Archive for May, 2011

Executive Profiles: Disruptive Tech Leaders In Social Business And Cloud Computing

Published on May 29, 2011 by R "Ray" Wang

Executive Profile Series Delivers The Inside View On Disruptive Technologies

Starting this week, we’ll be kicking off an on-going series of interviews with the people behind the technologies in Cloud Computing and Social Business.  The interviews should provide insightful points of view from a customer, industry, and vendor perspective.  The transcript of the 30 minute Q&A’s will follow a common format:

Cloud Computing

  1. Tell me in 2 minutes or less why Cloud Computing is changing the world for your customers
  2. What makes cloud computing disruptive?
  3. What is the next big thing in Cloud Computing?
  4. What are you doing that’s disruptive for Cloud Computing?
  5. Where do you see technology convergence with Cloud?
  6. If you weren’t focused on Cloud Computing what other disruptive technology would you have pursued?
  7. What’s your favorite science fiction gadget of all time?

Social Business

  1. Tell me in 2 minutes or less why Social Computing is changing the world for your customers
  2. What makes social computing disruptive?
  3. What is the next big thing in Social Business software?
  4. What are you doing that’s disruptive for Social Computing?
  5. Where do you see technology convergence with Social?
  6. If you weren’t focused on Social Computing what other disruptive technology would you have pursued?
  7. What’s your favorite science fiction gadget of all time?

Scheduled Interviews Include A Who’s Who List Of Industry Thought Leaders And Market Makers

Cloud Computing

Social Business More…

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Tuesday’s Tip: Three Quick Steps To Capture Social Customer Data

Published on May 17, 2011 by R "Ray" Wang

Organizations Must Overcome Four Fears To Master Social Customer Data

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been criss-crossing the country on a multi-city speaking tour talking about the strategic value of customer data. (In full discloure, the tour is sponsored by Informatica).  As we talk about the implications of social media and customer data, inevitably the audience raises four main concerns:

  1. Existing models outdated, but must be adjusted. How business is conducted does not reflect the shift to a social construct.  Existing systems rewarded management and control not engagement and influence. Organizations and business processes must support engagement and relationship applications.
  2. Organizations are no longer in control, and must build or reestablish relationships. Social opens up a can of worms.  Organizations who believe they are in control will quickly find out how little control they have.  Organizations must foster communities so that relationships can be nurtured.
  3. Volume of requests keep increasing, thus automation is the key to sanity. Those who experiment in social media often find out quickly they can not scale in a 1-to-1 fashion.  The empowerment of the individual means an increase in expectations in response and quality of service.  Automation tools must be put in place to manage, triage, and predict requests.
  4. Data deluge will kill the business, yet the data is the strategic asset. Huge amounts of information from unstructured sources such as comments, blogs, tweets, and video inundate existing systems.  Signal to noise ratios decrease with all the noise.  However, the relationships to the customer in orders, comments, products, services, interaction histories, and sentiment is more valuable than any other asset in the company.

More…

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Research Summary: Market Overview – The Market For SAP Optimization Options

Published on May 15, 2011 by R "Ray" Wang

Forward And Commentary

This market overview provides a starting point to SAP customers seeking optimization solutions.  The document delivers actionable advice and insights into a proven collection of software solutions.  As part of the full series, best practices documents will follow with in- depth case studies and a critical product evaluation of this growing market of SAP optimization solutions. 

A. Introduction

With the average Global 2000 ERP deployment nearing 11.5 years in service, ERP customers face a significant challenge with updating their existing investments. Installed pre-Y2K, users have attempted to work around the best practices of the ‘90s while seeking innovation and application agility. Subsequently, SAP users face three main challenges:

  1. Higher cost of ownership that reduces overall ROI.
  2. An aging and brittle infrastructure that hampers innovation.
  3. Increasing complexity that hampers greater adoption.

B. Research Findings

As SAP customers choose their go- forward apps strategy, interviews from 100′s of clients show that four paths emerge (see Figure 1):
  1. Stay with status quo;
  2. Move to shiny new SAP.;
  3. Stabilize SAP and augment; and
  4. Modernize SAP and surround with best-of-breed.
Figure 1. The Four Paths Of SAP Optimization

 

Consequently, an $80.1 billion third-party SAP ecosystem has emerged to address nine key areas (details on each vendor in the official report):

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Monday’s Musings: Using MDM To Build A Complete Customer View In A Social Era

Published on May 9, 2011 by R "Ray" Wang

Customers Have Evolved… Has Your Organization?

Right now customers and prospects probably ignore your organization’s marketing messages because mass marketing campaigns lack relevancy. Right now most customers answer each other’s questions because your customer service and support agents lack the authority or knowledge to resolve issues. Right now prospects ask each other what they think about a company’s product or service because most organization’s sales professionals lack credibility.

Consequently, organizations face immense challenges in influencing prospects and customers as three forces drive the changing dynamics in customer engagement (see Figure 1).

  1. Trust not financial performance is the new social currency. Trust drives influence, engagement, and relationships. People and organizations must earn trust through their actions across their relationships. Trust can be expended to gain influence, create engagement, and foster relationships. Trust can be taken away through lack of credibility, bad behavior, and dishonesty.
  2. Increase in social media adoption moves beyond fad. Social media adoption is a cultural shift not a fad. The growing preference for engagement through social channels drives new relationship models. Social has moved beyond the tipping point. How social evolves and permeate our lives is the question.
  3. Failure of CRM efforts to engage and influence. Traditional CRM focused on management versus engagement. CRM initiatives barely addressed customers and mostly ignored relationships. Projects focused on manager convenience instead of employee empowerment. More importantly, systems supported transactions not relationships.

Figure 1. Three Forces Drive The Changing Dynamics In Customer Engagement

Organizations Must Address Their Data Challenges To Gain A Strategic Advantage

More…

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Vendor Event: Informatica Customer Data Forum

Published on May 8, 2011 by R "Ray" Wang

Are you…

  • A sales or marketing operations executive who’s struggling to get a single customer view across divisions or channels to make relevant cross-sell offers and increase revenue?
  • A customer service or support manager who’s struggling to get a complete view of your customer’s relationship with your company to speed response times and boost customer retention?
  • An IT director who’s struggling to deliver trusted and complete customer data that the business needs—faster and at lower cost?

Let’s face it. Your customer and prospect data is incomplete and inconsistent. It’s stored in multiple systems located both on premise and in the cloud. You’re spending way too much time and effort pulling all this data together and not enough time on customer engagement.

You need a 360-degree view of customer relationships—one that takes into account all the products or services your customers own as well as their household/account relationships—and augment that view with all interactions they’ve had with your company.

Join Informatica at the Customer Data Forum to learn how to create a single, complete, and trusted view of your customers to drive revenue, increase profits and improve efficiencies. Learn how a single, complete and trusted customer view can help you…

  • Grow revenue by attracting new customers and by increasing the wallet-share of existing customers
  • Increase profitability by retaining current customers through better customer service
  • Improve operational efficiencies and reduce costs of delivering appropriate levels of service to current customers and acquiring new ones.

Register here

 

Date: Tuesday, May 17th
Time: 8:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Address: The Westin Edina Galleria
3201 Galleria
Edina, MN 55435
directions
Date: Wednesday, May 18th
Time: 8:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Address: The W San Francisco
181 Third Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
directions
Date: Thursday, May 19th
Time: 8:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Address: Sheraton Carlsbad Resort & Spa
5480 Grand Pacific Drive
Carlsbad, CA 92008
directions

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Event Report: Dell’s Annual Analyst Conference Highlights Enterprise Software Future

Published on May 5, 2011 by R "Ray" Wang

Annual Analyst Conference Highlights The New Dell Strategy

Dell held their annual analyst conference at The W Austin from May 3rd to May 4th, 2011.  The event featured multiple sessions including:

  • Services and Solutions For The Vitual Era
  • Data Center and Information Management – Trends & Business Issues – moderated by Brad Anderson Senior Vice President of Enterprise Solutions
  • A Side of Dell You May Not Know – moderated by Karen Quintos, Senior Vice President and CMO
  • CEO Perspective
  • Extending Dell’s Enterprise Solutions & Services – moderated by Michael Dell (@michaeldell)
  • Solutions Services Strategy Update

 

Figure 1. Flickr Feeds From Dell Annual Analyst Conference 2011

 

(Tag your images with #softwareinsider or #rwang0 to include into the feed)

Big themes at the event focused around the consumerization of IT (CoIT).  Dell’s revamped strategy responds to big trends such as the adoption of social media, changing workplace norms, proliferation of devices, and consumption of IT by end users.  Key messages from a software point of view across the consumer, SMB, mid-sized, and large enterprise markets highlighted a:

  • Dedication to BRIC and emerging markets. BRIC markets sustained market share and grew revenue at 17% during the downturn.  In fact, Dell held a #1 market share in India and #3 in China and Brazil.

    Point of View (POV):     Emerging markets play well into the Dell mid-market heritage.  More importantly, developed markets have mostly tapped out.  Double digit growth will come to technology firms who master the international markets.
  • Investment in cloud computing. Initial strategies address the IT buyer, developers and end users. Dell intends to attack the related services market with remote infrastructure management outsourcing(RIMO), cloud services, and transformation consulting.  On the apps side, SaaS, cloud re-platforming, and cloud migration play big roles in future strategy.

    POV:     While discussions around cloud focus mostly on the infrastructure layers, private conversations paint a picture of investment in Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and SaaS applications. Expect Dell to make more investments to bring solutions to market via the cloud.
  • Commitment to open solutions. Dell plans to ensure that all its acquired products and existing solutions maintain an open architecture.  Part of the strategy includes support for heterogeneous environments, virtual integration, and minimized technology lock-in.

    POV:     Dell claims that moving from proprietary to open systems, organizations can go from 300 servers per admin to 6000 severs per admin.  Storage savings shift from $2.20 per GB/month to $0.40 per GB/month. However, delivering open systems will require a lot of engineering investment among competitors not seeking to stay open.
  • Upsell into software. Strong channel and direct success in the hardware market opens up opportunities to sell systems management (Kace), cloud integration (Boomi), data management (Compellent and EqualLogic), and security software (Secureworks).

    POV:     Dell’s direct channels have proven that they can drop product into pipe and be successful.  For example, KACE grew revenues 400% since acquisition.   Long term, Dell must learn a software culture to be successful.  Not too many hardware vendors have made this transition.

More…

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Vendor Event: Informatica Customer Data Forum

Published on May 1, 2011 by R "Ray" Wang

Are you…

  • A sales or marketing operations executive who’s struggling to get a single customer view across divisions or channels to make relevant cross-sell offers and increase revenue?
  • A customer service or support manager who’s struggling to get a complete view of your customer’s relationship with your company to speed response times and boost customer retention?
  • An IT director who’s struggling to deliver trusted and complete customer data that the business needs—faster and at lower cost?

Let’s face it. Your customer and prospect data is incomplete and inconsistent. It’s stored in multiple systems located both on premise and in the cloud. You’re spending way too much time and effort pulling all this data together and not enough time on customer engagement.

You need a 360-degree view of customer relationships—one that takes into account all the products or services your customers own as well as their household/account relationships—and augment that view with all interactions they’ve had with your company.

Join Informatica at the Customer Data Forum to learn how to create a single, complete, and trusted view of your customers to drive revenue, increase profits and improve efficiencies. Learn how a single, complete and trusted customer view can help you…

  • Grow revenue by attracting new customers and by increasing the wallet-share of existing customers
  • Increase profitability by retaining current customers through better customer service
  • Improve operational efficiencies and reduce costs of delivering appropriate levels of service to current customers and acquiring new ones.

Register here

Date: Tuesday, May 10th
Time: 8:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Address: Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel
123 Queen Street West
Toronto, Ontario M5H 2M9
directions 

 

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