uberX service at SXSW starts today at 5 pm

News Analysis – SAP slices and dices into more Cloud, and of course more HANA

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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In a virtual press conference SAP’s Vishal Sikka in conversation with Jonathan Becher went through two press releases that the company just published.

Let’s look first at the key statements in the cloud press release:

SAP announced new offerings for SAP HANA Cloud Platform. Customers now have the ability to choose from three offerings: SAP HANA AppServices, SAP HANA DBServices, and SAP HANA Infrastructure Services. 

MyPOV –

Good for SAP to make products / services more consumable – the separation of Apps, DB and Infrastructure services makes sense from a SAP perspective, given HANA’s prominence in marketing and product plans, but may confuse buyers who are either used to a complete shield of physical details (e.g. Salesforce.com) or a more granular details (e.g. Amazon’s AWS, Google's GCP).

SAP HANA Offers New Pricing and Consumption Model New pricing options for SAP HANA intend to broaden the reach of the SAP HANA platform and make it easily accessible to everyone starting with a base price with add-on options available as desired. Customers buy through a consumption model and can either implement end-to-end platform use cases or choose additional options as needed such as predictive analytics, spatial processing and planning. This significantly increases the opportunities to get started with SAP HANA and affords customers the ultimate ability to innovate. 

MyPOV –

More granular pricing is usually a good strategy, so kudos to SAP. But SAP needs to pay attention to not get too complex and get the pricing right. Too early to tell if the first release has achieved that.

SAP HANA Cloud Platform Delivers Choice With New OfferingsTo address the growing apps economy, SAP announced new and enhanced offerings for SAP HANA Cloud Platform. Startups, ISVs and customers can now build new data-driven applications in the cloud. This platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offers in memory-centric infrastructure, database and application services to build, extend, deploy and run applications. SAP HANA Cloud Platform is available today via SAP HANA Marketplace. Customers can gain access to SAP HANA in as little as 30 minutes and immediately benefit from a unified platform service for next-gen apps, and can easily buy, deploy and run with the flexibility of a subscription contract. 

MyPOV –

Unfortunately the press conference was light on more details on SAP’s PaaS strategy. Earlier in the week my hope was that SAP might unveil something in conjunction with Pivotal’s CloudFoundry, similar to what IBM has done with CloudFoundry and BlueMix. And many of the apps services – around analytics, mobile etc. are similar to the ones offered on BlueMix. But overall I remain undecided on SAP’s PaaS strategy till we hear more – still overcoming the River / RAD announcement and plans. Which may be the reason SAP will come back with more PaaS details later in the year.

SAP HANA Marketplace Simplifies Purchasing ExperienceThe new SAP HANA Cloud Platform offerings are available for a simplified trial and purchase experience in sizes ranging from 128 GB to 1 TB of memory on SAP HANA Marketplace, an online store that lets customers learn, try, and buy applications powered by SAP HANA. SAP Fiori™ apps and hundreds of startups and ISVs offerings are also available on the site. 

MyPOV

The improvements and new UI of the HANA marketplace are probably some of the key advancements we have seen today. It looks simple and easy to procure apps and services, though I have not purchased any. Fiori looms prominently across all offerings, but I am not sure how Fiori will run in combination of the market place and its dependency on the Suite being somewhere available. Finally the monthly prices do not foretell a good story for the elasticity of the offering – one of my concerns around HANA since the early days.

SAP HANA Innovation Breakthrough With SAP Genomic AnalyzerThe SAP HANA platform continues to change the world of compute and what is possible. SAP is paving the way for real-time personalized medicine with SAP Genomic Analyzer, a new application powered by SAP HANA that aims to allow researchers and clinicians to find breakthrough insights from genomics data in real time. Currently in the early adoption phase, key planned benefits include faster data processing through various stages of genomics pipeline — alignment, annotation and analysis — and immediate analysis of data in minutes rather than days. Researchers are envisioned to be able to analyze genetic variants of large-scale cohorts to find patterns of variation within and between populations. With better identification of clinically actionable genetic variants and real-time visibility into “in-the moment” situations, clinicians shall be able to understand and personalize care to patients with diseases such as Type II diabetes. 

MyPOV –

Looks like SAP is on to something with genetic processing. When the product was first announced my un-representative sample of scientists I know and polled dealing with genetics shrugged their shoulders. Fast forward 6-8 months and they are asking me about HANA, a good turnaround for SAP.

In a separate press release SAP said, that it has broken (together with partners) the world record for the largest data warehouse:

This new world record demonstrates the ability of SAP HANA and SAP IQ to efficiently handle extreme-scale enterprise data warehouse and Big Data analytics. SAP and its partners had previously set a world record for loading and indexing Big Data at 34.3 Terabytes per hour.

A team of engineers from SAP, BMMsoft, HP, Intel, NetApp, and Red Hat, built the data warehouse using SAP HANA and SAP IQ 16, with BMMsoft Federated EDMT running on HP DL580 servers using Intel® Xeon® E7-4870 processors under Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and NetApp FAS6290 and E5460 storage. The development and testing of the 12.1PB data warehouse was conducted by the team at the SAP/Intel Petascale lab in Santa Clara, Calif., and audited by InfoSizing, an independent Transaction Processing Council certified auditor.

MyPOV –

This announcement is key as HANA critics have been stating that in memory is too expensive to run large scale data warehouses there. We now have proof of scale – but barring details on what was done, the business benefit and the cost of running at 12.1PB data warehouse are screaming for SAP to provide more details.

MyPOV

SAP delivered some key advances around moving its offerings to the cloud, in an entertaining and informative format – I hope to see the Sikka / Becher combo soon again – as it worked very well. 

But then I would have preferred for SAP to provide a more practical slicing of services for HANA: Price the cost for storing data in memory, maybe moving it on or out to another medium, processing it and any networking costs to get it there. These are the intuitive options for cloud database pricing. It’s fair and fine to bundle – but that’s the parameters of costs incurred. Sooner or later SAP will come hopefully closer to these categories – or better ones. 

In the meantime SAP deserves kudos for moving into the right direction.

Lastly I still see SAP as an enterprise software automation company (despite my own findings) – and not a technology company in the first place – so talking about hardware specs and performance is still something I need to get used to. But then SAP should be the one vendor talking about the business impact and benefits of technology with flair. At least once every 10 minutes of a press conference.

I compiled a Storify tweet collection, too - you can find it here. Have a look the twitter convo with the pundits is worth it. 

Delaware Court Affirms Conviction Based on Facebook Evidence

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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by John Patzakis

Tiffany Parker and Sheniya Brown of Wilmington, Delaware, exchanged heated messages on Facebook over a mutual love interest, and the conflict escalated considerably when they subsequently encountered each other in public and became embroiled in a physical altercation. Bystanders eventually separated the two, but the fight resumed when Brown returned with a knife. Shortly thereafter, officers from the Wilmington Police Department again separated the women and ultimately Parker was charged with second-degree assault and making terrorist threats. Parker claimed self-defense.

After the fight, Parker again took to Facebook to taunt Brown, stating:

“bet tht [sic] bitch didnt [sic] think [I] was going to see her ass…bet she wont [sic] inbox me no more, #caughtthatbitch….[ctfu]..this girl is crazy…..first of all she hit me first…[I] told you go head [sic] and you inboxed [sic] me back still being disrespectful…[I] told you say no more [sic]…[I] seen [sic] you today…we said our words you put your hands on me…[I] hit you back ..WE [sic]…”

At trial, the State introduced Parker’s post-altercation Facebook posts to tie her to the incident and discredit her self-defense claim. The State introduced her Facebook posts, which included her picture, the name “Tiffanni Parker,” and a time stamp for each entry. The State relied on circumstantial evidence, and the victim’s direct testimony to authenticate the Facebook evidence.

The jury convicted Parker of second degree assault, and she appealed, claiming that the Stated failed to properly authenticate the Facebook postings. Last month, the Delaware Appellate court affirmed the conviction (Parker v. State, — A.3d –, 2014 WL 621289 (2014)), framing the issue at hand as follows:

On many sites such as Facebook or Twitter, a user will post content—which can include text, pictures, or videos—to that user’s profile page delivering it to the author’s subscribers. Often these posts will include relevant evidence for a trial, including party admissions, inculpatory or exculpatory photos, or online communication between users. But there is a genuine concern that such evidence could be faked or forged, leading some courts to impose a high bar for the admissibility of such social media evidence. Other courts have applied a more traditional standard, “determining the admissibility of social media evidence based on whether there was sufficient evidence of authenticity for a reasonable jury to conclude that the evidence was authentic.” This approach recognizes that the risk of forgery exists with any evidence and the rules provide for the jury to ultimately resolve issues of fact.

The Delaware court followed the case of Tienda v. State 358 S.W.3d 633 (Tex.Crim.App.2012), which applies the “traditional standard” noted by the Parker court in the above quote. In Tienda, the court upheld the admission of social media postings over the defendant’s objection. The prosecution set the foundation for the evidence through various unique metadata and other circumstantial evidence. The Texas appellate court determined that “this is ample circumstantial evidence—taken as a whole with all of the individual, particular details considered in combination—to support a finding that the MySpace pages belonged to the appellant and that he created and maintained them.”

The Parker court ultimately concluded that social media evidence was no different from any other evidence and that it was thus subject to the same authentication test as any other exhibit. Applying the test set forth in Tienda, which has become the majority view in the U.S., the court concluded that the Facebook messages were properly authenticated based upon the victim’s testimony, and circumstantial evidence in the form of metadata, including date stamps, and user account names.

While the prosecution in the Parker case achieved a favorable result, it faced a concerted challenge on the authenticity of the evidence, and as we have seen in other cases, relying on simple printouts of social media site pages is a very risky value proposition. This highlights the importance of utilizing best practices technology such as X1 Social Discovery to ensure all supporting metadata and other key circumstantial evidence is properly and comprehensively collected to ensure proper authentication of social media and other website evidence.

Event Report: Microsoft Convergence 2014 Day 1 Demonstrates Solid Momentum and Mindshare ( #CONV14 )

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

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

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Microsoft Convergence Kicks Off In Atlanta

The annual Microsoft Convergence customer event kicked off on March 4th, 2014.  Far from the days of the Stampede in Fargo, North Dakota, the event shows how far the Microsoft Dynamics customers, partners, and products have progressed.  Over 12,000 attendees including customers, partners, staff, and prospects gathered in Atlanta, GA for the largest Microsoft Enterprise Applications conference.  The sold out event featured a volunteer program on Day 0 and a good number of partner meetings the weekend before.  Analysis from four key announcements on Day 1 include:

• Microsoft Dynamics gaining momentum on the large enterprise and divisions of large enterprises. Key customers presenting in the opening keynote include Chobani, City Harvest Inc, Delta Airlines, Lotus F1 Team, New Belgium Brewery, and Weight Watchers.  These presenting customers share a key theme of customer centricity and a Microsoft enterprise backbone.  Moreover, many showcase the devices and services theme set by former CEO Steve Ballmer.
  
  Point of View (POV): Constellation sees a growing trend where organizations and brands move to Dynamics for both CRM and ERP.  The ability to integrate back to other Microsoft technologies such as SharePoint, Office 365, and Azure Services provides both a pull and a push.  As organizations think about consolidating vendors and moving to the cloud, the Microsoft Dynamics team provides some compelling options in manufacturing, retail, distribution, public sector, professional services, and travel and entertainment.  The launch of a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Enterprise License at $200 per user per month show cases the move upmarket.

• Dynamics CRM users gain key marketing and social capabilities. Microsoft announces the next release of Dynamics CRM in Q2 of 2014.  Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, which was formed from the Marketing Pilot acquisition , debuts to assist with campaign management.  The service and support offering gains new features such as Unified Service Desk along with closer integration to recently acquired Parature.  Newly launched Microsoft Social Listening launches at no additional charge for Dynamics CRM Online professional license holders.
  
  (POV): The rewrite of acquired entity Marketing Pilot provides some improvement to the original product.  Parity at the Exact Target and Hubspot level will take at least two to three more releases.  Release of unified service desk paired with Parature, provides a powerful combination in customer service and support.  Microsoft Social Listening finally provides customers with a social tool that has been sorely missing in the line up.  More importantly, in CRM and customer experience, the mobile access options have not forced customers onto Windows Phone and instead have provided native support of iOS and Android..

• Dynamics ERP users prepare for new releases. Dynamics GP gets a release for Q1 2014 that includes identity management, workflow, and self service companion apps.  Dynamics NAV shoudl receive an update in Q4 2014.  More importantly, the team announced the availability of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 for May 1st 2014.  Key themes include mobile enablement, support for deployment on Windows Azure in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) layer, and an end to end apps and services framework.  .  The cross offering with the Windows Azure team is the Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services which improve implementation times and enable agile updates.
  
  (POV): Microsoft has kept its promise to update the Dynamics ERP product lines, despite the flagship product investment in Dynamics AX.  The support of Dynamics AX at the IaaS layer provides enterprise class capabilities in high availability, data and disaster recovery, and rapid deployments of pre-configured environments.  However, the inability of the SQL Azure team to meet performance requirements for not only the Dynamics team, but also other ISV OEM’s continues to keep major enterprise apps from full deployment of database at the PaaS layer.  The good news for customers, Microsoft has continued to improve the product lines and keep a steady cadence of upgrades and updates beyond traditional maintenance releases.

• Partnerships with major SI’s  and ISV’s continue to grow . IBM, Avanade, Capgemini and Hitachi lead the list of highlighted Dynamics practices.  A partnership with Dominion expands the global ISV alliance in the dealer management vertical.
  
  (POV): The Microsoft Dynamics team is taking a dual prong strategy on partnerships.  On one end, investment in global system integrators expands reach and vertical delivery.  On the other end, GISV partnerships provide a great base of platform usage and micro-vertical offerings.  Some examples include Angila Business Solutions (Food Supply Chain), Escher Group (Retail Automation), Ferranti Computer Systems (Utilities), I.B.I.S. (Manufacturing and Distribution), and Incadea (Auto Software), and Tyler Technologies (Public Sector).

The Bottom Line: Microsoft Dynamics Matures Into A Short List Option For Enterprises and Brands

Microsoft is now seen as a neutral and trusted player in the enterprise.  Prospects and customers seeking both standardization and innovation now turn to Microsoft Dynamics in their short lists.  Most customers and prospects are in an ERP and CRM replacement cycle and the mainstream adoption of social, cloud, mobile, and analytics tilt the favor to many of Microsoft’s offerings.  Many customers and prospects begin by modernizing divisions using two Tier ERP and deploying enterprise wide cloud based CRM.  Meanwhile, global system integrators and global ISV’s see an opportunity to partner instead of compete.

In general, the shift to devices and services at the corporate level will help create synergies for the Microsoft Dynamics team.  Further, leadership changes with Satya Nadella as CEO should help the Microsoft Dynamics team given his rotation through the division.  However, any reduction of marketing and development resources will hurt growth as these competitive markets require proper investment to compete with well-funded and high profile Silicon Valley based start-ups.   Overall, the future looks bright for customers, prospects, and partners in the Microsoft Dynamics ecosystem.  Customers and prospects should keep Microsoft Dynamics in the short lists.

Your POV.

Are you looking at ERP and CRM replacement? Do you need specialized requirements for your industry?  How are you doing this today? Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationR (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

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

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

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

Copyright © 2001 – 2014 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC All rights reserved.
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The Best Cloud Computing Companies And CEOs To Work For In 2014

2014 continues to be a year marked by the accelerating hiring cycles across nearly all cloud computing companies.

Signing bonuses of $3K to $5K for senior engineers and system design specialists are becoming common, and the cycles from screening to interviews to offers is shortening.  The job market in the cloud computing industry is leaning in favor of applicants who have a strong IT background in systems integration, legacy IT expertise, business analysis and in many positions, programming as well.

One of the most common questions and requests I receive from readers is who the best companies are to work for.  I’ve put together the following analysis based on the latest Computer Reseller News list The 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors Of 2014.  

Using the CRN list as a baseline to compare the Glassdoor.com scores of the (%) of employees who would recommend this company to a friend and (%) of employees who approve of the CEO, the following analysis was completed.  You can find the original data here .  There are many companies listed on the CRN list that don’t have than many or any entries on Glassdoor and they were excluded from the rankings below.  You can find companies excluded here. If the image below is not visible in your browser, you can view the rankings here.

The highest rated CEOs on Glassdoor as of February 23^rd include the following:

• Jeremy Roche of FinancialForce.com (100%)

• Robert Reid, Intacct (100%)

• Randy Bias, Cloudscaling (100%)

• Sridhar Vembu, Zoho (98%)

• James M. Whitehurst, Red Hat (96%)

• Larry Page, Google (95%)

• Christian Chabot, Tableau Software (95%)

• Aneel Bhusri, Workday (94%)

• Bill McDermott & Jim Hagemann Snabe, SAP (93%)

• Marc Benioff, Salesforce (93%)

• David Friend, Carbonite (93%)

Meet @LZulli: He Grooms High School Students To Be SharePoint Experts #spc14

If I can go back to high school and pick my own teacher, it would be Mr. Louis Zulli Jr. – a teacher from  Centre of Advanced Technologies in  Tampa, Florida. He  spearheaded a fantastic magnet program that lets high school students develop SharePoint solutions for the school. Examples of these impressive solutions:

• IOS, Android and Windows Phone  apps that leveraged SharePoint to display teacher’s assignments, school events and class times;
• Silverlight-based application providing a virtual tour of the campus;
• Integration of SharePoint with Moodle;
• An Academic Planner web application allowing students to plan their classes, submit a schedule, have them reviewed, track of the credits of the classes selected and whether a student’s selections meet graduation requirements;
• An innovative campus Hall Pass system that leveraged jQuery, HTML5, CSS3, XML, JSON, REST, List Data Web Services and features integration with IOS, Windows 8 and swipe card hardware.

These 16-18 year old kids graduates high school with hands on experience not only in SharePoint, but have already build their foundation in project management, business analysis, requirements development, quality assurance, user testing and agile software development.

Lou’s story was showcased today at the SharePoint conference keynote and I had the opportunity to catch up with him:

Also, checkout his presentation from SHARE conference where he explains how the program started and he shows the solutions his students developed:

Kudos Mr. Zulli! Hats off to your great work and paving a promising future for these next generation leaders!

Doug Laird Joins Couchbase

Constellation Research

J. Bruce Daley is a former vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, Inc.  , Title: Big Ideas Age Before Beauty Before there can be a wholesale conversion to the Cloud legacy applications must be converted. This will take decades and not every vendor has taken this obstacle into account when projecting growth. Professional Services Firms Need a Recurring Revenue Model The services business has a lot of advantages but one big disadvantage in that you are always going out of business. Some organizations are using the Cloud to offer clients new ways to spend money than just time-and-materials or fixed price projects. ...

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Siebel veteran Doug Laird has joined Couchbase as its Chief Marketing Officer. Laird will lead marketing world wide and is charged with establishing the company as the market leader for enterprise NoSQL. At Siebel Laird was Vice President of Marketing reporting to Pat House. 

Prior to Couchbase Laird was at Wildfire, where he served as CMO for its social media marketing business through the company's acquisition by Google for a reported $400 million. Prior to that, Laird served as vice president of marketing at QlikTech.  While Laird was at QlikTech the company increased annual revenue from $80 million to $321 million and had one of the best performing technology IPOs of the 2010. 

"We are delighted to have Doug join our management team at this pivotal time," said Bob Wiederhold, CEO of Couchbase.

Couchbase is a fast-growing provider of enterprise-class NoSQL databases.  Global companies are driving this explosive market growth as they look for database technology that can support the scalability, reliability and high-performance requirements of highly interactive, mission-critical applications. Couchbase clients include Amadeus, AOL, Cisco, Concur, LinkedIn, Orbitz, Salesforce.com, Shuffle Master, and Zynga.

"The NoSQL market is evolving into two distinct segments -- small, grassroots developer-led projects, and business-critical applications that require massive scale," said Laird. "Market success is no longer defined by the number of downloads and LinkedIn skill counts, but by the ability to support mission critical applications. This presents a huge opportunity for Courchbase."

Couchbase is headquartered in Silicon Valley, and is funded by Accel Partners, Ignition Partners, Mayfield Fund, and North Bridge Venture Partners. 

The company has a number of open positions listed around the globe on its jobs page in Engineering, Sales, Marketing, and Training among other areas.

Laird can be reached at 650-417-7500.

Peter Kim Joins Constellation as Chief Strategy Officer

Constellation Research announced today the appointment of Peter Kim as Chief Strategy Officer and Principal Analyst. Kim, whose research focuses on Digital Marketing Transformation, expands Constellation’s ability to provide marketing leadership research/solutions to its early adopter clients worldwide. The addition of Kim, a leading analyst in digital marketing and social business, signals Constellation's growing momentum in bringing together the brightest, innovation-minded analysts to serve its early adopter clients the most comprehensive analysis of disruptive technologies.

As Chief Strategy Officer and Principal Analyst, Kim will focus on the intersection of marketing and technology, where brands need more help than ever orchestrating platforms and service providers to deliver innovative customer experiences. Kim’s research agenda will provide guidance to CMOs, CXOs, and business strategists in the rapidly evolving area of Digital Marketing Transformation.

“Constellation Research has been disrupting the research industry model and I’ve sought to do the same in my work over the past two decades as a strategist, marketer, consultant, and industry analyst,” said Kim. “I’m delighted with the opportunity to take my talents to Constellation Research.”

Peter Kim was previously Chief Solutions Architect at Dachis Group, a multi-million dollar business advisory firm that pioneered the discipline of social business design. Prior to Dachis Group, Kim was an analyst at Forrester Research, where he helped brands take advantage of the rapid rise of corporate social media.

“I'm truly excited to have Pete on the team as a colleague and peer.  His ability to identify astute insights for marketing executives and grow multi-million dollar businesses is bar none in the industry research world”, said R “Ray” Wang, Constellation Research Founder and Chairman “Pete's arrival will help our clients with co-creation and co-innovation in world of digital disruption.  His domain expertise will bring gravitas to our Digital Marketing and Customer Experience business themes.  We're honored to have him on the team."

Peter Kim Biographical Information
Peter is Chief Strategy Officer at Constellation Research, Inc. Prior to Constellation, Peter held a variety of roles at Dachis Group including Chief Strategy Officer, where he built a multi-million dollar strategy consulting practice from scratch and guided the firm to a successful exit via acquisition. Previously he was an analyst at Forrester Research, focusing on the intersection of social technology and marketing strategy where he won awards for best research and top keynote.

Earlier, Peter led international marketing operations and was head of global digital marketing at PUMA AG.

Peter has been quoted by media outlets including CNBC, CNN, NPR, and The Wall Street Journal and featured as a speaker at events including SXSW, Web 2.0 Expo, and Enterprise 2.0. He is co-author of the book Social Business By Design and drives global industry discourse at beingpeterkim.com and as @peterkim on Twitter.

Peter holds degrees from the Darden School at the University of Virginia and the University of Pennsylvania.

Peter Kim’s 2014 Research Agenda
Research will focus on Digital Marketing Transformation and Customer Experience.

•  Social Business and Beyond
•  The New Marketing Technology Stack
• Delivering on the Promise of Omnichannel
• The Realities of Real-Time Marketing
• Advocacy in the Age of Big Data
• How To Select the Right Marketing Service Provider
• Rebooting the Advertising Agency

COORDINATES
Twitter: twitter.com/peterkim
Profile: https://www.constellationr.com/users/peterkim
Blog: beingpeterkim.com
Geo: Austin, Texas

Press Contacts:
Contact the Influencer relations team at [email protected].

Sales Contacts:
Contact our sales team at [email protected].

Microsoft Announces Office Graph - Connecting People And Content

Alan Lepofsky

Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Alan Lepofsky - VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research. With almost two decades of experience in the collaboration software industry, Lepofsky helps organizations improve the way their employees work together to get their jobs done. Lepofsky’s primary research area The Future of Work, focuses on: integrating collaboration and business processes (Purposeful Collaboration), structuring work via Social Task Management, leveraging analytics and digital assistants to work more productively, the strategic impact of mobile computing on business transformation, and measuring workforce culture based on Digital Proficiency instead of age. Twitter: @alanlepoLinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/alanlepo     , Title: Big IdeasIntelligent Collaboration: The Intersection of…...

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Today at the SharePoint Conference 2014 (#SPC14) Microsoft unveiled Office Graph, a new architecture layer that maps the connections between people and content across the Office 365 family of products. Office Graph is not something people will see directly, instead it is a "behind the scenes layer" that will be used by developers to create user experiences that surface the information in various ways. Think of it more like the electrical wiring running through your house. You don't interact with the wires themselves, but they do provide a way for devices to connect to plugs to get power.

In tandem with the Office Graph announcement, Microsoft previewed Project Oslo, their first user experience powered by Office Graph. Oslo uses Office Graph data generated from Exchange, SharePoint and Yammer and displays relevant content in a modern mosaic style user experience.



What does "relevant content" mean? Well, instead of sorting documents by the standard file-manager-esque name, date and time attributes, people can now find and sort content based on that has been shared with them, that they have viewed and/or liked, as well as the content that is trending. (presumably meaning the most commented and liked within their network of connections) This could represent a big step forward in helping people sort through the huge amounts of information in their organization or community. With the right information surfaced (pun intended!), people can more easily and accurately discover the content relevant to their work.

Office Graph is clearly the evolution of the work Yammer was doing around Enterprise Graph, so it's good to see that Yammer (most notably Adam Pisoni) is having a significant impact on Microsoft, versus the other way around. Perhaps some of the people that scoffed at the $1.2B acquisition price tag may want to revisit their initial reactions?

At the moment Oslo is a Windows 8 application, but ideally it will become an integrated component of products like Outlook, SharePoint and Office. That said, I can also see the merits of a stand-alone application... imagine Oslo being similar to magazine style newsreaders like FlipBook or Zite, but for the business content within your organization.

Similar to how Oslo displays information about content, it also shows the connections people have with their colleagues. In addition to the standard "Manager, Peer and Direct Reports" hierarchy, Oslo displays the people you are working with as well as the intersection of people you and another person are working with.



It is important to note that Oslo is just a preview of the type of things Office Graph could make available. With a deep understanding of how people and content are connected, it is my hope that Microsoft will make it easy for people to learn more about the reach and impact their contributions are having to their organization. Imagine knowing more about who's reading your blog posts, downloading your presentations, replying to your Yammer posts, etc. I call this area Personal Analytics, or #smalldata. With Personal Analytics people will be able to see which things they should spend more time on, and which things they should focus less on. Jive Software does a good job of this today with their Impact Metrics feature, so it will be interesting to see how quickly Microsoft, or perhaps their business partner community, creates similar functionality.

For Customers and Business Partners

I don't believe today's announcements will have a large impact for Microsoft customers right away. Rather, Office Graph and tools like Oslo represent a step forward in Microsoft updating the underlying architecture needed to for improved product integration. For example, today Microsoft has to do a lot of magic (ok, it's code, not actual supernatural capabilities) to map identities and user profiles back and forth across products like Outlook, Yammer, Skype and Lync. Office Graph should make that easier, both for Microsoft, customers and Business Partners to build their next generation products and services.

Today's Microsoft announcements comes a few months after IBM announced Mail Next, their project to improve the way people combine email and social capabilities. Based on early looks, IBM Mail Next appears more focused on email and task management, where Microsoft Oslo is more focused on Office document type content. Personally, I really like the user experience of Oslo... edge to Microsoft on that one. It will be interesting to see how both companies move these projects forward and how customers react.