A Software Insider's Point of View

News Analysis: Acumatica Raises $10M In Series C Funding, Aims For 1B In Revenue By 2023

Published on December 7, 2013 by R "Ray" Wang

New Funding Round Fuels Road Map And Geographic Expansion

On November 18th, privately held Acumatica announced Series C funding from Runa Capital and Almaz Capital. The Kirkland, WA based Acumatica, has been quietly providing its partners a customizable, cloud-based ERP and CRM development platform for the SMB market. Acumatica’s previous rounds were funded by Visma (a KKR company) and Almaz Capital (backed by Cisco). The announcement is significant because Acumatica intends to:

Expand its partner base into new markets. Acumatica currently has offices in Washington DC, Singapore, and Moscow. Through affiliates, resellers, and partners, Acumatica is present in the US, Canada, Mexico, UK, Nordics, The Netherlands, Africa, Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia. Sales come exclusively from partners. Thus, the company intends to recruit more partners for high growth markets such as Asia and Latin America. European expansion will focus on a replacement ERP market of aging systems

Point of View (POV): Early success with Acumatica has come from the ease of use and functional footprint that accelerates a partner’s ability to take a solution to market. However, future growth will require the leadership team to increase its investment in brand awareness and partner enablement. Expect key hires in partner sales, support, and R&D. Given the limited number of qualified partners in the market, Acumatica will have to convince partners from competitors to switch. Early indications show this market traction. In fact, since August 2013, Acumatica has added 50 partners, bringing the total to 270.

Continue Reading…

News Analysis: Acquisition Of Fiberlink Fills Key Gap In IBM’s One-Stop Mobile First Strategy

Published on November 25, 2013 by R "Ray" Wang

IBM Acquires Fiberlink (MaaS360) For Mobile Management And Security

On November 13th, Blue Bell, PA based Fiberlink Communications signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Armonk, NY based IBM for an undisclosed sum. Fiberlink has over 3500 clients in key verticals such as financial, retail, public sector, education, and healthcare. IBM expects to close the acquisition at year’s end. The deal is significant to customers because:

IBM is committed to deliver one stop mobility via acquisitions and organic growth. IBM has made eight acquisitions in the last 18 months (see Figure 1). In 2012, IBM acquired Emptoris, Worklight, and Tealeaf Mobile. Urban Code, The Now Factory, Xtify, Trusteer, and Fiberlink formed the 2013 acquisition list. Along the way in 2012, IBM launched three mobile offerings: IBM Endpoint Manager for mobile devices, IBM Connections Mobile, and IBM Security Access Manager for Cloud and Mobile. In 2013, IBM made the IBM Mobile First announcement along with the IBM Message Sight solution.

Point of View (POV): Mobile is the key onramp to digital business. The average individual is no further than three feet from their devices and always on 14 to 15 hours a day. Unfortunately, today’s mobile offerings often are piecemeal and incomplete. IBM has made a strategic bet to provide the end to end mobile first life cycle. IBM sees four key entry points for mobile: build, engage, transform, and optimize. Worklight and Urban code addresses build. IBM Connections Mobile, Tealeaf CX Mobile, and IBM Xtify enable human interaction for engage while IBM MessageSight enables machine to machine (M2M) communications. Meanwhile, the Now Factory provides big data insights to support the transform entry point. Emptoris Rivermine Telecom expense management, IBM Endpoint Manager, IBM Security Access Manager, Trusteer end point security, and IBM Urban Code release automation are part of the optimize entry point.

Mobile management is a critical function for successful BYOD and IBM’s Mobile First strategy. MaaS360 provides a cloud based mobility management platform and an on-premises version will be available shortly. The solution is policy based to support a wide range of BYOD security and privacy requirements. MaaS360 supports mobile device management (MDM), mobile content management, and mobile applicant management including containerization.

Continue Reading…

News Analysis: Sitecore Acquires Commerce Server In Quest Towards Customer Experience Management

Published on November 22, 2013 by R "Ray" Wang

Commerce Server Finds Its Logical Home

On Wednesday November 20th, 2013, Copenhagen, Denmark based Sitecore acquired Ottawa, Canada based commerceserver.net for an undisclosed price. Originally known as the Microsoft Siteserver and Commerce Server 2000, the product was orphaned by Microsoft, then Ascentium, the key development partner were given the rights to further develop and market the product. Adding to the lore, Ascentium changed their name to SMITH in the Fall of 2012 and the product group was rebranded to commerceserver.net.

Sitecore’s acquisition continues a consolidation trend in the Matrix Commerce market where vendors are aggregating technologies to support a buyer centric approach to customer experience. Constellation believes customers should pay attention because Sitecore:

Signals seriousness to deliver on end to end customer experience. Sitecore’s portfolio includes its core web content management offerings and an emerging set of digital marketing assets. Commerce Server adds key B2C functionality for hard goods, digital goods, and web based services; B2B capabilities in trading communities and e-procurement; complex B2X scenarios; and personalized portals.

Point of View (POV): Addition of commerceserver.net fills one key hole in Sitecore’s customer experience management portfolio. Customers and prospects can expect additional acquisitions from the new management team. In fact, the company has brought in heavy hitters such as a new CRO and CMO over the past 12 months. Constellation believes that Sitecore is serious in completing key holes in the end to end customer experience story and moving up the stack to support a range of small to large enterprise customers. In fact, Commerce Sever 10 scales up to support 220,000o orders/day on a 12 hour peak, 60 million user profiles, 10 million item catalogs, 100,000 catalogs and virtual catalogs, and hosting support for 100 active, 1000 provisioned. Constellation believes the acquistion places Sitecore in the direct battle with Adobe, IBM, Oracle, and SAP for customer experience and commerce.

Ensures Commerce Server a friendly and natural home. Commerce Server brings its core Microsoft heritage. Dependencies include Microsoft SQL Server, .NET, Commerce Server Staging (CSS), and Component Object Model. Commerce Server also plays well with other Microsoft server stack components including Biz Talk Server and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. Sitecore’s software is built on a Microsoft.NET platform. Deployable in Microsoft Azure, the core CMS can use Oracle or Microsoft for the database and content can be stored in either .NET or XML objects.

(POV): Customers should find relief that the Commerce Server assets return back to a product centric company. While SMITH (formerly known as Ascentium), a digital experience agency, served as a reasonable owner and even delivered the latest version 10 release, software cultures and services business models often clash. Why? The research and development investment required to take products to market work against the resource utilization and project focus required for successful services. Constellation will measure integration success by how well the team builds and accelerates the original major release plans (see Figure 1).

Gains critical ecosystem assets. Commerce Server brings 3000 customers and 25 partners around the world. Partners range from 17 enterprise providers, hosting providers, training, ISV, and consultants. Key industries for Commerce Server include retail, manufacturing, and e-government. Sitecore brings over 3000 customers, 1000 certified business partners in 50 countries, 8,000 certified developers, and 17,000 active members in the developer ecosystem.

(POV): Prior to the acquisition, Commerce Server product holes included content management, search, analytics, campaign management, and other key customer experience management capabilities. Sitecore fills many of these product gaps and adds a larger ecosystem. Customers can expect significant cross-training among the partners as they integrate the Commerce Server assets into their portfolios.

Figure 1. The Pre SiteCore Acquisition Commerce Server Road Map Continue Reading…

News Analysis: Salesforce 1 Signals Support For Digital Business at #DF13

Published on November 17, 2013 by R "Ray" Wang

Salesforce Seeks To Tackle Digital Business At Dreamforce

Over 125,000 virtual and physical registrants descend on San Francisco the week of November 17th for Dreamforce 13, a future of technology meets SXSW event. One day in advance of the largest enterprise software event of its kind, Salesforce.com announces Salesforce 1 (see Figure 1). The Salesforce 1 customer platform seeks to address a cadre of emerging digital business requirements that customer centric companies face.

Figure 1. Salesforce 1 Customer Platform Intends to Support The Internet Of Customers

Source: Salesforce.com

SalesForce 1 Reflects Much Needed Refresh Of Existing Platform

The new customer platform includes platform services, platform APIs, and the Apps created from the platform. Salesforce 1 platform services includes refreshes in Force.com, updates in Heroku, and adds Exact Target Fuel. As expected, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Exact Target Marketing Cloud, and Apps Exchange sit on top of the salesforce1.com platform (see Figure 2).

The key analysis of this release include:

Internet of Customers support. Salesforce includes social, mobile, cloud, and connected as the key components for The Internet of Things. In order to meet the requirements of a third wave of computing that moves from Internet of Things to what Salesforce calls the Internet of Customers, the new platform is designed to support this customer centricity convergence.

Point of View (POV): Constellation sees more than 50B connected devices and at least 150B connected endpoints by 2020. The opportunity is huge. While Salesforce.com addresses 3 out of the 5 key components of digital business, the vendor still needs to provide video/unified communications and big data/analytics. Constellation believes the big data and analytics opportunity is critical to enhancing customer experiences, to benchmarking and brokering data servcies, and to buildoing new business models around big data and analytics. Customers should encourage Salesforce.com to consider how to enable big data business models in digital business in the next iteration. Meanwhile, most customers can wait until future releases for video and UC requirements to be met.

Next generation apps developer platform. The PaaS layer adds a mobile first orientation that enables a write once and deploy anywhere platform. Developers can now deploy to a range of social, mobile, and connected devices. The platform services include 10X more API functionality. Developers can build customer apps, wearable apps, product apps, and salesforce apps.

Continue Reading…

Tuesday’s Tip: Understand The Five Generation Of Digital Workers And Customers

Published on November 12, 2013 by R "Ray" Wang

Age Is Not The Deciding Factor In Five Generations Of Workers

When discussing the future of work, most folks immediately jump to the discussion of millennials, generation Y, generation X, baby boomers, post war, etc. However, the shift to digital business finds a different type of five generations. This segmentation describes how digitally proficient people are with digital technologies and culture. Constellation sees five generations (see Figure 1):

Digital natives – people who grew up with the internet, comfortable in engaging in all digital channels.
Digital immigrants - people who have crossed the chasm to the digital world, forced into engagement in digital channels.
Digital voyeurs – people who recognize the shift to digital, observing from an arms length distance.
Digital holdouts – people who resist the shift to digital, ignoring the impact.
Digital disengaged – people who give up on digital, obsessed with erasing digital exhaust.

Figure 1. Five Generations Of Workers With Different Expectations And Values

The Bottom Line: Build Journey Maps For The Five Generations Of Digital Workers

Where you work, when you work, how you work, what you work on, and why you work have been disrupted in this digital world. These five generations of workers have different people centric values that Continue Reading…

Monday’s Musings: The Chief Digital Officer In The Age Of Digital Business

Published on November 4, 2013 by R "Ray" Wang

Market Leaders and Fast Followers Prepare for Digital Business In 2014

Conversations at Constellation’s Connected Enterprise last week validate a larger trend in the market place. The audience of 220+ early adopters with 75% representing line of business and 25% in IT highlighted the convergence of the five forces of consumerization described in 2009 and 2010. This convergence of these five pillars of digital business now form the foundation of all future digital business strategy and drive customer experience, matrix commerce, future of work, data to decisions, consumerization of technology, and digital marketing (see Figure 1.). In fact, market leaders and fast followers have embraced this strategic direction in their 2014 planning.

Figure 1. Convergence Of The Five Pillars Drive Digital Business Strategy

Emerging Trends In 2014 Digital Business Strategy Reflect The Shift To Digital Business

As Constellation works with leaders to define their 2014 business strategies, digital transformation plays a key role. Many organizations will:

Recognize that they no longer sell products and services, as buyers seek experiences and outcomes.
Democratize the data to decisions pathway to enable innovation.
Realize that B2B and B2C are dead. It’s a P2P and M2M world.
Focus on context as right time relevancy beats real time information overload.
Shift from engagement to personalization at scale.

(A full update will be posted in Harvard Business Review soon)

The Bottom Line: Organizations Can Expect The Rise Of Chief Digital Officers

Trends: Real World Lessons In Optimizing The Customer Service Experience From Kana Connect

Published on October 20, 2013 by R "Ray" Wang

Workshop On Optimizing Your Customer Service Experience Identifies Eight Strategies

At the 2013 Kana Connect event from September 15th to 17th, 2013 in New Orleans, I had the pleasure of co-leading a workshop with Scott Hays a Sr. Director, Product Marketing for KANA Software. The goal of the session was to explore eight strategies to improve customer experience.

By now, you are well aware that “experience counts.” Your customers’ loyalty and future purchases hang in the balance. In this session, we’ll explore the key things you can do to make sure their experiences are positive. Ray Wang from Constellation Research and Scott Hays from KANA guide an interactive workshop to invigorate your future initiatives.

Speaker(s): Scott Hays, Ray Wang, Constellation Research

The event began with a overview of Constellation 9C’s of customer engagement and then an overview of the eight ways to optimize your customer service experience. Teams were broken up to documen current state and to rank future state. Teams were told to identify the top three ways among these eight strategies:

Effortless and personalized
Channel convenience
Channel consistency
Social media
Unified agent desktop
Agent knowledge
Process-driven
Internationalization

Results Show Future Focus on Channel Consistency, Social Media, and Effortless and Personalized

Given the Kana customer base, current state priorities of agent knowledge, process driven, and channel convenience came as little surprise to the participants. In fact, most workshop attendees have had Continue Reading…

Event Report: Metaio’s #InsideAR Conference Hails The Future Of An Always On, Always Augmented Reality

Published on by R "Ray" Wang

Digital Business Arrives In The Always On Always Augmented World

On October 10th and 11th, 2013, over 800 attendees from more than 45 countries arrived at the Munich Olympic Park to share their passion and excitement about the latest augmented reality (AR) developments (see Figure 1). Hosted by augmented reality pioneer Metaio, Inside AR 2013, has emerged as one of the world’s largest conferences dedicated to the business of AR. The conference touched on key areas such as:

Wearable computing
Hardware advances
Applications and development
Global adoption
Future of digital business and AR
AR use cases from engineering to sales
Consumer AR
Future of print and packaging in AR
Public sector use cases

Figure 1. Full Flickr Stream Of InsideAR Including Demo Videos

Augmented Reality Brings Contextual Experiences To Life

Continue Reading…

Event Report: The Evolution And Maturation of @Tibbr at #Tucon2013, the Tibco User Conference

Published on October 19, 2013 by R "Ray" Wang

tibbr Continues To Show Momentum In Customer Adoption And Addition Of Key Enterprise Social Features

On October 14th to 17th 2013, the Tibbr enterprise social crowd mingled with the core Tibco faithful at this year’s TUCON 2013 user conference in Las Vegas. (An analysis of the broader Tibco announcements can be found from my colleague Holger Mueller). While the Tibbr team continues to build synergies with the core Tibco offering in Big Data, Events, Integration, and BPM, the Tibbr team also made key announcements that include:

tibbr crosses the 6.5M users adoption mark. The team announced paid user growth from 1.2M to 6.5M in over a year. Distribution partnerships with Amazon Web Services (AWS), KPN, and T-Systems highlight future opportunities for growth.

POV: The team’s partnerships and geographic expansion in Latin America and EMEA have paid off. With an entry point of $12 per user per month, 6.5M users represents a sizable growth in subscriber base, even after enterprise wide discounting. Given the virality of successful enterprise social networks (ESN), tibbr could prove to be a key cross-sell lead gen for the rest of Tibco’s products.

tibbr Files and partnership with Huddle. tibbr Files allows customers to integrate with existing content and file systems such as Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Huddle, and SharePoint. Users can access tibbr to view conversations, work on files, and collaborate through the tibbr interface. the tibbr team announced its partnership with Huddle at Tucon 2013.

Point of View (POV): Customers have been clamoring for more out of the box integration options to unify content repositories. The partnership with Huddle is crucial for organizations that rely on Huddle’s security mechanisms. In tibbr, users retain their security, permissions, and versions when accessing Huddle’s files.

tibbr Tasks. tibbr Tasks provides social task management capabilities. Users can create tasks in process, track and update tasks via social channels, and manage a visual portfolio of tasks across all project management tools.

POV: Tasks are a key requirement for supporting Purposeful Collaboration as described by colleague Alan Lepofsky. Many customers have deployed tibbr to unify disparate business processes. The addition of tasks embedded in enterprise social will improve collaboration at the business process level.

tibbr Pages. The new pages product allows users to publish content within and outside the organization. Pages also retains tibbr security rules.

POV: The tibbr team takes a stab at the proliferation of Microsoft SharePoint kudzu with its own application. By enabling users to find, publish, and share, the tibbr team adds another key tool to enabling content creation and collaboration for users.

Figure 1. The Tucon 2013 Scene and New Tibbr App Screen Shots

The Bottom Line: tibbr Emerge As A Key Player For Enterprise Social

News Analysis: Avangate Acquired By Francisco Partners For Matrix Commerce Capabilities

Published on October 12, 2013 by R "Ray" Wang

Digital Distribution Leader Gains West Coast VC Backing

On October 7th, 2013, private equity firm, Francisco Partners acquired Avangate, a leader in digital commerce and subscription billing. Avangate serves over 3,000 customers across more than 100 countries. Avangate has experienced 70% year over year growth over the past six years. The deal terms were not publicly disclosed and was led by My Le Nguyen.

Constellation sees this development significant for buyers and prospects because Avangate:

Gains critical west coast financial community backing. The acquisition of Francisco Partners supposedly includes a buy-out of existing investors. My Le Ngueyn of Francisco Partners is also an investor and board member at GXS, EF Johnson Technologies, and WatchGuard Technologies.

Point of View (POV): Avangate frees itself from the shackles of non-west coast investors who tend not to invest for high growth and lack the key networks of Silicon Valley based investors. My Le is a rising star at Francisco and will help Avangate invest in future areas of growth. The buy out of existing partners and shift to US-based ownership and technology ecosystem is critical to Avangate’s continued success trajectory.

Invests in key customer facing and product areas. Avangate provides what Constellation terms as a matrix commerce platform. The product delivers a unfied online eCommerce, subscription billing, global payments, and reseller & affiliate management offering. Avangate targets individual developers and large organizaitons such as FICO, Kaspersky, and Software AG.

Point of View (POV): Constellation expects the management team to invest deeper in product development, sales, customer service, and marketing. Recent customer successes requires Avangate to adequately support its growing vendor customer base with more engineering support, professional services, and product management resources. Expect continued expansion of Avangate’s online commerce and subscription billing capabilities.

Expands geographically and through mergers. New investment round provides opportunities to grow in new digital commerce hot spots as well as fund additional technology and customer base acquisitions.

Point of View (POV): Many opportunities exist in areas with high mobile penetration and digital commerce growth. Avangate could build upon its international strength given its European founding to expand its presence more into India, Indonesia, and Latin America to support both vendors selling into, as well as exporting out of those rapidly growing markets.

The Bottom Line: Matrix Commerce Platforms Continue To Gain Traction With B2B and B2C Customers

Meet R “Ray” Wang

"Ray" Wang is the Principal Analyst & CEO of the next generation research and advisory firm Constellation Research, Inc. Ray is also the author of this popular enterprise software blog “A Software Insider’s Point of View”. With annual viewership near 10 million of page views a year, his blog provides insight into how disruptive technologies and new business models impact the enterprise. Ray formerly served as a Founding Partner at Altimeter Group, VP of Enterprise Apps and Contract Negotiations Strategy at Forrester Research. He's served stints in product management, product marketing, and strategic consulting at Deloitte Consulting, Ernst & Young Consulting, Personify, Oracle, and Peoplesoft.; More...