Owning the Customer Experience is a Marketing Function

Partner, Sensei Marketing
Partner, Sensei Marketing

Sales & marketing veteran with almost 30 years’ experience and now 1800 digital projects to his credit for clients including Morgan Stanley, AOL, Hyatt Gaming Management, Snyder's of Hanover, Hitachi, the Home Depot, Kraft Foods, Drees Homes, American Idol, and hundreds more, including leading agencies around the North America.     ...

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The landscape in which businesses operate has changed dramatically in modern times, yet the roles of marketing executives and departments have been slow to change. According to consulting firm Deloitte, the influence and agenda of marketing executives have expanded, yet their organizational context has not fully caught up — they often have only indirect input on many of the critical customer and marketing-related decisions enterprises need to make. Navigating these tensions is what today’s chief marketing officers (CMOs) face.

Clearly, there’s a conflict at the core of marketing departments today.

The Conflicted Marketing Function

Marketers are expected to support the sales function and are measured by  short-term successes; yet true and sustainable success is only achievable through long-term customer development efforts.  Sales executives demand more quality leads, yet today’s quality customers are acquired when existing customers become advocates and influence their like-minded friends and colleagues to become customers.

Marketing is tasked with creating and building the business’s brand, yet increasingly a business’s brand is established by existing customers and shareholders sharing their experiences with that business, not by the advertisements and sponsorships brainstormed by marketers.

Businesses turn to marketers to embrace new digital marketing technologies, yet measure their success via short-term metrics such as the number of followers and mentions instead of the net effect of that social media activity on the business’ bottom-line.

Achieving Return on Marketing Investment

Business leaders, including marketing chiefs, argue that achieving – or even understanding – the return on investment from marketing efforts is difficult.  Traditionally, this has been true. Measuring ROI from marketing efforts requires some control of the entire customer life cycle, something few have been allowed to manage if they even knew how to do it.

Marketers, emboldened by the real-time engagement and response offered via digital and social media, are changing their fortunes – and that of their businesses – by taking ownership of the entire customer experience. Customer life cycle marketing is the practice of creating consistent experiences at each touch point in the relationship between a business and its customer – from the first cold-call, to the follow up sales meeting, to solution integration, to billing and customer service.

Creating Advocates

Bain & Company and Satmetrix, through the development of their Net Promoter Score (NPS), have proven that new customers acquired from the recommendation of existing customer advocates are more profitable customers than those acquired through traditional marketing efforts. As a result, marketers can provide a better service to their businesses by focusing on moving existing customers from satisfied customers to loyal customers, and from loyal customers to business advocates.

Creating advocates is not as straightforward a tactic as many will lead you to believe. Advocates are not merely happy and satisfied customers; they’re customers whose use of a product or engagement with a business is inextricably intertwined with their daily experience. These are the customers who voluntarily advocate for the brands they love. The recommendations issued by these types of customers  yield greater business benefit than recommendations offered by paid endorsements or by gamified social media celebrities.

How to Create Experiences

Here’s a short analysis of by The Economist Group on ways modern businesses have create the experiences required to earn advocacy.

1. Establish emotional markers along the customer journey.

Create delight in the experience; don’t just create better products: It’s important for marketers to address the holistic end-to-end customer experience and think about brand engagement, customer delight, and growth. Experience innovation is as much about how to delight as how to deliver. You remember the first time you got flew Virgin Airlines, the first time you walked into an Apple store. These experiences are emotional markers for these brands.

2. Weave your business into the customer’s lifestyle.

It’s about looking at the whole customer “ecosystem,” not just where you play today. Finding innovation opportunities often requires looking beyond your narrow product category. Thinking about the larger ecosystem—the opportunities to meet customer needs in the spaces surrounding your core product or service offering– allows you to expand your base and opportunities for growth. For example, Starbucks has developed a larger ecosystem that extends beyond morning coffee into daylong “moments of connection” across multiple food and beverage categories. New formats include a wine bar concept, with mobile payment and reward apps to enhance loyalty.

3. Don’t follow the current trends; seek the trend currents.

It’s about being customer-focused, but not customer-led: Experience innovators recognize that consumers can’t tell you about the things they really need but haven’t yet imagined.  And consumers can’t articulate how they will do things differently in the future. An example of this is when Delta brought the lounge directly to the gate, creating a new experience among travelers who had never thought of the gate as a café and social destination.

4. Focus on the end-to-end experience, not a single flagship product

Brand the total experience; don’t just deliver “a breakthrough idea:” Great experience innovation isn’t coming up with a single idea, but delivering a connected journey from one brand. Disney delivers magic with bracelets that optimize your waiting time in the park, new cruise and vacation experiences, and carefully curated apps that bring the experience to life for kids.

Sensei Debates

Should marketing own the entire customer relationship, not just the branding and lead acquisition functions?

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

The post Owning the Customer Experience is a Marketing Function appeared first on Sensei Marketing.

Platforms: What FinancialForce, Xactly, and Hubspot Understand

Platforms – can’t live with them… pass the potatoes.

I know, we all hate platforms.

The crux of the problem is explaining what a platform is and how it works, I can write for ages about the details and go into nitpicking details – and never publish.  The closest I got to it was the post I did when SFDC announced Salesforce1 (the platform, not the message of a mobile client attempt at confusing users).

But the issue remains: how to explain platforms easy and simple?

Then, it hit me as I was sitting at conference after conference these past weeks: use examples.  I collected some of the most obvious ones these past months and I want to share them with you to try to elucidate on what platforms are and how they work.

Defining a Platform

If there was ever a fool’s errand it is to try to get y’all to agree on what a platform is.  I know better than that.

However, before we start I want to give you a short version of  what I call platforms (and what you should also, if you want to be right… ok, ok, just messing with you…).

First a proper definition, but not from Webster’s (who misses the point by simply stating it is an OS – which is a very basic form or platform, but not related to cloud computing), but form Wikipedia (after disambiguation, ended up in computing platform) that says:

A computing platform is, in the most general sense, whatever pre-existing environment a piece of software is designed to run within, obeying its constraints, and making use of its facilities. Typical platforms include a hardware architecture, an operating system (OS), and runtime libraries

Some of the critical pars of this definition are: environment, self-contained, and with specific resources to leverage the environment at least as I read it, but I may be biased. Also, by “hardware architecture” I interpret Cloud Computing in the context of this post and my future writings.

In cloud computing, a hardware / software architecture combination, the platform is the middle layer that provides essential, secure, scalable, and repeatable services that are then leveraged by the SaaS and IaaS layers to run operations.  Think of it as a “traffic cop” that ensures that the right element (data, function, integration point, more) goes where it is supposed and ends up in the right place, after providing it with the right resources to get there.

The easiest way to think about a platform (PaaS) in cloud computing is to look at the requirements:

• A component of a three tier open cloud architecture (entails being able to communicate with any IaaS or PaaS or SaaS component directly without point-to-point integration) – see figure below

• A collection of functions delivered like a service (see some of the examples in the picture above); if you want to call them APIs, do so – but make sure they are open, discoverable, and secure as services at the very least (there is lot more about this coming in future posts).

I am in awe of the many versions and approaches I am finding (as well as failed attempts).  I will highlight a few, but know that I’m merely pointing you to some of the most mature I found; there are many, many others not included here (I cannot cover everything in one post, sorry).

The Platform-to-Platform Play

FinancialForce.is a very interesting play on platforms, as they are both an application leveraging Force.com (Salesforce1) as a platform and a platform on their own.  Depending on what solutions you implement you are either using a service that is delivered on top of Force.com (Salesforce1) or their own platform that also connects to Salesforce1 (Force.com) to provide additional services.

As you see in the chart above, there is an inherent element to cloud-based platforms that is to connect to other platforms and FinancialForce has done this quite well.  By establishing these connections between platforms they both deliver a value add via  new platform that can easily integrate into exiting ones as well as leverage previous investments the customer may have made.

This is the way organizations will leverage the solutions and power provided them by vendors in the cloud: through an aggregation of multiple services delivered by a myriad of platforms providers.

The traditional role of the vendor as a seller of software that does everything end-to-end is coming to an end and being replaced by vendors that connect platforms and offer services on top of them.

The Leveraged Outcome Play

The second example is something that Xactly showcased earlier this year: a new service based on the outcomes generated by the established service they provide.

If you don’t follow Xactly they have a service that helps organizations manage their compensation strategies and tactics.  They do this by delivering data points showing  what others are doing (anonymously) and use that information, together with real-time performance data, to manage compensation for sales people.

In a world that is dramatically changing the value and purpose of the salesperson, Xactly offers organizations an easy way to manage their performance and to reward the right behaviors with proper compensation dynamically and flexibly.

One of the things that Xactly noticed was that they had access to reams of data about more than compensation: who the people were, how they acted, what they did and didn’t do, what worked and didn’t, etc.  All that data started to show insights that were too useful to be abandoned.  Xactly at first used them to share with their clients, in a non-methodic manner, as casual insights.

Along the way they figured two things: one, the insights could be a  product once they figured a method to share them consistently with customers who wanted to know not only how they compared to others, but also what worked and didn’t for others.

Second, it was not only that specific data that made sense-  but the model.  The model of collecting data, any data, from transactions and operations as part of cloud-provided services.  This model, together with the data and the insights, became the basis for a new service they provided via their existing platform by simply leveraging the outcomes and the results of the other services.

This is what platforms do divinely well and easy: extend what has been done into many different new directions with minimal effort.

The Extending Functionality Play

Another platform example that I noticed recently was Hubspot.  At their recent user conference they announced that in addition to the Marketing Automation functionality they were already offering they would begin to offer more basic CRM functionality (related to Sales and Pipeline management as well as contact management).

This was partly led by requests from their clients and partly by them noticing that the data was the same and if they could add a few more reporting and operations functions to the cadre of services their platform offered they could extend the functionality of their platform – but more importantly do so in a way that delivered what customers wanted to see.

Hubspot focus was not only on the data they could add to their existing database, but more on the functions that their customers could not complete with other offerings as well as extending the functionality of their functional and reporting services.

By extending the functionality of their platform (adding new services) they were able to deliver more value to their customers and also showed them how easy it was to do so, enabling future requests for added functionality to come in to them and they can fulfill them – continuing the cycle.

Other Examples

One more place where I am seeing the rise of platforms play is in the CRM Idol competition.  Now on its fourth year, we are used to seeing the contest showcase the main technical challenges, and solutions, offered by new and starting CRM vendors.

During the previous years we saw plenty of focus on social, analytics, big data, marketing automation, and small medium businesses – but this year we are seeing a lot more focus on delivering all these solutions as platforms or even as services for other platforms.

While I cannot name names yet (as the contest is still underway and I cannot show favoritism) you can see the list of participants and draw your own conclusions.  However, know that I am more impressed by the technology deployment approach via platforms this year than at any other time.

Please keep in mind that these are just a few examples of what I am seeing as there are many other plays I didn’t highlight (but will going forward).

OK, your turn – flame on (I feel so old saying that)… Troll on… whichever you prefer.  Tell me what I missed and what you noticed.  Caveat: if you are vendor touting your own solution, likely that your comment will be “spamatized”.

What do you say?

Four Corners' 'Privacy Lost': A demonstration of the Collection Principle

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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Tonight, Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Four Corners program aired a terrific special, "Privacy Lost" written and produced by Martin Smith from the US public broadcaster PBS's Frontline program.

Here we have a compelling demonstration of the importance and primacy of Collection Limitation for protecting our privacy.

About the program

Martin Smith summarises brilliantly what we know about the NSA's secret surveillance programs, thanks to the revelations of Ed Snowden, the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald and the Washington Post's Barton Gellman; he holds many additional interviews with Julia Angwin (author of "Dragnet Nation"), Chris Hoofnagle (UC Berkeley), Steven Levy (Wired), Christopher Soghoian (ACLU) and Tim Wu ("The Master Switch"), to name a few. Even if you're thoroughly familiar with the Snowden story, I highly recommend "Privacy Lost". I'll update this blog in the next few days with a link to the ABC's downloadable version of the program.

The program is a ripping re-telling of Snowden's expose, against the backdrop of George W. Bush's PATRIOT Act and the mounting suspicions through the noughties of NSA over-reach. There are freshly told accounts of the intrigues, of secret optic fibre splitters installed very early on in AT&T's facilities, scandals over National Security Letters, and the very rare case of the web hosting company Calyx who challenged their constitutionality (and yet today, with the letter withdrawn, remains unable to tell us what the FBI was seeking). The real theme of Smith's take on surveillance then emerges, when he looks at the rise of data-driven businesses -- first with search, then advertising, and most recently social networking -- and the "data wars" between Google, Facebook and Microsoft.

The interplay between government surveillance and digital businesses is the most important part of the Snowden epic and it receives the proper emphasis here. The depth and breadth of surveillance conducted by the private sector, and the insights revealed about what people might be up to creates irresistible opportunities for the intelligence agencies. Hoofnagle tells us how the FBI loves Facebook. And we see the discovery of how the NSA exploits the tracking that's done by the ad companies, most notably Google's "PREF" cookie.

One of the peak moments in "Privacy Lost" comes when Gellman and his specialist colleague Ashkan Soltani present their evidence about the PREF cookie to Google - offering an opportunity for the company to comment before the story is to break in the Washington Post. The article ran on December 13, 2013; we're told it was then the true depth of the privacy problem was revealed.

My point of view

Martin Smith takes as a given that excessive intrusion into private affairs is wrong, without getting into the technical aspects of privacy (such as frameworks for data protection, and various Privacy Principles). Neither does he unpack the actual privacy harms. And that's fine -- such a program is not the right place to canvass such technical arguments.

When Gellman and Soltani reveal that the NSA is using Google's tracking cookie, the government gets joined irrefutably to the private sector in a mass surveillance apparatus. And yet I am not sure the harm is dramatically worse when the government knows what Facebook and Google already know.

Privacy harms are tricky to work out. Yet it's clear that no harms can come from using and abusing Personal Information if that information is not collected in the first place. I take away from "Privacy Lost" a clear impression of the risks created by the data wars. We are imperilled by the voracious appetite of digital businesses that hang on indefinitely to masses of data about us, while they figure out ever cleverer ways to make money out of it. This is why Collection Limitation is the first and foremost privacy protection. If a business or government doesn't have a sound and transparent reason for having Personal Information about us, then they should not have it. It's as simple as that.

Martin Smith's program highlights the symbiosis between government and private sector surveillance. The data wars not only made dozens of billionaires but they did so much of the heavy lifting for the NSA. And this situation is about to get radically more fraught. On the brink of the Internet of Things, we need to question if we want to keep drowning in data.

Four Corners' 'Privacy Lost': A demonstration of the Collection Principle

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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On October 6, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Four Corners program aired a terrific special, "Privacy Lost" written and produced by Martin Smith from the US public broadcaster PBS's Frontline program.

UPDATE: The program we saw in Australia was a condensed version of PBS's two part The United States of Secrets from May 2014. 

Here we have a compelling demonstration of the importance and primacy of Collection Limitation for protecting our privacy.

About the program

Martin Smith summarises brilliantly what we know about the NSA's secret surveillance programs, thanks to the revelations of Ed Snowden, the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald and the Washington Post's Barton Gellman; he holds many additional interviews with Julia Angwin (author of "Dragnet Nation"), Chris Hoofnagle (UC Berkeley), Steven Levy (Wired), Christopher Soghoian (ACLU) and Tim Wu ("The Master Switch"), to name a few. Even if you're thoroughly familiar with the Snowden story, I highly recommend "Privacy Lost". I'll update this blog in the next few days with a link to the ABC's downloadable version of the program.

The program is a ripping re-telling of Snowden's expose, against the backdrop of George W. Bush's PATRIOT Act and the mounting suspicions through the noughties of NSA over-reach. There are freshly told accounts of the intrigues, of secret optic fibre splitters installed very early on in AT&T's facilities, scandals over National Security Letters, and the very rare case of the web hosting company Calyx who challenged their constitutionality (and yet today, with the letter withdrawn, remains unable to tell us what the FBI was seeking). The real theme of Smith's take on surveillance then emerges, when me looks at the rise of data-driven businesses -- first with search, then advertising and social networking -- and the "data wars" between Google, Facebook and Microsoft.

The interplay between government surveillance and digital businesses is the most important part of the Snowden epic and it receives the proper emphasis here. The depth and breadth of surveillance conducted by the private sector, and the insights revealed about what people might be up to creates irresistible opportunities for the intelligence agencies. Hoofnagle tells us how the FBI loves Facebook. And we see the discovery of how the NSA exploits the tracking that’s done by the ad companies, most notably Google’s “PREF” cookie.

One of the peak moments in "Privacy Lost" comes when Gellman and his specialist colleague Ashkan Soltani present their evidence of the PREF cookie to Google - offering an opportunity for the company to comment before the story is to break in the Washington Post. The article ran on December 13, 2013; we're told it was then the true depth of the privacy problem was revealed.

Weekly Recap - Week ending October 3rd 2014

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

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• My takeaways form the Oracle HCM Analyst Meeting (read here)

• My takeaways from the Oracle Database and Fusion Middleware Analyst meeting (read here)

• 5 tips for Oracle HCM and Oracle Technology customers when dealing with Oracle

• Constellation Takeaways from Oracle OpenWorld with Natalie, Guy, Ray and me (watch here).

Other key news / events of the week - I wasn't able to blog about

• Tibco goes private, acquired by Vista Equity Partners - read here
• IBM launches Kenexa Talent Insights - read here

Some of the news coverage from press who talked to me:

Constellation Research takeaways of Oracle OpenWorld

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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It was both a technology challenge (Holger lost network as moderator and could not rejoin in video & audio, Ray did a good jop roping him in via chat) and a bad hair day as Guy did not turn on his camera... 

Enjoy and let us know what your Oracle OpenWorld Takeaways have been!

More News from the Information Revolution Front: Who's More Progressive - Airports, Movie Theaters, or the NFL?

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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Three industries provided connectable dots today.

First, the FCC announced that the blackout rule — which has prevented the broadcast of NFL games in a team’s home market unless the stadium is sold out — “has become outdated,” and will repeal it to eliminate unnecessary regulation and leave the question “to private solutions negotiated by the interested parties.”  The New York Times article points out that when the rule was created, ticket sales were a large contributor to a team’s income, but today most revenue comes from television.  And in 2013, only two of 256 NFL games were blacked out. Note that this doesn’t require the teams to broadcast the games that don’t sell out.

Nonetheless, the NFL “is fighting desperately to keep the FCC rule intact", filling terrifying briefs to the Commission saying “the eventual result likely would be decrease in the amount of professional sports on broadcast television.” Meanwhile, the National Cable Television Association sensibly points out that ticket prices have a lot more to do with whether fans go to the stadium. (You’d think temperatures would matter, but half the games blacked out in 2011 were in San Diego and Tampa Bay.)

In a second skirmish, Netflix announced a deal with the Weinstein Company and IMAX Theaters to open it first original movie, the sequel to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, simultaneously on Netflix and in IMAX theaters. The Weinstein Company has already agreed to make Netflix it’s exclusive U.S. subscription TV service for its first-run films stating in 2016. These moves attack the “windowing” paradigm of studios releasing films to theaters exclusively for three months.  Netflix, of course, already challenged television’s release model when it offered the entire season of House of Cards at once, arguing that their approach fit consumers’ wishes to binge. “What I am hoping is that it will be a proof point that the sky doesn’t fall,” said Netflix Content Officer TED Sarandos. “These are two different experiences, like going to a football game and watching a football game on TV.” Hmmn. 

In this performance, the role of the monopolist will be played by the three dominant theater chains.  Regal Entertainment, AMC Entertainment, and Cinemark, “have aggressively opposed any encroachment on their release window, maintaing that any shortening would encourage consumers to stay home,” according to one report.  “Regal..has wasted no time in slamming” the deal, and AMC will “boycott” the movie, and its “parent company Wanda may not carry it in China,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.  “‘No one has approached us to license this made-for-video sequel in the US or China, so one must assume the screens Imax committed are in science centers dn aquariums,' AMC said in a terse statement.” Terse doesn’t quite cover referring to a movie with a budget of ten times the original Crouching Tiger’s $23 million as “made for video.” And, umm, Imax. The Reporter headline was “Major Blow for Netflix, Imax,” by the way, apparently taking little interest in the customers or industry evolution.

Today's final threat to life as we know it is United Airlines’ decision to include the ability to book Uber through it’s smartphone app.   The marketing director for the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority told United’s VP for Marketing that “a lot of airports…are against Uber, because the drivers are not vetted and not regulated,” displaying more faith in the local Hack Bureau than crowdsourced reviews. United “want[s] to provide functionality. Our customers want it. They told us they like it and they’re using the product.” Weird, right? 

So, the answer to “Who’s More Progressive” is none of them — in each case the owners of the “bottleneck facility,” as we used to call the RBOCs back in the day, are protecting their ability to collect economic rents, while United, Weinstein, Netflix and the FCC have the customer's back. The NFL, theater moguls, and airports seem unconcerned with whether they are actually creating value for anyone but themselves. How many times do we have to see this movie?  Oh, I mean video.  – CAM

Event Report - Oracle OpenWorld - Oracle's vision and remaining work become clear - both are big

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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Oracle’s vision - It became once more clear what Oracle’s vision is - an integrated technology stack engineered by Oracle, from storage beyond SaaS all the way to value added services like DaaS (if not familiar that's Data as a Service). Operated by Oracle for the customer - or if the customer wants to, operated by them on premises. Even though Oracle is now ‘all in’ on the cloud message - it was last year that Larry Ellison admitted he gave up and would now use the ‘buzzword’ - the company strictly supports the dual deployment capabilities. Interesting enough the deployments options are important for customers, in one of the Q&As Thomas Kurian shared that there were over 20 customer that have gone full circle - moving cloud to on premises and back or vice versa. It is also clear that Oracle sees cost competitiveness on the IaaS layer as critical, as various executives said that Oracle will match Amazon AWS or Google Cloud platform prices, whoever is cheaper. It is clear that Oracle tries to commoditize the IaaS tier as much as possible, making up for revenue and profitability on the PaaS and SaaS side. Certainly an attractive strategy for Oracle.

Computing Eras (from Mendelsohn's presentation)

12c comes along - It is over 2 years now that Oracle has announced 12c. We talked to some customers and they attest it is working and they are seeing benefits. If these TCO benefits were similar or in the range of what Oracle talked about at OpenWorld 2012 remains to be seen. The real scale test for 12c is anyway Oracle’s usage for DBaaS and moving its SaaS apps to it. Andy Mendelsohn multiple times mentioned that Oracle will be moving the Taleo Talent Management products to 12c first - which should make an interesting showcase. But 12c had to be ready also to enable Larry Ellison’s ‘2 click keynote’ of moving both a database and an applications from on premises to the cloud. And it looks like that works - even though Ellison joked ‘it could break anytime as it is live software’. But it was more than the 2 clicks announced in Ellison’s Sunday keynote - nonetheless Oracle has created a huge value proposition for customers - to move on premise applications to the (Oracle) cloud. For customers tired of maintaining their older apps (and paying their DBAs) - there is now (or soon) a viable alternative to run these apps. Ellison was (rightfully) proud that Oracle lived up to its commitment to move customers along, as the company has through all recent technology changes.

Oracle's in memory approach (from Mendelsohn's presentation)

The in memory features of 12c seem to be working well, too. Mendelsohn gave a few database 101 lectures on the pros and cons of row vs column storage and how Oracle enables both - on disk and in memory flavor - at the discretion of the customer. And Oracle was not tired to point out that to take advantage of in memory applications did not have to be re-written (positioning vs SAP HANA) and could write to memory, too (positioning vs Microsoft SQL server in memory option). Surprisingly there were few customer success stories and use cases - but they may not have been surfaced to me. But in general an indication that Oracle customers are conservative to move to new database releases - I heard a number of customers saying that the never move to R1 - but wait for R2. 12cR2 is coming soon so it will be time to check in on the uptake of both in memory and pluggable databases / multi-tenancy. But even if customers may be slow to uptake these features, they are core to power Oracle’s ‘as a Service’ business. So one way or the other the 12c features will get a lot of usage soon.

Database (not Application!) Multitenancy (from Mendelsohn's presentation)

The platform - If you attended and read about OpenWorld and did not hear about platform as a service (PaaS) message something has gone badly missing. In keynotes and sessions Oracle speakers would not get tired of stressing how Oracle is shipping a PaaS - but also uses and makes the same available for customers to do work on higher in the stack products, like SaaS and DaaS. The demos Ellison showed in his 2nd keynote like e.g. creating an employee of the month application for Fusion HCM showed that in action (though much was prepared beforehand). The work horse in the platform is Fusion Middleware, less with its traditional middleware features around SOA and ESB, but more on its composition, mobile and integration capabilities. And there is some merit to the argument, in the past Oracle Applications would certainly use the Oracle Database - but the uptake of Oracle tools and later Fusion Middleware were another story. The challenge was Oracle Applications was always only one customer of the technology stack - an important one certainly - but Oracle platform products usually had to run on faster cycles than the applications could. Enters the SaaS world with multiple releases per year and all of a sudden release - and with that uptake cycles between enabling platform technology and applications consuming those can be synched. It remains a heck of a prioritization effort – balancing the Oracle internal Applications requirements vs best of breed market requirements – but Oracle is deep pocketed enough to fund probably most of both. The vision is certainly remarkable and it’s good to see that e.g. where we have the insight – with Oracle’s cloud HCM products – the work has already begun to uptake, expose, elevate to the Oracle PaaS platform.

Oracle PaaS Portfolio (from Kurian's presentation)

Engineered Top Down? – My impression of the Oracle endeavor has been that it is heavily top down oriented, starting with the Applications. Quick reminder – Fusion started around 2004. So Oracle has been working on SaaS applications much longer than e.g. PaaS / DBaaS / DaaS or IaaS. All the former are lower level components of the tech stack. In the ideal world engineers want to start bottom up normally. When I asked Thomas Kurian about this, his view was that the SaaS applications have been built on these services all the time, citing Java as the example. And that is certainly a valid point – but it would be phenomenal if Oracle would not have to do some kind of re-work to make its SaaS applications run on all the just into live coming technology and platform products.

Oracle SaaS Portfolio (from Kurian's presentation)

Massive Task – The creation of the next Oracle technology effort is a massive effort with a five digit number of engineers working on it. To make sure all these project run well together and synch up on time is a massive task. When I asked Kurian was fair enough to say the latest (and probably newest) effort – IaaS – is what is giving him the most gray hair. So customer need to watch for product maturity and keep an eye on quality, not that they would not anyway – but a more complex (and powerful) technology stack needs appropriate attention. To put it into perspective – only the combined R&D efforts of IBM are in similar scale – and IBM does not claim (and does not need to) for all of it to work together. Oracle has accepted a much tighter locking of its tech stack components. That is more work and risk to create – but has benefits on the upside for customers when it all works together. 15 or so years ago Oracle had a similar vision - the database and the combination of Forms and Reports would run its Applications. Well that never took off back then (separate blog post sometime) - and it's a different age. Both capabilities and challenges are a magnitude 2 2 larger than back then. So Oracle needs to get it done.
 

Oracle Cloud Scale as of June 2014 (from Kurian's presentation)

Adoption – When even a vendor builds something new – it not only needs to get it done technically with the right quality – but also get adoption in the customer base. And that happens through sales people and partners. It was good to see that Oracle has acknowledged that its salesforce was one of the first sceptics initially, but now the vendor has put in the incentives to get the new products sold. At the same time Oracle is looking at partner enablement, not only on the services side, but also on the product side. Kurian shared that Oracle has already had conversation with over 60 ISVs. Nonetheless Oracle needs to look at this area and produce the numbers in customers and revenue dollars. When I asked Mark Hurd on this he shared that Oracle doubled the applications sales force and will be on top of the challenge. Glad to hear it’s realized – but it needs to be tackled and addressed.

MyPOV

For the longest time I have been critical of how Oracle may be able to match the prices of Amazon and / or Google. But a back of a napkin calculation showed me how: If Oracle can only convert 20% of existing load that it run on premise with DB and Java in the next 5 years – then it is larger than AWS and / or Google, easily. And with that comes purchasing and bargaining power with the suppliers Oracle needs to deal with in its cloud roll out. And we all know cloud is a scale game.

The next area to watch is how well integrated vs. consumable the Oracle stack will be at the end of this exercise. There will be customers who will want to consume it all – and then there will be customers who only want pieces of that technology stack – lock in fear and other reasons will apply. Oracle uses standards – as far as available and applicable at these intersection – but if this will allow Oracle to capture both sides of the business, remains to be seen.

Overall things are coming together for Oracle in 2014 – which was by OpenWorld 2013 blog post header (see here) – a number of announced products are being made available in the next few weeks, more in winter, then spring and summer 2015. OpenWorld 2015 will have in place all that Oracle announced at this OpenWorld – in the meantime there needs to be a lot of precision flying – for customers, partners and Oracle. Mistakes will be costly on either side. Stay tuned.

7 Tips for CX customers and Prospects

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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Why is CX or Customer Experience So Important Today?

Attending OpenWorld 2014 brought to mind the importance of making sure your customer-facing organizations are really focused on the customer.  While this may seem like a very obvious thing to say, most studies show a large gap between what customers think about the experiences they have with their customers and what the company thinks about the experiences they provide.

7  Tips for CX customers and Prospects

The craze of CX or Customer Experience is rampant, with many definitions and many different meanings to customers, companies and vendors. It’s time to get some things straight. You must first decide is CX means Marketing, Sales and Customer Service or does CX mean to your company, just Customer Service? In the new world of modern Customer Experiences, it means any customer-facing interaction. Here’s some things to think about:

1. The customer doesn’t think about interacting or engaging with a company per department or silo – i.e., Marketing, Sales, Customer Service….

2. The company must begin to understand what they have in each department – Marketing, Sales and Customer Service before then can even begin to dream of being “of service” to a customer.

3. Understanding what each department has means that each department needs to understand what software they have, what it does, does is experience when internal people use it create the experience their customers want and see and will those customers return because the experience is so good?

4. Each department needs to understand what processes, policies, people, skill sets, resources, etc… it has to  create the experience their customers want and which ones are most important to make sure they will return because the experience is so amazing.

5. Once a company has a good handle on what they have, they then need to understand where the gaps are — not only within each department, but how each department interacts with each other to make the overall customer-facing experience great.

6. Once those gaps are defined, they must be quickly closed before competitors do so, otherwise customers will walk away- either with their feet or their mouse.

7. The last piece of advice? Pivot, shift and change or get out of the way so your competitors can take care of your customers.

The take-a-ways from the CX part of OpenWorld were essentially to:

• Discover how to deliver a seamless customer experience regardless of where or how customers connect with you
• Learn how to differentiate your brand by creating a unified web, social, and contact-center experience
• Gain insight into how to deliver proactive, highly personalized customer communications using closed-loop marketing and integrated analytics.

Oracle provided examples of companies that are currently in progress or have accomplished some of these goals from brands like General Motors to Insperity. (Those sessions were held in Moscone West otherwise known as CX Central)

A report by Global Insights on Succeeding in the Customer Experience Era, Oracle, 2013, showed that there is a 20% annual loss in revenue for business who don’t deliver great customer experiences. And that makes sense, because if the experience is not positive – customer will either return products or not even return to buy products and worse they will tell their friends and family. And not just in the small circles they can reach in person.

What social and digital media has basically done is to create a large megaphone for customers to share how good or bad their experiences are, in a nanosecond online and that content or those postings are permanent. As permanent as cave paintings that last thousands of years. And that’s why using a technology partner like Oracle is very important. What I learned at the conference is that they realize that it’s a lot to take in and to understand how to take existing systems and integrate all the new things. And they want to be the company you come to to get help with this. So hold them to this promise.

• Eloqua (a marketing automation platform as the base for marketing automation)
• BlueKai (cloud-based big data platform that enables companies to personalize online, offline and mobile marketing campaigns with richer and more actionable information about targeted audiences)
• Responsys (e-mail marketing, web-hosted marketing technology for reaching consumers on mobile devices and social networks, display advertising and other online channels)
• Compendium (content marketing)
• ReadyTalk (audio and web conferencing as well as webcast hosting)
• Vitrue (a cloud-based social marketing and engagement platform that enables marketers to centrally create, publish, moderate, manage, measure and report on their social marketing campaigns)
• RightNow (Knowledge Cloud Service combines knowledge management software technology with social media collaboration for a consistent, superior customer experience.)

Here’s More Details on each of these acquisitions:

• Eloqua: builds upon Oracle’s previous acquisitions of RightNow and Vitrue. The point of Eloqua is so that brands using Eloqua’s technology are better able to track, capture and analyze a potential buyer’s digital body language, including their preferences, behavior and decision-making processes, to more accurately score and qualify leads and identify high quality prospects.

• BlueKai: includes its Data Management Platform, which centrally organizes a company’s customer and audience data in the cloud to help implement personalized marketing campaigns across all channels and deliver better results and higher marketing ROI. BlueKai also runs the world’s largest third party data marketplace to augment a company’s proprietary customer data with actionable information on more than 700 million profiles.

 And BlueKai will be /is integrated with both Responsys for B2C marketing automation and Eloqua for B2B marketing automation in order to deliver orchestrated and personalized customer interactions across all marketing activities and channels. BlueKai combined with Oracle’s Marketing and Social solutions provide customers with the ability to build the richest user profiles combining information from first party and third party sources including media, advertising, social, and mobile sources. The combination will also allow both B2B and B2C organizations to build unmatched personalized cross-channel campaigns and customer interactions across e-mail, web, social, mobile, advertising and syndicated content channels.

• Responsys: The addition of Responsys extends Oracle’s Customer Experience Cloud, which includes Commerce, Sales, Service, Social and the Oracle Marketing Cloud. By bringing together Responsys and Oracle Eloqua in the Marketing Cloud, for the first time CMOs that support industries with B2C or B2B business models will be equipped to drive exceptional customer experiences across marketing interactions and throughout the customer lifecycle from a single platform.

• Compendium: The addition of Compendium extends Oracle’s Customer Experience Cloud, with a cloud-based content marketing provider that helps companies plan, produce and deliver engaging content across multiple channels throughout their customers’ lifecycle. Compendium’s data-driven approach aligns relevant content with customer data and profiles to help companies more effectively attract prospects, engage buyers, accelerate conversion of prospects to opportunities, increase adoption, and drive revenue growth.

The combination of Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud with Compendium is expected to enable modern marketers to align persona-based content to customers’ digital body language to increase “top-of-funnel” customer engagement, improve the quality of sales leads, realize the highest return on their marketing investment, and increase customer loyalty.

• ReadyTalk: As organizations of all sizes look at new ways to collaborate and engage audiences, the audio and web conferencing market has become increasingly competitive. To stand out in a market dominated by larger providers and successfully execute sophisticated marketing programs that fit with its customer-centric culture, ReadyTalk, a provider of audio and web conferencing services, selected Oracle Eloqua, a component of the Oracle Marketing Cloud. With Oracle Eloqua, ReadyTalk has been able to deliver highly personalized, targeted messages to nurture leads and convert customers into brand advocates, improving marketing effectiveness and ROI.

• Vitrue:  The proliferation of social media has changed the way that organizations and consumers interact. Vitrue’s social marketing platform helps organizations enhance their social marketing efforts to the next level of social engagement by giving brands the ability to scale across multiple social networks, target messages from global to local, create unique and consistent brand experiences, and publish content that engages fans and drives leads.

Together, Oracle and Vitrue plan to enable a unified social experience across customer interactions, resulting in meaningful customer engagements with consistent brand experiences across all channels and media; improved return on investment for social sales and marketing campaigns across paid, owned and social media; and enhanced customer service through real-time responsiveness and high touch engagement.

• RightNow: Oracle RightNow Web Experience provides a rich online customer experience solution so consumers can research, purchase, or resolve issues from any device. Set a standard for best-in-class service by allowing your customers to interact on their own terms while you increase conversions and lower service costs. //  Oracle RightNow Social Experience enables brands to manage social interactions as a fully integrated part of the customer experience.

Oracle RightNow Social Experience is designed to extend the customer experience to the places where consumers are learning, sharing, and buying across the social web. // Oracle RightNow Contact Center Experience delivers end-to-end management of the customer journey through unified records, interfaces, and knowledge. Even your junior agents are able to deliver exceptional experiences consistently across every channel for operational efficiency and service excellence.

Unintended consequences of the Right to be Forgotten

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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The "Right to be Forgotten" debate reminds me once again of the cultural differences between technology and privacy.

On September 30, I was honoured to be part of a panel discussion hosted by the IEEE on RTBF; a recording can be viewed here. In a nutshell, the European Court of Justice has decided that European citizens have the right to ask search engine businesses to suppress links to personal information, under certain circumstances. I've analysed and defended the aims of the ECJ in another blog.

One of the IEEE talking points was why RTBF has attracted so much scorn. My answer was that some critics appear to expect perfection in the law; when they look at the RTBF decision, all they see is problems. Yet nobody thinks this or any law is perfect; the question is whether it helps improve the balance of rights in a complex and fast changing world.

It's a little odd that technologists in particular are so critical of imperfections in the law, when they know how flawed is technology. Indeed, the security profession is almost entirely concerned with patching problems, and reminding us there will never be perfect security.

Of course there will be unwanted side-effects of the new RTBF rules and we should trust that over time these will be reviewed and dealt with. I wish that privacy's critics could be more humble about this unfolding environment. I note that when social conservatives complain about online pornography, or when police decry encryption as a tool of criminals, technologists typically play those problems down as the unintended consequences of new technologies, which on average overwhelmingly do good not evil.

And it's the same with the law. It really shouldn't be necessary to remind anyone that laws have unintended consequencesf.  That's the stuff of the entire genre of courtroom drama! So everyone take heart: the good guys nearly always win in the end.