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We have all heard the statement – you can’t cost cut your way to profitability. Too often in business, CxOs and others forget the spirit of this saying. Cost cutting, or more precisely, cost management, is vital to running your business. In many businesses and their associated supply chains, however, this is achieved in disjointed and siloed departments. This disjointed approach to cost cutting can achieve the basic goal of saving money and therefore “improving” the bottom line. But it falls short of long-term benefits for the businesses. Savvy CxOs need to look at cost through a different lens.
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SAP Financial Excellence Forum offers a preview of TechEd announcements including S/4HANA Finance and SAP Cloud For Analytics. The finance app needs a lift from S/4HANA Logistics while Cloud For Planning is … Continue reading →
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This WSJ article, in May 2014, was most certainly not advocating the end of the Cloud, but instead was highlighting the challenge of the ever-growing numbers of devices of all types connecting, and interacting, in a wholly different manner. The technology industry has come to realize that the Internet of Things is not just about sensors, it’s about the shift to millions and millions of devices interacting in new ways around events.
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Adobe has announced a series of enhancements to its Document Cloud's e-sign capabilities, but the most important aspect of the release for customers is an expanded partner program that integrates the product into Salesforce, Workday and SAP Ariba. From the release:
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A very bold move by Dell, that is not even sure to go down as announced, pending financing and VMware stock value. Business goes on, e.g. VMworld Europe kicks off Tuesday this week and it will be a key event to reassure European customers of what VMware can do. Maybe Michael Dell will jet over there, which probably would be a key endorsement move and could slow some potential ‘Euro frenzy’. The industry has not done well with mega mergers, think of the HP / Compaq merger, but these are key events that are even being reviewed in the press 10+ years later. It will be the same for the Dell / EMC merger that – if Michael Dell and his (new) team can pull it off – will be a remarkable re-invention of the Dell brand, a very different Dell. It will be key to see if Dell can muster the investment to build out a Dell ‘public’ cloud for all the arguments we have listed earlier, that’s where in my view EMC missed the boat. And being later has never helped in the high tech business, but to catch up is getting harder and harder, so speed and execution will be of the essence. We will be watching.
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Here are the things I'm looking forward to at the I Love APIs conference this week. APIs become more and more important - No surprise - APIs power more and more of the economyIs is getting easier - or harder - One key area will be to see if it getting easier to build and consume APIs - not even by a developer, but potentially (a savvy) business users.Do APIs scale? - It used to be that APIs could not do brute force interfaces - let's see how they scale up to the 21st century demands. And next to technical scalability, there is also business scalability with aspects like e.g. uptake, monetization, licensing and more.IoT - No surrpise - the hottest next generation application use case features prominently at the conference.
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Why is the PTC acquisition of Vuforia so important? PTC is is a global provider of technology platforms and solutions that transform how companies create, operate, and service the “things” in the Internet of Things (IoT). The company’s next-generation ThingWorx® technology platform gives developers the tools they need to capture, analyze, and capitalize on the vast amounts […]
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Welcome to another edition of Inside the SportsBiz Studio! This is my version of Inside the Actor’s Studio where I will feature a Q&A with another sports business professional willing to share insights from their career and opinions about the state of the industry. Just like the TV show, there will be some common questions that everyone […]
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After weeks of speculation, Dell and EMC made history on Monday with the announcement of a $67 billion merger deal—the largest in tech history—which will see EMC go private under Dell's ownership. While a transaction of this size and scope will justifiably be scrutinized in depth over the coming weeks, here are some initial takeways for customers to consider.
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Best of Breed Startups Often Initially Differentiate And Delight Customers With Extreme Customer CentricityThe journey to an initial public offering (IPO) often brings an intense customer-centric culture and focus that separates the startup vendors from their legacy competitors. These startup vendors woo their prospects with not only their emerging technologies and solutions, but also a commitment to enable their customer’s to deliver on disruptive business models. These vendors earn their market share and mind share by deliver
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Last week spent the majority it of it in San Diego, enjoying the warm southern California weather and sun. Why was I there? Attending the annual CSCMP conference. The conference was, as usual, well attended by an array of supply chain professionals. As in previous years, the event offered a wide array of break out sessions and interactions with fellow professionals. Three take aways from the event:...
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The Risks and Rewards of Leading an Organization to Deliver Superb Experiences that Keep Brand Promises
This report examines the need for businesses to have a senior executive lead the end-to-end customer experience.
Supply chain professionals everywhere are no doubt wincing about the recent recall of nearly two million boxes of Cheerios by General Mills—turns out they weren’t gluten-free after all. From the Washington Post:
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As brands realize Customer Experience Management is key to their overall strategy and long-term growth, our research at Constellation found CMOs should consider the following 7 principles when leading customer experience initiatives:1. Bring passion about the brand you work for and drive cross-functional collaboration and lead organizational change2. Focus on both communications and brand guardianship […]
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If you are an innovator or early adopter, be prepared that others may not see what you see. They may require a business case and more details on why you want to change the organization. If you know this in advance, it will save you a lot of heartache and make you much more successful. The five “gotchas” our research uncovered for CMO’s (or whomever is leading customer experience) to watch out for include:...
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For enterprises looking at public cloud use cases, the announcements made at re:Invent reconfirm AWS as a prime contender on any shortlist, as the vendor has become even more attractive for the enterprise buyer. On the concern side we see that AWS needs to find new ways to distribute knowledge, partnership with SIs are only one path, It's tough for anyone to stay on top of the innovation and the Venetian / Sands is bursting at the seams. And AWS needs to reach more of a enterprise audience - beyond the traditional developer audience of re-Invent conferences. But then AWS CTO Vogels talked for over 15 minutes about IoT use cases, which was kind of odd, as traditionally he delivers a technology talk. It maybe a sign of AWS starting to cater more to the enterprise executive...
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Amazon challenges ‘old-guard’ IBM, Microsoft and Oracle with QuickSight, Kinesis Firehose, Snowball, and new database services. Here’s a quick rundown with cautions for would-be adopters. Make no mistake: Amazon Web Services … Continue reading →
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Customers, Value Chain and The Customer Experience Imperative Should the CMO oversee the whole customer experience? Today, the value chain in business has gone from products that became commodities to services that fuel anticipation of superb customer experiences that go beyond anything customers have expected previously. These new customer expectations have put pressure on companies to […]
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I'm analyzing live from Amazon's AWS reInvent conference in Las Vegas. The conference is seeing record attendance, with over 19k attendees, more than doubling compared to the 2014 edition. Here's what you need to know about announcements made during the keynote about Database, QuickSight, and Amazon's enterprise aspirations.
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Amazon Web Services' opening keynote at re:Invent 2015 started in a familiar fashion, with SVP Andy Jassy providing an overview of AWS's rapidly expanding slew of services along with arguments why companies are moving, and should move, to its cloud. While Jassy's remarks were persuasive, the voice of the customer remains king—and AWS managed to convince no less than the CIOs of Capital One and General Electric to share their stories onstage.
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One of the most common complaints from employees is that they can’t keep up with the vast amounts of information available to them. Many of you have heard me talk about the issue not being email overload, nor even information overload, but rather input overload. We have too many places to look for, or respond to people, content and conversations.
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In what coud have been taken as an April Fool’s joke if the date was April 1st, Teradata today announced support for its data warehouse on Amazon’s AWS Cloud.
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It's a mystery to me why every European privacy advance is met with such reflexive condemnation in America.
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Part 1 and Part 2 outlined what, and how, core innovative technologies are creating business disruption, and provided some examples of new business models that illustrate these core principles.
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