NewsGator Collective 2013: Survival of the Social

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: 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 disruptive…...

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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

Event Report: Informatica Analyst Day Reveals A Growth Strategy

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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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

• News Analysis: Informatica Launches MDM 9.5
• Monday’s Musings: Using MDM To Build A Complete Customer View In A Social Era
• Monday’s Musings: Mastering When and How High End Brands Should Use Daily Deal Sites Such As Groupon
• 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

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!

New Hope from Big Data

Vice President & Principal Analyst
Test

Joseph is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, Inc.  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. Sensor networks Mobile devices Machine-to-machine interchanges Machine-to-human interactiions Sensor Analytics Internet of Things Sustainability Self-quantification Since 1978, Joseph has been involved with renewable energy research, developing advanced statistical methods for complex system analysis, and creating analytical techniques and management methodologies for solving business,…...

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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.

Except where otherwise noted, this content is
licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Ignore the Samsung S4: there is a mobile metric that vendors and carriers fear to discuss

Constellation Alumni

"I am fascinated by understanding technologies, then explaining how to apply these within enterprises -- while still retaining common sense." Charles Brett is VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, Inc..  His primary focus is on all aspect of mobility and the use of mobile technology in the enterprise.  For 25+ years Charles Brett has focused on delivering common sense to the application of technologies, especially software ones, in organizations of all sizes around the world. While concentrating at Constellation Research on mobility and its management in the enterprise (sometimes known as MDM or Mobile Device Management) he also addresses: mobile app development and deployment mobile apps and associated data management BYOD (Bring or Buy Your Own Device…...

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Yesterday saw the launch of the much awaited Samsung Galaxy S4 (and a worthy update it seems, if hardly earth shattering — much like occurred with the iPhone 5).  There has also been much talk about Android weaknesses, hardware or software market specialization as well as Google’s rising share price (and Apple’s currently falling one).  But what almost nobody discusses is: what will be the smartdevice replacement rate?  This metric is beginning to matter more and more to a whole raft of audiences — from device manufacturers to mobile carriers to enterprises and to consumers.

When Apple launched the original iPhone it was correctly hailed as something special — because it was.  The second iPhone was a significant improvement, both in quality (already high) but also in both form and function.  But, by the time of the iPhone 4S and then the iPhone 5 the improvements had become demonstrably incremental rather than revolutionary.

The same is largely true of Android.  Before the arrival of Jelly Bean in mid 2012 Android was pretty rough (but attractively open) and Android devices did not really match the iPhone. Then Samsung delivered the SIII and Note2 (and now the S4) while HTC has moved forward with its all aluminum One and Google with the LG-made Nexus.  All these devices are, with Jelly Bean, now a match for the iPhone.

But here lies the rub.  Once you have an iPhone 4S or 5 or HTC One or SIII or Note 2 or the latest Nexus — what is the incentive to replace these?

Of course there will always be a technoscenti who must have the latest device. They will not disappear but they are also not numbered in multiple millions (remembering that Apple sold 17M+ iPhones and Samsung sold 15M+ in Q4 of 2012 alone).  One key to the future is, therefore, understanding the device replacement rate and then how it will affect different communities in different ways.

If you have invested in a shiny new smartphone (and this applies perhaps even more so to phablets and tablets) with processing power beyond what there are the apps to consume (for example the S4 will come with an octa-core processor and 2GB of RAM — as much as you would find on a full laptop of 2-3 years ago, or even today), why would you want to replace this next year, the year after or even the year after that?  This is going to become the burning question and it is one with global implications.

The so-called ‘rich West’ may have had differing replacement propensities to the rest of the world. Furthermore, the case for multiple smartphones per person is not strong — and the arrival of dual SIM smartphones will only force additional device consolidation.   The rest of the world may still be catching up on acquiring smartphones, but it will arrive at parity pretty soon.  Yet what is clearly evident is that the cost of a smartphone is a much greater investment, as a proportion of disposable income, in the rest of the world which means that it will likely possess a much longer in-use life.

This means that, for mobile phone manufacturers, the alleged promise of a long term future selling into vacant smart device space will not last long when market saturation combined with the inevitable ‘loss of sexiness’ factor(also known as incremental improvements)  occurs in the ‘rich West’.  The result will achieve pretty much the same: expect smartphone replacement rates to match that of (say) laptops — which already have a life of 2-4 years.

[If you do not believe this, make a list of all your mobile devices (including laptops, mp3 players, phones, phablets, tablets, etc.) and indicate when each was bought and when you might plan to replace each.  I did it for myself and, even though both an iPhone and an iPad were stolen in 2012 (and replaced by Android devices), the average age of my devices is already well over 2.5 years.  As for replacement, the only device likely to see replacement in 2013 is the Windows tablet.]

Now  consider the impact and implications if the smart device replacement rate is as slow as I argue it is going to be.

Consumers, whether in the rich or not-so rich worlds will not care much.  They will replace devices when it suits them and value for money will count most of all.  Here Google would be onto a great opportunity with its most recent Nexus, except these are so hard to find to buy.  One oft-ignored aspect to remember here is that many consumers are also employees: with the rise and rise of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) the existence of the previously parallel Enterprise and Consumer markets for smart devices is likely to disappear as the latter absorbs the former.

For device manufacturers, including Samsung and Apple, the years from 2015-2020 are going to be horrible — with high consumer expectations of ever greater cleverness being disappointed  as each new evolution much looks pretty much the same.  Apple may yet crack China as a cult product, and in so doing may make itself effectively a China oriented organization (after all China could absorb in number of smart devices what the rest of the world combined does).  For vendors all this could be different if some new way (or category) of relevant (to the buyer) device emerges, as did the iPhone and iPad — but even this is likely only to put off painful days.

For mobile carriers and providers all this is an opportunity and a threat.  The opportunity is to withdraw from the costly device-subsidy model which involves massive up front purchases from device manufacturers: eliminating this would free up significant resources, not least cash.  The threat is that the 2 or 3 year contract model delivers ‘loyalty’.  If the focus moves away from devices the mobile carriers will need to focus on the customer (thus far largely unheard of, outside France’s Iliad  and one or two other refreshing organizations): service will be all important.

Finally there is the enterprise dimension.  BYOD has the great advantage that enterprises can rely on employees to make the purchases, which frees up CAPEX and other resources.  With vendors like Airwatch, Boxtone, Fiberlink, SOTI and Symantec, to name only five, offering increasingly sophisticated device and content management, having your employees buy their own devices is less and less the obstacle it was.  In addition, especially if most BYOD devices stabilize around Jelly Bean (for Android), on iOS6 (for iPhones and iPads) on WindowsPhone 8 and Blackberry’s BB10, then enterprise app development will become (relatively) simpler (and many of the criticisms of a multi-furcatedAndroid, in particular, will diminish — though Apple is not as guiltless as it would like to make out) through greater OS consistency.

Indeed, as one thinks more and more about what the replacement metric means it is hard not to conclude that the long term  winners are consumers and enterprises.

Brand Storytelling: Teradata’s Case of the Tainted Lasagna

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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Brand storytelling can be hard work. Not only are there all the internal hurdles to overcome, sign-offs and legal checks and so on – there is also the challenge of subject matter. What do you do if you have a complex product or solution that you are trying to explain? Which channels do you choose – and how do you incorporate social media into the mix.

I was recently speaking with a financial services industry CEO who lamented that they have the most boring product in the world. He couldn’t see how it would resonate with a social media-savvy audience.

But social media is not broadcast – especially in B2B (business-to-business) marketing. You’re not trying to reach and engage millions of people – you are (or should be) focused on the buyer’s journey and helping to ease your customer’s decision making process. That means selecting the most appropriate channel – and delivering content that provides very specific value to your customer at their point of need. And brand storytelling can form a very powerful component of your content strategy and lead nurturing program.

Still unsure of how this might work for you and your brand?

Enterprise software vendor, Teradata, have been experimenting with brand storytelling for some time and have taken a novel approach that you may want to steal (I mean “learn from”). Tapping into pop culture’s interest in forensic analysis (a la CSI), they have created a series of videos that take a new approach to case studies and product/solution brochures. The “Business Scenario Investigations” or “BSI” team dramatize business problems and then showcase how technology can be used to “solve” the problem.

Each of their videos can be found on the BSI: Teradata Facebook page as well as the YouTube channel. They cleverly provide a powerpoint version of the scenario via Slideshare and share the storyboarding process from problem definition to casting through to resolution.  And while the case of the tainted lasagna may not be to your taste, it’s likely to be very appealing to those CIOs and CMOs wanting to understand how data can transform their businesses. And that’s tasty. Very tasty indeed.

Do Cloud Communications Services Save Companies Money?

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.  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. 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 well…...

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I've just completed reviewing the 7 RFP responses for my session at Enterprise Connect 2013 on cloud-based communications services. The RFP is a 60 page document describing the communications and collaboration requirements for a 2,000 person enterprise with three locations.

End users may obtain a copy of the RFP at no charge at www.constellationr.com/cloud.

The seven responding vendors -  8x8, Avaya, NEC, ShoreTel Sky, Siemens Enterprise Communications, Thinking Phone Networks, and Verizon - have each gone to great lengths to provide the information required by the RFP which included over 300 individual functional components along with the WAN links and pricing for the entire service over a period of 5 years.

What has made this doubly interesting is that four of the respondents, 8x8, ShoreTel Sky, Siemens, and Thinking Phones, provided reference customers that I interviewed. After doing thorough interviews, I've written case studies, which were not vendor sponsored. I learned a lot about motivations for moving to the cloud, some of which involved total cost of ownership, but others centering around other value propositions of the cloud including geo-redundancy, disaster recovery, focusing on the most important IT/telecom business issues, and so forth.

The responses will be presented on March 19, 2013 at Enterprise Connect 2013. I will also make them available in a workshop/seminar format for organizations who want to know more about cloud communications, ts costs and drivers, and for those who would like to use these RFP results to quickly get to short list of one or two providers to pursue for a cloud communications solution.

The RFP workshop contains the following items:

1. An architectural overview of each solution
2. A review of the supported functionality
3. The total cost of ownership for the solutions, including both monthly OPEX and one-time CAPEX
4. Committed SLAs and credits for not meeting these SLAs
5. How each vendor approaches the design, on-boarding process, and continued operations and maintenance.

A sample graphic illustrating vendor responses about encryption as well as the vendor support demarcation point fis shown below. There are many other graphics and figures comparing these solutions in detail. More information is available at www.constellationr.com/cloud.

The Biggest Immediate Opportunity for WebRTC in the Enterprise

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.  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. 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 well…...

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Any vendor company making PBX or call center software should have a development initiative to add WEbRTC as a channel into the PBX or contact center software alongside SIP and other communications and collaboration protocols. This can be done without too much development cost, and it will put you on the leading edge with respect to the technology curve.