SAN FRANCISCO, CA– November 20, 2012 Constellation Research, Inc. the research and advisory firm focused on disruptive technologies today announced the publication of "The Enterprise Cloud Buyer’s Bill of Rights: SaaS Applications" by Constellation Principal Analyst and CEO, R “Ray” Wang. This research helps buyers and prospective buyers of enterprise cloud applications with building the right client-vendor relationships.  This bill of rights serves as a reference, checklist and point of discussion during the vendor selection and contract negotiation process for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) apps.   Though vendors may not honor all these rights today, they represent the best practices we have gleaned from being involved in negotiating over 500 SaaS contracts. This bill of rights also captures the general spirit and intent of most SaaS vendors’ executive management teams.

This report reveals:

• Why cloud buyer’s may face vendor lock-in
• The 9 key benefits of cloud computing
• 55 best practices by critical, important, and nice-to-have classifications
• How to build a cloud contract negotiations strategy across the ownership lifecycle

The majority of enterprise software is now consumed via SaaS or cloud deployments.  Despite a perception of simplicity in software acquisition, many cloud contracts require  all the rigor and due diligence of contracts for on-premises licensed software. The Enterprise Cloud Buyer’s Bill of Rights provides a tool for clients and vendors to change the tenor of contract negotiations from user subservience to an equal and collaborative long-term partnership.

Client – vendor relationships in the cloud are perpetual. When converting from an on-premises arrangement, it is imperative that these agreements provide a chance for a new slate.  Thus, chief information officers (CIOs), chief marketing officers (CMOs), line-of-business (LOB) executives, procurement managers and other organizational leaders should ensure that the mistakes they made in on-premises licensed software aren't blindly carried over. 

"At Constellation, we're changing the contract negotiation landscape. Our long term goal is to work with vendors to certify the bill of rights cloud vendors agree to upfront," said report author and Constellation Research CEO, R "Ray" Wang. 

This report fits into Constellation’s business-focused research themes:

• Consumerization of IT & The New C-Suite
• Digital Marketing Transformation
• Future of Work
• Next Gen Customer Experience
• Matrix Commerce
• Tech Optimization & Innovation

THE REPORT

More information about "The Enterprise Cloud Buyer's Bill of Rights: SaaS Applications" can be found here: http://www.constellationrg.com/research/2012/11/enterprise-cloud-buyers-...

ABOUT R "Ray" Wang

R “Ray” Wang is the Principal Analyst and CEO at Constellation Research, Inc.  He’s also the author of the popular enterprise software blog “A Software Insider’s Point of View”. With viewership in the millions of page views a year, his blog provides insight into how disruptive technologies and new business models impact the enterprise. Ray is a prominent keynote speaker and research analyst working with clients on engagement strategies, social business, customer experience, and decision management.   He advises Global 2000 companies on business strategy and technology selection.  Ray is quoted regularly in Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Bloomberg, Reuters, IDG News Service, and other media outlets around the world.

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Constellation Research, Constellation SuperNova Awards and the Constellation Research logo are trademarks of Constellation Research, Org. All other products and services listed herein are trademarks of their respective companies.

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - November 15, 2012 Constellation Research, Inc. the research and advisory firm focused on disruptive technologies announced today the publication of "Digital Disruption: Five Lessons from Asia Pacific's Digital Trajectory", a new trend report authored by Gavin Heaton which details how marketing leaders can adapt mobile and social innovation across Asia Pacific to their own market conditions.

This report reveals:

• Consumer adoption is disrupting patterns of media consumption and transforming the buyer’s journey
• Digital adoption will drive marketers’ thirst for mobile solutions
• The shift to digital requires a re-casting of the marketing funnel

With nearly ubiquitous adoption of mobile phones across Asia Pacific, Heaton argues that patterns of mobile and social adoption will shape marketing strategy, technology and campaign execution not only in Asia but across the globe.

"This is not a long term vision", says Heaton, "this transformation is already upon us. The opportunity for CMOs is to move now, shadow and then out-innovate their Asia Pacific counterparts".

We have long proclaimed that "this will be the year of mobile". In 2013, the rubber of this over-inflated promise will hit the road. Consumers have shifted their attention away from the PC and even the laptop - and marketers are grossly underprepared.

Connected consumers have expectations of a ubiquitous brand experience. They discover, debate and decide on the products and services they purchase ahead of the marketing funnel. And they do so independent of the marketing channels they are consuming. This "channel blindness" is both an opportunity and a threat to CMOs. This report presents five clear insights from a market that has already shifted to the mobile device as the "first screen". Marketing leaders make immediate preparations ahead of Q1 2013 or risk chasing the tail of their competitors as market conditions improve next year.

The Report

More information about "Digital Disruption: Five Lessons from Asia Pacific's Digital Trajectory" can be found here: http://constellationrg.com/research/2012/11/digital-disruption-five-less...

ABOUT Gavin Heaton

Gavin Heaton is Vice President and Principal Analyst focusing on enterprise technology innovation, digital strategy and customer engagement. Gavin's current research focuses on the changing role and expectations of CMOs, the fusion of marketing channels and change-driven marketing innovation. Heaton’s research and advisory enables clients to take advantage of the convergence of media, technology, brands, and business.

DIGITAL MARKETING TRANSFORMATION

Digital Marketing Transformation is the newest business-focused research theme at Constellation Research, Inc. The C-suite is realizing the futility of remaining analog in a digital world. CMOs can no longer live in the campaign to lead process - CMOs must also involve themselves in big data and analytics, social and community building, reputation, and loyalty. The future is real time convergence and its name is digital.

Lead analyst: Gavin Heaton

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Constellation Research, Constellation SuperNova Awards and the Constellation Research logo are trademarks of Constellation Research, Org. All other products and services listed herein are trademarks of their respective companies.

Announcing the winners of the 2012 SuperNova Awards

Tonight at Connected Enterprise we announced the winners of the 2012 SuperNova Awards.

The SuperNova Awards recognize leaders who fearlessly pursue implementation and adoption of disruptive technologies within their organizations. Meaningful adoption and development of new technologies is no easy task. Constellation knows that while the adoption of disruptive technologies is the lifeblood of corporate innovation and efficiency, it is often a thankless job. Enter the SuperNova Awards.

This year's SuperNova Awards was a huge success. Here's a recap: we received over 120 exceptional applications for the Awards, a substantial increase over last year. We tasked our all-star cast of judges with the difficult job of whittling down the applicant pool to 47 semifinalists. Then we turned to you, the public, and asked you to vote for your favorite semifinalists to determine the winners. 

And now the moment you've all been waiting for. Join us in celebrating the 2012 SuperNova Award winners!

Click through the profiles below to learn more about the winners and semifinalists, and how they're putting disruptive technology to work.

Consumerization of IT & the New C-Suite

Join us as we announce the 2012 SuperNova Award winners live, on stage, at the SuperNova Awards Gala Dinner on the first night of Connected Enterprise. We will be streaming the awards ceremony directly from Connected Enterprise, so you can find out who wins live!

Register now for the SuperNova Awards Livestream here: http://cce2012.eventbrite.com/

The SuperNova Awards recognize individuals who lead successful implementations of disruptive technologies.  We will be selecting eight winners from a group of exceptional semifinalists in the following categories: 

• Consumerization of IT & The New C-Suite
• Data to Decisions
• Matrix Commerce
• Technology Optimization & Innovation
• Future of Work (2)
• Next Generation Customer Experience (2)

Learn more about this year's SuperNova Award semifinalists here.

Get social: follow along on Twitter with the hashtag #SNA12

Premiere Cosmos^TM report provides data archiving insight and guidelines for technology buyers

Report highlights compliance and performance issues driving solution choices in data archiving efforts

Four vendors evaluated against rigorous criteria and practical use cases

SAN FRANCISCO – October 31, 2012 Constellation Research, Inc., the award-winning research and advisory firm focused on disruptive technologies, announced the publication of "Constellation’s Cosmos ^TM: Data Archiving Solutions", a new research report authored by Vice President and Principal Analyst, Alea Fairchild.  Constellation Cosmos^TM is Constellation Research’s flagship quantitative and qualitative product and solution comparison tool.  A typical Cosmos^TM contains 50 to 150 exception-based criteria, making Cosmos^TM a powerful tool for buy-side clients navigating the ever-crowded technology market. This report evaluates the data archiving solution offerings from four data archiving vendors: HP, IBM, Informatica and Solix.

This Constellation Cosmos^TM contains:

• 6 significant trends in data archiving, and comparison of vendors’ presence in these six areas
• Evaluation of solutions in four real-world use cases
• Recommendations for technology buyers evaluating data archiving solutions

This report rates the aforementioned data archiving solution offerings on the basis of six criteria segments including market execution and user experiences, as well as solution criteria and vendor resources. Commenting on the findings of the research Fairchild said, “We noted a very close race, where the focus has changed from more technical criteria to better data planning via data usage and growth analysis, simulation of archive policies, including preview of data prior to archiving and purging, and process management via a centralized view across multiple applications, databases and operating systems."

New compliance and performance realities drive demand for data archiving solutions

Constellation Research, Inc. produced this piece of research to serve clients as compliance and performance requirements necessitate improved data archiving performance. Data archiving has changed dramatically in the last three years, as explosive data growth and the maturity of database applications have meant a shift from structured data management to significant movements of all types of data to both on-premise and off-premise (cloud) locations.  Increasing rates of application retirement and the increasing requirements in compliance and e-discovery have caused enterprises to take a closer look at data archiving.

"In today’s enterprise, a well-structured data archiving strategy can help lower IT costs, improve application performance and enhance data security. Given the exponential growth of data in the enterprise, and the continued need to manage, regulate and maintain this data, we developed this report to assess some of the top offerings in the data archiving market to assist enterprises in making strategic decisions on how to manage data growth. Technology optimization creates a need to reduce cost but optimize databases to enhance performance. Feature-function comparisons don’t tell the complete picture in this regard, so we focuses on use cases, particularly in areas such as application retirement and database performance optimization” Fairchild said, commenting on the relevance of data archiving.

This Constellation Cosmos^TM  fits into Constellation’s business-focused research theme, Technology Optimization and Innovation.

THE REPORT

More information about Constellation Cosmos: Data Archiving Solutions can be found here: http://constellationrg.com/research/2012/10/constellation-cosmos-data-ar...

ABOUT Alea Fairchild

Alea Fairchild is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research.  Alea’s research explores key business themes including intelligent data management and the changing view of the data landscape from the Cloud, value chain data management: insuring partners’ data protection  and privacy policies, next gen government: data privacy and ILM best practices. Dr. Fairchild has 18 years of experience in global IT market analysis, and has worked for major market research firms as both an analyst and as a consultant. She has also been a consultant to the European Commission as well as to major multinational IT companies throughout Europe.

ABOUT Technology Optimization

New economic realities and shrinking IT budgets necessitate that IT organizations become better at justifying new projects, more efficient in delivering IT services, and smarter in adopting new technologies that can deliver business value while reducing costs. The Technology Optimization theme will provide research and advisory to CIOs that are seeking to invest in innovation and strategic advantage while operating within the confines of limited IT budgets.

Emergence of the “connected customer” necessitates introduction of new marketing paradigm

“Marketers must innovate or die”

Included: six principles relevant to marketing today

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - Constellation Research, Inc. the research and advisory firm focused on disruptive technologies today announced the publication of "CMOs: Re-Casting the Marketing Funnel for Customer Engagement” by Constellation Vice President and Principal Analyst, Gavin Heaton. This research report challenges the century-old marketing framework upon which most marketing is based, and argues for a new marketing paradigm focused on the connected customer.

The Connected Customer

Disruptive technologies have created a new type of connected customer who uses a range of digital and social networking technologies to discover, debate and decide on purchases in a completely different manner than customers of past decades.

Heaton argues the AIDA model, upon which most marketing strategies are based, is outdated and no longer accommodates the complexity faced by today's CMOs. Heaton writes that digital and social media has forced the hand of marketers who have remained resolutely analog in a digital world.

"It's not good enough to simply digitize 'business as usual' - the landscape has changed and today's marketers must innovate or die", says Heaton.

Six principles relevant to marketing today

The media landscape that gave birth to the AIDA model was much simpler than the one we now live with. Consequently, Heaton has identified six principles relevant to marketing in this new digital environment.

1. Fragmentation creates silos not synergies.
2. The marketing funnel assumes a passive customer.
3. The next-gen customer experience is owned from the outside-in.
4. Next-gen customers make purchases in their own time frames.
5. Purchase decisions occur before consumers reach the marketing funnel.
6. Trust is the currency of digital marketing.

Accommodate, don’t fear, the connected customer

The trends that are driving change in digital marketing have shifted the power in the brand relationship. This is actually a positive development that should be embraced. Rather than fearing the "connected consumer", marketers must reorganize and redouble their efforts to move from a focus on transactions to engagement. The first step is understanding the buyer's journey from the outside-in, in what Heaton calls "The 5 Ds of customer engagement". The 5 Ds reflect this new reality and provide marketers with a new way of envisioning the buyer's journey.

THE REPORT

More information about "CMOs: Re-Casting the Marketing Funnel for Customer Engagement" can be found here: http://constellationrg.com/research/2012/10/cmos-re-casting-marketing-fu...

LEARN MORE

Join Gavin Heaton for a free webinar on October 31, 2012 at 3p.m. PST to learn more about this new customer-centric marketing funnel. Register here: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/452275286

ABOUT Gavin Heaton

Gavin Heaton is Vice President and Principal Analyst focusing on enterprise technology innovation, digital strategy and customer engagement. Gavin's current research focuses on the changing role and expectations of CMOs, the fusion of marketing channels and change-driven marketing innovation. Heaton’s research and advisory enables clients to take advantage of the convergence of media, technology, brands, and business.