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.

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.
















 

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…...

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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…...

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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…...

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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 Plugged-In Manager:…...

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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…...

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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…...

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• 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…...

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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…...

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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