| Constellation Research

Event Report: Lithium Network Conference 2012 #LiNC

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…...

Lithium Technologies Shows Continued Customer Momentum And Success In Social Marketing And Support

To the tune of over 500 customers and prospects, Lithium kicked off LiNC on May 2nd, 2012, at the always stunning Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco. Compared to previous years, the audience was not only bigger, but also more experienced and energized. Rob Tarkoff (CEO) and Lyle Fong (Founder & Chief Strategist) kicked off the event with company updates, product road map highlights, and customer progress made over the past year.

Adding to the energy, four compelling case studies graced the morning and highlighted Lithium’s strengths in two distinct and advanced externally focused social CRM (SCRM) use cases: social customer support and marketing. The wide range of proud customers and brands included Chris Blandy, SVP of Digital Media, Fox; Mark Nichols, Director of Customer Support, Skype; Andrew Leary, EVP & GM, Ipsos; and Steve Young, Sr. Director of Technical Services, Cisco. During the event, several key announcements were made including:

Launch of a new product, Lithium Response™. In a top secret OEM partnership, the team unveiled Lithium Response™ a product that enables brands to increase customer satisfaction while reducing costs and improving efficiency in the call center. Key features include easier processes to turn community conversations from unstructured information to entries into the Lithium Tribal Knowledge Base (TKB), peer-to-peer support and gamification incentives to drive self-service customer resolution, cost effective social-web support, blended contact center capabilities, and mobile enablement. The product is generally available (GA) in Q3.

Point of View (POV): The OEM’d product comes from a little-known but powerful solution from a privately held, purpose-built social customer care platform. The product maximizes agent efficiency via categorization, prioritization and queuing, and routing. The system is smart enough to guide customers to self service by replying with relevant links to community content. This platform has been battled test with complicated communication service provider (CSP) environments. Adapted for the Lithium platform, customer can expect a rigorous enterprise class solution that lives up to Lithium’s standards. Lithium Response™ also takes advantage of Lithium’s access to the Twitter fire hose. The movement to address multi-channel customer support puts Lithium in unique league with vendors such as Genesys Labs, Kana, and Moxie Software, who can blend contact center and social support.

Delivers new release of social marketing. Building on customer feedback, the new Lithium Social Marketing Solution™ focuses on improving engagement. New features include support for rich media interactions, ad hoc groups, streaming conversations, and a new ratings and reviews module. A partnership with Shoutlet provides Facebook and Twitter campaign management. Social engagement is updated to include photo sharing, inline-conversations, groups spaces, and adoption of commons social logins. The new ratings and reviews module allows community driven content to be included via widgets. New development tools on iOS improve customer experience in the mobile interface of choice. The product is now generally available (GA).

Point of View (POV): Customers showed significant interest in the new social marketing solution features. The ability to improve ratings and reviews is much needed as this has become table steaks in communities and product catalogs. What’s impressive is the new line of partnerships that align with Lithium’s core strategy. Instead of building their own content publishing platform for campaigns, Lithium takes advantage of Shoutlet ability to place various types of content easily into the conversation. Partnerships with VMWare’s Socialcast unit allows Lithium’s Social Marketing Solution™ to integrate with internally focused collaboration tools to expedite the concept to product introduction process.

Begins concerted global expansion. Lithium announced new APAC headquarters in Singapore which add to its Sydney APAC presence. Lithium also has a strong presence in EMEA with operations in Paris, Zurich, and London.

Point of View (POV): As the market consolidates through attrition and acquisition, Lithium’s push to get more feet on the ground around the globe is much welcomed by customers. Lithium needs to expand fast and put its $53M in funding to work to acquire long-term customers in expansion markets.

Ups the ante in partnerships and alliances. New partnerships with Ipsos and Geoffrey Moore provide access to market research. Agency relationships include Sapient Nitro and Acquity group. Lithium adds software partners such as Shoutlet and VM Ware. Lithium’s approach is to find a small number but committed set of alliances and partnerships.

Point of View (POV): Lithium’s partnership and alliance program traditionally was the weakest among the major SCRM players. The addition of Ed Van Siclen, SVP of Global Alliances and BD, brings enterprise class partnerships to the Lithium’s arsenal. As SCRM matures, key partnerships with major system integrators must be prioritized as well as carefully crafted agency relationships. Software partnerships back to transactional systems such as ERP, CRM, and master data management will be key to long term success and enterprise adoption. More importantly, continued alliances with other engagement applications will keep the innovation engine alive for existing customers as they focus on improving engagement.

Figure 1. Scenes From #LiNC 2012

Source: R Wang

Recommendations

From several dozen conversations with customers and prospects at this year’s event, the following actions are suggested for prospects and customers:

Explore the new offerings for marketing and support use cases. Social Marketing shows great improvements in features and design while Response puts together a well crafted set of design points around multichannel customer support from a social point of view. As organizations move from hype to reality, a carefully crafted engagement strategy should consider these two tools. Keep in mind Lithium’s chosen to go deep and focused on two major social business use cases: support and marketing. The dedication to these use cases shows in rich offerings not only in the product, but also from the professional services team.
Consider integration options to larger use cases. As social moves from niche departmental solution to broader customer experience, customers and prospects should understand how Lithium’s partnership and alliance strategy will bring together the other pieces of customer engagement. For example, CRM or marketing automation integration is a logical next step.
Apply Constellation’s DEEPR framework in adoption of SCRM. DEEPR puts all the steps in the right sequence for successful adoption. Users can easily identify where they fit in the five levels of disruptive technology adoption. The framework applies to social business and provides the basis used in early adoption surveys such as Constellation latest report, “Lesson Learned From 100 Early Social Business Adopters

The Bottom Line: Lithium Technologies Remains On Short Lists As Organizations Make The Shift From Transactions To Engagement

Lithium’s success in the market builds on client success, one client at a time. While understated in its marketing and conservative in its approach to making bold statements, most customers rave about the ownership experience, the solution offering, and their success in achieving business value. The list of heroes and customer case studies tells the impact Lithium has had on their customers success based on improved engagement. Unlike many social vendors trading on hype and consumer fluffiness, Lithium’s set of solutions and technologies start with an enterprise class design point. The evolution to engagement systems from transactional systems will usher in an era of experiential systems which apply context to deliver agility and flexibility. Should Lithium innovate at the right pace of change, then the company will play a key role in this transition and move from engagement to experience.

Your POV.

Considering social CRM? Were you at LiNC? Not a Lithium customer? Tell us why? 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 Social CRM/ Social Business efforts. Here’s how we can assist:

Assessing social business/social CRM readiness
Developing your social business/ social CRM strategy
Vendor selection
Implementation partner selection
Connecting with other pioneers
Sharing best practices
Designing a next gen apps strategy
Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support
Demystifying software licensing

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.

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!

Marketing Transformation Future of Work Next-Generation Customer Experience Innovation & Product-led Growth Leadership Chief Experience Officer

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Mondays Musings: Why Are Innovative CIO's Betting Less On Cloud And Virtualization?

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

Innovative CIO’s Betting On Disruptive Technologies That Impact Enterprise Business Value

In the Four Personas of the Next Gen CIO published March 3, 2012, four personas of the CIO were identified: Chief Infrastructure Officer, Chief Integration Officer, Chief Intelligence Officer, and Chief Innovation Officer (see Figure 1). This research of 79 progressive CIO’s identified the key projects for each of the personas. As part of the survey, respondents were asked what key disruptive technologies would make an impact in the enterprise in the next year.

Figure 1. The Four Personas Of The Next Generation CIO

Source: Constellation Research, Inc.

In Constellation’s latest update (to be published May 2012), 105 innovative CIOs participated in the survey. The results indicate a shift away from cloud (56.4%-2012) and virtualization (29.6% – 2012) to mobile (60.2%-2012) and big data and analytics (48.7%-2012) (see Figure 2). Despite being the top projects in 2011, the drop in priority of virtualization (51.9%-2011) and cloud (69.6%-2011) doesn’t reflect the lack of interest. In fact, these projects have matured and innovative CIOs have now prioritized the next wave of innovation.

Figure 2. Over 100 Innovative CIO’s Identify The Top 3 Disruptive Technologies for 2013

Source: Constellation Research, Inc.

Some key findings:

Mobile enablement shoots to the top (60.2%). Mobile is the primary interface. Anywhere, anytime computing is here to stay and these CIOs are working on the infrastructure required to support BYOD and CoIT. App stores and mobile device management play a key role.
Cloud deployment drops but is the predominant preference (56.4%). Cloud is assumed as the deployment option of choice. CIOs now looking at providing the platforms to support apps stores, and applications development in the cloud to spur innovation.
Big data and analytics rounds out the top 3 (48.7%). Big data is hot. Today innovative CIOs take the Lytro approach. As with a light field camera where you take the picture first and then focus, big data strategies start with capture the data and find the correlations later.
Unified communications and collaboration increases in priority (41.1%). Improvements in cost performance ratios now put UC at the reach for any sized company. These tools have gone from luxury to essential with home work forces and disparate teams.
Social software enablement grows slowly among CIOs (33.4%). CIOs focus less on external social software while CMO counterparts drive the purchase and adoption. On the internal side, the data shows collaboration tied back to unified communications.

As the adoption of these disruptive technologies take shape, early adopters will find the leverage and force multipliers in the convergence of these technologies.

The Bottom Line: The Disruptive Tech Divide Creates A Huge Gap Between Winners and Losers

The gap in profits, innovation, and market share will continue to widen between the companies who adopt disruptive and emergent technologies and those who choose to stay the course. In some sense, average is over and organizations who strive for average will fail to survive. Unlike the Occupy movement, organizations should strive to be in the 1%. Why? There’s only room for the top 3 to 5 in any market segment. Those in the 99% will crumble under market forces and cease to exist.

Your POV

Are you an innovative CIO? What ‘s your point of view on which disruptive technologies are key for your transformation? 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 innovation efforts. Here’s how we can assist:

Kickstarting an innovation workshop
Starting a design thinking session
Selecting technologies that will drive disruptive business models
Connecting with other pioneers
Sharing best practices
Designing a next gen enterprise strategy

Mentions

20110303 Harvard Business Review – R “Ray” Wang “The Four Personas of the Next-Generation CIO”

20110302 CIO Magazine – Kristin Burnham “4 Personas of the Next-Generation CIO”

20110923 MidMarket CIO – R “Ray” Wang “VIDEO: The 4 Personas of the Next Generation CIO”

Related Research:

20110303 Constellation Research – R “Ray” Wang “The Four Personas of the Next-Generation CIO”

20110307 Software Insider – R “Ray” Wang “Monday’s Musings: The Race For Enterprise Class Consumer Tech”

20111226 Software Insider – R “Ray: Wang “Monday’s Musings: 10 Mega Business Trends To Watch for 2012?

20110621 Software Insider R “Ray” Wang “Research Report: How SaaS Adoption Trends Show New Shifts In Technology Purchasing Power”

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

Read more about Mondays Musings: Why Are Innovative CIO's Betting Less On Cloud And Virtualization?

Infor’s Two-Pronged Cloud 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,…...

While enterprise cloud computing pioneers such as NetSuite and Salesforce.com get much of the attention, there is some interesting cloud-work going on among traditional enterprise software providers. One such provider is Infor.

I had the opportunity to get an update on Infor’s cloud computing program last week, at Infor’s annual user conference, Inforum. The bottom line: I see Infor’s cloud strategy as having two prongs, and it is beginning to bear fruit.

I gave a brief overview of my thoughts on Infor’s cloud strategy in my video interview with Dennis Howlett. In this blog post, I expand on those initial thoughts.

Infor Representative of Traditional Enterprise Software Providers

Infor is generally known as a vendor that has accumulated a huge portfolio of enterprise software, by acquiring a number of players over the past decade. As a result, it claims an installed base of over 70,000 customers, making it the third largest enterprise applications provider by revenue, following SAP and Oracle. As such, it epitomizes the dilemma that such enterprise software providers face:

They are competing against cloud-only ERP providers, such as NetSuite, Plex, Intaact, FinancialForce, Rootstock, Kenandy, and others, who offer simple one-stop subscription-based cloud ERP. Infor is increasingly seeing these providers in net-new deals for core ERP systems, especially in the SMB market.
They are also battling against a host of cloud-based point-solution providers, who are creeping into Infor’s installed base offering everything from CRM to expense management to talent management. Infor has a number of good on-premises point solutions, but customers are increasingly finding cloud-based point solutions more attractive in terms of ease-of-implementation, flexibility, and time to value.

The largest of these cloud providers, of course, is Salesforce.com, which a number of Infor customers have already chosen for CRM. Interestingly, Infor does not have its own best of breed CRM system—even on-premises. It does have its Epiphany CRM system, but that is more of a marketing automation solution, not a sales force automation system, which is what most prospects are looking for.

Infor, as typical for most established enterprise software providers, needed an answer to both of these competitive challenges. In response, Infor has a two-pronged strategy, as I see it.

First Prong: Infor Business Cloud

The first prong of Infor’s strategy is to offer customers its own cloud solutions, both for full ERP and for point solutions. This program, first launched as Infor24 in 2006, is now branded as the Infor Business Cloud. The products offered therein are not merely hosted offerings—some of them were originally built as cloud offerings, while others are originally on-premises offerings that have been re-architected, allowing them to be deployed as multi-tenant cloud services.

In other words, Infor is not merely hosting its on-premises offerings and relabeling them as “cloud” (so-called “cloud washing). In my interview with Jim Ploude, who is responsible for Infor’s cloud business, he made it clear: the cost for Infor to deliver multi-tenant cloud services is orders of magnitude lower than it is for single tenant hosted services. There are also great advantages in terms of economies of scale, administrative overhead, risk reduction, and flexibility.

For Infor customers that insist on traditional single-tenant hosted services, Infor or one of its partners can provide that. But those services are separate from Infor’s Business Cloud, which offers the full benefits of cloud computing, and are more cost-effective.

In terms of ERP, the Infor Business Cloud currently offers only its Syteline product as a cloud service. But other products—which Jim was reluctant to name—are also in the pipeline for re-architecture as cloud offerings. These will give new customers additional choices for cloud ERP.
In terms of point solutions, Infor has a broader selection of cloud services, including Infor’s Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) product (originally the Datastream acquisition), expense management, property management, workforce management, and hospitality management. Jim himself came onboard with Infor as part of the Datastream acquisition and already had extensive experience in deploying that product as a cloud service.

As I point out in the accompanying video, most of Infor’s large customer base cannot move their entire applications portfolio to the cloud. They have already invested in on-premises systems. But they are increasingly interested in cloud solutions that interoperate with their on-premises investments. Infor, therefore, must provide hybrid offerings. Hybrid cloud offerings are not a compromise—they are necessary to meet customers where they are. This first prong of Infor’s strategy, therefore, represents a pragmatic approach that can work for the majority of Infor’s customers.

Infor’s Business Cloud is more than a statement of direction—it already boasts 1,200 customers and somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.4 million named users consuming its services. Although Jim would not give specifics, I have reason to believe that the majority of these customers are for the point solutions, with cloud ERP (Syteline) representing a small, but growing, number. This is not surprising, as ERP is really the last bastion for enterprise cloud computing.

Cloud Services to Facilitate Version Upgrades

There is one more angle to Infor’s business cloud that Jim was not able to discuss at length, because Infor still has announcements pending in this area. This is in regard to the use of cloud infrastructure, such as Amazon Web Services, to facilitate customer upgrades to new versions of Infor products.

When customers are considering to upgrade an existing on-premises system, much of the preliminary planning work—such as exploring features of the new version, conference room piloting, and analyzing differences between the customer’s version (which may include source code modifications or extensions)—requires a second working instance of the application. Those activities are a natural use-case for cloud infrastructure. For vendors such as Infor, who have a large installed base of customers—a significant percentage of whom are trapped in older, highly modified versions—cloud infrastructure represents an opportunity to more quickly move those customers to new versions, where they can benefit from the new products that Infor is developing.

At Inforum, Infor was not ready to announce plans for leveraging cloud infrastructure to support customer upgrades. But there is a real need in this area, and I’m looking forward to hearing more about how Infor plans to move in this direction.

Second Prong: Partnering with Salesforce.com

The second prong of Infor’s cloud strategy is its partnership with Salesforce.com, branded “Inforce.” As Salesforce already has made inroads into Infor’s installed base, and as Infor does not have its own best-of-breed salesforce automation system, a partnership between the two players makes a lot more sense than Infor attempting to build or buy its own cloud CRM offering.

I discussed the first deliverable of this partnership, Inforce Everywhere, in my blog post, Infor and Salesforce.com: More Than a Barney Relationship, and I was happy to see one Infor executive “borrow” this phrase in an analyst briefing.

Inforce Everywhere is an application, built natively on the Force.com platform and using Infor’s lightweight ION middleware, that allows a Salesforce.com users to see Infor ERP data in Salesforce.com screens. Conversely, it gives Infor ERP users access to Salesforce.com data. As a result, users can have a 360 degree view of customer information encompassing both CRM and ERP data.

For most ERP customers buying Salesforce.com, system integrators build such integration on a one-off basis. What Inforce Everywhere does is to provide such integration as a standard product. During Inforum I had an opportunity interview Julia Klein, CEO of CH Briggs, one of the first early adopters of Inforce Everywhere, and she gave a powerful testimony of how important this integration is to her company. She said that if Infor didn’t build this integration, she would have to hire someone to do it for her company.

Success Hopeful but Not Guaranteed

Infor’s two-pronged cloud strategy is coherent, but as with any strategy there are obstacles. On the first prong, the Infor Business Cloud, I see difficulties moving a sales force accustomed to selling software licenses with large up-front payments to selling cloud subscription services. I did receive some indication that Infor is aware of this problem and is taking steps to mitigate the sales disincentive to sell cloud services.

The second prong, the relationship with Salesforce.com, also has the same challenge related to the sales model, which it hopefully will address. In addition, the pricing I have seen so far for Inforce Everywhere appears a bit rich, especially when combined with Infor’s own ERP pricing and Salesforce.com subscription fees. Of course, nothing stops Infor or Salesforce.com from negotiating more aggressive discounts, but wasn’t cloud computing supposed to simplify the rug-merchant nature of enterprise software sales? My concern is that if the pricing is too rich, many good prospects may find it more attractive to just do a minimal amount of one-off integration between the two products, just like they’ve done in the past.

In spite of these challenges, I think Infor has a good chance of success. If so, it will be a good sign for other traditional vendors working on making the transition to the cloud.

Infor and Salesforce.com: More Than a Barney Relationship

Tech Optimization

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

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

Forward And Commentary

This document addresses many questions asked by CFO’s about cloud deployments and the top integration questions often asked by CFO’s responsible for key business initiatives that involve technology.

A. Executive Summary

Organizations have escalated their adoption of cloud computing and SaaS applications in the past 3 years. As part of the broader trend in consumerization of IT (CoIT), business leaders have slowly tipped the balance of power in determining technology acquisition. However, the proliferation of adoption has led to organizational chaos in data, process and meta data integration as users adopt and deploy the cloud in silos without considering the implications of organizational silos and services oriented architecture (SOA). As cloud integration emerges as an enterprise-wide issue, CFOs must get acquainted with the cost-value equation of cloud and SaaS applications. Why? Cloud integration emerges as a key competency for successful organizations seeking to innovate while maximizing returns on investment. Consequently, CFOs should understand ten key points on why they must master cloud integration.

B. Research Findings

The rapid adoption of cloud computing by business leaders unfortunately creates a bespoke environment technically known as “best of breed cloud hell.” With so many disparate systems in a loosely federated model, data rapidly becomes siloed, business processes easily become fragmented, and coordination across functional fiefdoms quickly becomes difficult. Consequently, cloud integration emerges as a key enabler in reducing the costs and improving the benefits of cloud computing. Recent conversations with 22 CFOs addressed these ten key questions:

What is cloud integration?
Why is cloud integration a growing competency for the CFO?
Is cloud integration more or less expensive?
Which integration approach is best in the long run?
How does cloud integration mitigate project risk?
What’s the business value for cloud integration?
Will bring your own device (BYOD) policies require cloud integration?
How can I support social media?
Do big data and cloud integration go hand in hand?
What kind of projects make sense for cloud integration?

The Bottom Line: Mastering Cloud Integration Is an Entry Point to Mastering Consumerization of IT
CFOs have a unique position to shape the future of their organizations as the decision-making power has shifted from the IT side to the business. IT budgets remain down 5 percent year-over-year, while tech spending by business units has increased 18-20 percent. The result – businesses have increased their influence in technology buying. By providing guidance during the strategy and budgeting process, CFOs have an effective tool to balance the needs of
business and IT. Cloud integration enables CFOs to deftly apply the “six s’s of consumerization of IT”

C. Report Links

The report is part of Constellation’s Unlimited Quark library and the individual report is available for purchase.

Your POV

Are you contemplating a shift in your integration strategy? Suffering from best of breed SaaS hell? 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 enterprise apps strategy efforts. Here’s how we can assist:

Reviewing your Apps Strategy
Vendor selection
Implementation partner selection
Connecting with other pioneers
Sharing best practices
Designing a next gen apps strategy
Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support
Demystifying software licensing

Related Research:

Wang, R “Ray” – “Monday’s Musings: The Race For Enterprise Class Consumer Tech”, Software Insider, March 7, 2011

Wang, R “Ray”- “Research Report: How SaaS Adoption Trends Show New Shifts In Technology Purchasing Power”, Software Insider June 21, 2011.

Mentions

Data Integration Blog – Pervasive Software “Ray Wang discusses integrating SaaS Best of Breed Hell”

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.

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

Read more about Quark Summary: What CFOs Need to Know About SaaS and Cloud Integration

The Hidden Cost for Inconsistent Social Media Support

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,…...

Most customer support managers agree that social media will continue to grow as a major channel for handling customer issues and resolving problems. While this is generally understood, what stands out is the lack of integration with established support channels, such as the telephone, Web and email. Companies have made substantial investments in handling customer requests over these traditional channels but often support their social channels with informal teams that are disconnected from the primary support channels. What many support managers fail to realize is that the majority of customers that post a request on social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter will also place a call into the contact center if their issue is not immediately addressed. This results in double handling a request resulting in increasing number of calls and costs. With the average cost of an assisted contact between $7 and $9 duplicate handling is expensive and often leads to customer frustration.

Integrating social media sites into the core customer support operations has been a slow process. Many do not see the value of doing this and fail to quantify the costs of not doing it. There are several steps a company can do to address this issue and improve their response times to customers. These include

Measure speed of response for social sites. Customers using social sites expect an immediate or short term response and will use alternate channels if a response is not received quickly.
Determine first contact resolution rates. Track social comments and verify if the issue is resolved or if further contact was made.
Evaluate response accuracy. The informal team that supports social sites seldom has full access to the databases and customer information systems found in the call center. While they may have limited access to information, they do not necessarily have customer records available to them.
Regularly capture and record customer comments in the customer database. This provides information on what issues are important and can be mined for future analysis on customer interests and sentiments.
Determine the influence of media reach for the social sites. If customer comments reach a large population, then a public response may be needed to reduce the damage of negative comments.
Decide skills needed for social sites. Responders do not necessarily need to come from core customer support operations but they need to be part of the customer service operation with full access to tools and technologies needed. It is important to store all responses in the customer information system, so when a customer makes an additional call on the same topic, the previous response in available to the CSR

Companies need to do a better job of understanding the rapid rise of social channels for product support issues. Marketing and service organizations must create a seamless customer experience and develop processes and add tools to integrate all channels to deliver first- time accurate responses.

Next-Generation Customer Experience

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News Analysis: KANA Enters MidMarket With Trinicom Acquisition

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

Acquisition Brings A Proven Multi-Channel Cloud Based Service Offering To The Growing Mid-market

Sunnyvale, CA based KANA announced on April 24, 2012 it’s acquisition of Netherlands based Trinicom, a multichannel, customer contact software provider serving over 200 companies in the BeNeLux market. Trinicom’s flagship T5 all-in solutions addresses multichannel customer service through email response management, web self-service, call management, live chat, “letter, fax, and desk contact”, chat bot, and knowledge base. The acquisition marks KANA’s entry and commitment to:

Addressing the under served mid-market. Trinicom brings enterprise class customer service and engagement tools to mid-sized businesses. KANA states in its press release that “mid-sized organizations in both public and private sectors are increasingly seeking enabling technology to support emerging customer experience needs and to build, enhance, and extend relationships with customers.” Why? Mid-market companies seek enterprise class solutions that don’t require the enterprise levels of staffing, support, and infrastructure. Trinicom brings the expertise in sales, marketing, and support for the mid-market to the traditionally enterprise focused KANA management team.

Point of View (POV): Trinicom suite of products for key service industries succeeds given its mid-market focus. In general, these organizations have 20 to 200 customer service professionals. Referenceable and successful customers come from banking, education, internet, insurers, non-profit, publishing and media, retail & eCommerce, telecom, travel & transport, and utilities (see Figure 1). In fact, Trinicom delivers an end to end offering across social, web, and agent desktops. Past clients expressed general satisfaction with go live times less than three months and on average within six to eight weeks. Most clients praise the rich configuration tools which allow clients easy adaptation without expensive customization.

Gaining a SaaS based deployment option. KANA today offers on-premises and hosted deployment models for its enterprise customers. Trinicom brings its SaaS based technology and Cloud business model to KANA’s existing deployment options. Trinicom’s SaaS operations in Northern Europe complement Kana’s global data center reach.

Point of View (POV): KANA’s lack of a SaaS offering has led to some loss in deals as the market shifts to SaaS as the defacto standard. The good news – the Trinicom acquisition gives KANA customers and prospects more choice in immediate deployment options. Subsequently, KANA gains a SaaS foundation for future offerings in both the mid-market and enterprise.

Expanding customer and revenue base. KANA currently serves 600 commercial and 250 public sector organizations. Trinicom adds key global capabilities and European market expertise. For instance, Trinicom will expand KANA’s presence in the local public sector market in EMEA.

Point of View (POV): The acquisition expands KANA’s customer and revenue base into the growing and profitable mid-market. KANA gains an immediate opportunity to service the mid-market and effectively compete with eGain, Eptica, Moxie, and Parature. More importantly, Trinicom opens up a lucrative mid-market public sector opportunity.

Figure 1. Trinicom Spans A Range Of Service Verticals In The Mid-Market

Source: KANA

Recommendations

As with major acquisitions, the following recommendations apply to existing customers:

Review existing contracts. Existing Trinicom customers should negotiate longer term contracts at current rates. Communicate areas for improvement in the contract and relationship.
Engage with the new management team. Document and push for prioritization of future feature requirements. Identify service and support transitions.

Prospects should consider the following:

Include in short lists. Mid-market prospects should add KANA into the short lists for multichannel customer service.
Evaluate KANA’s full set of offerings. Consider what aspects of KANA match to the organization’s requirements.

The Bottom Line: KANA’s Positioned As A Key Player In Emerging CRM Consolidation

Backed by Accel-KKR, KANA is the centerpiece of the private equity’s firm’s investment in enterprise software. As the CRM market enters into another round of consolidation amidst disruptive trends in social, mobile, cloud, big data, and unified communications, customers and partners can expect KANA to acquire and expand its reach in customer service, CRM, and customer experience software.

Your POV.

KANA and Trinicom customers how do you feel about the acquisition? Do you expect KANA to expand its SaaS offerings? What areas do you think KANA should invest in? 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 Social CRM/ Social Business efforts. Here’s how we can assist:

Assessing social business/social CRM readiness
Developing your social business/ social CRM strategy
Vendor selection
Implementation partner selection
Connecting with other pioneers
Sharing best practices
Designing a next gen apps strategy
Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support
Demystifying software licensing

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.

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

Read more about News Analysis: KANA Enters MidMarket With Trinicom Acquisition

Quark Summary: Does SAP HANA Change Your Database Strategy for SAP Apps?

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

Forward And Commentary

SAP’s made big claims about HANA and its capabilities today and into the future. This Quark goes into the details and Constellation’s point of view.

A. Executive Summary

Both HANA as an architecture and database alternative indicate SAP’s future direction and next-generation approach. Consequently, numerous clients and SAP customers have inquired on whether or not they can replace their underlying Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) in their SAP Business Suite with HANA. Constellation believes SAP HANA is a critical technology that SAP customers should evaluate and understand as the roadmap reveals itself. This report primarily describes the role HANA will play for use with SAP Business Suite and in future SAP applications.

B. Research Findings

Since 2008, SAP has hinted at a real-time data platform approach to its middleware and application infrastructure based on the power of in-memory database (IMDB) technologies. IMDBs are a database management system that stores data directly onto the main memory of a computer. In an IMDB, the memory resident data has one minimum backup copy on disk, but the primary copy lives permanently in memory. Traditional on-disk databases cache data into main memory for access but the primary copy permanently lives in storage.

Thus, IMDBs have faster access times than disk-optimized systems that rely on cumbersome and slower input/output (I/O) calls. The result – the ability to provide real-time information in nanoseconds instead of milliseconds to the user or a downstream consumption feed. IMDBs play a key role as big data requires faster processing times and real-time streaming. More importantly, social, mobile, and machine-to-machine requirements require real-time and contextual right-time delivery of information.

The research shows four main themes:

In-Memory Computing Is at the Heart of SAP’s HANA Roadmap and Architectural Vision
HANA Puts SAP in Conflict with Key DB Partners but Is the Right Strategy for Next Gen Apps and Independence
Currently HANA Is Not Available for Immediate RDBMS Replacement for SAP Business Suite
However, HANA Is Already Playing a Growing Role in Non- SAP Business Suite Scenarios

Recommendations: Explore HANA for Analytics, BW Replacement but Not Yet for Database Replacement

The HANA vision represents SAP’s future platform. Constellation makes three recommendations in the report as SAP unfolds its mid-term and long-term strategy.

C. Report Links

The report is part of Constellation’s Unlimited Quark library and the individual report is available for purchase.

Your POV

Will you replace your database with SAP? What’s the compelling business case and when would you do it? 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 enterprise apps strategy efforts. Here’s how we can assist:

Reviewing your Apps Strategy
Vendor selection
Implementation partner selection
Connecting with other pioneers
Sharing best practices
Designing a next gen apps strategy
Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support
Demystifying software licensing

Related Research:

Wang, R “Ray.” “News Analysis: The Implications of Oracle’s Taleo Acquisition.” Software Insider. February 9th, 2012.

Wang, R “Ray.” “News Analysis: SAP Buys SuccessFactors for $3.4B Signals SAP’s Commitment To Cloud, HCM, and Social.” Software Insider. December 3rd, 2011.

Wang, R “Ray.” “Monday’s Musings: Balancing The Six S’s In Consumerization Of IT.” Software Insider. December 3rd, 2011.

Wang, R “Ray.” “Research Report: How The Five Pillars Of Consumer Tech Influence Enterprise Innovation.” Software Insider. October 4, 2010.

Wang, R “Ray.” “Research Report: The Upcoming Battle For The Largest Share Of The Technology Budget Part 1.” Software Insider. July 27, 2010.

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.

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

Read more about Quark Summary: Does SAP HANA Change Your Database Strategy for SAP Apps?

SAP’s Mobility Strategy: One Million Developers Blooming

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

SAP in its press conference last week provided a major update on its database and mobility strategy. In my first post, I outlined my view of SAP’s database strategy. Now, in this second post, I provide my perspective on SAP’s mobility strategy.

SAP recognizes mobility as a critical element of its product strategy going forward, along with social business, cloud, and in-memory computing. But as some of my associates been hammering over the past two years, success in mobility requires SAP to enable thousands of small development firms and individual developers to build applications for SAP. Not just a few large system integrators or ISVs: SAP needs the enterprise equivalent of Apple’s App Store ecosystem.

SAP’s thinking on this front has been evolving. After its Sybase acquisition, it put the “Sybase Unwired Platform” (or SUP, but now renamed, the SAP Mobility Platform) at the center of its mobility strategy. You want to build mobile apps for SAP? Wonderful—buy, borrow, or otherwise get access to the SAP products you want to integrate with, plus an instance of SUP, and have at it. The problem was, however, that this approach limits the number of developers to the following categories:

Large or midsize ISV-partners of SAP, who were willing to make the investment in an SAP development environment, to develop mobility apps for sale to current and future SAP customers. This would be a small number.
System integration partners of SAP, who had live project opportunities that included mobility apps as deliverables. The SI could use the client's SAP development environment. These resulting apps would be to meet the needs of a specific client, although the SI might reuse the code in future projects. But this approach would produce few apps for a wider audience.
Individual developers or small SAP partners who understand SAP’s middleware and development architecture well enough to forgo use of SAP’s platform and can write mobility apps directly against SAP’s back-end databases. This is where many "app store" type apps could be produced. But here is where small developers come up against a brick wall: SAP does not make it easy to gain access to trial or development versions of many of the SAP products that a mobility programmer would need.

For some reason, Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM are able to make life easier for small developers. But for a hint of what it’s like for a small developer to work with SAP, take a look at this blog post (on SAP’s own SCN community site!): Why Does SAP Make This So Complicated?

Two Good Announcements, But More Work Needed

SAP, to its credit, appears to understand the problem. In its announcements, two were especially noteworthy in terms of addressing the needs of the developer masses and in terms of filling out SAP’s own mobile apps portfolio.

First, to enable those thousands of developers, SAP announced partnerships with three leading mobility development tools providers: PhoneGap (recently acquired by Adobe), Appcelerator, and Sencha. These will allow developers, working with tools they are already familiar with, to build apps using a new OData connector to integrate with SAP’s back-end systems. In addition, these tools will allow many simple apps to be built without having to rely upon SAP’s Mobility Platform.
The second big announcement was that SAP is acquiring Syclo, which has its own mobility platform as well as a suite of well-regarded field service and asset management applications. SAP said that what it is really after here is not the platform (which overlaps functionality of SAP’s Mobility Platform) but the field service apps. This is another step in SAP building out its portfolio of its own out-of-the box mobile apps. Based on my own work with clients, I know that field service and asset management, in fact, are top use cases for mobility in enterprise systems. If SAP can continue to buy or build collections of key mobility apps like Syclo’s, it will begin to fill out the major white spaces in its mobility portfolio, while still leaving much room for third-party developers to fill in the rest.

These are welcome announcements, but will they be enough? I don't think so. These announcements give the developers new tools, but they don't address the problem of getting access to an SAP development system for testing. Some of my associates, such as Vijay Vijayasankar and Dennis Howlett, echo this concern:

Dennis writes,

Needless to say there is a major hitch: developers who want to build apps with SAP data need access to a NetWeaver instance to test and model. Customers would have that, but small developer shops without an SAP license would not have that access without pricey, hair-pulling hurdles, which Sikka acknowledged during the press conference was a “19th century” approach. When pressed on this issue, SAP’s Fawad Zakariya, VP of Mobility and a key player in mobility ecosystem development reporting directly to Poonen, asserted that good news on this front was coming.

In a similar vein, Vijay writes,

I cannot stress enough on the licensing and monetization model to be figured out upfront – without that, access to software is practically meaningless. Developers have a lot of choice today, including many OSS choices. SAP needs a compelling story for them to use SAP technology….

… we are not sure how SAP handles the licensing/pricing in this scenario . And without that clarity coming real quick – I doubt if scores of developers will jump in and start developing cool apps. Sanjay Poonen responded on twitter few days ago than SAP will get it right quickly, and I totally trust him to do so – hopefully by SAPPHIRE in Orlando.

So here we have it. SAP is making significant progress to curry favor with small developers, but it still doesn't have a total solution to enable them with access to test versions or sandbox instances of SAP back-end systems.

Listen to the Developers

Some of my associates are still concerned that SAP has not found the right “pricing model” for mobility apps, but I think that is last year’s debate. Although not part of the formal announcements last week, it appears SAP is working on a pricing scheme that differentiates between major functional mobility apps, casual apps, and even “free” apps. Add in occasional one-off “enterprise pricing” for very large corporate deals, and I don’t think pricing needs to be an obstacle. Everyone can make money and customers can pay appropriately.

But the licensing problems are more systemic within SAP and most likely face legal or organizational resistance based on “how we’ve always done business.”

I am not a mobile apps developer. Therefore, I have no experience on which to judge when SAP will have all the pieces in place to encourage, in the words of SAP, one million developers to bloom. I can only look to those small developers already within SAP’s ecosystem for their reaction—when they are happy, then I’ll know SAP is on the right path. And what I’m hearing from them so far is that they’re still concerned about the licensing issues.

With SAP as the largest enterprise application company in the world, the mobility announcements are welcome news, but we still don’t have a total solution to enable thousands, let alone, millions of developers. I look forward to hearing about progress reported out of the SAPPHIRE conference in a few weeks.

You can watch a video of the entire press conference.

Photo credit: Flickr/docentjoyce

SAP’s Database Strategy Faces an Uphill Battle
SAP in Transition on Mobile, Cloud, and In-memory Computing
SAP Innovating with Cloud, Mobile and In-memory Computing

Tech Optimization

Read more about SAP’s Mobility Strategy: One Million Developers Blooming

SAP’s Database Strategy Faces an Uphill Battle

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

Last week I attended a half day SAP press conference in San Francisco, on the subject of SAP’s strategy for database technology and mobility. Both are hot topics in enterprise software, and there were plenty of announcements. In fact, it’s quite easy to get lost in the weeds. So, in this first of two posts, I’ll try to summarize what I see as the big picture for SAP’s database strategy.

SAP Positioning Itself as a Database Company

When SAP acquired Sybase in 2010, it said it was doing the deal primarily Sybases's mobility platform. But Sybase also has its traditional relational database products, leading with its Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) database. At the same time, SAP itself has been rolling out its HANA in-memory database (IMDB) technology. Until now, these two database products were managed separated, but no longer. SAP is consolidating all its database offerings—HANA and Sybase’s—along with middleware and tools, under one management unit.

There were many tactical announcements. SAP announced general availability of its BW business intelligence product on HANA, and its plan to make HANA available later this year as the database of choice for its small business customers of its Business One ERP product. In addition, customers later this month will have the flagship Sybase ASE database available as a deployment option for SAP’s Business Suite and All-in-One products.

SAP rolled out all of these announcements under the banner of its plan to become known as a database company.

Database Migrations Difficult to Justify

After the press conference, one SAP executive sensed my ambivalence about this plan. With Oracle taking an ever-increasing adversarial position toward SAP, I can understand SAP’s discomfort with having a large percentage of its best customers running on Oracle’s database. At the same time, the other two major providers of relational databases (IBM and Microsoft) are SAP-friendly. IBM is SAP’s largest system integration partner, while SAP and Microsoft often find their technology interests aligned. So, how do you threaten Oracle while not also threatening IBM and Microsoft?

Furthermore, does SAP honestly believe that existing SAP customers are going to migrate in droves from Oracle, IBM’s DB2, or Microsoft SQL Server to HANA or ASE? In the case of business analytics, there may be some movement toward HANA, yes, as the value of in-memory performance for analytic applications is somewhat easy to envision. But what about SAP’s business applications, such as Business One, All-in-One, and the Business Suite? With all the challenges and demands placed on CIOs these days, it’s difficult to imagine an installed SAP customer undergoing a database migration, simply to eliminate some Oracle, or DB2, or Microsoft SQL Server licenses. SAP insists there is business value for HANA in some transaction processing—and I can see that, say, in supply chain management. But is that enough to justify a database migration? Even less so, why would a customer swap out Oracle, DB2, or Microsoft for ASE, which is essentially a like-for-like product? I just don’t see it.

In side-bar discussions, SAP executives basically agree. Alright then, so the target is net-new application customers? But here the challenge is essentially the same. In most cases, business apps prospects already have skills and experience with Oracle, DB2, or MS SQL Server. Are they really going to want to invest in learning Sybase ASE, or HANA? Unless they can completely eliminate those other database platforms from their environments, going with Sybase or HANA is adding to their complexity, not simplifying things.

I think that selling databases is going to be harder row to hoe than SAP is making it out to be.

Subsidizing HANA May Meet Complications

Perhaps recognizing the challenge, SAP realizes it is going to have to sweeten the pot, especially for HANA. So, at the press conference, SAP announced that it is putting up some serious money, through two funds:

For new and existing customers: a $337 million fund to subsidize services for SAP customers to convert to HANA. I assume the initial target for these funds will be in migrating business analytics customers to HANA.
For technology start-ups: a $155 million venture capital fund through SAP Ventures for start-ups to build new apps on HANA.

It’s encouraging that SAP is putting its money where its mouth is. For customers, making a database change may not be cost-justified without some help from SAP. Moreover, tech start-ups may need some financial encouragement to build new products on HANA.

However, I see complications with each of these funding efforts.

With the customer fund, there may be issues with SAP’s partners. By funding SAP’s own services to assist with HANA, SAP is taking work away from partners, who typically play a key role in SAP implementations and migrations. In response to my question on this, SAP executives said that it will bring partners into this work at some point in the future.

Nevertheless, I have to believe that, at first, partners will view SAP as increasing its share of services at the partners’ expense. This is especially true under current economic conditions where customers can only absorb a certain amount of change at once. Moreover, by delivering HANA services directly, SAP delays giving partners the HANA experience they will need for the future. SAP can solve this problem, of course, by ponying up the money but letting customers choose whether to use SAP’s professional services group or partners to deliver the services, or by co-delivering services with partners.
For start-ups, HANA may not be as attractive as SAP thinks. Looking back at SaaS and other tech start-ups over the past decade, most of them chose to build on open-source database technologies, such as MySQL or PostgreSQL. The reason, of course, is that open-source infrastructure minimizes their own costs as they grow. It also leaves more customer budget available to invest in the application, instead of the required infrastructure.

I once asked a start-up executive why his firm was building on MySQL instead of Oracle. He replied, “Oracle scales technically, but it doesn’t scale economically.” I have to wonder if HANA will face the same resistance, even with funding from SAP Ventures. A quick check with associates indicated that there are already open-source in-memory databases (IMDBs), including CSQL and VoltDB. I have no knowledge of the capabilities of these products or how they compare with HANA. It is likely that HANA is head and shoulders above open source alternatives. But Oracle’s flagship database was and still is head and shoulders above open source capabilities, and that didn’t stop cloud start-ups from using MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Ultimately, very few organizations want to buy databases—or middleware. They want business applications, and those apps require databases and middleware as part of the technology stack. So, when SAP talks about becoming a database company, it’s hard for me to become excited.

Perhaps SAP already knows that it's going to be difficult. Earlier this year, it began floating the idea of making its goal, "to become the No. 2 database provider by the year 2015." But by the time of the press conference, the goal had been watered down to “becoming the fastest growing database provider.”

When you are starting from such a small market share, becoming the “fastest-growing” is not a very high bar.

Update, Apr. 16: Some deeper questions on Oracle's database strategy from Jonathan Wilson. And, a good post from Vitaliy Rudnytskiy, pointing out that HANA is more than an "in-memory database."

SAP in Transition on Mobile, Cloud, and In-memory Computing
SAP Innovating with Cloud, Mobile and In-memory Computing

Tech Optimization

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Research Summary: Why the Move from Transaction to Experience Requires Better Analytics

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

Forward And Commentary

This trends report examines how changing expectations among business leaders and the consumerization of IT will shape the future of insights and decision-making. As organizations make the move from transactions to engagement to experience, a new type of analytics will be required.

A. Introduction

Business leaders seek better insights for smarter decision-making. Unfortunately, today’s traditional intelligence tools were designed for two-dimensional transactional systems. As data from consumer trends such as mobile, social, cloud, big data, and video make their way into the enterprise, organizations seek new tools to discern insight from these new engagement and experiential systems.

The shift from transaction to engagement to experience depends on better business analytics. Success requires that new business analytical tools support the information supply chain as data moves from a cacophony of upstream data sources to new and innovative downstream modes of consumption.

B. Research Findings – Why the Move from Transaction to Experience Requires Better Analytics

Leaders seek more than just reporting and dashboards, they expect to make real decisions. A recent Constellation Research survey identified key expectations from business analytics to include: supporting business strategy and planning; optimizing costs across the value chain; identifying hidden patterns and relationships in big data; providing context for relevant engagement; and predicting demand in networks. Along with these key trends, the report discusses the:

Five Consumer Forces Influence the Future of Analytics
How Business Leaders Move Beyond Simple Reporting and Dashboards in Their Expectations of Business Analytics
Why Organizations Seek Insight to Make Better Decisions in the Shift from Transaction to Experience
How Big Data Provides the Key Element in Moving from Real- Time to Right-Time

Figure 1. Moving From Transaction To Experience

(Right-click to see full image)

The Bottom Line: Business Analytics Must Support Decision-Making Across the Information Supply Chain

The shift from transaction to engagement to experience depends on better business analytics. Success for business leaders requires that new business analytical tools support the information supply chain as data moves from a cacophony of upstream data sources to new and innovative downstream modes of consumption (see Figure 7).

Classify. Incoming information must be tagged and associated with relevant metadata and context.
Transform. Information must be converted to standard and conventions that can be consumed by all sources.
Augment. Related information must be attached to the data.
Secure. Access to, securing of, and masking of information must be applied.
Deliver. Information and insights should be delivered to the relevant input nodes.
Refresh. Periodic updates to information must be performed to keep data relevant.

C. Report Links

See how analytics play a major role in the shift from transaction to experience. Buy the full research report on the Constellation Research website.

Your POV.

How are you using analytics to improve engagement and experience? Let us know your experiences. Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

Reprints

Reprints can be purchased through Constellation Research, Inc. To request official reprints in PDF format, please contact sales (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com.

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.

Data to Decisions Matrix Commerce Next-Generation Customer Experience Innovation & Product-led Growth Leadership Chief Experience Officer

Read more about Research Summary: Why the Move from Transaction to Experience Requires Better Analytics

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Event Report: Lithium Network Conference 2012 #LiNC

Event Report: Lithium Network Conference 2012 #LiNC

Mondays Musings: Why Are Innovative CIO's Betting Less On Cloud And Virtualization?

Mondays Musings: Why Are Innovative CIO's Betting Less On Cloud And Virtualization?

Infor’s Two-Pronged Cloud Strategy