R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder Constellation Research

R “Ray” Wang is the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He co-hosts DisrupTV, a weekly enterprise tech and leadership webcast that averages 50,000 views per episode and blogs at www.raywang.org. His ground-breaking best-selling book on digital transformation, Disrupting Digital Business, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015. Ray's new book about Digital Giants and the future of business, titled, Everybody Wants to Rule The World was released in July 2021. Wang is well-quoted and frequently interviewed by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, and Bloomberg. Short Bio R “Ray” Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Founder, Chairman, and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation… Read more

Constellation Research Inc, an award winning, specialty research and advisory firm that serves business leaders who seek to unleash the power of emerging and disruptive technologies, today announced the appointment of Sachin Gosavi as Vice President (India). Sachin brings over 12 years of experience in marketing and strategy in India, and will focus on serving the growing demand for technology research services of large Indian firms and technology vendors.

Releasing the announcement, R “Ray” Wang, Principal Analyst and CEO, Constellation Research, Inc., said, “It’s great to have someone like Sachin on board in India. His proven track record in technology research business along with strong ‘C’ suite networking abilities will be valuable to our growth. In addition, his deep understanding of the independent technology research space will be help drive business value for our clients in India.”

Commenting on his appointment, Sachin Gosavi said, “Constellation Research has established itself as the true model of disruptive technology research, so am quite excited to join them. Most Constellation analysts bring over 2 decades of hands-on experience in working with senior leaders in enterprise organizations, and am looking forward to working with such stalwarts.”

In his previous role for a brief timeframe, Sachin was an independent marketing consultant advising technology start-ups. Prior to that, Sachin spent about six years with Forrester Research spearheading it’s marketing function in India. Through innovative methods, he not only helped establish the brand Forrester in India, but also significantly raised the marketing bar for it’s competitors in local markets.

Gosavi earned his Master’s in Economics from the University of Pune, and PGDMM from IMDR, Pune.

At Constellation, Sachin will engage with both (technology) buy side and sell side clients in India. His responsibilities include:

• Business development in India
• Establishing partnerships between Indian firms- industry bodies and Constellation’s expert knowledge base
• Assisting buy side business leaders with insight into the future of work, next gen customer experience, cross channel commerce, big data and analytics, and technology adoption
• Helping Indian firms accomplish their specific business objectives around enterprise software, ERP, Mobile, BI, SCM, PBS, CRM, Collaboration, Analytics, UC, Gov 2.0 and Social

COORDINATES

Twitter: @sachingo
Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/sachinvgosavi
Geographical Location: Pune, India
Email: sachin (at) ConstellationR (dot) com.
Mobile: +91.9822.555.012

Office:
A2/405, Mont-Vert Pristine, Off Aundh Road,
Pune 411020 (India)
Website: http://www.constellationrg.com

ABOUT CONSTELLATION RESEARCH, INC.*
Constellation Research is an award winning, specialty research and advisory firm that serves business leaders who seek to unleash the power of emerging and disruptive technologies.  Our analysts start by understanding the business objective, applying real world experience and insights, and then incorporating disruptive technologies and business models as appropriate.  We cater to board of directors and c-suite executives looking for an edge in business model and technology innovation.  Research outputs always provide an insightful buy-side point of view.

Why Your Mission Is Our Mission

In today’s business environment, the rate of change is not only constant, but also rapidly escalating.  New business models by upstarts disrupt competitors with increasing frequency in all industries and markets.  In just 10 years, even 5 years, or dare say 24 months, many established companies have been left vulnerable, beaten down, and toppled by new upstarts.  Why? Business leaders have been too slow to react to their customers and the changes happening in the societal, technological, environmental, economic, and political fronts.

In business models, products are now excuses to sell services.  Product innovation cycles have shortened from years to months to weeks.  On the work front, five generations in the workforce disagree on where to work, how to work, when to work, and why to work.  Add the current trend of consumerization of IT  to the pace of change and business leaders must strategically determine which new technologies should be considered.

Unfortunately, the legacy research analyst firms and advisory firms continue to fail their clients when faced with these new challenges. Why? Their myopic focus on an IT centric point of view ignores the realities of the market.  In fact, Constellation estimates that the average IT budget is down 5% year over year and at best up 2% among the most innovative companies.  However, tech spending is up on average 18 to 22% at the most innovative firms.  What’s happened? The buying power has shifted and business leaders increasingly take control of how they are applying technologies to their business while whittling down the corporate IT budget for operational efficiencies.

Why Your Success Is Our Objective

We’re business leader and business value focused. Constellation differentiates itself in the market in two ways by:

1. Focusing on the board room and C-suite point of view. Constellation’s research addresses the needs of boards, CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, CMOs, CHROs, CPOs, CSCOs, and COOs.
2. Addressing the business problem first.  Research starts by addressing business value and then applying where disruptive and emerging technologies may play a role.

The result – Constellation serves as a coach and advisor to senior business leaders working on tough business problems including:

• The future of work
• Next generation customer experience
• Cross channel commerce across the supply and demand chain
• Digital marketing transformation
• New organizational models including People-to People Networks
• The new C-suite
• Big data, decision systems, and information management
• Business value frameworks and metrics for success
• Energy management and green tech
• Legacy technology optimization

We look forward to serving you with Insight, Inspiration, and Impact.

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

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,… Read more

Most companies realize that their success depends on building effective customer experiences across multiple touch points.  Typically, it’s the customer support organization that is responsible for delivering support to maintain high-levels of customer satisfaction after a purchase.  The question facing many companies is how to deliver exceptional support during lean times, when organizations face headcount and budget limitations.  Now may be the time to take a look at recent innovations in customer response that automate service while also creating a positive customer experience.  Unlike earlier automated services that helped a company, often at the customer’s expense, new real time solutions enable a company to proactively and cost effectively deliver an extraordinary customer experience.

 Companies need to deliver services that reach customers where they are and across all modalities that customers prefer to use.  It is also important to become more proactive and reach out to customers in a timely manner, when they need the information.  Automated real time customer support includes:

• Contextual voice portals. Unlike menu driven voice response systems, adding contextual information regarding a customer’s status, account information, recent activities will personalize the interaction and engage customers in using the automated service. 
• Proactive notification. No one likes spam or robo call but proactive notifications on matters of interest across the device of the customer’s choice alerts the customer to matters of interest without requiring a customer to make a call or look up information on the Web.  Customers appreciate notifications when they offer relevant and opportune information.
• Social outreach. Social sites represent unprecedented activity and user adoption and provide a valuable way for a company to deliver its messages to large populations quickly.  Unlike the one-to-one engagement of proactive notification, social outreach goes to the masses and information spreads quickly.  It requires constant monitoring and attention to communities of interest to be effective and relevant.
• Text and video replies. With the use of smart devices, many customers prefer to see a text response or receive a short video clip compared to having to listen to the information from an agent or automatic voice response message.  Text and video messages encourage customers to use automated services, as they receive information in a more convenient and practical manner and have a better experience.
• Mobile response management. Mobile applications need to provide a means to support customer requests on the application itself without requiring the mobile device user to make a call.  Intuitive user interfaces attached to customer data or knowledge bases can provide customers with relevant guidance based on their profile and account information while on the mobile application.

Investments in automated services usually pay for themselves very quickly.  Although there are situations when a live agent is the most appropriate response to a customer’s inquiry, reaching customers before they need to make a call or anticipating future inquiries creates an image of a company that goes the extra step to support customers wherever they are across multiple modalities.

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,… Read more

With costs soaring many companies are trying to decide if on-demand cloud services for their contact center are right for them. New vendor entrants with multiple-channel support options have spurred interest in cloud solutions for customer support. Early adopters for cloud services were smaller companies who found cloud solutions an affordable alternative compared to premise-based solutions. However, larger companies with the need to effectively engage customers across multiple channels, including social and mobile applications have become more interested in cloud services.  The increased complexity for managing customers who no longer view the telephone as their prime channel and want consistent services across all channels is driving this change.  With an aging infrastructure and the need to support a more complex contact center environment companies find that cloud based services offer immediate benefits, such as faster time to deploy, increased flexibility and scalability and access to more advanced applications.

Companies must also factor in how changes in the management of their contact center infrastructure will affect service and support. Some companies move cautiously into cloud services for customer support by selecting a few applications, such as voice portals or e-services, while retaining other applications on premise.  But new bundled cloud service offering offer a compelling alternative and deliver a broad portfolio of services including multiple channel routing, workforce optimization applications security and network optimization that deliver comprehensive contact center solutions.

Moving to the cloud will not always be less costly, as there are many considerations based on the services offered and a company’s internal support infrastructure. When considering a cloud provider, it is important that a company realizes the importance of setting expectations on the service delivery and understand all costs.  Choosing a service partner for contact centers means fully evaluating their offering and ability to deliver high reliable services. Key areas to include in your service provider selection criteria include:

• Service level agreements (SLA). These spell out requirements and penalties for non-performance in areas such as response times for major and minor service issues.  SLAs indicate expectations for reporting and monitoring, problem escalation process, and quality assurance measures.
• Reliability.  The reliability of the network is essential for managing customer support expectations and system availability needs to be at 5 9’s. Also, assess the provider’s policy in providing system updates and determine all charges for making changes to current configuration. Include disaster recovery and back up plans in this discussion.
• Security. High security and ability to comply with external regulations are essential. Security measures include encryption, access control and identity management.

Consider your service provider as a business partner and focus on their ability to work with your organization for a more successful outcome.

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder Constellation Research

R “Ray” Wang is the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He co-hosts DisrupTV, a weekly enterprise tech and leadership webcast that averages 50,000 views per episode and blogs at www.raywang.org. His ground-breaking best-selling book on digital transformation, Disrupting Digital Business, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015. Ray's new book about Digital Giants and the future of business, titled, Everybody Wants to Rule The World was released in July 2021. Wang is well-quoted and frequently interviewed by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, and Bloomberg. Short Bio R “Ray” Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Founder, Chairman, and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation… Read more

Purpose and Intent

Much hype surrounds the topic of gamification. Often seen as a technique to add engagement to existing tasks, projects, marketing campaigns, and initiatives, the term gamification unfortunately lacks the seriousness it deserves. This report seeks to change the point of view and demonstrate where gamification plays a role in the enterprise. More importantly, executives will discover how gamification can drive behavior and outcomes through both monetary and non-monetary incentives in enterprise class settings.

Executive Summary

Gamification describes a series of design principles, processes and systems used to influence, engage and motivate individuals, groups and communities to drive behaviors and effect desired outcomes. Originating from the video game industry, many of these pioneering concepts now play a key role in driving incentive and behavior management for both brands in the consumer world and internal scenarios in the workplace. Enterprise gamification is a user experience (UX) and consumerization of IT (CoIT) trend that will take the market by storm in 2012. Constellation believes that by 2013, more than 50 percent of all social business initiatives will include an enterprise gamification component.

In interviews with 55 early adopters of enterprise gamification, Constellation identifies the three core pillars that include measurable action, reputation and incentives. By creating triggers through both monetary and non-monetary incentives among customers, employees, partners, suppliers and other interested parties, organizations can secure sustainable engagement and drive business outcomes such as improved marketing response from external communities, sustained long-term customer loyalty, increased collaboration among internal teams, or enriched onboarding, delivering success with new hires, partners, and customers.

Enterprise gamification requires an application of psychology and behavioral economics to incentivize outcomes. Because enterprise gamification maps closely to human behavior, organizations will want to follow Constellation’s best practices in appealing to the “Seven Deadly Sins” for gamification design.

Research report surfaces leading practices from 55 early adopters

Some highlights of the report include:

• Details on who’s using gamification across the enterprise
• The three pillars of enterprise gamification
• The six elements of sustainable engagement
• Sustainable behaviors to drive desired business outcomes
• The Seven Deadly Sins to Optimize Gamification Design
• The top gamified business processes for the enterprise (see Figure 1)

Figure 1. Marketing, Customer Service and HR Processes Lead in Gamified Processes

Your POV.

Designing your gamification models?  What enterprise business processes will you gamify first? next?   Ready to turbo charge your next generation customer experience?  Have you tested out iActionable, CrowdTwist or the 3B’s (i.e. Badgeville, Bigdoor, and Bunchball?  Ready to here how you can apply the white arts of the 7 Virtues to work?  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.

Get the report and other great research on the Constellation site

Resources and Related Posts

20110824 News Analysis: Bunchball Gamifies Salesforce.com And Delivers Simplified Applets

20110223 Best Practices: Applying The Seven Deadly Sins To Successful Gamification

20110120 Trends: 5 Engagement Factors For Gamification And The Enterprise

Community Input

Thanks to the following individuals for their review, input and contributions as part of the broader enterprise gamification community.

David Buckholtz (@dbuckho) – VP, Divisional CIO, Corporate IT, Sony Pictures Entertainment

Yvette Cameron (@yvettecameron) – VP & Principal Analyst, Constellation Research, Inc.

Andrea Chin – Senior VP, Transformation Office, Citigroup

Kris Duggan (@kduggan) – CEO and Co-Founder, Badgeville

Richie Etwaru (@richieetwaru) – Director, Chief Technology Officer’s Office, UBS

Irvin Fain (@ifain) – CEO and Co-Founder, CrowdTwist

Frank Falcone (@frankcrm) – Co-Founder and Executive Program Director, Rotman Centre for CRM Excellence

Maggie Fox (@maggiefox) – Founder and CEO, Social Media Group

Paul Greenberg (@pgreenbe) – Founder and President, The 56 Group

Ben Haines (@benlhaines) – CIO, Pabst Brewing Co.

Peter Kim (@peterkim) – Managing Partner, Dachis Group

Esteban Kolsky (@ekolsky) – President, ThinkJar, LLC

Marshall Lager (@lager) – Founder and Managing Principal, Third Idea Consulting

Alan Lepofsky (@alanlepo) – VP & Principal Analyst, Constellation Research, Inc.

Rajat Paharia (@rajatrocks), Founder and Chief Product Officer, Bunchball

Emanuele Quintarelli (@absolutezubzero) – Partner and Social Business Strategist, Open Knowledge

Alistair Rennie (@alistair_rennie) – General Manager Social Business, IBM

Ted Sapountzis (@sapountzis) – VP Social Media Audience Marketing, SAP

Adam Sold (@kafuchale) – Senior Director of Strategy, Dolby Labs

Dilip Soman (@dilipsoman) – Professor of Strategy, University of Toronto Rotman School of Management

Keith Smith (@chiefdoorman) – Chief Doorman and CEO, Big Door

Josh Weinberger (@kitson) – Independent Analyst

Michael Wu, PhD (@mich8elwu) – Principal Scientist, Lithium Technologies

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.

Copyright © 2011 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC All rights reserved.

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder Constellation Research

R “Ray” Wang is the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He co-hosts DisrupTV, a weekly enterprise tech and leadership webcast that averages 50,000 views per episode and blogs at www.raywang.org. His ground-breaking best-selling book on digital transformation, Disrupting Digital Business, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015. Ray's new book about Digital Giants and the future of business, titled, Everybody Wants to Rule The World was released in July 2021. Wang is well-quoted and frequently interviewed by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, and Bloomberg. Short Bio R “Ray” Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Founder, Chairman, and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation… Read more

SuccessFactors Acquisition Puts SAP In Direct Competition With Workday And Taleo

SAP (NYSE:SAP) announced its $3.4B acquisition of SuccessFactors (NYSE: SFSF) as it seeks to bolster its position in the Cloud and more importantly in the rapidly growing strategic HCM market.  Based in San Mateo, CA, USA, SuccessFactors brings over 15 million subscription users from 3,500 customers in 168 countries.  The company has 1450 employees and has been one of the SaaS/Cloud darlings of the industry.  When completed, SuccessFactors will remain an independent entity renamed, SuccessFactors, an SAP company.  Lars Dalgaard, Founder and CEO, SuccessFactors will lead the cloud business for SAP.  A quick analysis of the news reveals:

• SAP seeking a comprehensive and complementary HCM solution. SAP believes the combination of SuccessFactors and SAP will create a comprehensive HCM solution, marrying strength in enterprise applications with people-focused cloud applications. Today, SAP serves the market with a comprehensive and international Core HR and payroll.  Other on-premise offerings include talent management, workforce analytics, and shared services delivery. Key offerings from SuccessFactors include areas such as talent management, recruiting management, goal management, performance reviews, and business execution.  Further, SAP believes the core SFSF offerings will be an attractive to more than 500 million employees of SAP customers .  SAP has 15,000 HCM deployments (not customers) that could benefit from one-stop shopping.
  
  Point of View (POV): While the core offerings provided a solid approach, these applications remained in the systems of transaction world and lacked many of the newer requirements for systems of engagement.  In fact, many customers left SAP to go to SuccessFactors to accelerate innovation in the talent space. The rise of Taleo, Workday, and Ultimate Software comes from the lack of general innovation in the HCM space by legacy vendors such as Oracle, PeopleSoft, and SAP.  Cloud computing provided the opportunity to deliver rapid innovation to customers.  Consequently, existing customers will welcome the move while best of breed purists will have to overcome the surprise and determine how innovative they expect SAP to become in HCM.

• SuccessFactors’ provides SAP with massive cross-sell opportunities. SAP believes the core SFSF offerings will be an attractive to more than 500 million employees of SAP customers .  SAP has 15,000 HCM deployments (not customers) that could potentially go for one-stop shopping from SAP.
  
  Point of View (POV): SAP sees the acquisition as a great cross-sell opportunity for other cloud apps and analytics.  Other opportunities include CRM, Collaboration, Travel, and Procurement in the cloud.  In the past two years, Success Factors has made the shift to focus on business performance execution and provides a real time decision making platform.  While customers can acquire a solution from one vendor, the integration of the various cloud platforms may prove to be a challenge.  However, from a financial play, Co-CEO, Bill McDermott sees this as an easy way to meet his 2015 target of €20billion and move towards the 35% margin he seeks to bring shareholders.

• SuccessFactors’ brings enhanced social, and cloud expertise while SAP provides mobile assets. Lars and company do bring cloud expertise and know how.  They have shown how to manage and innovate in large scale cloud deployments.  In addition, the CubeTree acquisition provides some basic social features and a solid set of pre-built integrations to many consumer and enterprise products including Twitter, Google Docs and Google Reader, Salesforce.com, WebEx and Basecamp.  Meanwhile, SAP hopes to add the Sybase platform to add business to employee mobility capabiltiies.
  
  POV: SAP’s many efforts headed up by Peter Lorenz may have to be rationalized quite quickly.  Why? SAP’s complete portfolio comprises five different software architectures from ByD, Career OnDemand, Plateau, and Business Suite 7.  Without harmonizing the architectures, SAP will inherit a technical deficit.  Lars first task must be how to integrate such a cacophony of technologies including how to fit Sybase Mobile onto the SuccessFactors architecture.  The Streamworks team will also face challenges with integrating the social business assets of CubeTree which include wikis, blogs, polls, file sharing, link sharing, search, and other consumer tech features.

The Bottom Line For Customers And Prospects (Buy-Side): Proceed With Caution

On the call with SAP and SuccessFactors executives, they reconfirmed that SuccessFactors will remain an independent entity and operate as “SuccessFactors, an SAP company”.  Lars Dalgaard is recommended for addition to the executive board of SAP AG.  However, customers and prospects should:

• Shore up existing concessions and agreements with SuccessFactors. Use this opportunity to add additional licenses as needed, make contract revisions, and secure commitments on product enhancements.  Sales folks will be clamoring to complete end of year deals.  Now is the best time to negotiate a deal.
• Seek clarity on the future cloud road map. Questions about the future road map abound.  With so many different offerings from SAP, which platform remains.  How will SAP handle cloud based integration at the process, data, and meta data level?
• Explore other SAP offerings. Now with a broader portfolio, existing SuccessFactors customers who are not SAP customers may want to explore some of the other Line of Business Cloud offerings.

The Bottom Line For Vendors (Sell-Side): SAP Must Continue To Make Selective Acquisitions In Three Out Of The Five Pillars of Consumer Tech To Grow

This acquisition and many others show why large enterprise software companies such as SAP must acquire for innovation in order to grow top line revenue.  In the mobile, cloud, and social space, we are seeing a war for footprint and users.  The market can expect more consolidation and more chaos as these acquisitions change the overall market landscape.  For enterprise software, Oracle, Salesforce.com, IBM, and SAP must place bets on the five pillars of consumer tech entering the enterprise in order to remain relevant and grow.  SAP currently has built a solid foundation in analytics/big data with Business Objects and has made forays into Cloud with Business By Design and Mobile with Sybase (see Figure 1).  This acquisition moves it further along in Cloud.  However, SAP will have to do more in Social (CubeTree perhaps) and mobile to move forward.  Unified communications may come from a partnership with Cisco and Microsoft instead of an outright acquisition or organic development.

Figure 1. SAP Covers Three Out Of Five Pillars In The Consumerization of IT

The cloud does change many dynamics for all technology vendors.  Here’s why:

• Hardware vendors emerge as cloud providers.  Dell’s entrance into providing bundled Cloud services shows how the model can also provide bundled services from a trusted hardware provider.
• System integrators move to the cloud to provide differentiated IP. Capgemini’s Immediate offering shows how a system integrator can provide Cloud BPO with bundled services under a single SLA and contract.
• Full stack providers move to create value to both the IT buyers and the line of business executive. For example,  IBM has led the way with its Social Business and Cross Channel Commerce acquisitions.  Oracle has finally acknowledging that the cloud exists with the RightNow acquisition and accelerated the cloud wars.

The next 12 to 18 months will show how innovation created by startups will find a natural path to existing legacy vendors.  The model is no different than in hardware 15 years ago.  However, with software, new innovators and entrants will continue to emerge due to the low barrier of entry for innovation and the compelling returns in exit strategies.

Your POV.

SuccessFactors customers, what’s your reaction to the SAP purchase?  SAP customers, will you move to SAP?  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

Please let us know if you need help with your next gen apps strategy efforts.  Here’s how we can help:

• Mapping out the roadmap in the Future of Work
• Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support for SaaS, Cloud, and On-Premises software.
• Evaluating SaaS/Cloud options
• Assessing apps strategies (e.g. single instance, two-tier ERP, upgrade, custom dev, packaged deployments”
• Designing end to end processes and systems
• Comparing SaaS/Cloud integration strategies
• Assisting with legacy ERP migration
• Engaging in an SCRM, HR tech and strategy
• Planning upgrades and migration
• Performing vendor selection

Resources

SAP Conference Call Replay With Bill McDermott and Lars Dalgaard

News Analysis: Oracle Buys RightNow For $1.43B

Monday’s Musings: Balancing The Six S’s In Consumerization Of IT

Monday’s Musings: A Working Vendor Landscape For Social Business

Research Report: The Upcoming Battle For The Largest Share Of The Technology Budget Part 1

Media Coverage

20111203 ZDNet: Between The Lines – Larry Dignan “SAP acquires SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion: Cloud consolidation accelerates”

20111203 ZDNet: Irregular Enterprise – Dennis Howlett “SAP acquires SuccessFactors: a first take”

20111203 IDG News Service – Elizabeth Heichler “Update: SAP buys SuccessFactors for $3.4 bn to boost cloud offering”

20111203 SAP On The Cloud – Sven Denecken “SAP to Accelerate Cloud Strategy with Acquisition of SuccessFactors – will talk more #SAPSummit”

20111203 Bloomberg BusinessWeek -Ragnhild Kjetland “SAP to Buy SuccessFactors for $3.4 Billion to Match Oracle”

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.

Copyright © 2011 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC All rights reserved.

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,… Read more

Avaya announced its purchase of speech analytics firm Aurix to support its UC and contact center solutions. This acquisition indicates the growing need for companies to mine, analyze and understand their customers’ conversations. For too long contact center metrics focused on the agent’s conversation but were unable to categorize voice interactions of their customers to assess their concerns and attitudes. I believe it is an important shift for customer service organization to use speech analytics to better understand customers’ attitudes and improve their experience through analysis and interpretation of what they are saying. Speech analytics is ready for prime time and is an important tool to gain valuable customer insight. Benefits of speech analytics allow you to:

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,… Read more

Enterprises are actively expanding their use of video and consider it an essential component of their overall communication initiatives. Video conferencing has become pervasive, as technical improvements make it easier to use, less expensive and more manageable. Today’s diverse workforce creates a high demand for personalized contact with external locations and video conferencing promotes more intimate meetings. Sales managers also find video conferencing creates a closer relationship with prospective and existing customers. However, video conferencing expansion should not be left to sporadic upgrades across departments but part of a well thought out plan to ensure maximum usage without sacrificing quality and the user’s experience. Consider the following steps when developing your enterprise videoconferencing strategy. Picture your end state. Video conferencing should not be considered a solution where one size fits all. There are many practical options for using video and it is important that you prioritize which types of solutions will deliver the results needed. Solutions may range from high level global meetings to internal training classes. Develop end users’ requirements. Classify different work groups according to their job functions and communication responsibilities. Knowledge workers may consider frequent video conferencing sessions as essential to their job performance, while other employees may be an occasional attendee of a video conferencing meeting. Additionally, determine if the videoconferencing sessions will be mostly for internal communications or for external meetings with customers and partners. Identify what type of experience users’ require. Most video conferencing today takes place in a room equipped with a video conferencing camera and speakers. However, desktop video is growing quickly and enables users participate in video conferencing sessions through their PC or a video phone. Tablets and smart phones are also growing in importance especially for remote and mobile workers. Executive level meetings may favor high quality immersive experience of telepresence. Also, note limitations to some types of video conferencing sessions. An employee who sits in a cubicle may disturb others using desktop video requiring video endpoints be set up in convenient break out rooms. Manage the quality of the uses’ experience. Video conferencing requires real time connectivity for high resolution. When expanding video conferencing, it is critical to ensure there is adequate bandwidth and that packet loss is less than 0.1% in any five minute period. It is also necessary to support QoS on the LAN and WAN for uninterrupted traffic flow. Include special-use applications. As tablet adoption increases, mobile video will expand as businesses use tablets for multiple business purposes. Using the video capabilities of tablets, organizations can capture and record real time events to remote sites. For example, a healthcare organization may equip its doctors and nurses with tablets to provide face to face meetings with distant patients or a manufacturer can use tablets to see inside remote facilities to observe workers and conditions. Consider real time video support. As video adoption becomes viral, it is important to measure its effect on the overall capacity of the network. When planning for video conferencing adoption determine the number of simultaneous sessions you plan to support and additional network equipment, such as gateways or session border controllers, that may be needed. It is also essential to address video’s security requirements, such as NAT/Firewall traversal or HTTP tunneling, etc. Highlight its ease of use. Although video calls have become very simple to set up, there is still some reluctance on users who may not feel confident in setting up a video conference. For those groups who plan to participate in video conferencing, set up training sessions to ensure widespread adoption. Determine purchase method. Video conferencing solutions are available as premise based and cloud solutions. The purchase option depends somewhat on the company’s network capabilities to support video and its implementation of security and management tools. If the network is video ready, then the premise based solution may offer a lower cost. Cloud solutions reduce management time and are faster to implement and many consider cloud solutions as an operational expense, which appeals to some companies. Integrate with overall UC plan. Video should be considered a part of a company’s overall communication strategy and be included in its Unified Communications upgrade plan. This enables users to have a common interface for video and integrate more fully into the overall communication infrastructure. Interoperability is also important criteria and you need to understand how vendors support other vendors’ video endpoints.

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,… Read more

Many companies support social media sites to reach the millions of customers who actively network on their sites to communicate, publish comments and seek information. However, a major opportunity is often overlooked, which is to proactively use social media to reduce costs in their contact centers. Customer support centers are primarily reactive and rely heavily on expensive inbound telephone calls to support the needs of its customers. However, strategic use of social media sites can reach out to customers before they need to make a call and deliver value-added support for their customers.

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,… Read more

After many years of moving contact center operations off-shore, either directly or through outsourcers, several companies have changed direction and are repatriating agents to onshore locations.

Lower salaries and improved profit margins drove companies to off-shore locations, such as India and the Philippines but now a growing number of companies are reconsidering their decision. Bringing agents back onshore is not based on any new spirit of nationalism but on the fact that many customers complain about the quality of services received from off-shore agents. For routine questions, customers seem satisfied working with off-shore agents who offer a simple direct response. However, for more complex interactions, customers much prefer a live agent and one who can quickly provide the information needed. Customer satisfaction ratings often fall short with non-native English speakers who rely heavily on scripted conversations and perform poorly when they need to deviate from their script. This results in agent’s lack of contextual understanding of the issue, fewer first call resolutions, longer hold times and multiple transfers. Callers’ dissatisfaction may ultimately result in customer defections.

The timing seems right to bring some agents back on shore, as the growth in home agents by several outsourcers attracts a better educated pool of workers and increased flexibility in work hours. Although on-shore home agents receive a higher hourly wage, companies save in other areas, such a more call completions, lower travel costs, and higher agent retention, which results in lower training expenditures. Rather than viewing customer support as a commodity, several companies realize that improved service deliver is a competitive differentiator that promotes customer affinity.

The move to bring more agents on-shore will happen gradually but slow economic conditions makes organizations even more aware of the value of retaining their customers with improved support. Some examples of companies that moved some of their operations back onshore include the airlines such as Delta and US Airways manufactures such as Dell and Chrysler and retail operations such as Netflix. For companies that want to outsource on-shore agents, there are many available vendors who support both onshore and offshore outsourcing including Convergys, Sitel, and Teleperformance. Outsourcers that specialize in supporting home onshore agents include Alpine Access, LiveOps and West Communications.

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,… Read more

Unified Communications (UC) adoptions will continue to grow in NA in 2011 but future investment plans show a significant decline over the prior two years. Constellation Research partnered with Computer Economics to survey UC decision makers and found a steady growth in the adoption of UC among companies with earnings greater than fifty million dollars annually for the current year. This survey revealed a steady uptake in UC adoption from a 25% adoption rate in 2009, a 27% adoption rate in 2010 and a 34% adoption rate this year. However, the survey also found a sharp decline in short term plans to invest in UC during the next 18 months. In 2011, 18% of respondents planned short term UC investments compared to 40% in 2010 and 35% in 2009.

While the overall market outlook for UC remains positive, it is evident that the current economic slowdown has put a damper on UC investments for many organizations, where tight budgets limit spending. This same survey also revealed that the majority of companies investing in UC had a positive ROI on their investment, so decision makers understand the benefits of UC deployments. With a slow economy it is up to vendors to do more to demonstrate quantifiable savings for specific industries to help prioritize the adoption of UC solutions. Providing customers with tools to better quantify realistic savings will facilitate business case development and help organizations move forward with their UC upgrades. For full survey results see Constellation Research Group’s report, “2011 Unified Communications Adoption Trends”.