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Event Report: The Day 0 & Day 1 Tweet Stream From #OOW12

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…...

Enjoy the Day 0 and Day 1 Tweet stream.

The Storify Tweet Stream

Related Research:

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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 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!

Tech Optimization Innovation & Product-led Growth Leadership Chief Experience Officer

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Event Report: Preview 1 & The Keynotes At Constellation's Connected Enterprise 2012 (#CCE2012)

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

Think TED Meets Enterprise For The C-Suite

We are almost 30 days away from Constellation’s flagship event -Connected Enterprise 2012! This event from November 9th to 11th, 2012, celebrates innovation in the enterprise and the impact of disruptive technologies on business. Our theme for 2012 and 2013 centers on the “Art of the Possible”.

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.

Over 200 participants will enjoy this experiential 3-day, 2-night executive retreat that includes mind expanding keynotes from visionaries and futurists, interactive best practices panels, deep 1:1 20 minute interviews w/ market makers, rapid fire high energy new technology demos, The Constellation SuperNova Awards event, a golf outing, and an experiential companion program.

Building on the success of our event in 2011 and input from clients and attendees, this year’s themes align with our research themes:

The Future of Work
Next Generation Customer Experience
The Shift From Data To Decisions
Digital Marketing Transformation
Matrix Commerce
Technology Optimization and Innovation
The New C-Suite and Consumerization of IT

Learn From Thought Leaders At #CCE2012

Come hear from the world’s top thinkers. We’ve assembled a wide range of experts who will touch on the key issues of our time. Join us for an interactive Q&A session with:

Dr. Janice Presser, CEO and Principal of The Gabriel Institute. In 1984, two behavioral scientists – Dr. Janice Presser and Dr. Jack Gerber – set out to find an answer to the question “What really happens when people ‘team’ together?” Twenty-five years of research and testing, including nine years of software development, produced technology engineered to identify and organize the ways in which people interact in teams. When you register for CCE 2012, you will have the opportunity to experience Teamability for yourself. Join Dr. Janice as she shares with you the new ‘metrics of teaming’ that emerge from this new technology, and the ways in which Teamability will play a critical role in the Future of Work. An interactive Q&A session with Dr. Presser and Mark Talaba, EVP and a Principal of The Gabriel Institute, will follow. Also check them out on IndieGogo as they crowd fund their next breakthrough.

Love Goel, CEO of GVG Capital and “Father of Multi-Channel Retail”. Love will dynamically describe the convergence of disruptive technologies and how this has created a seismic powershift. Why? For the first time in human history, buyers of products and services have better information than purveyors at the point of purchase — eviscerating old business models and market leaders. Learn how innovative companies are exploiting this powershift to transform the consumer experience and their industries from banking to retail, and healthcare to media.

Tom Kelley, General Manager and Co-Founder of IDEO Design. Tom will be keynoting our SuperNova Awards ceremony speaking on key ingredients in the recipe for innovation and how Design Thinking and innovation go hand in hand.Tom’s presentation will highlight the meta-lessons his firm IDEO has learned from working with its B2B and B2C clients on thousands of innovation programs. He will describe how companies of all kinds can achieve renewed energy and improved agility by creating an environment in which creative problem solving contributes to innovation and growth

Linda Rottenberg, “Miss Davos”, Co-Founder and CEO of Endeavor Global. As the global landscape shifts, including the rise of growth markets, so does the role of managers within organizations. Linda will outline practical ways to cultivate a leadership style that spells success in the new global economy. Using inspirational examples, Rottenberg will explain: using chaos as a catalyst; designing products and services to be locally relevant; scaling teams (including decentralized ones) in a unified way; building trust in business relationships; and fostering “psychic equity” within a team or company to ensure shared goals. Attendees will also come away with practical tips for adopting an entrepreneurial mindset needed to succeed in the new “Innovation Generation.”

Michael Mandelbaum, Co-Author w/ Tom Friedman “That Used to Be Us”. Michael will speak based on the ideas presented in Michael Mandelbaum and Thomas Friedman’s bestselling book, That Used to Be Us. Michael Mandelbaum, one of our leading foreign policy thinkers, offers both a wake-up call and a call to collective action. He will analyze the four challenges we face—globalization, the revolution in information technology, the nation’s chronic deficits, and our pattern of excessive energy consumption—and spell out what we need to do now to sustain the American dream and preserve American power in the world.

Anne Lise Kjaer, Futurist and Visionary Thinker of Kjaer Global. Kjaer’s presentation delivers insights into some of the key drivers shaping the mindsets of tomorrow’s people and highlight what marketers should consider to remain relevant and successful. Kjaer will look at how society and consumer will change in the age where social capital, people engagement and transparency sets the agenda for the 21st century businesses.

Part 2: Market Maker 1:1?s From The Industry’s Most Sought After Leaders

In our second preview, we’ll talk about the Market Maker 1:1?s we’ll be having with Aaron Levie of Box, Adam Pisoni of Yammer, Mike Ehrenberg of Microsoft, and Vishal Sikka of SAP.

Come Join Us At CCE2012

Register for the event

Check out the full schedule:

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.

Data to Decisions Future of Work Marketing Transformation Matrix Commerce New C-Suite Next-Generation Customer Experience Tech Optimization Innovation & Product-led Growth Leadership Chief Experience Officer

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3 rules when choosing your mobile devices: remember, your vendor can mess you (both enterprises and individuals) up, intentionally

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…...

In the past week there has been much anxiety in the iPhone world, with Apple displacing the well liked Google Maps for its own poorly received new mapping application. Apple has promised to improve, and it likely will. But avoiding blind acceptance of vendor-proffered futures is a must. In the world of mobile devices, the need to choose devices carefully, applying some selection rules, has become an imperative if you — whether as a BYOD owner or an enterprise — are not to find yourselves hung out to dry.

In my 2010 book — Explaining iTunes, iPhones and iPads: for Windows Users (and now well out of date) — two specific ideas were explored. The first was that Apple consciously adopts an approach best summed up as AKWIBFY,NY (or Apple Knows What Is Best For You, Not You). Yet again Apple has demonstrated this in iOS6 with its removal of the Google Maps app and replacement by its sub-standard in-house developed mapping app. At the same time the book described the iTunes environment as being like an octopus – with the iTunes Store as the body, the Internet as the tentacles and the iTunes app on Pc or Mac, on the iPad and on the iPhone as the sucker — to suck you into Apple and then to extract as much money as practical while leaving you no escape. While there is little doubt that iOS6 is an improvement on previous versions, now consider a further aspect that few comment upon. Though iOS6 will run on an iPhone 3GS (but not 3G), 4 and 4S iPhones it slows each one down, the more so the older the device. If one suspected a conspiracy you might argue this was deliberate, to force you (sorry… ’encourage’ you) to upgrade… Sadly, none of the above seems to be about listening to customers or giving them what they need. Instead the emphasis is on what Apple needs, irrespective.

Apple, however, is not the only guilty party. Take two other examples – Sony and Samsung, albeit with rather different implications.

Sony seems to believe it has some form of special design that permits it to ignore customers in their own interest (but actually in Sony’s interest). No wonder Sony continues to suffer, and it deserves to continue suffering while behaving like it does. For example, should you have bought a relatively recent Sony laptop (in the last 3-5 years) you will discover an attitude which can be summarized as: ‘if you do anything to your device (like open it) the device warranty is invalid’. Only Sony can open one of its devices (often at great customer expense), even for something as common as replacing a hard disk. But Sony goes further, in ways that are arguably more insidious. It produces laptops on which it it actively prevents upgrading. Should you have had the misfortune to buy a Vaio with Vista on it, one which was not rated for Windows 7, too bad — Sony will do nothing for you, not even provide drivers or an option to pay to upgrade. The Sony ‘solution’ is you should buy another (Sony) device. Sadly the same will likely be true on Sony laptops for moving from Windows 7 to 8. Again, the vendor is acting to inhibit the customer (whether that customer is a BYOD one or an enterprise), even if a customer is prepared to accept responsibility for his or her actions. (To be fair to Sony, on its top end Vaio laptops that it alleges are beloved of enterprise executives, it initially disabled the inbuilt Intel virtualization capability — only to change the BIOS to enable it after a storm of protest. Unfortunately this change of heart did not come with an opening of access to the commonly accepted Insyde H2O BIOS, thus preserving other Sony-desired constraints and probably inhibiting moves to Windows 8 ).

Samsung is not necessarily much better, but there is a difference — as we shall see. If you bought an original Galaxy Tab 7? tablet this came with Android 2.2 (Froyo). Many months later than Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) became available from Google, Samsung belatedly upgraded users to 2.3 — while also making clear that this upgrade was its limit and customers should expect no more (at least from Samsung). If you want a later version of Android, buy a Galaxy Tab2 (the ‘buy another device from us refrain is beginning to become dully repetitive’).

But the original Galaxy Tab 7? tablet was popular. This meant it had attracted a community of interest that worked first to root the device and then to bring version 2.3 to the Galaxy Tab 7? much esooner than Samsung did. Since then that community has brought Android 3 (Honeycomb), then 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and now 4.1 (Jelly Bean) to this and selected (popular) other devices, whether tablets or smartphones. Furthermore, these unauthorized OS implementations run well, not least because they are uncluttered by the volume of unnecessary vendor-supplied skins and apps on them (it is a sad fact that the bloatware that is now regarded as sloppy practice on laptops and PCs has re-emerged with a vengeance to clog up many tablets and smartphones). In addition, rooted devices frequently are more up-to-date and with better anti-virus, management and other protections than leaving older OS versions in place.

What lessons should enterprises and BYOD draw from these examples? Here are three:

Choose your device (laptop, tablet and/or smartphone) with an eye to popularity. The more popular the device, the more likely there will be a community to provide ongoing improvements into the future, and long after your vendor has given up. This applies as much to iOS devices (where a thriving jailbroken community exists, because Apple devices are so common) as much as to selected Android devices, where the Samsung SII and SIII are obvious equivalent attractions.
Research the constraints that a possible vendor may place or introduce to prevent upgrading or improvement. Attitudes like those exemplified by Sony (and to a lesser extent by Apple and Samsung) represent a hindrance to the enterprise and the BYOD owner trying to use his or her purchase within the enterprise. Vote with your wallet and do not permit vendors to railroad you into buying new devices when you do not need them. You should expect a modern smart device to have practical usability of a minimum of three years and probably four (though this will not apply to technology fashionistas).
Do not write-off rooted or jailbroken devices as automatically suspect (as many enterprises are prone to do). In fact the inverse may be more accurate. A rooted or jailbroken device may possess a sounder environment with less risk than a vendor-supplied one, and probably with a longer OS life as well as an upgrade/improvement path. Of course care is necessary. Yet longevity matters and controlled jailbreaking or rooting by enterprises for BYOD customers make yet make an immense amount of sense, save much money and enable your investment to last much longer than vendors seem to want.

Next month Windows 8 arrives and probably Windows Phone 8. With these will come a myriad of new laptops, tablets and smart phones that will be bought by the BYOD community and by enterprises (one of the great potential strengths of Microsoft’s products are that it does understand the enterprise, though it remains to be seen how well this will work with the various versions of Windows 8 running across PCs, laptops, tablets and smartphones). In general, with Windows Phone 7.x devices being a recent and obvious exception, Microsoft is good about enabling users to upgrade from prior versions of Windows (this is has not always been simple but has usually been practical).

Windows 8 has an opportunity to bypass the many confusions (whether technical or of delivery) that vendors of Android and of iOS currently offer, though whether this will materialize with Windows 8 remains to be seen. You should apply the three lessons described above to Windows 8 devices. Yet it would be so much simpler for enterprises and BYOD users if these unnecessary complications and constraints as currently applicable in the iOS and Android worlds become unnecessary considerations… Enterprises and BYOD owners would both benefit together.

New C-Suite

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Event Report: The Tweet Stream From #DF12

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

Enjoy the tweet stream from #DF12. It’s all in here.

The Storify Tweet Stream

Related Research:

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.

New C-Suite Tech Optimization Innovation & Product-led Growth Leadership Chief Experience Officer

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Event Report: Dreamforce X (#DF12) Emerges As The South By Southwest (#SXSW) For The Enterprise

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

Dreamforce Represents The Mecca For The “Art Of The Possible” In The Enterprise

Whether Salesforce.com’s flagship conference at Moscone Center was the most attended conference (~48,000) or the most registered for event (~90,000), matters not. When examined in context of the magnitude of what was accomplished, the impact of this 10th annual event transcends attendance numbers. Business folks and the converted IT brethren converged on the week of September 18th, 2012, to see what the future could be inside the enterprise. They left with inspiration and the gospel of what was possible, as told by those before them. The event represented the intersection of where aspiration meets innovation for the enterprise.

Key takeaways from interviews with over 100 attendees reflect the following trends:

Attendee sentiment signals the return of the front office. Prior to the coining of the CRM term, front office was the term which defined marketing, service, eCommerce, and sales force automation. The move back to integrated customer experiences reflects a renewed interest in all the front office touch points and all the support in the back office required to support the customer experience. Attendees walked in with questions about how to integrate their legacy ERP and expose their transactional systems into the front office.
Customers seek knowledge and case studies on business transformation. Delegations arrived to see how they could change their business. Most came with both business and IT to learn from the best practices of others. Almost every customer case study session was packed and common questions revolved around, “How did you do that?”
Product announcements and pre-announcements bring the enterprise closer to the consumer experience. Pre-announcement of Salesforce Identity for Winter 2013 will provide users with Facebook-like single sign on and identity management services. The availability of the Touch Platform services will provide a write once, deploy anywhere touch based mobile UI Experience. The pre-announcement of the Force.com Canvas provides a UI layer to run any other application within the Salesforce.com environment. The App Exchange Checkout delivers out of the box billing for developers and improves the users app store experience. Geolocation capabilities in the pilot of database.com in the Winter 2013 release will improve mobile experiences. Chatter communities pilot in Fall of 2012 and pre-announcement addresses the issue of multiple group management.
Salesforce.com aspires to be the center of the innovation ecosystem. Many have speculated that Salesforce.com would enter the back office market with finance or HR. Others have thought it would invade the marketing automation or service ecosystem. Conversations with product strategists and executives hint that the longer term goal is to facilitate the innovation ecosystem. Recent investments in updating Force.com and initiatives to attract new ISV and system integrators to the partner ecosystem demonstrate this commitment. In fact, Workday announced Salesforce Chatter inside its core product. Infor’s CRM team has built its marketing lead generation product, Inforce Marketing on the Force.com platform. Gamification platform Badgeville joined rival Bunchball into the Salesforce.com ecosystem.

The Flickr Stream From DF12

The Bottom Line: Success Requires The Heavy Lifting From Art of The Possible To Reality

After years of cost-cutting, dictatorial IT control of technology investments, and little technological advancements, investment in innovation in the enterprise is back. As business leaders take charge of their destiny, they seek new business models empowered by new technologies. This shift reflects not only the consumerization of IT, but also the shifts to an engagement strategy. Dreamforce X demonstrated that this was more than a fad. High profile customer case studies reinforce how enterprises can change the game. Dreamforce has emerged as the place for enterprise thought leadership.

However, organizations should not be naive about the change management issues required for success. Adoption has always rested with the people. Organizations require time and repetition to reinforce transformational principles. In addition, technology governance is required to avoid issues with SaaS/Cloud best of breed hell when line of business leaders rapidly and randomly deploy solutions without considering process granularity, data integrity, and meta data integration. Significant effort is required to provide an engagement layer for mobile, social, and analytics. Keep in mind, Salesforce.com lacks an analytics platform.

Dreamforce showed the art of the possible. Management teams must take the next step of investing in the change management and the architectural integrity required to make it possible. The journey won’t be a simple plug and play, but it will be much better than what we experienced the last cycle.

Your POV.

Have you drank the kool-aid from Dreamforce? Are you ready for the new shift to front office? What are you doing to deliver an integrated customer experience? 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
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:

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.

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SAP's Emerging Cloud Platform Strategy

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,…...

I participated last week in two days of SAP briefings with a group of about 15 bloggers. Part of the time was devoted to explaining SAP's evolving cloud strategy, which I will attempt to summarize in this post.

Keep in mind that what I'm sharing here is not SAP's own messaging around its cloud strategy. Rather, it is my interpretation of where SAP is going and what it needs to do to be successful.

SAP Has a Proliferation of Cloud Assets

Over the past few years, SAP has been at work rolling out a number of cloud services. The most well-known is Business ByDesign (ByD), a full-suite ERP system, written from the ground up for software-as-a-service (SaaS). This was an enormous development effort, and it went through two development iterations until 2011, when it was ready to scale in production. SAP now has over 1,000 customers running ByD.

Following initial delivery of ByD, SAP also began rolling out its line-of-business applications. These were built on the ByD cloud platform to meet the needs of specific business functions, such as sales force automation (Sales OnDemand) and expense reporting (Travel OnDemand). There are others, also.

Then in 2011, SAP acquired SuccessFactors, a well-respected cloud-only HRMS vendor. This greatly increased SAP's stature as a SaaS provider, but it also added another set of cloud assets and executive leadership to the mix. Further adding to the complexity: SAP is in process of acquiring Ariba, the venerable provider of supplier networking services.

From Cloud Applications to a Cloud Platform

In my view, the current situation has led to a number of problems. First, SAP's cloud portfolio is largely a collection of unrelated systems, and several different cloud platforms. There has been no common architecture, and no integrated product roadmap.

Second, the rest of SAP's product porfolio is not standing still. Specifically, SAP has been making large investments in its in-memory database technology (HANA), and it has acquired and developed an impressive array of mobility applications and mobility platforms. All of these products have cloud-delivery aspects.

Third, SAP lacks a single extensible cloud development environment. (ByD does have a PaaS capability, for partners only, but it is limited to ByD.) Customers and partners don't just want cloud apps, they want the ability to extend those apps and build new applications that can interoperate with them. In other words, they want PaaS (platform-as-a-service) in addition to SaaS.

SAP's emerging cloud strategy addresses all of these issues: it embraces all of SAP's existing applications as well as its database and mobility platforms, and it gives customers and partners a development environment to build upon and extend these services.

Here are key aspects of SAP's cloud strategy, as I see them:

Everything as a Service. Behind the scenes, SAP has been rearchitecting its SaaS offerings to be delivered as web services. For example, it has broken up ByD functionality into 32 "honeycombs," so that no two of them share a common database. Rather they communicate via messaging. SAP has taken the same approach with its line-of-business applications. In fact, all of SAP cloud applications will be deployed as web services, including its mobility and database offerings. I have to believe this also includes SuccessFactors. SAP will now be able to sell individual modules (e.g. Finance), or a complete suite, or combinations in between.
Platform-as-a-Service. SAP has built a PaaS capability, now referred to as the SAP Netweaver Cloud (earlier code-names included JPass, Neo, and Project River.) It is intended as a multi-language/multi-framework platform. It is primarily a Java-platform, but its open nature also allows development in a variety of other languages, such as Spring and Ruby. Furthermore, it allows developers to access all of the SAP cloud applications, database services, and mobility services that are now accessible via web services (see point #1). It even allows applications to access SAP on-premises systems such as SAP ECC, CRM, and HCM. Conceivably, therefore, the Netweaver Cloud could be used for customizations/extensions of SAP on-premises systems that have been traditionally done with ABAP coding.
Ecosystem. The SAP Netweaver Cloud can be used internally by customers or their system integrators, and it also can be also used by third-party developers to build new applications for sale on the SAP Store. This facilitates the growth of SAP's developer ecosystem.

The Netweaver Cloud runs in SAP's own data centers (including those gained through the acquisition of SuccessFactors). There are a number of other features, such as identity services and document services, which I won't go into in this post.

The Pluses and the Minuses

There are several things I like about SAP's emerging cloud strategy.

Integration. SAP's is finally integrating all of its cloud assets into a single platform. If successful, nearly anything SAP delivers should be available and accessible through Netweaver Cloud.
Openness. Netweaver Cloud does not use a proprietary language, like Salesforce.com's APEX. Use of public development languages, such as Java and Ruby, facilitates adoption by developers and also works against lock-in to a single platform. Likewise, the PaaS makes use of open source projects from Apache and Eclipse, which should further facilitate adoption by developers.
Availability. Netweaver Cloud has already been released to customers, and it is scheduled for general availability at the end of this month. A free 90 day trial is already being offered. This puts SAP out ahead of Oracle, whose Oracle Public Cloud is still in controlled availability (though hopefully there will be announcements at Oracle's Open World conference next month).

On the other hand, there are some aspects that give me concern.

Will Customers Understand It? The cloud-only providers have one great advantage: simplicity. Everything Salesforce.com builds is on its Force.com platform. Likewise, enterprise cloud leaders such as NetSuite and Workday grew up with single platforms. Their platforms are relatively easy to explain and easy to understand. SAP, on the other hand, has a variety of on-premises and cloud systems. Furthermore, it has built or acquired a variety of database products and mobility applications and platforms. The SAP cloud platform must now deal with all of these products. It's not easy to explain, as witnessed by the difficulty SAP's own team had in communicating it with our group of tech bloggers. If the bloggers struggle with understanding it, what hope does SAP have to make the message clear to customers or prospects?
Will Developers Adopt It? Developers are a key to success in cloud systems, just as they are in mobility applications. Salesforce.com already has a large and enthusiastic ecosystem of developers for its Force.com platform. Microsoft has an enormous ecosystem of development partners, for whom Microsoft's cloud platform (Azure) is more-or-less an incremental step in using existing Microsoft development tools. Will SAP's current population of partners readily embrace Netweaver Cloud, or will they be content to continue development in the SAP tools they have been using for years?
Is SAP Too Late? Salesforce.com's PaaS was first introduced in 2006 (I wrote about it at the time, here). NetSuite has had CloudSuite for years. Microsoft has already rolled out and continues to refine its Azure PaaS. SAP is only now rolling out Netweaver Cloud. Though SAP denies this, I do believe that its cloud development efforts in recent years have taken a back seat to its database and mobility development efforts. So now, SAP is playing catch-up. SAP has a lot of work to do to be perceived as a cloud leader.

Regarding that last point, on the other hand, my research at Computer Economics shows that PaaS is a technology that is still in the early adopter phase. Most organizations are still buying individual SaaS applications and have not yet made a strategic commitment to cloud computing as a platform. They have hybrid systems: some on-premises, and some in the cloud. Of course, there are exceptions: these are the early adopters that embrace cloud computing not only for SaaS applications but for PaaS as a development strategy. Nevertheless, the majority have not yet seen the vision. Therefore, if SAP can quickly make its cloud strategy clear and deliver working product, it may still have a shot at being a major player.

Here are some reports from other bloggers who were at this event:

Vijay Vijayasankar: SAP Needs A Better Cloud And Platform Story, And A Good Story Teller
Jarret Pazahanick: SAP Briefing - Cloud, Mobility and HCM
Fellow bloggers Vijay Vijayasankar, Jon Reed, John Appleby, and Harald Reiter: Video discussion on SAP Cloud, Mobility, and Database Strategy

Disclosure: SAP paid for part of my travel expenses to this event.

SAP in Transition on Mobile, Cloud, and In-Memory Computing
SAP innovating with cloud, mobile and in-memory computing
Salesforce.com to allow customization of its hosted service

Tech Optimization

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Press Release: New Report by Constellation Research Addresses Customer Support Outsourcers’ Incorporation of Social Media and Mobile Apps

San Francisco – September 19, 2012 Constellation Research, Inc., the award-winning research and advisory firm focused on disruptive technologies announced the publication of "Innovative Customer Service Outsourcers Expand Channel Support", a new research report authored by Vice President and Principal Analyst, Elizabeth Herrell, that identifies how market-leading outsourcers enhance customer experience via support of social media and mobile apps.

This report reveals:

Innovative customer support outsourcers must embrace new modes of engagement and deliver integrated support across all channels.
The customer support paradigm is changing. The key to innovative customer support is to evolve with the customer.
Best practices for supporting the next generation social customer
How six innovative customer support outsourcers engage their customers on social and mobile applications

Customer adoption of social media and mobile apps grows steadily, yet many companies fail to integrate these newer channels of communication into their core customer support operations, often resulting in fragmented customer experience. Although customer support outsourcers handle millions of transactions daily, only a handful of outsourcers effectively support social and mobile apps. Constellation Research’s new report provides insight into how market-leading outsourcers support this growing trend and provides best practices for engaging their services.

Herrell said, “This is uncharted territory for many customer support outsourcers and it is important for companies to understand and require that their outsourcer provides comprehensive support across these newer and fast growing channels.”

This latest report fits into Constellation’s business-focused research theme, Next Generation Customer Experience.

THE REPORT

More information about "Innovative Customer Service Outsourcers Expand Channel Support" can be found here: http://constellationrg.com/research/2012/09/innovative-customer-service-...

ABOUT Elizabeth Herrell

Elizabeth Herrell is Vice President and Principal Analyst covering Unified Communications and Collaboration, Social Business, and Contact Centers. Elizabeth’s current research is directed on the convergence of UC and collaboration solutions, premise and cloud based solutions, and next generation customer experience including social, mobile, and video applications.

COORDINATES

Constellation: http://constellationrg.com/users/eherrell

Twitter: @ eherrell

Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethherrell250

Geo: Flagstaff, Arizona

NEXT GENERATION CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Customers are moving rapidly to a People-to-People (P2P) world where B2B and B2C no longer make sense. Customers seek simplicity in their customer experiences and will only choose to engage when approached with the appropriate context. Consequently, customers don't care what department they talk to for marketing, sales, and service. They expect an organization to act as one entity and their front office experiences to meet the same experiences regardless of touch point.

As customer centricity plays a greater role in the design of each interaction point from the front office to the back office, new paradigms in user experience, social interactions, mobility, and big data play a big role in crafting these experiences. Because an individual can play different roles that carry different levels of expectations, organizations must prepare for a world that expects real-time context, not right time bombardment.

Lead analysts: Elizabeth Herrell and Dr. E. Brent Kelly

ABOUT CONSTELLATION RESEARCH

Constellation Research is a research and advisory firm focused on disruptive and emerging technologies. This renowned group of experienced analysts, led by R "Ray" Wang, focuses on business-themed research including the Future of Work; Next Generation Customer Experience; From Data to Decisions; Matrix Commerce; Technology Optimization and Innovation; and Consumerization of IT and the New C-Suite.

Constellation's collection of prestigious analysts bring real world experience, independence, and objectivity to client solutions that span cross-role, cross-functional, and cross-industry points of view. Clients join Constellation Research for a fresh and business focused perspective.

Unlike the legacy analyst firms, Constellation Research is disrupting how research is accessed, what topics are covered, and how clients can partner with a research firm to achieve success. Over 100 clients have joined from an ecosystem of buyers, partners, solution providers, c-suite, board of directors and vendor clients.

For more information about Constellation Research, visit www.ConstellationRG.com

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Read more about Press Release: New Report by Constellation Research Addresses Customer Support Outsourcers’ Incorporation of Social Media and Mobile Apps

Gifts in the Cloud: Salesforce and Amazon Deliver on Employee Rewards

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…...

sfdc amazon

Salesforce.com is rolling out its new Work.com platform this week at Dreamforce 2012 (#DF12) in San Francisco. As discussed earlier this month, Workday features prominently as a critical partnership in the Work.com offering, although it was nowhere to be seen in the “Work.com” product area of the Salesforce Campground on Tuesday evening (“Day 1 at the Dreamforce Expo).

However, what was visible on Tuesday was the new rewards platform in Work.com, where employees and managers are able to earn and award not just badges and points but now also gift cards as part of the fulfillment component of an employee rewards program. Here at Dreamforce, Salesforce will be announcing their partnership with Amazon to enable gift cards as a new component of their rewards platform.

Tech-enabled social recognition and performance solutions are on the rise, incorporating peer-to-peer recognition delivered in a social environment integrated with a rewards platform that increasingly includes gift cards and other merchandise. The latest strategies take traditional recognition programs focused on event-driven milestones and pre-determined rewards and merchandise levels and transform them into a real-time, contextual social and performance-based solution that taps into the unique motivators of individuals.

In a market that is estimated in size at 2% of company payroll, it is not surprising that Salesforce is expanding its social performance platform to play where companies like Achievers, Globoforce, O.C. Tanner, Rideau and many others have already staked their claim. Utilizing a cloud provider like Amazon is a natural step for Salesforce, and I expect many similarly situated partners will be brought together into a comprehensive rewards network where companies can plug into and tailor solutions for the unique needs of their organizations and individual employees.

Future of Work

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Does Your Customer Support Outsourcer Integrate Social and Mobile Apps?

Constellation Orbits
Constellation Research, Inc.

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

It is not uncommon for in-house customer support organizations to mistakenly believe it is not their responsibility to support non-legacy channels, such as social media and mobile apps and will defer to the marketing or other departments to provide this support. This gap becomes even a bigger issue when companies consider outsourcing only their core customer support channels, such as telephone support, email and Web chat. The failure to extend and integrate customer support for social media and mobile apps results in fragmented customer experiences and inconsistent responses.

When considering outsourcing customer support, it becomes critical for companies to evaluate potential customer support outsourcers on their ability to provide fully integrated support across all channels. Although customer support outsourcers handle millions of transactions daily, the reality is that only a handful of outsourcers effectively support social and mobile apps today. Constellation Research’s new report, “Innovative Customer Support Outsourcers Expand Channel Support”, provides insight into how leading outsourcers manage social and mobile channels and suggests best practices for engaging their services.

Best practices related to social and mobile app support include the following:

Engage with customers within the same site when possible. Customers have powerful communication tools at their disposal, such as Twitter and Facebook and can immediately spread opinions, comments and reviews to a vast audience over the social network. Companies need to reach out to social channels to stay in touch and monitor customer comments and views.
Support collaborative conversations. One-way delivery of information does not foster customer engagement. Customer support organizations need to listen to their customers and use their feedback to improve performance. This includes monitoring social comments for customer opinions and issues, analyzing data to gather insight into customers’ behaviors and concerns and to respond to customer posts within the applications as needed.
Link directly to mobile app. Provide customer support directly to the mobile app without requiring the user to toggle out to make a phone call or send a text message. This engages the customers more fully and promotes increased usage of the mobile app.
Respond with speed and accuracy. Delayed response does not sit well with the socially engaged customer who shuns slow responses, such as email or with long delays for callbacks on problems. If a social response is too slow it may also trigger a separate incident over another channel resulting in a company handling the same request twice.
Certify representatives trained for social support. Smart outsourcers realize that a representative’s attitude and skill has a profound effect on customers. These customer support outsourcers train and certify representatives proficient in handling non-voice interactions such as SMS, text, Twitter and chat and who can quickly respond to customers over social media.
Gather insight from multiple sources. A telephone survey is not enough to collect business intelligence on customers’ actions, views and sentiment. Look for outsourcers who provide analytics across multiple channels delivers this insight and allows companies to make changes quickly when the situation requires immediate action.

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Mobile Enterprise Business Errors (Unintended) #7: Ruining your customers experience on mobiles

Constellation Alumni

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Genesys European G-Force conference in Barcelona. Genesys has adopted the slogan “Save the world from bad customer service”. In a mobile context, three aspects raised in Barcelona deserve comment.

The first was the charming story of a child’s prized Green Pig being left, by accident, at a Los Angeles (near Hollywood) hotel. On discovering when arriving home in Europe that Green Pig was missing, the parents called the Hotel which swiftly located the missing toy and promised to mail it back as soon as possible. The hotel staff, however, went further, in best Hollywood-make-believe style. They created a short photo record of Green Pig enjoying himself away from his owner: there was a picture of Green Pig at the bar, on the running machine, tucked into bed – and finally being handed into a taxi to head to the airport for the flight home. Needless to say that extra effort, included with in the package sent, was highly appreciated when Green Pig finally rejoined his owner.

This customer-oriented excellence is the converse of what too often happens when builders of mobile apps fail to do sufficient work (or are lazy about ‘whole completion). Eric Tamblyn and Mayur Anadkat are responsible within Genesys for adding mobile capabilities as part of multi-channel (voice, IVR, web, sms, etc.) support offered on the Genesys platform. In talking with them about instances of mobile enterprise business errors (unintended) that they had come across both offered the same type of example – incomplete finishing of mobile apps as well as a failure to understand the implications and opportunities of multi-channel communication.

Take the airline KLM. It has a clean and visually appealing app. But, if the app cannot do what you want, you are referred to a contact page. On that page are phone numbers. But, if you try to click on any of these, nothing will happen – even when the app is running on a smartphone and when the logical action is to start a call when you select the phone number. Furthermore, if you do manually make a call, all context about what you (the user) were trying to do on the mobile device has gone — and effecively you have to start all over again. This is neither necessary nor desirable (from both the customer and app-owner point of view).

Put another way, an app like this is crazily incomplete, and the very antithesis of the excellence of the Green Pig customer experience. Yet do not think KLM is alone. For example, Iberia can send you an sms about a flight change and asks you to contact your nearest Iberia office — without telling you where that is (which is way more irritating than what KLM does). Many, many other enterprises, from banks to retailers, are making the same sort of error in mobile app completeness – which irritates their customers as well as overtly failing to exploit mobility.

There are variations on this. For example, should you look at the web site of the UK hotel chain Travelodge from a mobile phone browser to try to book a hotel room, it will ask you to authorize the app to find your location (presumably, if one is positive, so that it can find the nearest Travelodge to you or, if you think negatively, to track you in future). If you decline to permit the app to locate you – which may be wholly irrelevant if you are in Barcelona today and looking for a hotel in London or Manchester in 3 weeks time – you can go no further in the app. You are blocked; the potential sale is lost.

These examples of Mobile Enterprise Business Errors (Unintended) rightly infuriate. Presumably the whole purpose of building an app for a smart device is to assist, to add a new channel of communication.

KLM, Iberia and Travel Lodge are not unique. Watch out for other such unintended idiocies – and if you encounter them, send details to me at: [email protected]).

New C-Suite Tech Optimization

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