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: @alanlepo<br>LinkedIn:&nbsp;https://ca.linkedin.com/in/alanlepo &nbsp; &nbsp; , Title:&nbsp;Big IdeasIntelligent Collaboration: The… Read more

This week Google made two product announcements that generated a lot of press. The first is that it would be shutting down Google Reader on July 1, 2013. The second was the introduction of Google Keep, which people are referring to as the evolution of Google Notebook and a competitor for Evernote. (more on that below)



The closing of Google Reader has infuriated many people the tech community who have in turn stated they won't look at future Google offerings (like Keep) because they no longer have any faith that Google will maintain various (non-core) products. I understand and respect that position, but I don't share it. Google has a long history of shutting down products, perhaps most notably (among techies) Wave and Buzz. Just Google "Google Graveyard" and you'll find dozens of sites that track the vast array of products that are no longer being developed.

In my opinion Google has the right to shutdown any service (that people don't pay for) they would like, provided they do so in a professional manner. That means providing adequate warning and instructions on how to export your data. With Reader they are giving more than two months, and they are providing Google Takeout as a way to export your RSS feeds. Many alterantives are already jumping on the "Replace Reader" bandwagon. Personally, I use Zite on my iPad to get most of my news.

While I am not pleased that Google would shut down a product used (and loved) by so many people, it will not affect my decision to continue using Gmail, maps, Google+, Drive, and a dozen other products that I pay Google $0 for. I will take a look at Google Keep and future products, but do so with the knowledge that they may go away at any time. The need for long term stability is one of the reasons I pay for Evernote Premium, but still that's no guarantee.

So, getting back to Google Keep, my opinion is this is very early beta code, not nearly ready to replace anyone's use of a more powerful note taking tool like Evernote or OneNote. That's ok though, GMail was in beta for how many years? I am sure Google will get lots of feedback, release updates quickly and end up with a pretty good tool that integrates with many components of the Google platform.

The following are the issues I've had with Keep, listed as I discover them. I will continue to add items.

• Extremely simple, no rich text (tables, fonts, etc)
• Choose an image to upload does not provide an option to choose from your pictures from Google+/Picasa, it's only upload from computer
• When a new note is created the cursor goes into body field instead of title, which I find very annoying
• The icon to select the note colour is different on mobile (looks like a painter's palette) than on the web (it's a paint can)
• I created a voice note on mobile, but when I view it on the web, there is no embedded player (in Chrome at least), you have to download the file to listen to it
• You can't change the note colour from the main view, you have to open the note
• No folders/notebooks to help organize your content
• No tagging
• You can't reorder the individual items in lists
• In Keep the icon for "Insert An Image" is a picture of a mountain. In  Google+ it's a picture of a camera and uses the hover text "Add Photos". I'd like to see consistency across all products please.
• No way to sort notes.  (ex: title, created, modified, etc.) This is the biggest blocker for me so far.
• When I update a note, it does not resort to the first note

What do you think is missing and what would you like to see?  I imagine one of the first things they will do is enable people to share information in Keep with their Google+ Circles. You'll also probably be able to display Keep notes in Hangouts. The UI for Google Drive is quite "1990s file-manager-esque", so I'd like to see Drive evolve to have a Keep like UI, where you can see thumbnails of content. Stay tuned, I expect Keep will evolve quite quickly.

Have you looked at Google Keep, or are you staying away from Google due to lack of trust?  
 

Alumni: Constellation Research Constellation Research

Dr. Brent Kelly is a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research and President of KelCor, Inc. He focuses on the unique intersection of unified communications, social business, cloud services, video and mobility.&nbsp; Dr. Kelly provides strategy and counsel to key clients including Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, investment analysts, venture capitalists, technology policy executives, sell-side firms and technology buyers. <br> Prior to joining Constellation, Dr. Kelly served for 10 years as a partner at Wainhouse Research where he was the primary author of most of the firm’s unified communications reports and forecasts. Dr. Kelly is a regular presenter at Enterprise Connect (formerly VoiceCon), the communications industry trade show where his… Read more

BT is the first conferencing service provider poised to roll out audio conferencing services based on Dolby voice technology. Slated to appear in Q3 2013, this service promises to offer a super audio conferencing experience by providing spatial audio capabilities that allow conference attendees to hear and interact with one another in much the same way as if they were present in the same conference room.

            Traditional audio bridges “mix” the audio of the participants together and then send it out to everyone. The problem this creates is that the verbal cues we use to break into a conversation and regulate its flow are mixed out causing people to talk over one another.

Dolby’s spatial audio keeps the individual voices separated so that people can hear these cues just as they would if they were in the same conference room – individual voices can be heard, even if people happen to begin speaking at the same time. In addition, Dolby signal processing provides noise suppression and echo cancellation that can significantly improve the quality of an audio conference.

The key to success, however, will be whether people will change their behavior enough to wear stereo headsets. The BT/Dolby audio solution requires participants to have stereo speakers or wear a stereo headset.

BT claims that nearly all of the companies it has spoken to about this offering are quite gung ho about it, especially after they hear it. The BT pitch is that not only does it make meetings more productive, but it may save companies money to boot. The reason is that BT/Dolby audio is available only over IP, not PSTN connections. Traditional audio conferences have two cost components: 1) the cost of the PSTN access (toll free or long distance charges), and 2) the cost of the actual audio bridging service. A company using BT/Dolby audio conferencing has much lower access costs because that company’s users and external participants join a conference using an IP network, which is less expensive than joining using the PSTN. This lower access cost will offset the slightly higher bridging cost BT will charge for the enhanced audio capability.

I initially experienced the difference between regular audio conferencing and Dolby audio conferencing firsthand about two years ago and again last year at Enterprise Connect 2012. Since then, Dolby has made great strides by tweaking its audio algorithms to get even better performance and by creating a tabletop conferencing phone/speaker phone that looks sort of like a black flying saucer. This disk shaped device has numerous mics and speakers, and provides those actually sitting at the conference table the spatial audio listening experience.
Those joining a conference using a PC, smartphone or a tablet client will be required to wear a stereo headset if they wish to have the spatial audio capability. Anyone using a single ear headset or Bluetooth device or that has a single desktop speaker will still have the benefit of the noise suppression and the echo cancelation, but the spatial audio will not work through a single speaker.

Dolby claims that its research shows that people who have experienced the spatial audio conferencing have indicated, through post-listening surveys, that they would indeed be willing to wear a headset with speakers over each ear on order to have the high quality audio experience. For BT’s and Dolby’s sake, I hope they are right, but I believe it will be very difficult to get mobile users who have laptops, tablets and smartphones to pack a dual speaker headset with them when a small Bluetooth device is so much more convenient.
Dolby said a few years ago that it prefers to license its technology rather than make devices itself. Well, this has clearly changed with a Dolby-branded audio conferencing phone. Perhaps the company could enhance its chances for success with its audio conferencing technology by considering making Dolby-branded Bluetooth (wireless) stereo headsets that have Dolby’s excellent sound fidelity with a small, but cool looking, form factor. Or perhaps Dolby could convince Jabra, Plantronics or Logitech to make such a headset for it.

Constellation Orbits Constellation Research, Inc.

Elizabeth is a well-recognized industry-leading analyst. She was previously Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research.&nbsp; Prior to Constellation, Elizabeth spent eleven years at Forrester Research as vice president and principal analyst.&nbsp; She has managed large consulting projects for business and government organizations and provides technical insight and guidance to business and government organizations on their communication issues. Prior to her role as an industry analyst with Communication Initiatives and Forrester Research, Elizabeth held senior management positions with IBM, ROLM and Siemens ICN where she was a senior manager for strategic planning and alliances. Expertise Elizabeth’s expertise includes in-depth knowledge of unified communications,… Read more

Smartphones have become pervasive and more than half of all customers use their mobile device when contacting a company for service.  Currently, the majority of smartphone customers encounter rigid IVR menus, as their initial step prior to accessing information or conducting transactions.  This situation totally ignores the enormous capabilities found in today’s smartphones and does little to enhance a company’s image.  Fortunately, there is good news for customer engagements, as [24]7introduced a major breakthrough in customer service with Visual Speech that links the call to an HTML5 mobile experience.  Visual speech combines screen, touch and speech to deliver a totally new experience to mobile users and does not require the user to download a mobile app.  Additionally, its big data platform employs predictive analysis and real-time decisioning to provide a more meaningful customer engagement by better understanding the users’ intent and interests.  Visual Speech simplifies an interaction by pushing relevant content to the mobile device and empowering the user to take control of the interaction.  

Visual Speech supports simultaneous voice and data interactions, so a caller can see view a schedule, lists or other relevant data at the same time as they are talking. This significantly streamlines its use and results in higher adoption for self-service transactions. However, it also supports assisted service, as the full context of the engagement within the Virtual Speech application is sent to an agent when the caller requires  live assistance. This is especially important for smartphone users who will not need to repeat the information already provided to the Visual Speech application when transferred to an agent.  Visual speech supports both iPhones and Android devices. 

[24]7, a multi-channels customer service provider, greatly increased its visibility in the intelligent speech self-service area when it acquired from Microsoft its interactive self-service assets (Tellme and many of its former employees) and its purchase of Voxify for its predictive business logic platform in 2012. The combination of predictive analysis and innovative speech self-service platform offers a compelling solution for delivering next generation mobile customer experience in the cloud.

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,&nbsp;Everybody Wants to Rule The World&nbsp;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… Read more

Customer Success, Acquisition, And New Features Drive Day 1 Headlines

Almost 12,000 Microsoft faithful converged in New Orleans for the flagship Dynamics event.  Wayne Morris (@WayneMorrisOz), CVP kicked off the event reiterating the theme of “A World Ahead”. Meanwhile, Kirill Tatarinov (@KirillTatarinov), President of Microsoft Business Solutions Division, led the session with a series of impressive brands and compelling customer success stories.  Highlights from the day include:

• Impressive Global 2000 customer wins. Kirill hinted at wins at SpaceX and followed with live customer presentations from ShockDoctor, Chobani, Weightwatchers, and Revlon.  Dennis Goetz (CFO) of Shock Doctor shared how they grew their business moving away from spreadsheets to Microsoft Dynamics GP.  Maureen Hurley (VP of IT) and James McConeghy (CFO) explained how Chobani installed Microsoft Dynamics AX in their main New York plan in less than a year and then implemented Dynamics AX at a new plant in less than 27 days. Christine Butler (VP of CRM and Business Development, and Loic Vienne (VP of Systems) at WeightWatchers discussed how they put in Microsoft Dynamics CRM to manage with 500 million customer touch points a year.  David Giambruno (SVP and CIO) and Steven Berns (Executive VP and CFO) of Revlon, made the impressive move to consolidate 21 ERP systems into one on Microsoft Dynamics AX.
  
  Point of View (POV): The Microsoft Dynamics team has successfully moved up market from a previously SMB centric message.  The rise of global 2000 customers in the $500M to $5B revenue range shows the growing presence, success, and scalability of Dynamics AX and Dynamics CRM.  Though the business is estimated to bring $1.4B in revenue, Microsoft Dynamics still represents a small fraction of Microsoft’s overall revenue ($73.72B 2012).  However, success in the Microsoft Dynamics business improves attach rates and cross-sells into Sharepoint, Office, SQL Server, and Azure.  Microsoft’s small investment in Dynamics reduces customer fragmentation and plays a key role in long-term growth.

• Acquisition of Netbreeze for social analytics. The Netbreeze acquisition brings data mining, natural language processing (NLP), and text analysis to social signals such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, 6,000 online news websites, 500,000 message boards, and 18M blogs.   The system supports 28 different languages including Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), English, French, German, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. Direct language translation beats translation back to one language.
  
  Point of View (POV): Netbreeze and Marketing Pilot address a growing need among the customer base for marketing automation and management.  Netbreeze is key to merging both the structured CRM information and the unstructured social signals.   As the CMO role continues to reclaim its technology destiny, we are moving away from transaction integrity and moving towards surfacing insights.  Netbreeze provides insight into marketing spend effectivity.

• Announcement of Marketing Pilot 15.  MarketingPilot 15 adds improved user experience and analytics.  In addition, the long awaited connector to Microsoft Dynamics CRM arrives on March 2013.  International general availability is planned for later 2013.
  
  (POV): Marketing Pilot provides core marketing capabilities that were missing in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.   Customers seeking an integrated marketing solution should consider Marketing Pilot.  However, the technology platform is dated.  For those customers seeking a cloud based approach, Silverpop, InfusionSoft, Aprimo, and Marketo may serve as better alternative today.  Compared to CMS marketing products like SiteCore or Adobe CQ, Marketing Pilot remains a distant second in features, but a top contender when cost is considered.

• Windows Azure partner hosted offerings for ERP. Partner hosting for Dynamics GP 2013 and NAV 2013 will be available in June 2013.  Dynamics AX will see an Azure hosted version in 2014.
  
  (POV): Among the Dynamics ERP customers, partner hosting remains a popular option for dipping their toes into cloud ERP.  A key barrier to Azure hosting has been the performance issues with SQL Server for Azure.  Resolution of those issues will free Dynamics to deploy more of its capabilities in Azure.  The go forward architectural model for Dynamics AX resembles Dynamics CRM where a VM is assigned per tenant but all management is done by Microsoft.

• New mobile applications for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012.  New mobile apps will address key horizontal functions such as expense management, time tracking, and approvals.  The expense management offering will capture and reconcile expenses, time allows the completion of time sheets, and approvals allows managers to complete business requests.  Microsoft intends to support Windows 8 and Windows RT tablets, Windows Phone 8, Android phones, and iOS phone devices
  
  (POV): Customers are increasingly asking for a mobile experience.  The move to address mobility focuses on “in-between time” tasks that improve productivity for employees and bolsters offerings for services based industries and public sector.

Figure 1. Ongoing #Conv13 Flickr Stream

<iframe align=center src=http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?user_id=35408001@N04&set_id=72157633038407298&detail=yes frameBorder=”0″ scrolling=no width=”600″ height=”500″></iframe>

The Bottom Line:  Progression In The Dynamics Product Line Results In A Competitive Alternative For Customers

On December 21, 2000, Microsoft announced the intention to acquire Great Plains.  In July 2002, Microsoft bought Navision A/S, the foundation of Dynamics NAV and AX.  Until 2007, Microsoft Business Solutions had struggled to find and grow beyond its SMB niche. Over the past seven years, the team has focused on deepening vertical capabilities, improved integration with Microsoft components, expanding partner programs, and making strategic acquisitions for product and technology features.  The process has been slow but steady but increased investment in Dynamics AX and Dynamics CRM has paid off.

Fast forward to 2013, Microsoft now has a strong portfolio of solutions that Global 2000 organizations can deploy with confidence.  The MBS team is not afraid of tuck in acquisitions nor purchasing common IP from trusted partners.  The rearchitecture efforts and gradual hosted capabilities have helped move the product forward.  Consequently, customers and prospects seeking a newer architecture, Microsoft footprint, and deeper micro-vertical capabilities now consider the core Dynamics products for both ERP and CRM in short lists.  Key use cases include the consolidation of ERP, move to Two-Tier ERP, and primary CRM system of record.   However, customers should be cautioned that success will require selection of the right Microsoft Partner.  Selection of the right partner is never an easy process as many partners exist and validation of capabilities still remains a challenge for prospects and existing customers.

Your POV

Are you Microsoft Dynamics customer? Do you plan to invest more or less with them in 2013?  What do you think about their strategy?   Are you ready to consolidate on Microsoft? Add your comments to the blog or send us a comment at R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) org or R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com

Please let us know if you need help with your apps strategy.  Sign up for a Constellation Academy Workshop or let us assist with:

• Assessing readiness
• Designing your strategy
• Assessing integration capability
• Vendor selection
• Connecting with other pioneers

Resources and Related Research

Event Report: The Sentiment At Microsoft Convergence 2011

Friday’s Feature: Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010

Research Report: Microsoft Partners – Before Adopting Azure, Understand the 12 Benefits And Risks

Monday’s Musings: The Hidden Value In SaaS Deployments

Trends: 2011 Cloud Computing Predictions For CIO’s And Business Technology Leaders

Research Summary: Best Practices – The Case For Two-Tier ERP

Tuesday’s Tip: When To Go With A Two-Tier ERP Strategy

Strategy: 5 Lessons Learned From A Decade Of Naught

Tuesday’s Tip: 10 Cloud And SaaS Apps Strategies For 2010

Tuesday’s Tip: 2010 Apps Strategies Should Start With Business Value

Best Practices: Lessons Learned In What SMB’s Want From Their ERP Provider

Reprints

Reprints can be purchased through Constellation Research, Inc. To request official reprints in PDF format, please contact Sales .

Disclosure

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

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

Copyright © 2001 – 2013 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC All rights reserved.
Contact the Sales team to purchase this report on a a la carte basis or join the Constellation Customer Experience!

Alumni: Constellation Research Constellation Research

Yvette Cameron was VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, Inc. focusing on next generation HCM processes and technologies, and is founder of NextGen Insights. Yvette is now a Constellation Research alumna. , Title:&nbsp;Big Ideas CRM concepts will transform HCM processes for new levels of Employee Engagement and Business Results Companies are investing heavily to understand and optimize their customer relationships, but less so with their employee relationships. We must apply the tenets of CRM to HCM processes to understand, engage and align the workforce, because customer success begins with employee success. From “Command and Control” to “Engage and Inspire” Traditional work practices and business structures are evolving at an unparalleled rate. New thinking and… Read more

In a time when technology vendors are starting to shun the “social” moniker, it was refreshing to hear the messaging at the NewsGator Collective 2013 Annual User Conference that NewsGator is all about “making social real” in the enterprise. 

If you’re not familiar with NewsGator, it is a leading provider of social technologies, delivering its flagship solution, Social Sites, on top of Microsoft SharePoint (an application in use at more than 70% of businesses today). It has more than 4 million users across hundreds of customers, including Kellogg’s, Mars, State Farm, JP Morgan Chase, Target, Allstate, Unisys, Kraft Foods, Merck and others.

In all, more than 200 customers (including those named above), partners and thought leaders gathered in Denver for this 3-day event, immersing themselves in social business by sharing best practices and research, engaging in live brainstorming sessions, networking, and even engaging in a live hack-a-thon resulting in four coded customer-driven projects slated for delivery with NewsGator’s next release.

President and CEO Daniel Kraft (newly appointed in August 2012), kicked off the event by sharing his view of how human networks have enabled human success and business progress from one era to another. He described the evolution from a “Network of Hands” (the industrial age) to a “Network of Minds” (the knowledge economy) to today’s environment where emotions and passion are unconstrained by physical location and instead are enabled through social technologies (the “Network of Hearts”).

(source: NewsGator)

Kraft believes this evolution demonstrates “survival of the social,” and cautions that, “if you do not buy into it, somebody else will.” The case studies shared during the conference spoke of increased customer retention, improved sales productivity, reduced turnover of high impact employees and more, demonstrating tangible business benefits from social investments. With over $1 trillion potential value to be unlocked annually, including 20-25% increased productivity of high skilled knowledge workers (according to McKinsey Global Institute)¹, it’s hard to argue that Kraft is anything but spot-on with his assertion.

Employee Engagement is not just an HR Responsibility

Heads of Marketing, IT, Learning and Collaboration, Communication and other business units led the conversations around motivating and engaging the workforce, identifying high performers and key contributors, ensuring sustainable adoption, and measuring impact and results.

If these sound like the traditional concerns of HR and Human Capital Management (HCM) technologies, you’re right. Yet the number of attendees representing the HR function at this conference was relatively limited.

For me, this was further evidence of two main trends concerning talent management in an era of social connectivity:

1) HR does not own employee engagement.  Driving organizational performance through employee engagement is not simply a concern of the HR organization; leaders from across the enterprise are stepping up to rethink work and how best to drive sustainable results. Increasingly important to achieving better work and talent management results are the “non-HCM” technologies making their way into the enterprise: social tools and collaboration platforms that help people align, connect and get work done every day.

2) HR is not leading social initiatives.  When social technologies are part of the new thinking (as is increasingly the case), HR is more often the supporting player (if not absent altogether) rather than the driving force behind such initiatives. The risk to HR is being sidelined as an administrative or policing function rather than establishing itself as a strategic business partner that both adds to and creates new value for the organization.

With all the evidence that social enablement facilitates engagement and alignment, and that an engaged and aligned workforce has direct, positive effect of business outcomes, why isn’t every company “doing social”?

The answer, according to Katherine Flax, Chief Marketing Officer for JP Morgan Chase, is complex. “It’s an evolutionary process for many companies,” said Flax during a Future of Work panel at the NewsGator Collective. “With the concerns about compliance…it’s easier for companies to say “No” than to say “Yes” to social.” She added that saying “no” is actually a bigger risk than saying “yes,” given the many benefits of a socially-enabled enterprise.

I refer to this risk as the new ROI of Social: the Risk of Ignoring. If social tools are not part of the fabric of the organization, introduced during the hiring and onboarding process and leveraged throughout the work lifecycle as a natural way to get work done, the risk for disengagement, misalignment and reduced productivity are significant. These are concerns for every leader in the organization, not just HR.

My POV:

Last year, Microsoft dealt NewsGator a one-two punch when it announced its latest release, SharePoint 2013, would deliver social capabilities, followed by its acquisition of Yammer, an enterprise social technology vendor. However, NewsGator has not just rallied but thrived since those announcements. It reported more than 100 new customers in 2012 and many new product innovations including Social Site’s dual compatibility with both SharePoint 2010 and 2013 from a single code base; a new user interfaced dubbed “Lookout”; support for social learning use cases through its new application, NewsGator Enrich; broader analytics capability through its Webtrends partnership; advanced mobile capabilities and more.

NewsGator has also recently announced that it is rearchitecting its Social Sites suite, eliminating its dependency on Microsoft SharePoint and becoming platform agnostic.  This will put NewsGator more squarely in the crosshairs of enterprise social networking (ESN) competitors of all sizes including Jive, IBM, Huddle, Igloo and tens of others.  Its differentiation will come through a vertical focus on specific businsess-driven use cases.  In fact at this month’s Collective conference, NewsGator announced the development of several of these use-case driven applications to drive tangible business results, centered on Customer Engagement, Field Management and Innovation.

These investments from NewsGator echo what we at Constellation Research are seeing – namely a shift in buyer focus from technology to business outcomes. More and more, social technologies are demonstrating real business results, and the question of “social” in business is moving from “if” to “when and how”.

Current and prospective NewsGator clients will benefit from its continued investments in social use case innovations, continued integration to the Microsoft stack as well as integration beyond the Microsoft apps to SAP, Salesforce.com Chatter and others. Clients will also benefit from NewsGator’s new Adoption Framework, a methodology focused on helping organizations achieve better results at the intersection of people engagement, business alignment and technology enablement. For many organizations, making SharePoint “work” is a top priority, and in this endeavor, NewsGator currently has the lead position for both cloud and on-premises SharePoint customers (an important fact since Microsoft has announced it will not integrate Yammer to on-premises SharePoint beyond basic connectivity).  For companies not betting their enterprise collaboration futures on Microsoft, NewsGator’s move to a platform-agnostic solution will make it a viable alternative as well.

The path to enterprise social collaboration may come from a single technology platform, like NewsGator, or through an aggregation of social-enabled technologies (for example, integrations of social-enabled tools across HCM, CRM and core communications). Either way, making social real in the enterprise – helping organizations unlock the untapped potential of a humanistic approach to business both within and across an enterprise – is a business imperative.

Your POV

What do you think?  Has your company embraced  the concept of “Survival of the Social” or are you still evaluating the business case for social investments? Are you a NewsGator customer with stories to share? Add your comments to the blog or send us a comment at Y (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com.

Please let us know if you need help with your Social Business efforts. Sign up for a Constellation Academy Workshop or let us assist with:

• Assessing social business readiness
• Developing your social business engagement strategy
• Creating a new vision for the future of work
• Vendor selection
• Connecting with other pioneers

¹ “The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies.” McKinsey Global Institute, July 2012.

Filed under: Cloud, Future of Work, Learning and Development, Mobile/Social, NewsGator, NextGen Workforce, People Processes, Social, Talent Management, Work Management Tagged: Apps Strategy, Collaboration, constellation research, Daniel Kraft, future of work, HCM, HR Tech, Microsoft SharePoint, Millenials, NewsGator, Next Generation apps, SaaS, Social, Social Enterprise, Social Sites, Talent Management, Trends, Workforce Technologies, yvette cameron

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,&nbsp;Everybody Wants to Rule The World&nbsp;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… Read more

Informatica Sets The Stage For A New Chapter In Its History

Informatica held its annual industry analyst day February 26th to 27th, 2013 at the Rosewood Sandhill in Menlo Park.  The event showcased Informatica’s go-forward strategy and road map for growth over the next three years. Key highlights include:

• Capturing a $6.5B market opportunity in license and subscription revenues. Marge Breya, Informatica’s new CMO, set the stage with a vision of how Informatica is poised to capture a $6.5B addressable market.  Key use cases include analytics, operational integration, cloud integration, master data management, and data governance.  Achieving these results will require $3.6B in installed base plays, $1,9B in new logo plays, and $1B in geographic expansion. Key markets for geographic expansion include replacing hand coding in Brazil, China, Japan, Mexico, and Russia.
  
  Point of View (POV): Constellation estimates a $300B enterprise software market for 2013 with $130B in applications and $170B in infrastructure software.  Informatica intends to go after a $6.5B addressable market that includes analytics, cloud data integration, operational data integration, master data management, and messaging.  Success will require an expansion in focus from the traditional IT leaders and developer buyers to the emerging needs of business leaders.

• Supporting a world of Hybrid IT.  Juan Carlos Soto, SVP & GM for Informatica Cloud, discussed how clients now see Hybrid IT as the new norm.  In fact, cloud based adoption has shifted from line of business (LOB) owned to IT led adoption of cloud over the past three years.  Soto sees three pillars of success that include delivery of a platform for hybrid IT, cloud services for all, and Informatica inside.  Key features for 2013 include data masking, process automation, integration with Microsoft Dynamics AX, integration with NetSuite, integration with Workday, integration with Oracle CRM On Demand, integration with Amazon RedShift, and integration with Ultimate Software (which was announced March 13th).
  
  (POV): In a world of Hybrid IT, Constellation expects integration to be a core requirement for success. Consumerization of IT has led to a proliferation of mobile and cloud endpoints that require sophisticated data integration capabilities among all possible connections, data flows, business processes, and access.  Informatica’s success depends on its ability to attract the cloud integration decision makers and users for basic cloud integration for enterprise and those seeking more complicated enterprise cloud integration use cases.  The platform for a Hybrid IT play via a Virtual Data Machine (VDM) has the most potential for success in creating new business models.  Informatica Inside will succeed so long Informatica is seen as “the Switzerland” for integration in cloud stacks and solutions.

• Providing the integration and quality requirements for a big data world. Ash Kulkarni, SVP & GM for Data Integration and Data Quality, addressed the analytical integration, operational integration, and data governance strategy.  Informatica’s themes for next generation data integration include agility in development, flexibility for deployment, and confidence in management.  New features in analytical data integration include built-in data virtualization, complex event processing, support for decision making, and big data integration for Hadoop customers.  The data governance features include improved inference for data domain discovery, automated enterprise data discovery, business friendly glossaries with rich metadata lineage, streamlined workflow and task management, data masking, visual exception auditing, audit data retention policies for production and legacy apps archiving,
  (POV): Efforts to bolster the flagship integration business focus on the faster, better, and cheaper mantra.  Customers can expect greater ease of use with the core PowerCenter platform. Data integration features tied to work flows bring integration to life.  Data governance features are robust in design and place Informatica among the top vendors for depth and breadth of functionality.  As integration remains the key cash cow, customers can expect more derivative solutions to simplify the growing enterprise complexity.

• Expanding leadership in master data management. Dennis Moore, SVP & GM for Informatica MDM, took stage with Ravi Shankar the VP of MDM product marketing, and Dmitri Korablev the VP of MDM product strategy.  The latest release, Informatica MDM 9.5.1 includes support for the social customer master, mobile client support, effective date support, big data matching, unified data governance, and bulk data import and export.  In the Cloud MDM Winter 2013 release, features include multi-dimensional hierarchy support, enhanced matching, drag and drop hierarchy management, and an improved setup wizard.  The Spring 2013 release will include a much needed Salesforce.com multi-org consolidation and Informatica Cloud Contact validation service.
  
  (POV): Informatica MDM has show significant success on a multitude of dimensions including vertical expansion, geographical expansion, and push into multiple domain master data management.  Informatica has invested in deeper industry solutions for MDM including counterparty/LEI risk management for banking, securities data management for banking, data management for healthcare, data management for insurance,  abd clinical trials and compounds data management for pharma.  More importantly, Informatica has encouraged a partner ecosystem that includes manufacturing solutions from Wipro, oil and gas well master from Tata Consulting Services, media master from Serene, ICD-10 conversion from Highpoint, and CPG BPO from Capgemini.  Meanwhile, the pending Heiler acquisition should bolster the multi-domain story with supplier collaboration, strong cataloging capabilities, and improved product data management.

The Bottom Line: Informatica’s Investment In Growth Amidst A World Of Disruption Is Good News For Customers

Prospects and customers should find comfort in the investments Informatica is making to expand its product line portfolio to support a more complex world of social business, mobile enterprise, cloud computing, and big data.  Informatica’s use cases of analytics, operational integration, cloud integration, master data management, and data governance, provide customers with a neutral, one-stop shop to manage their information life cycle requirements.  How Informatica innovates with its customers, partners, and alliances will determine the go forward growth path.  Customers will measure success by how easily the line of business executives and IT can bring order to chaos.

Your POV

Are you an Informatica customer? Do you plan to invest more or less with them in 2013?  What do you think about their strategy? Add your comments to the blog or send us a comment at R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) org or R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com

Please let us know if you need help with your integration or MDM strategy.  Sign up for a Constellation Academy Workshop or let us assist with:

• Assessing readiness
• Designing MDM strategy
• Assessing integration capability
• Vendor selection
• Connecting with other pioneers

Related Research

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• News Analysis: Salesforce.com Acquires Radian6 For $316M
• Monday’s Musings: Q1 2011 State of Social CRM and CRM From An EMEA Point Of View
• Best Practices: Applying Social Business Challenges To Social Business Maturity Models
• Research Report: Constellation’s Research Outlook For 2011
• Research Report: How The Five Pillars Of Consumer Tech Influence Enterprise Innovation
• Event Report: Salesforce.com Pushes Social CRM Technology — But Don’t Expect Companies To Be Successful With Tools Alone
• Monday’s Musings: Why Every Social CRM Initiative Needs An MDM Backbone

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Vice President & Principal Analyst Test

Joseph is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, Inc.&nbsp; Covering all things related to Data Management and Analytics, he focuses on making better decisions through using new sources of data, innovative ways of interweaving the volumetric flow of data of increasing compexity, and disruptive techniques for drawing inferences and making predictions from that data. <br> Sensor networks <br> Mobile devices <br> Machine-to-machine interchanges <br> Machine-to-human interactiions <br> Sensor Analytics <br> Internet of Things <br> Sustainability <br> Self-quantification <br> Since 1978, Joseph has been involved with renewable energy research, developing advanced statistical methods for complex system analysis, and creating analytical techniques and management… Read more

Big Data is a catchy phrase. Unfortunately, it is often misused and misunderstood. Often, Hadoop and Big Data are used interchangeably; as if the Apache Hadoop family of projects are the only solutions for Big Data, or that that only use for these projects is from Big Data. Neither is true.

As an EDW/BI practitioner, I watched the Hadoop, or really, the Map/Reduce framework, be embraced and forced into being by software developers who were frustrated by Structured Query Language (SQL) and the need to create Entity-Relationship Diagrams (ERD) as data models or schæmas. They were equally unhappy with the various work-arounds to access Relational Database Management Systems from within their programs, such as Object Relational Models (ORMs) and Data Access Objects (DAOs). At first, I felt that these developers were simply lazy.

However, as I worked more with these so-called NoSQL technologies, it helped to clarify the dissatisfaction that I felt during the years I was leading EDW and BI projects. Thirty years ago, I worked in Aerospace System Engineering, developing methods and algorithms for risk assessment using Bayesian statistics. But, by 1996, I became involved in my first EDW project. Since then, the actual structure and functions associated with the data - defined by the data, became less important than fitting the data into an artificial structure imposed by business process models.

Don't get me wrong. Relational algebra, relational calculus and the DBMS technologies that came out of this mathematics, are all very useful. And, in the right hands, SQL is a very powerful language. ERDs provide a wonderful way to map data to business processes and to both transactional and analytic systems.

But… There is so much more that can be done with the data coming from traditional human-to-machine (H2M) interactions, but increasingly from human-to-human (H2H), machine-to-machine (M2M) and machine-to-human (M2H) exchanges. The interweaving of the flows of data from such disparate sources is what drives my research today.

• Gamification driving the adoption of smart meters for utilities
• Self-quantification use cases in the workplace
• Sustainability for increasing the bottom line
• Combing social media and sensor data for profitability
• Sensor analytics as an ecosystem

These, and over 70 other use cases that I'm cataloguing, come from the innovation surrounding hype of Big Data, and the Data Science movement. In a recent Quark, I've classified this innovation into 11 areas. A compete mindmap is linked from the initial mindmap shown below, and in the report.

A Mindmap of the 11 Innovation Trends from Big Data

The Quark covers the trends coming from these innovations, and develops the four keys required to bring valuable decision making processes into your organization from these innovations. It's entitled "Big Data: It's Not the Size, It's How You Use It". For such a simple report, it took over 8 months to develop. Mostly this delay was caused by the fast-paced evolution of the innovations. The executive summary from the Quark is linked from the title.

I hope that you find that information, as well as the mindmap, useful in incorporating inference, prediction, insight and performance with intuition for making better decisions.

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