Tales of the One in Ten

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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But then something happens that he could never have imagined.

Watch and share and help change someone else’s story.

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The Enterprise Mobility Problem

Brian Katz

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Brian Katz is a director at pharmaceutical company Sanofi, where he manages mobile initiatives, including mobilizing the salesforce, building best practices for developing apps, handling BYOD initiatives, enabling new devices and form factors for success, and looking at ways to innovate in the mobile space for Sanofi. He started his career working with a multi-national New York financial company as an email architect, designing and maintaining their email and communications systems, which also involved supporting their mobile computing platforms. ...

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The question needs to be asked whether these enterprises should care. The BYOD (Bring your own device) faithful will insist that the enterprises must care, as employees will use any device they fancy and they must be ready. Security will insist on it, as the new features are always new things to be blocked until the din reaches the crescendo of caring, forcing them to truly examine if an issue exists, most often it doesn’t. Yet, we let it go unsaid, in almost every corner enterprises are looking at mobility wrong, except for the few in that rarified air.

You see, mobility is this bell that all are ringing, loud and clear. They have seen the drummer and are marching to his beat, handing out smartphones and tablets left and right. Apple is cleaning up in the enterprise and Samsung is starting to make some headway for Android. It’s like an episode of Oprah, you walk into work one day and look beneath your seat and there’s a tablet or smartphone waiting. If you are really lucky there might even be a few apps preloaded or the companies that really get it have an app store already setup and ready to go, filled with apps that fit your needs.

The funny thing is, 6 months later, they all start asking where all the new productivity is that they read about in every Wall Street Journal or even the New York Times. They thought that all they had to do was hand the devices out. They setup basic PIM functionality. Everyone can get their email, contacts and calendaring on their devices. According to IBM they should be getting an extra hour a day of productivity from each person. Some think that if they give their users smartphones and tablets they should get two extra hours each day.

Along the way, these companies forgot what they were doing in the first place. They built their business and created a strategy for growth and profit. They hired good people and gave them the tools they needed to get their jobs done. Then these shiny little objects that came with stories of unheard of productivity and efficiency distracted them. It caused them to stray from the basics that made them good companies in the first place. There was no strategy when these mobile devices were rolled out, other than they would work. They forgot that mobility is just another tool in the arsenal of their workers. These tools required jobs that could be done with them. The jobs couldn’t be done exactly the same way they had been in the past because those tools already existed. They had to be suited for a new way of working. They had to be fit to their workers wants and needs. They necessitated a loosening of the old ways of doing things and needed to give heed to new apps and devices that allowed more flexibility and agility.

Mobile devices, in and of themselves, are pointless. They aren’t tools. It’s only when you combine the mobile devices with the right apps, that they become tools fit to the right need. It’s when they take an old business process and turn it on its head because they enable a new, better way for it to be performed that they are successful. It’s when it allows someone to enter information in a system instantaneously after it is acquired versus the old way of writing it down, walking back to their desk and inputting it that it becomes efficient. When a pilot no longer has to carry 20 pounds of manuals for a flight and then leaf through to find the right page, but instead just types in the search box of their tablet to find the right procedure that it becomes successful. When approvals that required an email, a web browser, a SharePoint session, and a complete approval flow taking 30 minutes in total and a PC become a mobile app where the manager reviews the case and clicks approve in 2 minutes, then you’ve become successful.

An enterprise can ignore the goings on in mobile or throw themselves whole hog into giving their workers devices, but until they integrate mobile into their business strategy, processes and procedures, all they’ve done is spend a lot of money on some really shiny toys.

Reflections on the Future of the Cloud at SAPPHIRENOW

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 Research Inc. He…...

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In this post panel debrief, R "Ray" Wang shares his insights regarding the future of the cloud and shares how the cloud enables the transformation to digital. 

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Three Billion was a Snap - why even selfies deserve data protection

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 latest Snowden revelations include the NSA's special programs for extracting photos and identifying from the Internet. Amongst other things the NSA uses their vast information resources to correlate location cues in photos -- buildings, streets and so on -- with satellite data, to work out where people are. They even search especially for passport photos, because these are better fodder for facial recognition algorithms. The audacity of these government surveillance activities continues to surprise us, and their secrecy is abhorrent.

Yet an ever greater scale of private sector surveillance has been going on for years in social media. With great pride,Facebook recently revealed its R&D in facial recognition. They showcased the brazenly named "DeepFace" biometric algorithm, which is claimed to be 97% accurate in recognising faces from regular images. Facebook has made a swaggering big investment in biometrics.

   "Big Privacy: The New Big Data Privacy Pact" webinar June 18
   

    Data mining needs raw material, there's lots of it out there, and Facebook has been supremely clever at attracting it.It's been suggested that 20% of all photos now taken end up in Facebook.     Even three years ago, Facebook held 10,000 times as many photographs as the Library of Congress:

[Picture courtesy of the now retired 1000memories.com blog]

And Facebook will spend big bucks buying other photo lodes. Last year they tried to buy Snapchat for the spectacular sum of three billion dollars. The figure had pundits reeling. How could a start-up company with 30 people be worth so much? All the usual dot com comparisons were made; the offer seemed a flight of fancy.

But no, the offer was a rational consideration for the precious raw material that lies buried in photo data.

Snapchat generates at least 100 million new images every day. Three billion dollars was, pardon me, a snap. I figure that at a ballpark internal rate of return of 10%, a $3B investment is equivalent to $300M p.a. so even if the Snapchat volume stopped growing, Facebook would have been paying one cent for every new snap, in perpetuity.

These days, we have learned from Snowden and the NSA that communications metadata is just as valuable as the content of our emails and phone calls. So remember that it's the same with photos. Each digital photo comes from a device that embeds within the image metadata usually including the time and place of when the picture was taken. And of course each Instagram or Snapchat is a social post, sent by an account holder with a history and rich context in which the image yields intimate real time information about what they're doing, when and where.

The hallmark of the Snapchat service is transience: all those snaps are supposed to flit from one screen to another before vaporising. Now of course that idea is contestable; enthusiasts worked out pretty quickly how to retrieve snaps from old memory. And in any case, transience is a red herring, perhaps a deliberate distraction, because the metadata matters more, and Snapchat admits in its Privacy Policy that it pretty well keeps the lot:

• When you access or use our Services, we automatically collect information about you, including:
• Usage Information: When you send or receive messages via our Services, we collect information about these messages, including the time, date, sender and recipient of the Snap. We also collect information about the number of messages sent and received between you and your friends and which friends you exchange messages with most frequently.
• Log Information: We log information about your use of our websites, including your browser type and language, access times, pages viewed, your IP address and the website you visited before navigating to our websites.
• Device Information: We may collect information about the computer or device you use to access our Services, including the hardware model, operating system and version, MAC address, unique device identifier, phone number, International Mobile Equipment Identity ("IMEI") and mobile network information. In addition, the Services may access your device's native phone book and image storage applications, with your consent, to facilitate your use of certain features of the Services.
• Location Information: With your consent, we may collect information about the location of your device to facilitate your use of certain features of our Services, determine the speed at which your device is traveling, add location-based filters to your Snaps (such as local weather), and for any other purpose described in this privacy policy.

Snapchat goes on to declare it may use any of this information to "personalize and improve the Services and provide advertisements, content or features that match user profiles or interests" and it reserves the right to share any information with "vendors, consultants and other service providers who need access to such information to carry out work on our behalf".

So back to the data mining: nothing stops Snapchat -- or a new parent company -- running biometric facial recognition over the snaps as they pass through the servers, to extract additional "profile" information. And there's an extra kicker that makes Snapchats extra valuable for biometric data miners. The vast majority of Snapchats are selfies. So if you extract a biometric template from a snap, you already know who it belongs to, without anyone having to tag it. Snapchat would provide a hundred million auto-calibrations every day for facial recognition algorithms! On Facebook, the privacy aware turn off photo tagging, but with Snapchats, self identification is inherent to the experience and is unlikely to be ever be disabled.

As I've discussed before, the morbid thrill of Snowden's spying revelations has tended to overshadow his sober observations that when surveillance by the state is probably inevitable, we need to be discussing accountability.

While we're all ventilating about the NSA, it's time we also attended to private sector spying and properly debated the restraints that may be appropriate on corporate exploitation of social data.

Personally I'm much more worried that an infomopoly has all my selfies.

Have a disruptive technology implementation story? Get recognized for your leadership. Apply for the 2014 SuperNova Awards for leaders in disruptive technology. 

First Take - Sapphire 2014 Day 1 Keynote - Top 3 Takeaways

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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We are attending Sapphire 2014 in Orlando and it’s time to see how the SAP under soon to be sole CEO Bill McDermott will start messaging and communicating

And different it was with a 30 minute start with young leaders presenting how they change things with Innovation, being polyglot, starting radio stations in Africa and learning to code. Nice – but begged the question what it had to do with SAP and why it got so much room in the keynote. 

Social Discovery’s Time Is Now

X1

Barry Murphy is the Senior Vice President of Product Marketing and Strategy at X1.  In this role, Barry leads X1's product marketing function, aligning X1's offerings to market needs for search and information access, eDiscovery, cloud and virtual search, and social discovery. Barry joins X1 from eDJ Group, where he was an analyst and thought leader in information governance, eDiscovery, records management, and content archiving. Previously, Barry was Director of Product Marketing at Mimosa Systems, a leading content archiving and eDiscovery software provider. He joined Mimosa after a highly successful stint as Principal Analyst for eDiscovery, records management, and content archiving at Forrester Research. Barry received a B.S. from the State University of New York at…...

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The 80/20 rule tends to apply in all aspects of life, and it is certainly applying to social discovery, at least in terms of who “gets it” and who doesn’t.  I say that because, when I talk to folks about social discovery, about 80% of them feel that it is a fringe issue that will be something to deal with in the distant future.  Only 20% realize that social discovery is happening now and that getting ahead of the curve presents a huge opportunity.

On the surface, it would seem problematic that so few embrace the realities that social media is here to stay in the business world.  According to Forrester Research’s The State Of Consumers And Technology: Benchmark 2013, US, “consumers of all age groups use social networking. From the 85% of Gen Zers to the 57% of the Golden Generation who visit Facebook at least monthly, social networking is ingrained in the Internet experience for all generations. Consumers use social media to interact with companies, too. The average US online Facebook user “likes” 14 brands on Facebook, while almost seven out of 10 social networkers engage with brands on social media.”  That social media content is discoverable is not up for debate; the argument tends to be around whether actual social discovery is mainstream yet.

The proactive management (e.g. archiving) of social media is not yet a mainstream practice in US enterprises.  In talking to a colleague at an archiving vendor, the primary reason for this is cost.  Yes, there is a lack of maturity in policies (both usage and retention) and a fear that simply journaling social media into an archive will just bloat digital landfills, but the primary issue is cost.  This is because most of the solutions for capturing social media into an archive are hosted and have recurring subscription and storage fees.  As a result, the starting cost – just to add social media to an archive – is over $25,000.  For most enterprises, that additional cost is a non-starter.

Just because proactive management of social media is not mainstream does not mean that social discovery as a practice is not.  I can look at the sales numbers for X1’s Social Discovery (X1SD) product and tell you that the growth rate is such that it is clear the practice is widespread.  I have also heard from service providers that are doing over 30 Facebook collections per week.  To me, that indicates that social discovery is a mainstream practice.  With X1SD, the cost issue is averted because the starting cost is less than $1,500.  Plus, the filtering capabilities allow investigators to only pass potentially relevant content downstream in the eDiscovery lifecycle.  And, being a desktop install means that no custody or control issues will pop up (especially important in the law enforcement use-case).

Most of the coverage of social media tools focus on the marketing use-cases – for example enterprise listening platforms and social relationship platforms.  Those use-cases serve important business functions, but discovery platforms need to meet a higher standard.  They need to show defensibility and have great control over custody of the data.  With such capabilities in place and in use today, it is only a matter of time before enterprises connect the dots and begin addressing social discovery with as much discipline as they do collection of email and other enterprise content.

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First Take - 3 Takeaways from HireVue’s Digital Disruption conference - Day 1 Keynote

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 a privilege to be invited to the first HireVue user conference at the beautiful Stein Ericsen lodge in Park City, Utah. Great to see the company embracing its location, showing off the beauty of the Wasatch Mountains and treating attendees to a 100% Utah sourced welcome reception. 

 

Here are my three top takeaways from the Day 1 Keynote:

• Very good corporate DNA – It’s always good to see when entrepreneurs make it – but when they start their company as college students and have to persevere till the technology is viable – it is even a more compelling story. In HireVue’s case Newman started in college, and struggled with the viability of personal video back then. The company used to mail webcams out to customers and candidates, with uncertain odds of successful installation on site. Luckily with more and more hardware having front facing cameras, this is no longer an issue. With Sequoia Capital and others the company has VC and investors with a very strong reputation for long term investment, something HireVue will need as it invests into product (it doubled its R&D resources) and expands abroad (it just opened the UK as a beachhead to Europe). But ultimately software is build, sold and supported by people and it was great to see a humble but energized management team, characteristics reflected and lived well by the large employee force onsite, too. So overall a very promising corporate DNA. 

Picture of HireVue Reporting

• Mobile matters – It was good to see HireVue fully embracing mobile. The company showed off new tablet and smartphone support (iOS and Android) and thus providing more productivity to applicants, recruiters and interviewers. The user interfaces were clean and well designed, the next stage being a full embrace or responsive design mechanics across platforms. What ultimately matters to customers and prospects is, that neither applicants in the application process nor employees will be left without appropriate mobile support. 

Picture of HireVue Analytics

• (True) Analytics – In my view this was the highlight of the keynote. Too many enterprise vendors use the term analytics too loosely and often the term gets hijacked by the marketers on a quest for a new term for BI / reporting / dashboards. Our test for true analytics is, that they either do something directly or at least propose a set of actions to a user. And we are glad to state that HireVue’s analytics pass that test, recommending more likely to succeed candidates to the recruiters. The company has choosen a wise staggered analytical model deployment approach with a default model, an enhanced companywide model and all the way to a position based model to make decision / recommendations on who to interview (and likely hire) first. The more information HireVue customers disclose – the more advanced the model at their disposal, all the way to the position based model. HireVue has gotten some key things for analytics success right – a business user driven rating of success and progressive improvement of the analytical model as more data comes to its disposal. This makes HireVue one of the first vendors to deploy (true) analytical models for day to day HCM decisions (other vendors are working on this, too – but it is still largely work in progress for them). 

MyPOV – HireVue has reached a clear leading position in the fast emerging video recruiting market, other vendors have acknowledged that with numerous partnership. The company is taking the right steps in product development to maintain that lead and has proven pundits wrong that Salt Lake City cannot be a great startup location. Its global expansion poses new opportunities and challenges it needs to address and fund, but it is too early to call where that is going. HireVue is the enviable position that the implementation of its software has a positive quantitative ROI, something that does not happen often in enterprise software history. Now it comes to drive behavior change in enterprises on how they recruit talent.

In the longer run the company needs to find a second area of automation that it will invest into and excel in. Life at the top is great, but the air – like at Stein Ericsen Lodge – is dry and thin. Executives have realized that – but not shared yet what that area will be. But they have some time to tackle these strategic questions.

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Indian Services Providers Fall from Disrupter to Legacy – Next Step Consolidation

Founder, capioIT
calitolIT

Phil is the founder of capioIT, a research analyst firm focussed on driving change in the analyst and research market through innovation and collaboration, with a strong focus on IT services and BPO strategies in the Asia/Pacific region. He has 17 years' experience in corporate strategy, consulting and market intelligence, gained in a diverse range of organisations and industries. Prior to founding capioIT, he established the Australian and Services business units at Springboard Research. Prior to Springboard Research, Phil was responsible for driving analyst firm IDC's research in the services marketplace across the Asia/Pacific region. During his 6 years at IDC, Phil led a large multi-national team of analysts across a range of IT related services with a particular focus on IT…...

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Individually and collectively, Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, Wipro, HCL, Cognizant and others unmistakably revolutionalised the IT services marketplace. Most visibly this was through leveraging India and other offshore locations. Equally importantly was their focus on, and strength in, process and customer service improvements. This forced legacy vendors such as IBM, Capgemini, Accenture et al, to change rapidly to slow their revenue and reputational erosion.

Unfortunately for the Indian based providers, their competitive edge has been eroded by factors including, the replicability of scaling in India, the cost and HR limitations of the model and a can’t beat them, join them, mentality by legacy vendors.

capioIT believes that Indian providers have failed to continue to drive market disruption. In an “as a service” world, growth for IT and business services providers is not through leveraging geographic cost differentials, rather through the automation of services, in the form of the development of services assets and IP based solutions.

As capioIT has noted, the shift by services providers away from the drug of offshore labour arbitrage to IP based solutions has proved difficult to execute on for all services providers. Indian based organisations have not avoided this under-performance. Highlighting this is Infosys who stated a grand ambition in 2012 for asset based services. Unfortunately, noting the proportionate decline in revenues from asset and IP based services, earlier this month it decided to spin off its asset based business into “Edgeverve Systems”. If Infosys was able to execute effectively on market changes, the legacy people based business should have been spun off, not the assets.

One of the real indicators of how much of a legacy the likes of Infosys, Wipro have become is their inability to differentiate in customers eyes in terms of cloud, both from an IaaS and SaaS services perspective.  For example, none of the Indian providers have excessively compelling capabilities in salesforce.com service provision and integration. Now they share this challenge with fellow legacy vendors such as CSC, HP et al.

Bottom Line

Whilst in general  current revenue growth is solid, fundamentally the Indian providers have lost their unique differentiation both individually and collectively. Where do they go from here? Unfortunately for many of them, they are going to have to consider the same outcomes as the legacy services  vendors, as they fail to reinvent themselves very quickly they will have to consider mergers as a realistic survival option.

I do not believe that by the end of 2015 all the big five Indian firms will be in their current ownership structure. Whilst it is difficult, and not always helpful to speculate, one can gain pointers from the partnership between CSC and HCL. The complementary nature of this and executive interlock gives to the reasonable conclusion that it is a flagging of a potential merger between the two organisations in the not too distant future.

Microsoft Dynamics: Delivering Amazing Customer Experiences

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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Microsoft Dynamics announced new capabilities in marketing, customer care and social listening are now globally available as part of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM spring wave of updates in 54 markets and 42 languages.

MY POV: What this means to you is that this new release delivers a more comprehensive solution with marketing, sales and customer care capabilities that are  integrated with leading productivity applications, such as Microsoft Office 365, Yammer, Lync, Skype, SharePoint and Power BI for Office 365.

Want an example of how Marketers are using Microsoft Dynamics Marketing?

The PGA TOUR uses the new marketing automation solution to better organize its creative, media and trafficking activities and to provide improved reporting information to its sponsors. The video shows how the PGA TOUR uses Microsoft Dynamics Marketing to run marketing promotions across a wide array of media types year-round.

In addition to the availability of Microsoft Dynamics Marketing and Microsoft Social Listening, Microsoft also released updates to Microsoft Dynamics CRM that include a new Unified Service Desk. For on-premises customers, the company delivered these new capabilities as part of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Service Pack 1. Microsoft further announced it plans to expand the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online service to additional markets in Europe, Asia Pacific and South America in the third quarter of calendar year 2014.

“Microsoft Dynamics CRM has made unbelievable progress over the last few years, and the amazing capabilities in this release deliver significant value to our customers as an important component of the Microsoft Cloud for business,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft Corp. “Through innovative business applications in the cloud, businesses can better meet their customers’ needs and thrive in a changing world.”

Microsoft on Monday reinforced that its contractual commitments for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online meet the requirements of the European Union’s “model clauses” and the high standards of European Union (EU) privacy law as acknowledged by the “Article 29 Working Party,” making Microsoft the first — and so far the only — company to receive this recognition.

“In addition to enjoying the benefits of these new capabilities across marketing, sales and service, customers can be comfortable doing business with Microsoft when it comes to their data,” said Bob Stutz, corporate vice president, Microsoft Dynamics CRM. “We focused our development efforts on understanding what our customers need to deliver amazing customer experiences. We redesigned our user interface, implemented a six-month rapid release cycle, made three acquisitions and built many new features — all culminating in the wave of releases we are bringing to market today.”

Global expansion

The expanded availability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online to markets in Europe, Asia Pacific and South America begins this month with the availability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online in Turkey. This global expansion gives customers a new and comprehensive online CRM solution in their market.

Market smarter, sell effectively and provide care everywhere

Early Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 customers are already benefiting from the new capabilities that enabled them to sell more effectively than before to meet the challenges of a mobile and social world, become smarter marketers, and provide world-class care to their customers.

Want Another Example? Microsoft’s Social Listening

With Microsoft Social Listening, sales, marketing and service professionals tap into social conversations to get real-time feedback on their brand, products, competitors, campaigns and issues that might be relevant to their business. For instance, Sealord, a global sustainable fishing enterprise, uses Microsoft Social Listening to better understand its stakeholders — from their beliefs about key industry and sustainability issues to the global network of organizations and individuals influencing opinions in this area. When the topic of shark-finning sparked social media outrage, Sealord took the opportunity to make its stance known, resulting in global acknowledgement and a reach that could be easily measured, understood and communicated internally with Microsoft Social Listening.

“Without Microsoft Social Listening, we would not have had the opportunity to hear what was top-of-mind for our stakeholders and the community we serve, and ensure Sealord’s work to be sustainable in these areas was understood,” said Alison Sykora, public affairs and communications manager, Sealord.

Microsoft Dynamics Marketing gives marketers one solution that allows them to carefully plan their campaigns, deliver qualified leads to their sales teams and subsequently measure the return on their marketing investment.

Microsoft is also enabling a complete range of functionality for customer service professionals. This includes the powerful self-service capabilities in the recently acquired Microsoft Parature offering to the multichannel capabilities coming in the new Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online update and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Service Pack 1 for on-premises customers, including the Unified Service Desk. Microsoft Dynamics CRM enables companies to provide relevant, responsive and personalized customer service.

More capabilities and features of the new Microsoft Dynamics CRM spring wave of updates, including Microsoft Social Listening and Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, are detailed in the Release Preview Guide. A blog post series by Bob Stutz is available on CRM Connection. In addition, all can follow and engage with the Microsoft Dynamics CRM community @MSDynamicsCRM at http://www.twitter.com/msdynamicscrm, #MSDYNCRM.

About Microsoft Dynamics

At the heart of every successful business are the people who make things happen. Microsoft Dynamics designs modern business solutions that empower individuals with intuitive tools that allow them to do their best work. Our proactive, easy-to-use business applications adapt to the way people and systems work, enabling businesses to rapidly deploy and be forward-looking in an ever-changing world.

Looks like Microsoft Dynamics is stepping up to the plate to create better customer experiences.

@drnatalie