues experienced with Java on desktop for good in spring 2015 (largest applause by the customer audience), equally a new user interface is being well received by customers. On the differentiating capability side, Kronos is looking at (true) analytics, starting with the common scheduling problem, that schedules get changed right away after being published. Being able to advise a scheduler to make better scheduling decisions is going to be key for Kronos’ customers. Another area is going the addition of gamification elements, first shown in leaderboard functionality (more here). A good fill run down of all innovations areas can be found in this press release. 

Aron Ain opens KronosWorks, key branks in the Kronos Cloud

• Customer Success matters - During the keynote Kronos CEO Aron Ain re-iterated the vendor’s commitment to customer success, motivating customers to fill out surveys and sharing that he is looking at all of the surveys., particularly the voice notes, so time for Kronos customers to share their experiences. Though not stated explicitly, something maybe amiss here at Kronos, as Ain shared that the variable compensation of the Kronos professional services teams is now up to 50% based on customer feedback / satisfaction. A move other vendors have done already, but on the flipside may create conflicts between implementation budgets and consultants who want to please clients - an area to watch. Along the same lines, focused on customer success, Kronos will offer blue prints to help customers with going into other countries, helping with documentation of local regulations. 

Gamification powered Leaderboards are coming

• Analytics make the difference - As mentioned before above, analytics are key on the Kronos’ roadmap. Using Apache Spark is a good technology decision and it will be interesting to see what Kronos will do beyond scheduling quality. Overtime analysis was mentioned later during meetings with Bill Bartow. At the same time Kronos is ramping up professional services capabilities for both BigData and analytics products (more here). 

The new Kronos User Interface for Workforce Central

MyPOV

No Left v Right Brain – And Other Mythconceptions

Gavin Heaton

Founder
Disruptors Co

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

Read more

I love this infographic on various urban myths that permeate our modern existence. By author, David McCandless, it visualises some of the most Googled myths and misconceptions – with larger bubbles indicating that it is a common search term. Some of my personal favourites include:

• That you SHOULD wake sleepwalkers
• That bats are NOT blind
• There is no solid division between the LEFT and RIGHT hemispheres of the brain.

What surprises you?

Weekly Recap - Week of November 7th 2014 [video]

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

Read more

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

• Top 3 Takeaways from the Workday Rising Keynote - read here
• Progress Report - Infosys Analyst Meeting - Can you transform customers while you transform yourself - read here

Worthy news / events I missed this week

• OpenStack Summit Paris - see here 
• Google Cloud Platform Live Event - see here
• IBM Unveils Intelligent Cloud Security Portfolio - see here
• Quentin Clark Joins SAP as CTO - see here

Press quotes this week

• Wall Street Journal - Workday to make Netflix like recommendations - see here
• International Business Times - 100 Days of Vishal Sikka [...] - see here

Fashion Observation of the Week

• Caught Brian Sommer - again in jeans and with no tie!

Catch me next week at KronosWorks, Amazon AWS re:Invent and IBM SWGAI.