Future of Work - One spreadsheet at a time

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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Whenever people need to do anything with numbers in a professional environment – Microsoft Excel is the tool at hand. Most enterprise desktops come with a full Microsoft Office suite and with that Excel is there as well. With that enterprise grasp the Office tools have overall gotten such a hold of people, that many buy Office for their home document handling needs, too. High schools, universities and enterprises even offer Excel training courses. So the domination of Excel for number centric work is pretty absolute.

So no question – to unseat Excel is really hard, but then the product has some weaknesses. Even though it offers easy template creation, users have to do things over and over again. How often have you created the infamous pie or bar chart (again and again … and again)? What if a product could ‘sense’ semantics and offer the appropriate tools, processes and visualization, right out of the box?

In my view I thought the Microsoft competitors had largely given up – to my surprise I stumbled over an unlikely entrant – Informatica’s Springbok (a codename that likely will change, currently the product is pilot mode). [Please note that the Excel competitive / replacement position is my interpretation, Informatica is not officially positioning the product as such.]

Screenshot of Springbok sample data sheet with automated insights

There are some things Informatica has done remarkably well – and these will create significant value for the average business user:

• Just upload your data – and Springbok will make sense of it. As simple as it sounds – this is really hard. But pretty well solved and addressed.

• Besides the usual functional menu, Springbok offer the user directly value enrichment. If the user clicks e.g. on a column with zip codes, Springbok offers a distribution of them. Click on a column with state data, Springbok offers a map of the USA with states highlighted by frequency in the data set. 

• Complex out of the box functions are just ‘there’ – no need to code, integrate or even procure (though I am sure at some point users will have to pay for enhanced services such as Dun & Bradstreet validation and normalization).

 

Future of Work Tech Optimization Innovation & Product-led Growth Data to Decisions New C-Suite informatica Microsoft Chief People Officer Chief Experience Officer

The most important Internet security group you’ve never heard of

Steve Wilson

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

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You can be forgiven if the FIDO Alliance is not on your radar screen. It was launched barely 18 months ago, to help solve the "password crisis" online, but it's already proven to be one of most influential security bodies yet.

The typical Internet user has dozens of accounts and passwords. Not only are they a pain in the arse, poor password practices are increasingly implicated in fraud and terrible misadventures like the recent "iCloud Hack" which exposed celebrities' personal details.

With so many of our assets, our business and our daily lives happening in cyberspace, we desperately need better ways to prove who we are online - and even more importantly, prove what we entitled to do there.

The FIDO Alliance is a new consortium of identity management vendors, product companies and service providers working on strong authentication standards. FIDO's vision is to tap the powers of smart devices - smart phones today and wearables tomorrow - to log users on to online services more securely and more conveniently.

FIDO was founded by Lenovo, PayPal, and security technology companies AGNITiO, Nok Nok Labs and Validity Sensors, and launched in February 2013. Since then the Alliance has grown to over 130 members. Two new authentication standards have been published for peer review, half a dozen companies showcased FIDO-Ready solutions at the 2014 Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas, and PayPal has released its ground-breaking pay-by-fingerprint app for the Samsung Galaxy S5.

The FIDO Alliance includes technology heavyweights like Google, Lenovo, Microsoft and Samsung; payments giants Discover, MasterCard, PayPal and Visa; financial services companies such as Aetna, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs; and e-commerce players like Netflix and Salesforce.com. There are also a couple of dozen biometrics vendors, many leading Identity and Access Management (IDAM) solutions and services, and almost every cell phone SIM and smartcard supplier in the world.

I have been watching FIDO since its inception and reporting on it for Constellation Research. The third update in my series of research reports on FIDO is now available and can be downloaded here. The report looks in depth at what the Alliance has to offer vendors and end user communities, its critical success factors, and how and why this body is poised to shake up authentication like never before.

Update on the FIDO Alliance: IDAM Implications for a World of Digital Business

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

My Involuntary Medical Tourism - and a bad Pattern for the U.S.

Chris Meyer

Chris Meyer is a thought leader focusing on the information economy, globalization and business innovation. His latest book is "Standing on the Sun".
Got Nerve

Chris's mission is to anticipate and shape the future of business. He has pursued this goal as an entrepreneur, executive, consultant, author, and the leader of a think tank.

 Based on the ideas in his 2002 book Future Wealth, Chris developed a plan for a business based on a network of thought leaders. He joined The Monitor Group in 2006 to develop this idea as Monitor Networks, where he was Chief Executive from 2004 to 2009. In 2006, he co-founded Monitor Talent, to take these ideas forward operationally. Prior to joining Monitor Group, he was the Director of the Center for Business Innovation at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, from 1995 until its closing in December 2002. The Center fostered the conversation of leading issues among the business community, developed public conferences,…...

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I was in Singapore a few weeks ago for a mixture of work (digital innovation) and play (attend a wedding). Good times.

Until the night before the wedding, when with our Australian friends who’d kindly flown up to meet us, we went out to the deservedly famed Indian restaurant in the PanPacific hotel.

You’ll note that the entrance is pretty dark, to prepare you for the quite dramatic lighting inside.  My friend and I, strolling in, approached the image of Ganesha you see in the picture. Unfortunately I overlooked the 5” high platform on which the Remover of Obstacles was displayed, and tripped — as I fell, I caught a finger on the crossbar on the wall resulting in the all but complete evulsion of the nail (you don’t want me to explain.)

I mentioned the hotel by name above because the staff could not have been more solicitous and competent, and after providing me a napkin full of ice suggested I visit Raffles Hospital, a mile away.

Here begins the voyage of discovery. 

My wife and I appeared at the emergency room check-in desk, and before any administrative questions were asked I was seated in an examination room. The doctor appeared within two minutes to take a look.  He offered me two options.  They could remove the nail, basically hanging by a thread, and I would just wait to see if a new one would grow back; or they could remove it, wash it, reinsert it where it belonged, and stitch it onto the finger.  He told me the latter would improve the chance of a normal nail growing in, so that’s what I chose.

Half an hour later we were done, including a precautionary X-ray I requested. I went back to my hotel with a kit of dressing supplies and medications.

The total bill was 465 Singapore Dollars, or $372. (That X-ray I asked for was taken and read for $80.)

When I got back to the US I went to see my doctor, who said that she’d never heard of reinserting a nail back into a finger, and admired how well it was healing.  She also said that at Mass General Hospital the cost would have been in the thousands.

Let's review: Instant service; a treatment with a great outcome that likely wouldn’t have been tried in the U.S.; and a cost an order of magnitude less than the U.S. equivalent.

Travel indeed broadens the mind.

So it was with a changed point of view that I read of the difficulties of the U.S. blood industry, facing sharply declining demand. The trend is “wreaking havoc in the blood bank business, forcing a wave of mergers and job cutbacks unlike anything the industry…has ever seen.” Transfusions are down from 15 million to 11 million units over the last five years, it turns out, despite the aging of the population, costing the industry $1.5 billion in revenue.

Granted, this was in the business section.  But I couldn’t help wondering why the medical advances at the root of this development weren’t the headline — e.g. total hip replacement formerly required 750ml (1.5 pints) of blood and now uses only 200ml.

To return to the difference in cost between Raffles and Mass General – perhaps this has something to do with it: “Nonprofit organizations collect whole blood from unpaid donors, but hospitals may pay $225 to $240 a unit, according to executives in the business, which covers a variety of costs, including testing. If the unit is billed to the patient, the price can be $1,000 or more.” – CAM

New C-Suite Next-Generation Customer Experience Chief Customer Officer Chief Executive Officer

Bye, Bye Buyosphere – A journey of disruption, disrupted

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. ...

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Focusing on the customer journey is never easy. After all, customers are fickle, transitory, loyal and contradictory. I am somebody’s customer. You are. We are all somebody’s customer. And being a customer is an emotional experience. We buy on whim, impulse or trigger. We may plan, research and save as long as we like, but decisions can be swayed by friends, connections, a good salesperson. Or even a lingering smell.

But knowing this doesn’t make easy for businesses – even marketers don’t make it easy for marketers. With every click, interaction and purchase, with every review, tweet, blog post or call, connected consumers like us are shaving away the stubble of established brands. We are eroding the protective layers that brands have built up over time to insulate themselves from us.

We know this has been happening for some time. It is a shift of power in the buying process away from brands to consumers. It is digital disruption in its purest form – connected consumers tapping into the opportunities and power of the internet to out flank the efforts of brands. And helping us to chart this disruption – indeed helping us to move from idea to practice, has been Tara Hunt, author of (amongst other things) The Whuffie Factor, coworking pioneer and theorist (in a very accessible way). In many ways, Tara has been a harmonising voice in a technology dominated world – reminding us that its the people that matter most.

Tara’s 2009 presentation on vendor relationship management has influenced the thinking of many (or even found its way into the thinking of many surreptitiously), including myself. But never content to let ideas percolate in isolation, Tara  went beyond the theory into practice, bootstrapping and launching Buyosphere, a fashion suggestion and style matching website. I can remember signing up myself, wondering how it may work out here in Australia. It was an idea ahead of its time.

In late 2012, after growing and struggling to scale, Tara stepped out of Buyosphere, taking a role with Toronto based communications and engagement company, MSLGROUP. As she explained at the time, “If we were going down, let’s go down in a blaze of glory. Or at least with a product we could be proud of.”

Yesterday, in classic style, Tara shared the next stage of the journey – saying goodbye to Buyosphere:

Once upon a time there were three startup founders who had a dream. They were going to build something that solved fashion search. And they spent 3 years of their lives, their entire savings and pretty much all of their energy on it. Fortunately, they built something great and learned a whole bunch. Unfortunately, they ran out of money, time and energy and had to go back to work and once they abandoned the site, it never took off. xoxo Buyosphere. We love you.

Watch this video and you will hear the very personal, emotional and exciting journey that Tara and the team went through. It’s the journey that so many of us take – or wish we had taken. And while I too, feel sad, to see from a distance, that Buyosphere has ended, I also feel great hope. There have been lessons learned and friendships forged. This is a story of disruption, disrupted, not destroyed. And I for one can’t wait to know what’s next – not just from Tara but from all who build on her experiences.

Marketing Transformation Matrix Commerce Next-Generation Customer Experience B2C CX Chief Customer Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief People Officer Chief Human Resources Officer

The Apple Privacy Watch

Steve Wilson

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

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Update 22 September 2014

Last week, Apple suddenly went from silent to expansive on privacy, and the thrust of my blog straight after the Apple Watch announcement is now wrong. Apple posted a letter from CEO Tim Cook at www.apple.com/privacy along with a document that sets outs how "We’ve built privacy into the things you use every day". 

The paper is very interesting. It's a sophisticated and balanced account of policy, business strategy and technology elements that go to create privacy. Apple highlights that they:

• forswear the exploitation of customer data
• do not scan content or messages
• do not let their small "iAd" business take data from other Apple departments
• require certain privacy protective practices on the part of their health app developers.

They have also provided quite decent information about how Siri and health data is handled.

Apple's stated privacy posture is all about respect and self-restraint. Setting out these principles and commitments is a very welcome development indeed. I congratulate them.

 

Today Apple launched their much anticipated wrist watch, described by CEO Tim Cook as "the most personal device they have ever developed". He got that right!

Rather more than a watch, it's a sort of guardian angel. The Apple Watch has Siri built-in, along with new haptic sensors and buzzers, a heartbeat monitor, accelerometer, and naturally the GPS and Wi-Fi geolocation capability to track your speed and position throughout the day. So they say "Apple Watch is an all-day fitness tracker and a highly advanced sports watch in a single device".

The Apple Watch will be a paragon of digital disruption. To understand and master disruption today requires the coordination of mobility, Big Data, the cloud and user interfaces. These cannot be treated as isolated technologies, so when a company like Apple controls them all, at scale, real transformation follows.

Thus Apple is one of the few businesses that can make promises like this: "Over time, Apple Watch gets to know you the way a good personal trainer would". In this we hear echoes of the smarts that power Siri, and we are reminded that amid the novel intimacy we have with these devices, many serious privacy problems have yet to be resolved.

The Apple Event today was a play in four acts.

• Act I: the iPhone 6 release
• Act II: Apple Pay launch
• Act III: the Apple Watch announcement
• Act IV: U2 played live and released their new album free on iTunes!

It was fascinating to watch the thematic differences across these stanzas.  Do different Apple business units have different business cultures?  Or, as seems more likely to me, do they experiement with customer responses across various product lines?  Look at this stark contrast: With Apple Pay, they stressed security and privacy; it was a front line selling point.  We were told about the Secure Element, the way card numbers are replaced by random numbers (tokenization), and an architecture where Apple cannot see how much you spend nor where you spend it.  On the other hand, when it came to the Apple Watch and its integrated health sensors, privacy wasn't mentioned, not at all. We are left to deduce that aggregating personal health data at Apple's servers - or letting app developers do what they like with PII - is intrinsic to the health apps business model.  

The cornerstones of data privacy include Collection Limitation, Use Limitation (or "Purpose Specification") and Openness. Custodians of our Personally Identifiable Information (PII) should refrain from collecting and retaining PII they don't really need; they should specify what they do with PII and restrict unrelated secondary usage; and they should tell people what they're doing, generally in a Privacy Policy. With Siri, Apple sadly fails all these tests.

The Apple Privacy Policy is altogether silent on Siri. The document details the sorts of information collected through its overt business processes like registration, sales and support, but it says nothing about the voice recordings and transcripts of Siri communications. Neither does the Siri FAQ mention what is done with all that data. It's quite an omission, seeing that when you dictate an SMS or an email to Siri, Apple retains a copy of communications that are normally out of bounds for your telecomms carrier.

It's been left to journalists to try and find out what Apple does with the information it mines from Siri. Wired magazine discovered eventually that Apple retains masked Siri voice recordings for six months; it then purportedly de-identifies them and keeps them for a further 18 months, for research. Yet even these explanations don't touch on the extracted contents of the communications, nor the metadata, like the trends and correlations that go to Siri's learning. If the purpose of Siri is ostensibly to automate the operation of the iPhone and its apps, then Apple should be refrain from using the by-products of Siri's voice processing for anything else. But we just don't know what they do, and Apple imposes no self-restraint.

We should hope for radically greater transparency with the Apple Watch and its health apps. Most of the watch's data processing and analytics will be carried out in the cloud. So Apple will come to hold detailed records of its users' exercise regimes, their performance figures, trend data and correlations. These are health records. Inevitably, health applications will take in other medical data, like food diaries entered by users, statistics imported from other databases, and detailed measurements from Internet-connected scales, blood pressure monitors and even medical devices. Apple will see what we're doing to improve our health, day by day, year on year. They will come to know more about what's making us healthy and what's not than we do ourselves.

Now, the potential benefits from this sort of personal technology to self-managed care and preventative medicine are enormous. But so are the data management and privacy obligations.

Within the US, Apple will doubtless be taking steps to avoid falling under the stringent HIPAA regulations, yet in the rest of the world, a more subtle but far-reaching problem looms. Many broad based data privacy regimes forbid the collection of health information without consent. And the laws of the European Union, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere are generally technology neutral. This means that data collected directly from patients or doctors, and fresh data collected by way of automated algorithms are treated essentially the same way. So when a sophisticated health management app running in the cloud somewhere mines all that exercise and lifestyle data, and starts to make inferences about health and wellbeing, great care needs to be taken that the indiviuals concerned know what's going on in advance, and have given their informed consent.

One of the deep privacy challenges in Big Data is that data miners don't know what they're going to find. Even with the best will in the world, a company can struggle to say in its Privacy Policy what PII is expects to extract (and thus collect) in future from the raw data it collects today. At Constellation Research we've been fleshing out a new sort of compact between businesses and individuals that seeks to keep users abreast of developments in data analytics, and promises to provide people with proper control of personal Big Data results.

It ought to be possible to expressly opt in to Big Data processes when you can understand the pros and cons and the net benefits, and to later opt out, and opt back in again, as the benefit equation shifts over time. But even visualising the products of Big Data is hard; I believe graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to allow people to comprehend and actively control the process will be one of the great software design problems of our age.

Apple are obviously preeminent in GUI and user experience innovation. You would think if anyone can create the novel yet intuitive interfaces desperately needed to control Big Data PII, Apple can. But first they will have to embrace their responsibilities for the increasingly intimate details they are helping themselves to. If the Apple Watch is "the most personal device they've ever designed" then let's see privacy and data protection commitments to match.

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

SuperNova Award Polls Now Open

The 2014 SuperNova Award polls are now open! 

Cast your votes for the winners of the 2014 SuperNova Awards by viewing the individual application and clicking "Vote for this Entry" button. Polls close September 30, 3014. 

View applications and vote here: https://www.constellationr.com/events/supernova/2014

Why should you vote? 

At Constellation, we believe that the widespread adoption of disruptive technology cannot be accomplished without enthusiasm from the greater public around new and emerging technologies. Your vote, your enthusiasm, helps spread the promise of disruptive technology to the rest of society. 

“Constellation encourages members of the public to cast their votes for the 2014 SuperNova Awards. This is an important element of the competition because while we value the opinion of our SuperNova Award judges, we want to make sure the deciding power is not concentrated in the hands of a few. Constellation prides itself as model of democratized access to information and outcomes,” commented R “Ray” Wang, Chairman and Founder of Constellation Research, Inc.

One winner will be named in each of the seven categories. Winners will be announced live, on stage at the SuperNova Award Gala Dinner on October 29, 2014. The SuperNova Award Gala Dinner is held the first night of Constellation's Connected Enterprise.  

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Data to Decisions Future of Work Marketing Transformation Matrix Commerce New C-Suite Next-Generation Customer Experience Tech Optimization Innovation & Product-led Growth AR Executive Events AI ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Generative AI Robotics Analytics Automation Cloud SaaS PaaS IaaS Quantum Computing Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP CCaaS UCaaS Collaboration Enterprise Service developer Metaverse VR Healthcare Supply Chain Leadership Chief Customer Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Financial Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief People Officer Chief Procurement Officer Chief Supply Chain Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Operating Officer

Box Hits Puberty and Starts the Journey From Product to Platform

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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Remember those awkward teenage years when you were no longer a child but not quite an adult? That is where Box finds itself today, as it matures from a cloud based file storage and sharing company to one that is facing the expectations and challenges of adolescence. Last week at their annual BoxWorks conference, in front of 5000+ customers, partners, press and analysts Box set out to answer the life defining questions, "What do I want to be when I grow up? What do I want to do with my life?"

For Box the answers are starting to take shape, as they work to shed the image of "file sync and share” (which is a very crowded market) by focusing product development and marketing on what they call “content-centric collaboration”.  Below I’ll explain what that means, but if you don't have to time to read any further then here's my main take away:  

"Box is no longer simply a product, but instead a platform for building applications that leverage content at the center of their process or workflow."

What We Did Hear

1) Box + Office365: people will be able to roundtrip edit and store documents between Box and Office365

My Point of View (MyPOV): Box began by promoting themselves as an alternative to Microsoft SharePoint. Back in the old SharePoint on premises days, Box had a very competitive “cloud-alternative” story.  Fast forward to today, and Microsoft has quite a compelling cloud portfolio in Office 365 and Microsoft One Drive. I'm glad to see that Box has realized they need to integrate with, not compete against Microsoft.

2) Box Notes: usability and feature improvements, including the addition of tables

MyPOV: Box Notes provides a very simple online word processor which enables teams to work on a document at the same time. This is much more effective than having people update a document with their comments or revisions and then upload a new revision. At this time Box Notes is still very simple and not a competitor to Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Still, the addition of tables provides some much needed structure, enabling people to create rows and columns of data which will lead to more advanced uses of Box Notes.

3) Box Preview: The addition of annotations, meaning you can add comments anywhere on the document, picture or slide.

MyPOV: I'€™d much rather it be named Box Viewer, but that's not my call! Annotations are going to be a great addition to the collaborative functionality of Box, as in place comments are much more useful than just having a series of discussions along the side of the page with no link to what they are referring to. Note: this is not unique as products like Convo have had this for a long time. I'd love to see Box acquire a company like Convo and improve not just their annotations capabilities, but their enterprise social networking / newsfeed capabilities as well.

4) Box Workflow: This is the bringing together of policies, rules and metadata. The simple explanation is that administrators will have the ability to define rules that perform actions when certain events occur. For example, if a file is placed in a certain folder then assign a task. Or, if a file contains a credit card number then place it in a quarantine directory for approval.

MyPOV: The was originally announced at BoxWorks 2013 and after the event I blogged about how significant this is. In this first release the actions and triggers are pretty simple. Box does plan on providing more advanced features like conditional branching in the future. Metadata, or the addition of custom fields to a form is a very significant step in defining the future of Box as a platform for building applications. I will cover this in more detail below, and in even more detail in an upcoming Constellation Research paper.

5) Box for Industries: Box will be selling solutions tailored for specific industries; starting with Retail, Healthcare and Media and Entertainment.

MyPOV: One of Box's strengths as a company has been hiring people in sales and product design who have deep understanding of specific industries. That means, when Box engages with customers in industries like Healthcare, Finance, or Legal they are able to understand their needs and propose appropriate solutions. The addition of specific product offerings tailored for industries mirrors the go to market strategies of software giants like IBM, SAP, Oracle and Infor.


What We Didn't Hear

I was disappointed that Box did not make any announcements in the following areas:

1) Analytics and Insight: Given last year's acquisition of DLoop, I had hoped to see some features from Box that provide at least the most basic look into the people and content in your network. Currently regular Box users (not admins) can not see things like Most Downloaded files, Most Active Conversations, Most Liked Content, etc.  Box also lacks and recommendation features linking similar type of documents together. For example: If you'€™re reading this page about bikes, you may also want to read this page. By comparison, Microsoft has put a great deal of work into their Office Graph and Delve products, which enable people to easily see the most important and relevant people and content.

2) No Improvements In the Activity Stream (social) or a Welcome Page/Dashboard: One of my biggest complaints about the Box User Experience is that it is very hard to see what is happening in your network. For the most part, Box's UI is just a series of folders and files. When I log onto Box (web or mobile) I'd like to be presented with a personal dashboard that shows me what my colleagues are doing, events that have taken place around my content, what new content is available, and a whole lot more. This dashboard should offer a variety of sorting, filtering and notification options. Today Box is essentially just File Manager (Window) or Finder (Mac) in the cloud. I'd like to see it be much more of a destination for getting work done.

3) No Improvement In Task Management: Box enables people to assign to-dos to files, but the task management features pretty much end there.  They do partner with several Task Management tools such as Asana, AtTask, Azendoo, Clarizen, LiquidPlanner, Wrike and others but I'd like to see more native functionality.  At a minimum, show me a view of my tasks, with the ability to sort on date and status.  Ideally, purchase one of these vendors and offer great project management capabilities.


The Road Ahead. Platform, Not Product.

More important than any one product announcement is the larger picture of Box's overall goal. To discuss that, let's start with looking at what Box does:  

In the most simple form Box enables people to store files on the internet so that they are accessible at any time from a variety of devices.  

While simply storing and sharing files on the internet instead of on a local hard-drive has value, the true benefits become more apparent when those files are shared as part of a business process. Some examples includes: Sharing an RFP contract between a customer and a company; doctors discussing an X-ray; Marketing sharing product images; or Finance collaborating on invoicing data.  

But what if instead of Box being a part of a process, Box actually became the platform for building the application that handles the entire process?  That's what Box is hoping to become. In this scenario, instead of an insurance company using an application that simply links to a claims form that is stored in Box, the insurance company would develop an web or mobile application that uses the file storage and display capabilities of Box. Similarly, instead of using medical software and then linking to a file stored in Box, imagine doctors and clinicians collaborating on medical images or videos using a web or mobile applications that leveraged Box'€™s security, storage, sharing and collaboration features.

That is precisely what Box Business Partner Novacoast has done with Full Resolution Health, an application that parents and clinicians can use to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of autism. Via a mobile application, parents can upload videos of their children, and then clinicians access and assess those videos on the web. At no time does either party know that they are using Box.




MyPOV: I'm glad to see Box looking at a much broader market than just storing, sharing and syncing files. Box is building a large ecosystem of business partners and independent developers, which is a good sign of a growing and popular platform, as these folks tend to go with the opportunity (i.e. money) is.

For the time being, competitors like Google Drive and Microsoft One Drive are not focusing their go to market strategies on a similar application development story. However, Box is not alone in this space. Salesforce offers a compelling platform in SalesForce1 and Salesforce Files and Amazon's Web Services a dominant platform for developers has recently announced their own integrated file sharing service named Zocalo. Microsoft has a huge partner ecosystem that could start to take advantage of OneDrive. Box's main startup competitor DropBox also had a large partner ecosystem, and is starting to convert some of their massive consumer following into enterprise (business) customers. Finally, IBM should not be discounted with their BlueMix development platform, SoftLayer cloud infrastructure and Connections collaboration and file sharing capabilities.

In an upcoming Constellation Research Report we'll be taking a deeper look at Box's workflow features including Policies and Automation, and metadata.
 

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

Event Report: SAP Australian User Group Summit Highlights Systematic Concerns About SAP

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

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

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Australian Users Concerns About SAP Similar To Other Global Users

Over 500 Australian SAP users gathered between September 8th and 9th, 2014 at the Sydney Hilton for the annual user conference.  Users came from IT roles, marketing, HR, and finance.  In speaking to over 100 attendees, key concerns include:

• Lack of clarity in future product road map.   Users wanted to know what was next after their ECC investment.  Most expressed frustration with integrating acquired products, dealing with disparate data models, and inconsistent country level support.  A large government customer stated “It’s taking us much longer to integrate with SAP acquired products than necessary. You’d think they had done their homework during post merger integration”.
• Investment in industry specific functionality.  While SAP has restarted its focus on industries, most customers sought functionality requests made years ago.  As smaller customers, they felt ignored by SAP in getting their requests prioritized for development with no additional account spend.  A logistics company expressed frustration noting, “We were early customers in 2008.  The requests we made for industry extensions are common requests among our peer group. It’s been six years and our salesrep ignores our requests and we feel SAP does not care to improve functionality”
• Rash of key management and product development departures.  Attendees expressed concerns about CTO Vishal Sikka’s departure and additional management team departures from Success Factors and other acquisitions.  One mining and natural resources customer stated, “We fear SAP is headed back to ABAP development and abandoning the innovations that Vishal pushed on the Germans”
• Over emphasis on HANA without showing business value.  While Paul Young from SAP made a case on why one should use HANA to accelerate innovation, most users did not see the business value of HANA.  As a financial services customer pointed out, “SAP HANA licenses are not discounted, the cost structure is too high, the product still unstable, and we don’t have enough trained resources to continue our pilot.  We will probably cancel out this from our contract for 2015″
• Value for maintenance.  Several customers on MaxAttention and other support considered third party maintenance options including Rimini Street. They did not see the value of their maintenance dollar in the type of support they received for the premium they paid.  As one government client noted, “Our maintenance dollars have been squandered by SAP’s acquisitions (see Figure 1).  Instead of investing in the core product, they went on an acquisitions and development binge.  All we wanted were improvements to the core product, not these wild goose chases in technologies we don’t need”
• Ability to return unused licenses.  Many clients who are in declining industries, seek ways to park or return licenses.  These customers have had no luck in reaching SAP to have these conversations.  One frustrated manufacturer noted, “The sales reps have ignored my calls, adding to the frustration.  He even told me that I’m ignored because because I’m not growing his account value”.

Figure 1.  Customers Seek Understanding On Where Their Maintenance Dollars Have Been Invested

 

The Bottom Line: SAP Users Concerned With Their Overall Investment

The experiences faced by Australian users, represents similar concerns with SAP customers around the world.  While larger customers paying at over $4M in maintenance receive VIP attention by SAP, most customers express frustration with investment in the current product.  Meanwhile,  sales reps continue to use “why don’t you move to SAP HANA” as the panacea for all ills, but customers no longer buy the line.  Even SAP’s Chairman Hasso Plattner has expressed frustration at customers in a blog on “The benefits of the business suite on SAP HANA“.  Overall, customers want to know if SAP has a direction.  Can they justify their maintenance value.  Will they keep their brand promise of building solid software that’s not only mission critical today, but also moves to where customer’s requirements are for the future?

Recommendations: Stabilize Your SAP Investment And Plan For The Future

While determining where to go in the future, Constellation recommends the following strategies in determining a go forward strategy with not only SAP, but also legacy ERP vendors on the journey to digital business and digital transformation. (see Figure 2).

• Ask for an order doc and price list
• Use third party maintenance as a lever
• Battle indirect licensing
• Understand your license usage
• Never, ever, bundle your contracts
• Focus on designing SOA Principles
• Stabilize the core, invest in cloud
• Remember you are the boss of the relationship

Figure 2.  Four Paths Of Modernizing Your Legacy Apps

Your POV

How do you feel about your SAP investment?  Is SAP meeting your needs or are you going elsewhere? Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationR (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

Please let us know if you need help with vendor selection or contract negotiation efforts.  Here’s how we can assist:

• Vendor selection
• Implementation partner selection
• Connecting with other pioneers
• Sharing best practices
• Designing a next gen apps strategy
• Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support
• Demystifying software licensing

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Disclosure

Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us. For the full disclosure policy, stay tuned for the full client list on the Constellation Research website.

* Not responsible for any factual errors or omissions.  However, happy to correct any errors upon email receipt.

Copyright © 2001 – 2014 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC All rights reserved.
Contact the Sales team to purchase this report on a a la carte basis or join the Constellation Customer Experience!

 

The post Event Report: SAP Australian User Group Summit Highlights Systematic Concerns About SAP appeared first on A Software Insider's Point of View.

 

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Salesforce.com Announces New Salesforce1 Fund from Salesforce Ventures to Fuel Mobile Innovation for the Internet of Customers

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’s new in the land of start-ups? Well Salesforce.com just announced Salesforce Ventures which has allocated $100 million to invest in companies building innovative mobile apps and connected products that extend the power of the Salesforce1 Platform. The first wave of Salesforce1 Fund investments include DocuSign, i.am+, InsideSales.com and Skuid. The idea is that with Salesforce Ventures, portfolio companies can leverage the expertise of the Salesforce.com Foundation to make giving back part of their business model from the beginning.

Salesforce Ventures invests in the next generation of enterprise technology to help companies connect with their customers in entirely new ways. Portfolio companies receive funding to accelerate their growth and gain a competitive edge through access to the world’s largest cloud ecosystem and the guidance of salesforce.com’s innovators and executives. With Salesforce Ventures, portfolio companies can also leverage the expertise of the Salesforce.com Foundation to incorporate its 1-1-1 model of integrated philanthropy to make giving back part of their business model.

It makes sense since technology continues to transform the way companies connect with their customers. By 2020, according to Cisco, there will be 50 billion connected things and a trillion connected sensors on the Internet of Things—from smartphones and wearable smart devices to jet engines and cars. But what matters most is that behind every device, every app, and every product is a customer. This is really the Internet of Customers, and the opportunity for companies to revolutionize how they connect with their customers has never been greater.

More on the companies they are funding:

●      DocuSign—DocuSign’s Digital Transaction Management (DTM) platform empowers mobile Salesforce users and their customers to go 100 percent digital so that anyone can transact anything, anytime, anywhere, on any mobile device securely – all from within Salesforce1. 

●      i.am+—i.am+ is a fashion and technology brand that makes aspirational garments and accessories with functionality and untethered communications.

●      InsideSales.com—InsideSales.com integrates core telephony features like Click-to-Call™ and Lead Management—powered by a predictive analytics engine—into any Salesforce1 mobile experience to make field reps more productive and accelerate sales.

●      Skuid—Skuid allows customers to quickly create powerful, gorgeous apps for any device without code.

 The Salesforce Ventures portfolio includes innovative cloud companies such as Anaplan, Box, DocuSign, Dropbox, Evernote, FinancialForce, GainSight, Kenandy, Layer, MuleSoft and StayClassy. Salesforce.com has invested in more than 100 enterprise cloud startups since 2009. Looks like Salesforce Ventures is furthering salesforce.com’s commitment to creating the world’s most innovative cloud ecosystem that extends the power of the Salesforce1 Platform to help companies connect with their customers in entirely new ways.

If you want additional information on this new venture, you can find it here:

●      Learn more about Salesforce Ventures: http://www.salesforce.com/ventures

●      Follow @salesforcevc on Twitter: http://twitter.com/salesforcevc

●      Learn more about the Salesforce.com Foundation: http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/

And if you want to start giving back, join Salesforce Ventures and The Salesforce Foundation at Disrupt SF on Tuesday, September 9 to assemble backpacks for SFUSD students.

@drnatalie

VP and Principle Analyst, Constellation Research

See you at Constellation’s 4th Annual Connected Enterprise

The Executive Innovation Conference | October 29th-31st 
Half Moon Bay, CA | Ritz Carlton

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New Analysis - IBM and Intel partner to increase cloud security

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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Security concerns have long been a detriment to cloud deployment plans. In certain regulated industries not being able to guarantee that certain workloads and data are on a specific machine have been straightforward showstoppers, e.g. in Healthcare and Financial Services. 

 

Tech Optimization Data to Decisions Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Innovation & Product-led Growth Future of Work intel softlayer Google IBM amazon Microsoft SaaS PaaS IaaS Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP CCaaS UCaaS Collaboration Enterprise Service Security Zero Trust Chief Information Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Privacy Officer Chief Executive Officer