Event Report: Preview 2 & The Exclusive Market Maker 1:1 Keynote Interviews At Constellation’s Connected Enterprise 2012 (#CCE2012)

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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Think TED Meets Enterprise For The C-Suite – Constellation’s Connected Enterprise.

Constellation’s flagship event, Connected Enterprise 2012, starts November 9th to 11th, 2012.  This intimate innovation summit in Dana Point, CA (www.stregismb.com) is designed for senior business leaders who are attempting or successfully using disruptive technologies such as social business, cloud computing, mobile enterprise, big data and analytics, gamification, and unified communications/video to drive business value and transform business models.

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 – 2012 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!

Event Report: IFS World Conference 2012 & Innovations Abound Beyond ERP (#IFSWoCo2012)

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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Key Themes Include Mobility, User Experience, and Innovation

Over 1100 IFS customers convened October 15th to 17th, 2012 in Gothenburg Sweden for the IFS World Conference.  The conference brought together the world of projects, service and asset, manufacturing, and supply chain.  The conference highlighted the:

• Massive move to mobile. IFS continued their push into their mobile apps portfolio with seven touch apps.  Martin Gunnarsson director of research and development, discussed how the mobile solution addresses three personas: casual, professional, and transactional. IFS Time Tracker addresses project time and attendance reporting, confirmation, etc.  IFS Trip Tracker simplifies travel expense reporting.  IFS Sales Companion helps sales professionals manage their accounts, tasks and opportunities. IFS Quick Reports provide the ability to create and view ad-hoc reports on a mobile device.  IFS Quick Facts enables fast keyword search of any object in IFS Applications.  IFS Flight Log allows the management of platform operational data in the aerospace and defense industry.  IFS Support Companion delivers interaction with IFS support centers.
  
  Point of view (POV): The move to mobile continues the user experience emphasis of IFS.  These new Touch Apps address specific work processes and allow for quick to complete tasks.  By calling on services running inside IFS Cloud, users gain direct access without having to talk to the ERP back end.  IFS should be lauded for support of the three key mobile apps ecosystems: Google Play Store, Apple App Store and Windows Marketplace.  pushing out to public apps stores provides customers with an easy and frictionless experience.  Customers and prospects can expect more touch apps to address areas in CRM, HR, reporting, search, and projects in 2013.

• Launch customers on IFS Applications 8. Customers on hand at the conference provided upfront honesty of the migration to IFS Applications 8Early adopters, Remmele Engineering, Portsmouth Aviation, VBG Group, Bright Point, and Teracom shared insights on their move to IFS Applications 8.  Some customers moved from IFS 2003, others from IFS 7.5.  Right now 40% of the customer base has made the move to 7.5 or 8.  IFS has 34000 users are live or implementing and expect 25 customers by year end to be live on IFS applications 8.
  
  (POV): The different release paths, industries, and use cases reinforced the marketing messages that the move to IFS Applications 8 was worth the trouble.  Customers cite the user experience, business intelligence, and the move to mobility as the key reasons for the shift.  Regulatory compliance and new industry specific features also played a significant role.

• Beefed up partner program. IFS announced a multitude of partnerships supporting Touch apps.  The partnership with Honeywell brings IFS’s field service, supply chain, and asset management with Honeywell’s scanning and mobile devices to address asset up-time and reliability.  The NEC partnership will extend the reseller relationship and deliver smartphone apps for NEC’s customer base. Norwegian Addovation will provide user access and shared documents in IFS Document Management for smartphones.  TimeZynk will deliver social task management solutions for personnel planning, time management, and social networking.  Cedar Bay delivers an inventory and quality assurance processes.  Cooper Software provides customer and supplier reports via email, fax, and EDI.
  
  (POV): IFS is intent on building out its mobile ecosystem.  Using the IFS Cloud as the connection point, partners no longer have to worry about keeping up to date with the ERP backbone.  Thus, Honeywell provides many rugged mobile devices for Android and Windows for asset-intensive industries such as energy, utilities, and oil and gas.  The NEC relationship helps provide access to the Japanese market.  Cedar Bay provides access to UK, France, Spain and the Americas.  Cooper Software reaches out to the UK, Sweden, an France.  Given that many prospects cite security as a key barrier to adoption, IFS may want to establish partnerships with mobile enterprise management vendors to head off this concern.

The Photo Stream From #IFSWoCO2012

Source: R Wang. All rights reserved.

The Bottom Line: Users Seek Innovation In Enterprise Software That Aligns With Industry Specific Solutions

Conversations with over 35 IFS customers confirms recent survey work that shows mid-market customers seek turn-key, last mile solutions.  Users turn to IFS as an alternative to SAP or Oracle for its innovation in mobile, user experience, and purpose built solutions.  Over the next 24 to 36 months, prospects and customers can expect more innovation to be driven by vendors who deliver industry specific solutions.  The Five Pillars Of Consumer Tech (e.g. social mobile, cloud, big data, and unified communications) will continue to play a key role in driving enterprise innovations.

Your POV.

Have you considered a purpose built industry solution? Does user experience and mobility matter in your vendor selection? Ready to upgrae your ERP?  How important is mobile for your organization?  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

Related Resources

News Analysis: IFS Acquires Metrix To Boost Mobility And Service Management

Research Report: How The Five Pillars Of Consumer Tech Influence Enterprise Innovation

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 – 2012 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!

Mobile 2013 – Tel Aviv: a feast of interesting mobility developments

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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Mobile 2013 was held this week in Tel Aviv. From some 150 original companies, 20 were exhibiting and 10 were chosen to make a final short list for a winner for 2013. What follows is an eclectic selection of 8 solutions presented at Mobile 2013. It shows just how much room there is for innovation in mobility, and not just for the consumer marketplace.

To start, take two extremes. These were:

Paparazit (www.paparazit.com): this is a “social celebrity app” where the app reports online the location of a celebrity (if you see one) or where you can check on your favorite celebrity’s latest location; while I cannot think of anything quite so surplus to my own needs it is astonishing in its focus (perhaps real celebs. will pay to have this app removed but, on second thoughts, would-be celebs. will probably (sic) celebrate).
Neomatix (www.neo-matix.com) offers a stark contrast — an app which exploits electro-optic methods based on image processing algorithms for monitoring tire pressure by using the camera on a smartphone — without needing to attach anything to a tire and without needing to dirty your hands; this is definitely a useful innovation (and the app is available for free this week on the iTunes store, and available later for Android, etc.).

CellBuddy (www.cell-buddy.com) is a work-in-progress but with intriguing possibilities. It addresses the excessive cost of international data and voice roaming (where, for example, costs outside your home carrier can exceed Euros 11 or US$14 per MB of data sent or received). By adding a sleeve to an existing phone, which includes an additional unique GSM identifier, all roaming is then handled by CellBuddy at a substantially reduced cost. For travelers to many countries this could be a welcome substitute for having to buy and then use the right SIM for each individual country. With CellBuddy you buy once, set up an account and then use where you need. (Personally I could use this now and with c $45B likely to be spent on roaming in 2012 one can see the attractions for all except greedy telephone carriers.)

Navin (no URL given) is a start-up which proposes to use crowdsourcing techniques to improve positioning within buildings (given that GPS locations within a building are generally not practical). An app, downloaded to smartphones, gathers position information using a combination of signals (including WiFi, cellular, RF, magnetometers, accelerometers and gyroscopes, etc.) to send back compact data to Navin which can then provide more accurate positioning to these within buildings. It is a ‘learning’ model: the more people use it, the better the information about that building.

BrightSpots (www.brightspots.net) combines gamification and rewards for those seeking to improve brand awareness. The company seeks to make it easy to create games or reward-based HML5-based apps (for example electronic scratch-cards) that can be sent to customers or potential customers. People play the games and the reward may have to be picked up in a store or at a branded location (an event or conference or some such). By introducing gamification to smartphone users BrightSpots hopes enterprises and brands will have a means to use the modern technologies in everyone’s hands to attract the attention of customers.

BuzzJourney (www.buzzjourney.com) is similar but different to carpooling.com. The difference is that a driver can describe a journey to BuzzJourney and would-be passengers can express interest — and pay to BuzzJourney the equivalent of what public transport might cost them for that journey. The driver receives 75% of that public transport fare from BuzzJourney, with the latter keeping 25%. With 2-3 passengers a journey might pay for itself. BuzzJourney is already operating in Israel. It expects to expand beyond Israel in 2013 — and one can see the attraction.

Finally, two different approaches to security on mobile devices:

the first will be familiar from a Constellation Report and past blogs (http://www.constellationrg.com/blog/2012/02/mpv-multiple-persona-virtual… and http://www.constellationrg.com/blog/2012/02/mpv-multiple-persona-virtual…) – Cellrox (www.cellrox.com): Cellrox offers Multiple Virtual Personas on Android devices, with each Persona being made securely separate, via virtualization.
the second comes from Zimperium (www.zimperium.com) with its zCore IPS (Intruder Prevention System) for smartphones and tablets which claims to recognize and prevent network-based attacks in real time, along with pre-emptive prevention of widespread worm attacks and vulnerability patching. What Zimperium aspires to is the establishment of an essential layer of security for smartphones and tablets. Enterprises should be interested, along with Zimperium’s zAppliance — a smart security console to monitor and manage an organization’s policies.

There were plenty of other participants and well more than 500 attendees. Interest was high. But, in the view of Constellation Research, originality seems to know no bounds when it comes to mobility, and it does not matter if this is aimed at the consumer, the enterprise or a combination.

Update 2012-10-16: Zimperim won 1st Place and Cellrox 2nd Place from the Final List of 10

How to Optimize Your ERP System

President, Computer Economics and Strativa, Inc.
Computer Economics and Strativa, Inc.

Frank Scavo is skilled at formulating and communicating IT strategy, developing the business case for new systems, and facilitating the selection of enterprise systems, such as ERP, CRM, and supply chain management. He is also an expert in benchmarking IT spending and staffing levels for end-user IT organizations. Frank was one of the first tech bloggers, beginning in 2002 with his launch of the Enterprise System Spectator providing independent analysis of issues and trends in enterprise applications software and the strengths, weaknesses, advantages, and disadvantages of the vendors that provide them. Frank has been quoted as an IT expert in numerous business and industry publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Computerworld, CIO Magazine, ZDnet, eWeek, Datamation,…...

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Earlier this month, I gave a keynote presentation on the subject of ERP optimization, at the Manufacturing ERP Experience conference in Cleveland. This post provides a quick introduction to the subject of ERP optimization and a video of my complete keynote.

Not Enough Just to Select and Implement the Right System

When it comes to ERP, most business leaders realize that it is critical to select the right system and implement it successfully. Likewise, when it comes to advice about ERP, most analysts and consultants focus on their attention on best practices for ERP vendor selection and implementation. 

But very few analysts pay attention to what happens after the implementation. An organization will spend many more months using an ERP system than it will selecting and implementing it. A company might take three to six months to select a new ERP system and another year or two to implement it: but it will be using that system to support its business operations for seven years, 10 years, or hopefully even longer.

How ERP Systems Become Sub-Optimized and What to Do About It

There are many opportunities for ERP system to no longer fully serve the needs of the business--even ERP systems that have been correctly selected and implemented. Business requirements may change, due to organic growth, mergers and acquisitions, introduction of new products and services, changes in business models, new demands from customers, or any number of other factors. As a result, organizations frequently become dissatisfied with their ERP systems.

Business leaders, therefore, need to periodically optimize their ERP systems, both on the benefits side and the cost side. This ERP optimization effort encompasses four main tasks:

1. Analyze Root Problems. Trace each ERP problem according to a four-way framework, that is, problems related to (1) the software itself, (2) how the software was installed, (3) the business not using the system, and (4) the business not using the system effectively.
    
2. Identify Corrective Actions. By understanding the root causes, the corrective action often becomes clear, and it often does not mean an expensive and disruptive exercise in selecting and implementing a new system. Rather, the existing system can be optimized.
    
3. Identify Potential Cost Savings. After three years, the majority of ERP total cost of ownership is not in the up-front implementation costs: it is in ongoing support. Therefore, it is essential to optimize the ongoing support costs for ERP, considering a number of practical recommendations.
    
4. Execute the ERP Optimization Roadmap. Finally, the recommended actions need to be prioritized, planned, and carried out with just as much discipline as the original implementation demanded. If done correctly, optimizing ERP can effectively extend the life of a current system to better serve the business for years to come.

You can watch my full presentation on optimizing ERP by clicking on the image at the top of this post. 

If you'd like a full copy of the presentation slides, just email me. My email address is in the right hand column.

Related Posts

Factors that Affect ERP Implementation Cost 
Twenty Years of ERP Lessons Learned
Optimizing ERP Support Staffing in Smaller Organization
 

Press Release: Constellation Research Publishes “Mid-Market Customers Still Seek Turnkey, Last-Mile Solutions”

Breakaway Strategies: Looking Beyond HCM Vendors for HCM Technology

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 the run up to this year’s annual HR Technology Conference, I’ve been meeting with HCM technology vendors large and small. As expected, almost every vendor articulates an interest in, if not full vision for, social enablement of its offering. Some offer social capabilities today, some are expanding beyond initial forays in recruiting or learning, and others point to future directions with social based on customer demand. The path to social is also varied, coming through native development, partnership or even acquisition.

The Social HCM market is nascent, with vendors evolving their strategies and customers wrestling with questions ranging from business applicability to internal ownership of “social” in the enterprise (should these initiatives be driven and owned by IT, Legal, HR, Marketing, or…?)

Applying a different lens to the definition of Social HCM – one focused on employee enablement, engagement, and knowledge acceleration – brings another class of vendors into view: social business software providers. These vendors deliver on the foundations of social learning and social talent management, and have been doing so for years. They’re just not top of mind when shopping for those solutions because they don’t typically market to an HCM audience with an HCM messages.

Consider players like Atlassian, Jive, NewsGator, Socialtext, Telligent, IBM and the many others that serve the social business software market. By their very nature of being social collaboration tools, they support many foundational processes such as social learning and social talent, with companies routinely reporting measurable benefits across employee and business performance. Yet for various reasons – including the fact that HR is not usually a driver for social technologies – you don’t see these players at the HR Technology Conference. But you should, as they routinely deliver on these and many other social use cases that are of direct interest to HR leadership:

• Social Onboarding: establishing and assigning new hires to communities and groups; ability to follow people/content; system-driven recommendations on who to follow, groups to join, content to review.
• Social Performance: informal and social feedback via activity streams; badges or other recognition feedback and social rewards;      granting “skills” or “expertise” levels to others in the social network; improved engagement through gamification.
• Social Goals: broadcasting activities and goals (including status and completion); soliciting feedback on goals and projects; granting badges or other recognition; task management for shared goals and objectives and identifying related work of others.
• Social Learning: creating, posting, sharing, rating, tagging and following content; informal learning through micro blogging and activity streams, often with embedded and actionable content; expertise identification; ideation and crowd sourcing innovation across the enterprise.

Looking at the list of Exhibitors at the HR Tech Conference, I found only two pure-play social networking providers exhibiting this year: NewsGator¹ and Yammer¹. (I say only two, as Socialtext is now part of Talent Management provider Peoplefluent, and other solutions like Saba and SuccessFactors are already broader talent management providers with embedded platforms. In fact, even Yammer is now part of the broader Microsoft stack and can no longer be considered “pure play.”)

NewsGator in particular is an interesting addition to the list of exhibitors this year. If you’re not familiar with them, NewsGator has been delivering social business applications for many years through their Social Sites offering. They also integrate directly into Microsoft SharePoint – a solution in use by an estimated 75% of organizations.

Recently, NewsGator launched a new offering called NewsGator Enrich, which goes beyond the core use cases above and focuses on specific learning use cases to power informal, social learning across the enterprise. This latest offering includes a socially driven knowledge base for collaborative knowledge development and exchange, and interactive video learning capability for complex learning scenarios. A few of the core tenets of the Enrich Knowledge Base (KB) are described below.

• Create knowledge base (KB) items in context of business workflows. Conversations in the activity stream, or specific question and answer      activities are readily tagged and saved to the knowledge base. A bookmarklet enables any web page to be referenced to the KB with a single click, and documents of any type are quickly added as well. Content can also be created directly within the knowledge base, turning any employee into a contributor to organizational know-how.
• Quickly access the right knowledge. In addition to filtering KB content based on the most recent, most viewed or other categories, user-added metadata such as titles, tags and descriptions facilitate searching, discovery, and categorization of the knowledge base content.
• Turn unstructured Q&A into a powerful resource. Answers can be accumulated, with the “accepted” answer identified for clarity and consistency.
• Drive engagement with embedded gamification. Award badges and provide recognition to users based on their contributions and activities.

The HCM technology market is undergoing a significant shift. As we move from systems of transactions to systems of engagement, traditional “HCM” processes will be redefined, and it is only natural that new solution providers emerge from outside the HCM space. The move by NewsGator to deliver on highly targeted social learning use cases is the latest case-in-point, as well as a broader signal to the market that HCM technologies can come from non-HCM vendors.

While you’re checking out the many vendors at this year’s HR Technology Conference, I encourage you to stop by the booths of “non-traditional HCM” vendors as well. The door is open for social technology vendors to expand beyond their social collaborative networking foundations and deliver next-generation approaches to traditional learning, talent management and other “people” processes. I expect we’ll see more from NewsGator and others like them in the future, as “HR Technology” gives way to more business outcomes focused “Work Management Technology.”

¹(Disclosure: NewsGator and Yammer are both clients of Constellation Research client).

Behind the Scenes in Polycom's RealPresence CloudAXIS Announcement

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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Polycom announced today a strategy with a supporting products and services portfolio to support it. One element of this strategy is called Polycom RealPresence CloudAXIS. The idea behind CloudAXIS is that any standards-based endpoint can connect, but what is new is that those using Google Talk, Skype, and potentially other presence-based IM clients can connect too.

What is missing is a clear explanation of how this solution works. I'll try to provide the details.

Essentially, the new user interface Polycom has created, the UX, has hooks that allow it to federate presence and instant messaging with Skype, Google Talk, Facebook, Microsoft Lync, IBM Sametime, and presumable other IM engines in the future.

One key here is that the person initiating a conference needs to be using Polycom's client; this can be on a PC, Mac, or tablet, or it could be on a professional or group video endpoint controlled through Polycom's new tablet interface. 

The way it works is that the person using the Polycom client drags "buddies" he/she wants in the video conference into a conference area on the screen (reminiscent of Avaya's Flare interface), and then clicks on a "start conference" button. Clicking the start conference button sends an IM to those who are invited to the conference containing a hyperlink. Those using Skype, Google Talk, Facebook, etc.,  click on the link to join the conference. Clicking on the link opens up their browser, and they are connected.

The important element here is that this *is not* using the native video capabilities in Skype or Google Talk. It is using the codecs available in the browser, and only HTML5 browsers are supported. Thus, this is not an H.264 SVC-based conference, nor does it support wideband audio. Skype has its own proprietary SILK codec and Google licenses technology from Vidyo, so don't think you'll be using these codecs when in a browser call with Polycom CloudAXIS... it will be using one of the freely available codecs that do not require a license that are available in the browser.

Of course, on the back end of this solution is Polycom's SBC (OEM'd from Edgewater Networks), and Polycom RMX video bridges or potentially the new RealPresence 800s virtual MCU that runs on off the shelf servers. This will provide secure firewall traversal and secure entry into the conference.

Polycom is positioning its CloudAXIS solution as both a premises-based offering and an offering available to service providers. Besides being able to allow lots of users to easily connect, it is intended to discourage or limit use of over the top solutions like Skype or Google Talk that may cause security concerns.

For now, though, this solution is not running the new H.264 SVC or AVC video codecs.



 

News Analysis: SnapLogic Snaps Up $20M In Series C Funding For Cloud Integration

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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Ignition Partners Injects $20M in Series C For Hot Cloud Integration Market

On September 19th,2012,  SnapLogic closed its Series C funding round.  The latest funding round:

• Strengthens product offerings. SnapLogic offers an integration platform, integration server, integration design tool, and integration market place designed for the cloud world. With almost 100 Snaps in its appstore and almost 200 built to date, users can easily integrate best of breed cloud apps in thousands of combinations. The ecosystem includes free snaps such as Amazon EC2, Box, Clarizen, Facebook, Flickr, Four Square, Twitter, Yelp, and Zoho. Paid snaps include popular enterprise apps such as Coupa, Eloqua, Financial Force, MarkLogic, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, NetSuite, Oracle Peoplesoft, Parature, RightNow, Salesforce.com, SAP, and Zuora.
  
  (POV): Customers and prospects can expect SnapLogic to invest the new funds in engineering.  Key areas of focus include improving the user experience, easing the cost of ownership, and delivering improved SDKs. Expect Snaplogic to also improve the creation of plugins by enterprise customers.  Many customers have also built their own Snaps.

• Opens up doors to the Igntion Partners network. Led by Ignition Partners and joined by Triangle Peak Partners, the Series C round complements Andreesen Horowitz existing investments of $10M in Series B and the Series A round of $4.8M with Andreesen Horowitz and Floodgate.
  
  Point of View (POV): Investment by Igntion opens up opportunities within the portfolio. Key synergies include companies such as Cloudera, DocuSign, Fireaps, mFoundry, Service Mesh, Visible, and Zenprise.  SnapLogic already works within several Andreesen Horowitz investments including TideMark.

• Improves distribution. Success in the enterprise has focused around key industries such as telecom, technology, entertainment, financial services and retail.  SnapLogic has won many large accounts and sees continued growth in North America.
  
  (POV): Constellation expects SnapLogic to focus in on expanding their North American sales force and distribution channels.  EMEA growth will probably come from the more mature cloud markets in the UK over the next 12 months.

The Bottom Line: Best of Breed Cloud Hell Requires Next Generation Simple Integration Solutions

The proliferation of cloud applications, consumerization of IT, and need for innovation at the edges, creates an an amazing opportunity for next generation cloud integration vendors.  Buyers seek easy to own interoperability among their best of breed cloud environments.  With business leaders leading the decision making, companies such as SnapLogic have an opportunity to address a need for simplicity in integration. More importantly, enterprise customers also seek the ability to build their own integrations using the same tools.

Your POV.

How are you handling cloud integration? Do you use SnapLogic or another vendor? 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 business strategy efforts.  Here’s how we can assist:

• Assessing social business/digital marketing readiness
• Considering a crowdsourcing and prediction markets strategy
• Developing your social business/digital marketing  strategy
• Designing a data to decisions strategy
• Create a new vision of the future of work
• Deliver a new customer experience and engagement strategy
• Crafting a new matrix commerce strategy

Related Research
Quark Summary: What CFOs Need to Know About SaaS and Cloud Integration

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 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 – 2012 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!

News Analysis: Spigit Buys CrowdCast To Corner Innovation Life Cycle Market

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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On September 18, 2012, Pleasanton, CA based Spigit, a social innovation vendor acquired Crowdcast, a San Francisco based social business intelligence pioneer for an undisclosed sum.  Crowdcast Founder/CEO Mat Fogarty and Chief Scientist Leslie Fine will join Spigit’s executive team as part of the acquisition. Crowdcast is backed by Menlo Ventures and Alsop Louie Partners.

Spigit, which has raised over $26M to date, brings 1200+ worldwide customers that can benefit from the Crowdcast offering.  Key customers include MetLife, American Express, Walmart, GE, Pepsico, Nike, Merck, Sprint, Farmers Insurance, CapGemini, and Warner Brothers.  Crowdcast customers include SAP, Boeing, Hershey’s, iARPA, and Electronic Arts.

This acquisition signifies larger trends for customers in the crowdsourcing and innovation market who:

• Seek the ability to move from crowd sourced data to actionable decisions. Founded in 2007, Crowdcast allows companies to crowd source organizational knowledge and intelligence from employees and partners to improve decision making.  Crowdcast tracks and rewards employees for their accuracy in predictions.  Meanwhile, Spigit Engage provides the key tools  to match social collaboration with traditional work flow. Spigit ICON supports ideation via a question and answer format. As part of the agreement, Spigit will add four Crowdcast patents to its patent portfolio.
  
  Point of View (POV): Spigit’s core customers expect to move beyond social collaboration and ideation in isolation.  Spigit’s integration with Sharepoint, Yammer, Jive, and Facebook will expand the reach of these solutions through partnerships.  In addition, Spigit’s core offerings, Engage and ICON, support the innovation process from concept to execution while Crowdcast delivers innovation from post execution to prediction.  Pairing these two powerful capabilities closes the loop from data to decisions.  With informed people and processes, organizations can seek follow-through to decisions and actions from crowd sourced data.  Should the combined entity achieve integration, customers will achieve this end to end capability.

• Expect to transform innovation from art to discipline.  As part of the agreement, Spigit will add all of Crowdcast’s patents to its portfolio.  The combination allows customers to take traditionally qualitative approaches and craft repeatable and quantifiable results.
  
  (POV): Customers can manage their overall innovation investment as portfolios and accordingly plan, visualize, manage, and improve. Competitive advantages comes from the accuracy in predicting innovation through metrics such as return on innovation, risk on innovation, and forecasting.

The Bottom Line: Customers Seek Outcomes Not Solutions In Innovation

The acquisition provides an opportunity to address a market for delivering outcomes not just solutions in innovation through crowd sourcing techniques, innovation portfolio management, and social intelligence.Conversations with a dozen of Constellation’s 2012 SuperNova Award finalists indicate that the innovation process can no longer be a one-off.  Executives expect innovation processes to not only be measurable, but also repeatable.

Your POV.

Have you used a crowdsourcing and ideation platform? Do you have an idea what tools are more effective than others?  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 business strategy efforts.  Here’s how we can assist:

• Assessing social business/digital marketing readiness
• Considering a crowdsourcing and prediction markets strategy
• Developing your social business/digital marketing  strategy
• Designing a data to decisions strategy
• Create a new vision of the future of work
• Deliver a new customer experience and engagement strategy
• Crafting a new matrix commerce strategy

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Reprints

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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 client list on the Constellation Research website.

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

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The Path to Social Talent: What is Your Vendor's Route?

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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There is an interesting tug of war taking place in the world of social talent management software. Some players take the side that “social” should be a core competency of the talent platform, and hence delivered natively with that solution/suite. Others consider social a technology that should be plugged into talent and human capital management (HCM) solutions, and are developing various connectors to fit the different social tools. Yet still others are taking a hybrid approach – acquiring social technologies with a view toward deep and unique leverage of the social platform, while building plug-ins to additional social tools.

Different approaches will certainly yield different results. Integrating social to bring activity streams and social conversations into a talent process is a good first step, but even in today’s early adopter market the emerging buyers for social talent software are looking for greater benefits from their social investments. Building out (or acquiring and deeply integrating) a social platform to bring social collaboration into a suite of talent processes can be a game changer for organizations, but what if other social tools are already in use? Will the enterprise end up with too many tools, too much noise and ultimately face social fatigue?

Let the technology vendors duke out the “HOW” of “getting to social.”  Buyers should instead focus on the “WHAT”: what business value is generated from these newly social applications? Ultimately the vendor needs to demonstrate, and buyers will need to prove to their own organizations, that investments in social technologies yield results such as these:

• Sustainable employee engagement, not just a short term increase from a passing fad;
• Beyond connections and file sharing – although this is a good start – improvement in how work gets done (efficiency, quality, improved productivity, cost reductions, etc.);
• Rapid access to knowledge and expertise wherever it resides across the enterprise;
• Accelerated innovation;
• Improved workforce connectedness for frictionless work;
• Revenue creation;
• Improved customer outcomes.

Look for my latest Quark titled “Understanding the Paths to Social HCM: Evaluating Integrated vs. Embedded Social Technologies for HCM,” now available to all Constellation Research clients. I’ll also touch on this topic in my upcoming presentation at HR Technology Conference in Chicago, on Wednesday October 10, entitled “The Social Enterprise: New Tools Transform How Work Gets Done”.