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It’s coming. That annual event that calls together the technology leaders and rising stars; innovators and educators; providers and users of all things HCM technology. The “gathering of the clans” (as the Scots would say) as old friends and colleagues touch base to see who’s working where this year. A 3-day long festival of information, technology, networking and, I’ll admit it, FUN, that never fails to yield new ideas and important new connections.
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Marketing and Advertising Budgets Are The New Land Grab
Constellation Research, Inc. predicts that the global advertising market (paid search, display, and classified) will hit $125B by 2015. While IT budgets continue to stay flat, marketing budgets are up. Warc’s recent Global Marketing Index (GMI) entered positive territory in March 2012. Consequently, the heat up in marketing and advertising market attracts not only start-ups, but also tech vendors looking to enter this lucrative market.
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Former PricewaterhouseCoopers Partner brings social business and strategy management experience to research and advisory firm focused on disruptive technology.
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Over at Computer Economics, we've now launched our 2012 Technology Trends survey, and we're looking for qualified IT executives to take a 15-minute survey about their technology investment plans.
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Lessons Learned from Mobile Management Optimization
Kevin Capp, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Castle Rock discusses the town's mobile communications problems, and how he conducted negotiations with the mobility carriers to resolve them.
Customer community forums provide a meeting place for customers to engage with fellow customers in order to share ideas and information, get tips on product usage and access knowledgeable subject matter experts. Importantly, early adopters find that community forums differentiate them from competitors by providing interactive ways for customers to engage and find support. Forums aggregate relevant product information and usage ideas and share pertinent information to online communities. As more customers become members of a company’s community forum, it is essential to monitor sites and add fresh content to provide a wide range of valuable and actionable information to consumers.
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The Real-Time Hype Is Filled With Flaws
The hype around big data, social media, and mobility has many folks imagining the real-time enterprise in the future of work, next generation customer experiences, matrix commerce, or the data to decisions journey. While real-time theoretically leads to quicker information and faster response times, the reality requires closer examination for three reasons:
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Data Science is a new term and a new job title that has been receiving quite a bit of hype. There have been arguments over the definition of this term, and whether or not it truly describes a new field of endeavor or is just an offshoot of statistics, software programming or business intelligence. Another take is that many of the definitions of a Data Scientist can be met by few if any individuals, but really define a team. The television show Numb3rs ran with new episodes in the USA from 2005 through 2010. In many ways, the show was a prototype for such a Data Science team. Let's look at the roles on the show, and see how they might translate into your organization.
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Bring up the subject of social tools to business leaders, and many will still take the position that these technologies have little to no real value in supporting daily workplace initiatives. But whether these leaders are ready for it or not, today’s workers are bringing expectations for social and mobile technologies into the workplace. Ever-connected, accustomed to instant access to information and people, social and mobile technologies are simply the way we live and work today.
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Leading “Internet of Things” Analyst to add depth to Constellation’s disruptive technology coverage.
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Social Communications Create New Customer Value While Improving Customer Support Processes
New waves of social communications change how customers communicate and have a major impact on the customer support organization. Social communications offer a better way for companies to interact with their customers, eliminate outmoded processes and create new opportunities for customer engagement. Importantly, using social communications as a platform for customer engagement will increase use of self-service by customers, which directly reduces operational costs for customer support while also facilitating stronger ties to the company.
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Understanding the Segments and Knowing the Players
In Part 2 of this report, we provide an estimate of the size of the cloud-based communications market and describe service provider approaches to this market. We articulate differences between “true cloud”, hosted, dedicated and virtualized solutions, list known vendors by geographical markets and conclude with actionable recommendations for organizations considering unified communications as a service.
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Understanding the Drivers and Dispelling the Myths
In Part 1of this report, we discuss why organizations should seriously consider cloud- based communications solutions right now. We discuss the eight drivers most service providers use to advocate their services along with the six inhibitors that naysayers use to counter initial exuberance for them, dispelling myths promulgated by both sides. We examine TCO specifically and point out why arguments in addition to TCO are compelling. We conclude with actionable recommendations for organizations that choose to pursue communications as a service.
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Making the Transition from Data to Decisions
We suggest a dozen best practices needed to move Business Intelligence (BI) software products into the next decade. While five “elephants” occupy the lion’s share of the market, the real innovation in BI appears to be coming from smaller companies. What is missing from BI today is the ability for business analysts to create their own models in an expressive way. Spreadsheet tools exposed this deficiency in BI a long time ago, but their inherent weakness in data quality, governance and collaboration make them a poor candidate to fill this need. BI is well-positioned to add these features, but must first shed its reliance on fixed-schema data warehouses and read-only reporting modes. Instead, it must provide businesspeople with the tools to quickly and fully develop their models for decision-making.
Microsoft Provides The Passion And Products For Partners To Compete In A Post PC Era
Microsoft kicked off its Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto, Canada amidst 16,000 partners (See Figure 1). Attendees caught the latest news and product announcements while sharing new business models and products for a post PC era. Key announcements for Day 1 and Day 2 include:
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We are in a BYOD era with employees clearly indicating that they want to choose the devices they use for their work. Increased mobility among workers has led to high adoptions of smart phones and tablets as preferred communication devices. For routine contacts with co-workers and business partners, most workers choose email and instant messaging over traditional phone calls. Telephones still dominate for conference calls but increased use of video conferencing suggests that phone conversations will diminish as video conference calls increase. The question on the minds of many executives is what is the long term relevance of their corporate telephone system and if it is necessary to continue to make large investments in these systems. With funds tight for IT investments, is it time to let go of the desktop telephone as basic equipment for all employees.
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Making The Case for Hybrid IT on the Path to Business Value
Hybrid IT models will emerge as the norm in the next 12 to 24 months. These models deliver not only value-added specialized services, but also commodity services with greater scale and elasticity. Constellation recommends five guiding principles in the journey toward Hybrid IT: balanced governance; change management; business level integration; security; and enterprise flexibility and choice. Organizations can expect Hybrid IT models to play a key role in the strategy of innovative businesses that must deliver value, profitability and market differentiation.
Used Software Pioneers Gain A Small Victory In A Shrinking On-Premises Software World
The surprise July 3rd, 2012 judgment by the Court of Justice of the European Union for UsedSoft GmbH v Oracle International Corp rules that “An author of software cannot oppose the resale of his ‘used’ licenses allowing the use of his programs downloaded from the internet”.
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One of the challenges of an ever more mobile environment that is that the degree of dependency on mobile carriers to provide services also increases. This applies to both voice and data. Yet, of these two, the implications about the inadequacy of data services is becoming more and more worrying, especially for enterprises or organizations [...]
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Finding the Total Cost of Ownership, Financial Crossover Points, and Implementation Distinctions between the Three Options
This document provides a financial comparison between the options listed below and between multiple vendors for each option. It also provides commentary on the differences in functionality and in implementation approaches between the three options and the vendors’ solutions.
Option 1 – Premises-Based (Private Cloud).
Option 2 – Cloud-Based or Fully Hosted.
Option 3 – Overlay or Side-by-Side.
A broad and possibly confusing range of options face enterprises and organizations of all sizes as they consider immediate and future communications and collaboration needs. To help make this task easier, sixteen vendors offering a total of 24 solutions have stepped up to respond to an RFP covering cloud, overlay, and on-premises options. The RFP was for 2,000 UC seats. The organization consisted of a headquarters location and two branch offices. There was a 75 person call center also included.
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How Can Cloud Storage Support a More Intelligent Enterprise Storage Future?
This market overview looks at how organizations can begin to manage their data both internally and externally in the cloud to minimize economic costs and maximize data usage as an asset for enterprise success. Readers should gain an understanding of storage technology and process activities to achieve a strategic storage management plan.
Nominations are now closed for the 2012 SuperNova Awards. Thank you to everyone who submitted an application for this year's awards. We're continuing our quest to recognize leaders in technology who have created disruptions in their industries, and have received an overwhelming number of nominations that embody this SuperNova Spirit.
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