Welcome to an on-going series of interviews with the people behind the technologies in Cloud Computing.  The interviews  provide insightful points of view from a customer, industry, and vendor perspective.  A full list of interviewees can be found here.

Brad Smith, President and Chief Executive Officer of Intuit

Biography

Brad Smith became Intuit’s president and chief executive officer in January 2008, culminating a five-year rise through the company where he successfully led several of its major businesses. Intuit is a leading provider of business and financial management solutions for small and mid-sized businesses, financial institutions, consumers and accounting professionals, and is consistently ranked as one of the most-admired software companies and best places to work.

As the company marked its 25th anniversary in 2008, Smith celebrated the past while creating a strategic vision that recognizes important market shifts that will serve as growth catalysts for Intuit’s future. Among the most significant trends is the accelerating shift to a “connected services” world, where people and businesses increasingly go online to manage their lives, and abandon the traditional paper-based, human-produced, brick-and-mortar bound services of the past. Intuit is uniquely positioned to take advantage of these trends and help drive the shift to a connected services economy.

In the midst of this change, Intuit’s mission remains enduring: To be a premier innovative growth company that improves its customers’ financial lives so profoundly that they can’t imagine going back to the old way. The company’s strategy builds on this sense of purpose and foundation of success, while capitalizing on the current market shifts to accelerate Intuit’s business performance.

Before being named CEO, Smith was senior vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Small Business Division. Appointed to this position in May 2006, Smith was responsible for the company’s small business division which included the portfolio of QuickBooks, Quicken and Payroll products, serving 7 million small businesses. Before moving to the small business division, he led the company’s Consumer Tax Group in San Diego from March 2004 through May 2005. The group produces TurboTax, the nation’s leading consumer tax preparation software.

Smith joined the company in February 2003 as the vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Accountant Central and Developer Network in Plano, Texas. Previously, he was senior vice president of marketing and business development at ADP. Smith also held various sales, marketing and general management positions with Pepsi, Seven-Up and Advo, Inc.

Smith earned his master’s degree in management from Aquinas College in Michigan and a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Marshall University in West Virginia.

The Interview

1. Tell me in 2 minutes or less why Cloud Computing is changing the world for your customers

Brad Smith (BS):

Ray this plays in our favor. We see the old paper-based, human produced bricks and mortar economy quickly shifting to connected services. As you get more devices in people’s hand and the digital generation coming of age growing up with PlayStations, iPods, and iPads, the shift is inevitable. People are going online to manage their lives. Here are some interesting anecdotes:

Historically our challenge with small businesses was getting them out of a shoe box. Now you have more and more of small businesses starting up. They see opportunities to save time and money. We have one million customers on SaaS solutions in small business. Customers gain a tremendous win. They get better value in terms of the ability to discover additional products and services, and they get anytime access online or with a mobile device. Overall, they gain a higher lifetime value for their customers.

Take the tax business, 75% of the filings are online. The fastest growing product for us is Intuit Online Payroll. Everything is happening in the mobile phone. Our customers preference is that they want data in the cloud, and they want to have proof that it’s secure. They want to, and can get access to multiple devices, anytime and anywhere. This is transforming our customers and their lives.

2. What makes cloud computing disruptive?

(BS): This is where I’ll give you 3 anchor points:

1. From a social perspective cloud allows a massive base of users and employees to get involved to create the value. I’ll talk about Brainstorm.  Two of our newer employees, Tad and Vlad, identified that we had a problem. Employees had lots of great ideas but they didn’t necessarily go anywhere because people didn’t know about them. So they invented a tool called Brainstorm. It’s a tool for employees to log ideas, comment on ideas, find ideas to work on, and mobilize teams to implement. We now can answer each other’s questions. Brainstorm allows us to collaborate in 60 cities. This used to happen only in a conference room. Since its launch, employee contribution has fueled more than 5,500 ideas which have materialized into nearly 250 new products or features that have been launched in the commercial market.

2. From a mobility point of view, here’s what’s opening up our eyes. Six billion people in the world and two billion have access on the PC but guess what? Five billion are walking around with a phone. This is crossing the digital divide. We’ve got a whole new set of services for people who didn’t have access. For years we’ve had a vision since Scott bought TurboTax – the 10 minute tax return. Now, 60% of Americans can use their iPhone, take a picture of their W-2, and in the 1040 EZ we can pull the info off the picture and pull it into the return. This is SnapTax. Isn’t that amazing? Mobile also allows us to use sensory capability and GPS for helping someone find the right deal. Take a picture of a receipt and it’s loaded in QuickBooks. We now redefine how data is entered for the customer.

3. From a global view, it’s so much easier to take a service to multiple countries and localize the offering to meet a customer’s needs. Cloud enables both social contribution and user contribution. Cloud makes it easier for us to provide services a customer wants. Mobile, tablet, and iPad can easily access the data in the cloud.

Cloud is changing business models, reaching a broader array of customers and enabling them to participate in the process.

3. What is the next big thing in Cloud Computing?

(BS): Ray, cloud computing is about putting the power of data at the center. Two key components drive the next big thing – privacy and security of that data. You have to trust and earn the trust of the customer to do things that benefit them. Companies like LinkedIn and Facebook are trying to learn how and what the right way to use this kind of information. The first point is ensuring the stewardship of the data.

The second point is how do you use this data to create more customer value? One example is what we’ve done for the QuickBooks franchise- in particular; QuickBooks Online trends for small businesses. A four person florist in Boston can now compare their cost of goods and see whether or not they have a better or worse performance with a similar business in another city. It can be lonely as a small business owner without having someone to talk to. One powerful way to improve customer value is to take the data, aggregate it, and anonymize it. One of the big things we’re focusing on right now is, can we get to a unique and common identity so that we can find all this information for you and we can know who you are and all the different pieces of your life and treat it with the right privacy.

4. What are you doing that’s disruptive for Cloud Computing?

(BS): First and foremost cloud is helping us change how we serve our customers and how we create value. Imagine completing a tax return with minimal data entry. Think of a product like the one we have India called Fasal, where 70% of Indian small businesses are farmers. We took the text capability on the phone and help farmer’s to see what wholesalers are paying at farmer’s markets. Armed with that data, they can figure out which farmer’s market to go to sell produce and gain a 20% yield.

We are creating platforms for innovation. Just before I took this call, Scott Cook, our CTO Tayloe Stansbury, and a few entrepreneurs, were talking about how we extend our Intuit Partner Platform so we can maximize the value for our customers. Our goal is to bring it together to do what customers want. This includes features such as single sign on, common billing, and seamless integration. Delivering this type of capability in a platform is highly disruptive. Why platforms? It’s the top developer want – access to millions of customers.

5. Where do you see technology convergence with Cloud?

(BS): We’re starting to see, lots of debates. Is it private cloud, public cloud? Often we talk about this, but it really isn’t an “or.” In fact, we see it as an “and.” Corporate clouds will converge. For example, we have a strategic alliance with Microsoft. We’re taking the Windows Azure platform for the SMB for cloud apps and combining their assets with ours to create 750,000 development firms to go after a common set of problems. Our two companies have agreed to partner even though we compete. But now we can go after common opportunities.

In another case, we have a partnership with Salesforce.com. Marc and the team have built further up-market. However, as we started to see more overlap, we took a look at how best to serve these customers. QuickBooks is where I spend my time. Salesforce agreed to port over to the Intuit Partner Platform. The end result is an easier way for users to manage Salesforce customer information alongside their QuickBooks data.

We also see convergence of the mobile device and the physical wallet. NFC and the ability to exchange information with mobile phones for P2P payments. This is all happening before our eyes. We have an interesting angle as we move from the leather wallet to the mobile wallet. Smart wallet is at the heart of transactions. Do they have money? Can we track limits? Is there a saving opportunity with a different brand?

What’s funny is we are headed down a path we couldn’t get to if the cloud hadn’t come. In the early days of Quicken, Scott was trying to avoid entering data twice. You keyed it into software. We tried to key things in Quicken and then synced to your bank account. Then we said wow, what about the shift from never entering data twice to never entering data at all? Mint.com changed things for us– they had a never enter data model. Now the shift is from do it yourself, to do it for me. Can you imagine technology doing it for us? We are headed down this path and things like artificial intelligence are much more real now.

6. If you weren’t focused on Cloud Computing what other disruptive technology would you have pursued?

(BS): Two thoughts immediately come to mind. First, I have a tremendous passion for education. Take the success of Kahn Academy and the TED conference, which is transforming our educational system. Emerging economies are become developing economies and it tracks with how well their education systems are performing. This is ripe for opportunity.

The second one is around energy. I don’t think it’s as simple as green or clean. It’s a fundamental issue facing the globe. We can get there with education.

7. What’s your favorite science fiction gadget of all time?

(BS): My all time favorite is the StarTrek Transporter. I wish I could get to West Virginia and see a Marshall University football game and then have it bring me back to the Bay Area.  I need a beam me up app.  The newer one is funky.  Imagine if you had a midlife surrogate to pick the body you want, the look you want, and be in perfect shape and have your surrogate do what you wanted. Beats the p90X.  Right now the surrogate is my favorite!

Your POV

What do you think? Got a question for Brad?  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

The Tech Vendor series is closed.  To be considered for the Business and Tech Innovators series, please reach out to Elaine (at) ConstellationRG (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.

Disclosure

Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us. For the full disclosure policy, see the full client list on the Constellation Research website.

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

Real-time analytics on big data is one of the hot topics for many organizations. Given that the traditional information infrastructure for analytics has evolved from a batch-oriented approach, it is challenging for IT to augment the existing environment to meet the low latency and reliability requirements. It demands a new approach: highly scalable, real-time data acquisition and availability with a publish/subscribe messaging infrastructure and solution accelerators.

Your business can gain faster insight against petabytes of data at lower cost, risk and complexity across diverse initiatives including compliance, risk management, trade analytics, and real-time monitoring.

Join Ray Wang & Neil Raden of Constellation Research and Big Data analytics experts from Greenplum – A Division of EMC and Informatica for the kick-off session of the Big Data Tuesdays Webinar Series to learn:

• What big data streaming is and why your business would care
• Analytics requirements you need to consider to tackle big data
• How to evolve your current architecture
• Benefits to expect with low latency, high volume big data analytics

REGISTER HERE

Welcome to an on-going series of interviews with the people behind the technologies in Social Business.  The interviews  provide insightful points of view from a customer, industry, and vendor perspective.  A full list of interviewees can be found here.

Randy Guard – Vice President of Sales Development and Product Management, SAS Institute

Biography

As Vice President of Sales Development and Product Management, Randy Guard leads the product strategy and business development efforts across SAS. Randy and his Product Management teams work closely with SAS’ Research and Development organization to define and manage product road maps based on market needs and customer input. Randy’s Global Practice teams drive revenue growth by delivering market-driven offerings and supporting strategic customer engagements. These teams of product and industry domain experts help customers and partners apply SAS software to solve their critical business problems.

Before joining SAS in 2000, Randy served as Manager of e-Business Solutions for BuildNet, a provider of builder management solutions to the residential and commercial building industry. He also served as Regional Director for Spectrum Technology Group, specializing in building e-business and data warehousing solutions. Randy began his career with Andersen Consulting (Accenture), where he led systems development and implementation efforts for clients across financial services, retail and consumer packaged goods, utilities and public sector industries.

Randy holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Duke University.

The Interview

1. Tell me in 2 minutes or less why Social Computing is changing the world for your customers.

Randy Guard (RG): From our standpoint, social computing and social media present a completely new set of interactions. These interactions range from direct to indirect and include customers, prospects, and even competitors. Social computing is more than just a set of new data or just another channel. Our early customers and prospects are truly dealing with an exposure dilemma and figuring out how to best engage in this new social world, and integrate social computing in many aspects of their business.

Valued customers/prospects are talking online about the companies and products they like or dislike. In many cases, the company is not present in the dialog and definitely not leading the conversation. Consequently, a brand’s reputation is out there in the open and vulnerable. Everything that they have spent years and years building now has a different level of exposure. More importantly, a company has less control over the brand reputation now. They have to develop a good listening habit and build an environment where they can influence and support. Companies need to be able to answer new questions like … How do they understand what’s going on in the social world? Whats’ the volume of activity? And who are the influencers? At SAS there is heavy emphasis on the analytics component to understanding social media – more than just volume, we like to understand influence and the dynamics of the social network itself.

So, organizations now have to figure out how to more effectively engage their customers immediately given the accelerated maturity cycle that exists in a social computing world. Engagement must account for a diverse set of sources such as social media blogs, forums , and company hosted environments … and all of this across the broad spectrum of computing devices.

The social view is not 2 to 3 or 4 years out. These fundamental shifts are underway now. Organizations can expect very rapid change amidst a new set of interactions and increased level of exposure. As we talk to customers about social computing and social media analysis they can all rapidly comprehend the impact, and the value of being present and engaged in this new set of interactions.

2. What makes social computing disruptive?

(RG): Ray, as you know, the content in social is all about you or your product or service, and it is not owned by the company. It truly comes from the marketplace. Everyone wants feedback, and in some cases companies can’t deal with the deluge. Two things drive the disruptive nature. One is the speed in which you get feedback. This is achieved when people talk about your product or service, and quickly build momentum (both positive and negative). The other dimension is the pervasiveness of the information and how it travels through the network. Pre-social computing, you might have a bad experience at a retail store. You might have told your friends and family. Now that same feedback and negative experience not only can be commented on to thousands, but it can also be shared in audio and video. Suddenly, a whole new form of influence emerges and propagates very quickly. Now, an individual store issue with a single customer can quickly evolve into a corporate or a brand issue. Again, it works on the positive side too. The potential customer can see how an average person is passionate about a company’s product, and that can make a huge impact in sales. Customer testimonials are often more genuine and impactful than those from a corporate spokesperson or ad.

3. What is the next big thing in Social Business software?

(RG): Integrating social content with enterprise data is critical to go to the next level. Right now many of the initial gains are isolated successes to “listening” and some are focused 2-way engagement. We’ll continue to evolve with integrated social content and analysis that ties back to even more enterprise systems. Our first level of this integration has already driven value to our customers plus added new features to coming releases. Listening in the social world is obviously important, but then you need the right engagement plan to address the situation. For example, we have seen issues in a company’s supply chain (e.g. an increase in backorders) drive a rapid spike in negative sentiment in the social world. The product was positive in the eyes of the customer, but the availability issue was getting massive negative attention. They quickly needed to put out a message to the customers plus added some promotions on shipping, and alternative products, etc. They also needed to fix the backorder issue asap.

4. What are you doing that’s disruptive for Social Computing?

(RG): From a SAS point of view, we have done several things. We start by leveraging our analytic capabilities. This spans from managing the massive amounts of data and categorizing it, determining sentiment, and even visually associating it with social networks and the key influencers. This wasn’t around a few years ago. Just getting the data is one thing. Analyzing and understanding it is another aspect and this is what really drives the value. The goal is to distill massive amounts of data for the business user – we call it putting the data into business context. Success requires good analytical processes, like sentiment analysis, influence scoring, and content categorization. The bottom line is that we make it approachable for the business users to better accomplish their goals of product delivery, customer service, competitive analysis, etc.

We leverage our world class analytics and embed them into the applications. You don’t have to be a programmer to analyze and act on social media data. You can point to data sources like blogs and forums and company web sites and a variety of data streams, and we can put all this information into context. Another key is that we provide a highly interactive visual interface for the users. Both on the web and on mobile devices. We have apps built for tablet devices that are part of our overall social media offering set.

5. Where do you see technology convergence with Social?

(RG): We definitely see convergence with mobile, big data, and cloud. While users do expect valid and cleansed data, more importantly, users want to get the data (and analysis) in front of them at the right time (i.e. whether they are in the office or on the go) and be able to take action. Social sets a new bar of user experience. We’ve moved beyond the expectation of building large user manuals for this kind of business application. The applications are intuitive and ready to “walk up and use”. In addition, big data plays a role as we capture information that is persistence or in a stream and in many forms (structured, semi-structured, text, video, etc). The data volumes are enormous and continue to grow, therefore the analytical loads are getting bigger as well.

6. If you weren’t focused on Social Computing what other disruptive technology would you have pursued?

(RG): I’m sure that I would be working in the area of renewable energy. A combination of strong personal interest and a background in electrical engineering, I try to keep up with the innovation in this space … from wind, to solar and fuel cell technologies. From a business aspect, there is a pretty impressive start up community in this area and some very cool technologies out there and under research.

7. What’s your favorite science fiction gadget of all time?

(RG): Ray, that’s easy the Star Trek transporter, though I’m sure that’s a popular one. I’m also quite fond of the neuralizer from Men In Black, used appropriately for meetings of course!

(Photo courtesy: Men In Black)

Your POV

What do you think? Got a question for Randy?  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

The Tech Vendor series is closed.  To be considered for the Business and Tech Innovators series, please reach out to Elaine (at) ConstellationRG (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.

Disclosure

Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us. For the full disclosure policy, see the full client list on the Constellation Research website.

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

Big Data, Cloud Based Performance Apps, Drive Interest In Additional Investment

Redwood City, California based Tidemark announced that it raised $24 M in Series C funding from Redpoint Ventures, Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, and Dave Duffield.  Key points include:

• Redpoint Ventures leads the round and Geoff Yang joins the board. To date Tidemark has raised $35M with $6.3M in its Series A and approximately $5M in its Series B.  Tidemark will add Geoff Yang, a founding partner of Redpoint Ventures to the company’s board of directors.
  
  Point of View (POV): Redpoint Ventures has had a great history with investments in enterprise software and cloud computing.  Success stories include Concur, Documentum, Fanfare, FileNet, Heroku, Metreo, Polycom, Responsys, Sybase, and Zimbra.  More importantly, current board of director Phil Wilmington, the former CEO of OutlookSoft and co-CEO of PeopleSoft, has been named Executive Chairman of the company.

• Funding will enable Tidemark to expand both sales efforts and expand initial EPM use cases. Today Tidemark offers a suite of EPM applications that include metrics management; strategic, financial, and operational planning, budgeting, and forecasting; and profitability modeling.  With additional funding, Tidemark plans to build out its enterprise sales force and target the growing market for business intelligence systems that address both big data and real-time data driven decision management.
  
  Point of View (POV): Tidemark’s solution provides forward looking analysis and real-time performance management.  While the first set of use cases address the cloud based enterprise performance management market, the core software provides a key foundation in bringing applications away from transactional systems and into a new world of engagement and experience systems.  Key features include parallelized in memory analytics, native cloud data integration, native HTML 5 interface, mobile first UI, and real-time collaboration.

The Bottom Line For Customers: Tidemark Brings Real-Time Data Driven Decisions To The Cloud

The rise of big data, aging BI systems, and the need for cloud based approaches lead many organizations to rethink their business intelligence (BI) and business analytics strategies.  As BI continues to evolve from fragmented and historical reporting to pervasive, predictive, and real-time decision support, an organization’s success increasingly depends on the support for an expanding information matrix.  Tidemark represents the next class of solutions that can address the big data challenge in the cloud, while delivering real-time and actionalbe solutions that are easy for line of business users to consume in a social, mobile, and collaborative fashion.  Consequently, organizations such as Acosta and US Sugar are already moving in this direction.

The Bottom Line For Technology Vendors: Expect Investors To Increase Funding For Enterprise Class Solutions

The buzz and rage over the past three years has focused on consumer plays in the valley.  However, activity in the past six months suggest that investors are making the shift to enterprise focused start-ups.  Why? With 1 out of every 1000 consumer plays making a successful exit, the pivot to enterprise appears to be a safer and less crowded bet.  Investors and enterprise class technology companies can expect 2012 to be an exciting year of mergers, acquisitions, investments, and IPO’s.

Your POV.

Are you ready for next gen analytical apps? If you are an existing EPM user, what will make you make the switch? Are your current applications cutting it?  Got a question?  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

Related Research:

• Research Report: Rethink Your Next Generation Business Intelligence Strategy
• Research Report: How The Five Pillars Of Consumer Tech Influence Enterprise Innovation
• Monday’s Musings: Why Every Social CRM Initiative Needs An MDM Backbone
• Monday’s Musings: 10 Essential Elements For Social Enterprise Apps

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, see the full client list on the Constellation Research website.

Copyright © 2012 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC All rights reserved.

Social Media Explained In 140 Characters (More or Less)

Some time back a tweet went out describing what all the tools were (Figure 1).  I modified this a bit and now use it in alot of presentations to audiences around the world.  More than 80% of the conference organizers usually are fine with this slide.  Take a look and tell me what you think.

Figure 1. Social Media Overview

Your POV

So here’s the deal, some conference organizers won’t let me use this slide because they are worried about being politically correct or appropriate.  I’m curious to see what you think as I crowd source an answer for a current client? Is this appropriate or not?

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 Social CRM/ Social Business efforts.  Here’s how we can assist:

• Assessing social business/social CRM readiness
• Developing your social business/ social CRM  strategy
• Vendor selection
• Implementation partner selection
• Connecting with other pioneers
• Sharing best practices
• Designing a next gen apps strategy
• Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support
• Demystifying software licensing

Related Research

• Seven Basic Privacy Rights Users Should Demand For Social Business
• Introducing the 43 Use Cases Of Social Business
• Best Practices: Applying The Seven Deadly Sins To Successful Gamification
• Trends: 5 Engagement Factors For Gamification And The Enterprise
• Monday’s Musings: Balancing The Six S’s In Consumerization Of IT
• Monday’s Musings: A Working Vendor Landscape For Social Business
• Product Review: Google+, Consumerization of IT, and Crossing The Chasm For Enterprise Social Business
• Monday’s Musings: Using MDM To Build A Complete Customer View In A Social Era
• Monday’s Musings: Mastering When and How High End Brands Should Use Daily Deal Sites Such As Groupon
• News Analysis: Salesforce.com Acquires Radian6 For $316M
• Monday’s Musings: Q1 2011 State of Social CRM and CRM From An EMEA Point Of View
• Best Practices: Applying Social Business Challenges To Social Business Maturity Models
• Research Summary: Software Insider’s Top 25 Posts For 2010
• Best Practices: Five Simple Rules For Social Business
• Research Report: Constellation’s Research Outlook For 2011
• Research Report: How The Five Pillars Of Consumer Tech Influence Enterprise Innovation
• Research Report: Next Gen B2B and B2C E-Commerce Priorities Reflect Macro Level Trends
• News Analysis: Jive Fills Warchest, Ready to Battle Enterprise Software Giants And IPO?
• Tuesday’s Tip: Applying The Five Stages Of Adoption Towards SCRM Projects
• News Analysis: Lithium’s Acquisition of Scout Labs Ups The Ante in Social CRM
• News Analysis: Biz360 Acquisition Signals Attensity Group’s Move Into Social CRM
• Monday’s Musings: Avoiding Failure In Social CRM Projects Requires Ecosystem Coordination
• Research Report: The 18 Use Cases of Social CRM – The New Rules of Relationship Management
• News Analysis: Siperian Acquisition Vaults Informatica Into An MDM Leadership Position
• News Analysis: Jive and Radian6 Partner – Great For Business, But Could Fragment IT Systems
• Event Report: Salesforce.com Pushes Social CRM Technology — But Don’t Expect Companies To Be Successful With Tools Alone
• Monday’s Musings: Why Every Social CRM Initiative Needs An MDM Backbone
• Personal Log: Altimeter Group – Helping Organizations Bridge The Technology Obsolescence Gap
• Monday’s Musings: 10 Essential Elements For Social Enterprise Apps

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, see the full client list on the Constellation Research website.

Copyright © 2012 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC All rights reserved.

Public Outrage Grows Over Lax Privacy Polices At Popular Social Networking Sites

Recent actions by social networking leaders in the market place have brought new attention to a user’s privacy rights.  Despite the fact that these sites provide a freemium service to users, abuse and arrogance of a user’s privacy rights combined with user ignorance has led to not only a public outrage, but also increasing action from privacy advocacy groups to petition government agencies.  Three public examples include:

• Google+ Search Plus Your World controversy. The recent decision by Google to feature personalized search results from one’s contacts has generated an uproar.  While users may opt out of receiving search results based on personal data, users can’t block information found by their Google+ contacts including those that are +1 pages, messages, contacts, and videos.  Despite the personalization benefits to users and the fact Twitter and Google could not agree on terms on real-time search, the forced march and prioritization raises concerns over a user’s rights.  Consequently, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has asked the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate Google’s practices.
• Facebook Timeline uproar. When Facebook recently rolled out their new Timeline feature, users expressed outrage.  Though Timeline simplified access to a user’s profile, the lack of time to make changes, suddenness of announcement, and confusion over public versus private data furthered complaints.  The constant stream of privacy changes without user control led to EPIC’s petition to the FTC and Facebook’s settlement. Facebook’s market dominance (see Figure 1.) and public proclamation that “The Age of Privacy Is Over” should lead to greater scrutiny by privacy advocates.
• LinkedIn Ads backlash. Rolled out in June 2011, LinkedIn exposed the products and services of interest to members for use with advertising. Advertisers could then display which members “endorsed” products and services from an advertiser.  The lack of solicitation from an opt-in process led to a backlash from users and LinkedIn backing down to consumer pressure.

Figure 1. US Social Networking Sites Market Share By Page Views

Consumers and Businesses Should Expect and Demand Seven Basic Privacy Rights

As adoption grows, the potential for abuse exponentially increases.  Exposure of location based services (LBS) can lead to safety concerns from a stalking and burglary perspective.   Ignorance on how user generated content is used can lead to the unwanted public sharing of private information such as pictures, conversations, and relationships.

To protect a user’s right as well as create a trust environment required for success in social business, business and consumer users should demand that vendors deliver seven key rights:

1. Default opt-out on sharing private information. Basic profile information not limited to name, gender, email address, birthday, address, contact information, contacts, and relationships should be defaulted to opt out.  Default opt out should apply to user generated information such as messages, photos, audio, and video.
   
2. Transparency in how personal information is used. Social networking sites and other social business concerns should detail what information will be shared.  Users should know if their information will be sold and if so to whom.
   
3. Advanced notice on new changes to privacy options. Social networking sites should provide adequate warning when new features impact a user’s privacy preference. The duration for advanced warning should be commensurate to the amount of time required for a user to opt out or make changes to avoid involuntary exposure.
   
4. Affirmative consent for overriding privacy preferences. Users must opt-in to changes in privacy.  The default option should be opt-out. the recent EPIC Facebook Privacy Complaint  FTC Complaint and settlement reinforces the requirement for affirmative consent and provides good guidance on privacy rules.
5. Access prevention to user’s data upon account deletion.  Information about a user should be locked down when an account is deleted.  This information should not be used in aggregate statistics or data.  Only the user should be allowed to resurrect an account.
6. Export provision for user generated data. Customers should own their data and take it with them as needed.  A mechanism to export user created information should be provided to the user.  Doc Searls and the Project VRM community has been advocating Personal Data Stores for quite some time and this will be the necessary requirement for social business to make it to the next level.
7. Deletion of all data upon user’s request. Should a user request a hard delete, users should be granted this option for a permanent delete with all information removed from all files.
   

The Bottom Line:  Will Users Trade Privacy For Convenience In An Era of Social Business?

Convenient features based on personalization provide a rich opportunity for both consumers, brands, and enterprises to take advantage of social media and social networking tools.  Despite Mark Zuckerburg’s foolish cry that the “Age of Privacy is Over” and the ongoing confusion between what information is public or private, Social Business can not succeed unless trust is ensured.  Trust is the key platform as we shift from transaction to engagement and ultimately personal fulfillment systems.

Consequently, users must remain vigilant in protecting their privacy and not take a fatalistic attitude that privacy is over.  In fact, users should push hard to take a stance to preserve their rights to be offline as a counter measure. Vendors, social networking sites, and enterprises must do their part and ensure trust among their stakeholders (e.g. employees, customers, partners, suppliers, etc.) or expect more public backlash. Privacy is not over.  The fight has just begun and ultimately users will win.

Your POV

Are you ready to defend your privacy rights?  Got a story where your privacy rights have been trampled? Need help reviewing your privacy policy against the Seven Basic Privacy Rights?  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 Social CRM/ Social Business efforts.  Here’s how we can assist:

• Assessing social business/social CRM readiness
• Developing your social business/ social CRM  strategy
• Vendor selection
• Implementation partner selection
• Connecting with other pioneers
• Sharing best practices
• Designing a next gen apps strategy
• Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support
• Demystifying software licensing

Resources

20120113 Information Week – Thomas Claburn “Google+ Search Controversy Grows”

20120112 ZDNet: Identity – John Fontana “FTC Asked To Probe Google+, search Integration”

20111219 ZDNet: Social Business – Rich Harris and Eileen Brown “Facebook Timeline privacy concerns deepen as rollout begins”

20111215 PC World – Jill Duffy “10 Things You Should Know About Facebook Timeline”

20110812 ComputerWeekly – Warwick Ashford “LinkedIn Bows To Pressure Over ‘Social Ads’ Privacy Concerns”

20110623 Mashable – Todd Wasserman “New LinkedIn Ads Leverage Recommendations And Follows”

20110109 ReadWriteWeb – Marshall Kirkpatrick “Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over”

Related Research

• Introducing the 43 Use Cases Of Social Business
• Best Practices: Applying The Seven Deadly Sins To Successful Gamification
• Trends: 5 Engagement Factors For Gamification And The Enterprise
• Monday’s Musings: Balancing The Six S’s In Consumerization Of IT
• Monday’s Musings: A Working Vendor Landscape For Social Business
• Product Review: Google+, Consumerization of IT, and Crossing The Chasm For Enterprise Social Business
• Monday’s Musings: Using MDM To Build A Complete Customer View In A Social Era
• Monday’s Musings: Mastering When and How High End Brands Should Use Daily Deal Sites Such As Groupon
• News Analysis: Salesforce.com Acquires Radian6 For $316M
• Monday’s Musings: Q1 2011 State of Social CRM and CRM From An EMEA Point Of View
• Best Practices: Applying Social Business Challenges To Social Business Maturity Models
• Research Summary: Software Insider’s Top 25 Posts For 2010
• Best Practices: Five Simple Rules For Social Business
• Research Report: Constellation’s Research Outlook For 2011
• Research Report: How The Five Pillars Of Consumer Tech Influence Enterprise Innovation
• Research Report: Next Gen B2B and B2C E-Commerce Priorities Reflect Macro Level Trends
• News Analysis: Jive Fills Warchest, Ready to Battle Enterprise Software Giants And IPO?
• Tuesday’s Tip: Applying The Five Stages Of Adoption Towards SCRM Projects
• News Analysis: Lithium’s Acquisition of Scout Labs Ups The Ante in Social CRM
• News Analysis: Biz360 Acquisition Signals Attensity Group’s Move Into Social CRM
• Monday’s Musings: Avoiding Failure In Social CRM Projects Requires Ecosystem Coordination
• Research Report: The 18 Use Cases of Social CRM – The New Rules of Relationship Management
• News Analysis: Siperian Acquisition Vaults Informatica Into An MDM Leadership Position
• News Analysis: Jive and Radian6 Partner – Great For Business, But Could Fragment IT Systems
• Event Report: Salesforce.com Pushes Social CRM Technology — But Don’t Expect Companies To Be Successful With Tools Alone
• Monday’s Musings: Why Every Social CRM Initiative Needs An MDM Backbone
• Personal Log: Altimeter Group – Helping Organizations Bridge The Technology Obsolescence Gap
• Monday’s Musings: 10 Essential Elements For Social Enterprise Apps

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, see the full client list on the Constellation Research website.

Copyright © 2012 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC All rights reserved.

Business Leaders Often Poorly Prepared For Cloud/SaaS Contract Negotiations

Business leaders often take great care in building their Cloud and SaaS strategy, only to have many of the benefits of flexibility and agility hampered by overlooking details in their cloud contracts.   In conversations with over 200 cloud customers in 2011, key reasons include:

• A common belief that SaaS and Cloud contracts are simple
• Lack of software contract negotiations and procurement experience
• Failure to review previous departmental contracts now in renewal mode
• Limited access to SaaS and Cloud contract expertise

Avoid These Common Mistakes In Cloud Contracts

While SaaS/Cloud contracts are considerably less complicated, buyers should remember that even Cloud/SaaS software contracts still require some careful planning.  Lessons learned from over 1200 software contract negotiations highlight five common mistakes made in cloud contracts.

1. Blindly including support costs with the contract. While Cloud/SaaS contracts automatically bundle maintenance and updates into the subscriptions, customers often do not realize that they do not have to buy support.  In fact, vendors are not allowed to require customers to buy support with subscription.  Avoid going for the highest level support upon initial contract signing.  This option can always be added at a later date.
   
2. Failure to negotiate flex up provisions. Most contracts begin with a small number of users in a departmental setting.  However as usage grow, most enterprises just add additional users without securing upfront discounts potentially leaving 1000′s of dollars on the table.  In contracts, remember to secure discounts for 2x, 3x, and 4x, your initial usage.
3. Forgetting to negotiate flex down. As with securing discounts for adding usage, the true test of elasticity occurs when companies flex down usage.  Negotiate the ability to reduce usage by 10%, 20%, and 30% without incurring penalties.
   
4. Paying upfront without a discount. While many Cloud/SaaS vendors prefer annual agreements and annual payment upfront, savvy Cloud/SaaS buyers prefer to pay in more frequent cycles such as monthly and quarterly.  Should a Cloud/SaaS provider seek upfront payment, negotiate a discount commensurate to your hurdle rate.
5. Not trading refrenceability for success. Customers often jump at the ability to serve as a referenceable client without ensuring that the software has been deployed.  Agree to serve as a reference only after the software has been deployed.  One common strategy, trade referenceability for prioritization of key features into the next release.

As Cloud/SaaS contracts emerge as the norm, buyers should keep abreast of other changes.  Stay tuned for the 2012 Cloud/SaaS Customer Bill of Rights to be published Q1 2012.

Your POV.

Need help with your software contract?  Contact us throughout the vendor selection process.  We can help with a quick contract review or even the complete vendor selection.  Let us know your experiences.  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

How can we assist?

Buyers, do you need help with your apps strategy and vendor management strategy?  Trying to figure out how to infuse innovation into your tech strategy? Ready to put the expertise of over 1200 software contract negotiations to work?  Give us a call!

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

• Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support
• Evaluating SaaS/Cloud options
• Assessing apps strategies (e.g. single instance, two-tier ERP, upgrade, custom dev, packaged deployments”
• Designing innovation into end to end processes and systems
• Comparing SaaS/Cloud integration strategies
• Assisting with legacy ERP migration
• Engaging in an SCRM strategy
• Planning upgrades and migration
• Performing vendor selection

Related Resources And Links

20100419 Tuesday’s Tip: Dealing With Pesky Software Licensing Audits

20090714 Research Summary: An Enterprise Software Licensee’s Bill of Rights, V2

20101214 Tuesday’s Tip: Dealing With Vendor Offers To Cancel Shelfware And Replace With New Licenses

20100308 Monday’s Musings: Decoupling Support From Maintenance – What Apps Vendors Can Learn From Microsoft Dynamics

20100222 Monday’s Musings: Why Users Should Preserve Their Third Party Maintenance Rights

20100104 News Analysis: SAP Revives Two-Tier Maintenance Options

20090210 Tuesday’s Tip: Software Licensing and Pricing – Do Not Give Away Your Third Party Maintenance And Access Rights

20090709 Tuesday’s Tip: Do Not Bundle Your Support and Maintenance Contracts!

20091222 Tuesday’s Tip: 10 Cloud And SaaS Apps Strategies For 2010

20091208 Tuesday’s Tip: 2010 Apps Strategies Should Start With Business Value

20091102 Best Practices: Lessons Learned In What SMB’s Want From Their ERP Provider

20091006 Tuesday’s Tip: Why Free Software Ain’t Really Free

20090504 News Analysis: Oracle Waives Fees On Extended Support Offerings

20080909 Trends: What Customers Want From Maintenance And Support

20080215 Software Licensing and Pricing: Stop the Anti-Competitive Maintenance Fee Madness

20090405 Monday’s Musings: Total Account Value, True Cost of Ownership, And Software Vendor Business Models

20090324 Tuesday’s Tips: Five Simple Steps To Reduce Your Software Maintenance Costs

20090223 Monday’s Musings: Five Programs Some Vendors Have Implemented To Help Clients In An Economic Recession

20091012 Research Report: Customer Bill of Rights – Software-as-a Service

20090910 Tuesday’s Tip: Note To Self – Start Renegotiating Your Q4 Software Maintenance Contracts Now!

20090721 Tuesday’s Tip: 3 Approaches To Return Shelfware

20090127 Tuesday’s Tip: Software Licensing and Pricing – Now’s The Time To Remove “Gag Rule” Clauses In Your Software Contracts

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 © 2012 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC All rights reserved.

Welcome to an on-going series of interviews with the people behind the technologies in Cloud Computing.  The interviews  provide insightful points of view from a customer, industry, and vendor perspective.  A full list of interviewees can be found here.

Adam Rogers – Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Ultimate Software

1. Tell me in 2 minutes or less why Cloud Computing is changing the world for your customers

Adam Rogers (AR): Ray, let’s call it like it is. Cloud isn’t really disruptive – it’s already  disrupted – and we’ve made that transition over the past 10 years.  The new frontier for enterprise software is building systems that conform and cater to the user and how they want to work.  Let’s use Amazon as an analogy. A core difference between Amazon and the dozens of other e-commerce sites that competed for mind share in the 2000′s is that they realized early on that doing great work on behalf of the PERSON was more important than the URL or the consumer product segment.

Our customers benefit from cloud computing by taking advantage of business solutions for managing their people, instead of dealing with the cost and expense of IT. Second, because we handle all upgrades, they gain access to the latest functionality and don’t get trapped in a legacy on-premise solution that is outdated. There’s no barrier to upgrading. However, you’ve heard this all before. Honestly, these are really table stakes in business software today.

What Cloud is transforming for our customers is their ability to tailor the solution to their specific needs. For example, Google wanted us to handle the administration of payroll and the system-of-record, but they wanted to maintain the user experience of their internally developed GHR system. By connecting Ultimate to GHR through the Cloud, they can deliver a familiar user experience for their people while taking advantage of our backbone.

Importantly, small businesses gain access to enterprise systems at an affordable price point because:

1. If done right, it allows smaller businesses access (via affordability) to what used to be very expensive enterprise applications.

⁃ up front through the economies of scale well-architected systems create, enterprise class software can be sold at much less expensive price points than previously.

⁃ ongoing costs are contained.. and running in world-class data centers that only fortune 1000 companies could previously afford.

2. It brings the benefits of consumer software (constantly improved, modern user interfaces and simple) to enterprise customers who demand secure, stable and reliable applications.

We moved to cloud computing and SaaS 10 years ago because we felt it was good for our customers but in the end it also opened up the market to smaller customers with much smaller IT budgets. This is obviously great for our business model but very rewarding to know we can offer a world-class solution to what used to be out of reach to many companies.

2. What makes cloud computing disruptive?

(AR): Disruption typically has two major components. The first is cost and the second is making products available to a new class of customers.

Cloud computing has not only reduced the cost of business software, it has also made sophisticated systems available to organizations that previously wouldn’t have been able to afford to purchase and maintain those products. I think that’s a fairly obvious outcome at this point as discussed already.

What is less obvious, but more important in the long term, is that Cloud computing means we can — for the first time, really — combine applications that are tailored to the person and the device (an iPad, for example) with a robust administrative system on the back end. Those applications can be really small, and highly tailored, while still connecting to the core. That means users don’t have to deal with a lot of complexity, they can just focus on the work at hand — while still participating in the company’s core system.

This is disruptive because as the end of the day, this is great for consumers and customers but to execute, it really flips all accepted thinking on it’s side.

- Now we have to update our software early and often – the consumers demand this kind of cadence to realize the value. Consumers are using consumer applications and consumer devices and demanding that same elegant experience from their Ent Apps. GenX/Y’s are taking over the executive offices and making decisions on business software.

- Think about what it takes to do that… it’s an agile/iterative development process with continuous integration and deployment. That’s a simple sentence that is a multi million dollar investment for development teams. It took us years to make this turn.

- Finally it’s disruptive because you have to be comfortable in the state of “blowing in the wind”. Typical enterprise companies built loyalty through ridiculously expensive upgrades and data that was so locked down you had to syphon your data out discretely if you were thinking about switching vendors. Now you MUST, absolutely MUST deliver a steady flow of functionality and make your data available and accessible via standard web protocols. That’s a scary situation for many established vendors. It’s disruptive because that’s what our customers want. That’s what we are giving them. But many won’t.

3. What is the next big thing in Cloud Computing?

(AR): The intersection of consumer applications (more than just social) into Enterprise data. SaaS and cloud moved your data to the [potentially] accessible cloud. Soon it will be about making sense of all that data in the cloud. So Enterprise SaaS vendors will be forced to make their data accessible. That’s uncomfortable position for many traditional enterprise software companies who always felt the “hoarding” of their data is what kept customers paying their maintenance bills. So now the data must be “freed” and accessible through standard formats. And not only that, just like Gen X/Yers started bringing iPhones and Skype into the Enterprise without “permission”, we will need to be able to mash our Enterprise data up with consumer applications (especially social). Why not allow identity management via Facebook?

For example, take Apple with iOS5 is delivering their notification center — one place for the person to direct all their important action items. It is our job to plug into that if the user wants us too. Same with social streams. People don’t want 10 different streams, they might want a couple… so how do we publish and subscribe into those places where a user already works. Instead of taking an application-centered view, it is time to take a person-centered view. Cloud lets us do that.

4. What are you doing that’s disruptive for Cloud Computing?

(AR): Ultimate has grown to 2200 customers because of the inherent disruptive power of Cloud computing and SaaS. And we’re just at the start of this transition as an industry. But we have to keep looking forward. I’m not ready to share details yet, but let’s just say that business applications–even Cloud applications–have really been all about interrogating the user in order to capture data that matters for administering the company. We believe that era is over.

5. Where do you see technology convergence with Cloud?

(AR): Connections between applications and information is happening at the device and person level. The iOS5/iPad example is a great one. I want to create my own work environment, bringing together the information I need in the context that makes sense to me. With powerful devices and hyper-connective cloud-based applications, we can really make that happen which is exciting. And when you get the itch to start talking about technology, you really have to be careful.

In Silicon Valley, there is a never-ending focus on architecture, technology and administration. So much in industry is in discussion about why Cloud, SaaS, Mobile is great.

- These are means to an end. That end is great solutions for people. Apple gets this. They invent experiences instead of marketing processor speeds and USB ports.

6. if you weren’t focused on Cloud Computing what other disruptive technology would you have pursued?

(AR): - Definetely something in the field of medicine. I was studying biomedical engineering before switching to electrical and going down the computer/software path. As much as modern medicine has progressed there seems to be so much more room for massive technology advances.. Both in administering how we traverse through the hospitals/doctor’s offices and when we are in surgery.

7. What’s your favorite science fiction gadget of all time?

(AR): Dr. Who’s Tardis. What could be better than seeing how awesome the technology will be 1000 years from now?

Source: BBC

Your POV

What do you think? Got a question for Aaron?  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

The Tech Vendor series is closed.  To be considered for the Business and Tech Innovators series, please reach out to Elaine (at) ConstellationRG (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.

Disclosure

Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us. For the full disclosure policy, see the full client list on the Constellation Research website.

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

New Funding Shows Strength In Social Business Market And Lithium’s Business Model

Emeryville, California based Lithum Technologies announced today that it raised $53.4M in financing.  The lead round is from New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Other investors include SAP Ventures.

• NEA leads the round with Peter Sonsini joining the board. Peter‘s been active with ecommerce play BeachMint, community platform BuzzMedia, ruby development player Engine Yard, and cloud player Eucalyptus.  Of note all “existing Lithium investors, including Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures, Emergence Capital, Greenspring Associates, Shasta Ventures and Tenaya Capital” participated in this D round.
  
  Point of View (POV): NEA’s traditionally gone in early and invested with visionary entrepreneurs.  However, this play fits along its second investment thesis for venture growth equity opportunities.  NEA’s track record bodes well for Lithium should they decide to go the IPO route.  More importantly, NEA provides Lithium with a vast network of resources for both sales, business development, and expansion.

• Lithium’s executed well amidst an increasingly competitive landscape. Lithium has shown growth into key verticals including auto, consumer products, financial services, retail, technology, telecommunications, and travel and leisure.  Key wins and expansions include BskyB, McDonalds, Nestle, Nissan, SuccessFactors and Telstra.
  
  Point of View (POV): Expansion into key verticals, improvement in SaaS upgrade technology, and the addition of enterprise class executives such as Rob Tarkoff, Ed Van Siclen, and Jim Drill show a seriousness to take the company to the next level.  The social business sale is starting to expand beyond the CMO role and across other line of business executives.  As the sale touches across the enterprise, the new management team is better positioned  to address the needs of CIOs, CFO’s, and other line of business execs as well as agency and system integrator partners.  More importantly, Lithium can expect consolidation in the market and increased competition from Jive, Salesforce.com, IBM, and others to heat up.

The Bottom Line For Customers: New Financing Validates Your Investment With Lithium Technologies

The strength and size of the additional financing validates Lithium’s position in the market place and bodes well for both existing customers and prospects.  Lithium intends to expand its role in defining the social customer experience.  This round of additional financing enables Lithium to:

• Support new social business use cases
• Expand into new markets such as digital agency ecosystem and growing geographies
• Invest in more research and development
• Fund future acquisitions
• Improve service delivery for existing customers

The market place is about to consolidate and the additional funding ensures stability at Lithium as well as reaffirms its position among the leaders in social customer experience and the broader category of social business.

The Bottom Line For Technology Vendors: Expect Consolidation Across The Vendor Landscape In 2012

Activity around social business deals have accelerated in the last three months. Jive’s IPO has provided this market category with a catalyst for continued investment.  More importantly, key fundamentals such as increasing customer adoption, continued market share gains by start-ups and pure-play vendors, and interest by established software vendors indicate the beginning of a mergers and acquisition cycle in 2012.  Technology vendors can expect deals and partnerships as each of the Social Business software categories: Customer engagement, SCRM/ External Communities, Enterprise 2.0/Internal Collaboration, and Social Middleware combine to address the 43 use cases of social business.  The market can expect the following combinations:

• Established CRM vendors to add social offerings
• Social middleware vendors to move up the stack
• Consolidation of SCRM players with Enterprise 2.0 communities
• Expansion of SCRM vendors into other CRM areas

Figure 1. Expect Consolidation Across The Vendor Landscape In Social Business For 2012

Your POV.

Are you ready for Social Business? If you are a Lithium customer, what do you think?  Got a question?  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 Social CRM/ Social Business efforts.  Here’s how we can assist:

• Assessing social business/social CRM readiness
• Developing your social business/ social CRM  strategy
• Vendor selection
• Implementation partner selection
• Connecting with other pioneers
• Sharing best practices
• Designing a next gen apps strategy
• Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support
• Demystifying software licensing

Related Research:

• Monday’s Musings: Balancing The Six S’s In Consumerization Of IT
• Monday’s Musings: A Working Vendor Landscape For Social Business
• Product Review: Google+, Consumerization of IT, and Crossing The Chasm For Enterprise Social Business
• Monday’s Musings: Using MDM To Build A Complete Customer View In A Social Era
• Monday’s Musings: Mastering When and How High End Brands Should Use Daily Deal Sites Such As Groupon
• News Analysis: Salesforce.com Acquires Radian6 For $316M
• Monday’s Musings: Q1 2011 State of Social CRM and CRM From An EMEA Point Of View
• Best Practices: Applying Social Business Challenges To Social Business Maturity Models
• Research Summary: Software Insider’s Top 25 Posts For 2010
• Best Practices: Five Simple Rules For Social Business
• Research Report: Constellation’s Research Outlook For 2011
• Research Report: How The Five Pillars Of Consumer Tech Influence Enterprise Innovation
• Research Report: Next Gen B2B and B2C E-Commerce Priorities Reflect Macro Level Trends
• News Analysis: Jive Fills Warchest, Ready to Battle Enterprise Software Giants And IPO?
• Tuesday’s Tip: Applying The Five Stages Of Adoption Towards SCRM Projects
• News Analysis: Lithium’s Acquisition of Scout Labs Ups The Ante in Social CRM
• News Analysis: Biz360 Acquisition Signals Attensity Group’s Move Into Social CRM
• Monday’s Musings: Avoiding Failure In Social CRM Projects Requires Ecosystem Coordination
• Research Report: The 18 Use Cases of Social CRM – The New Rules of Relationship Management
• News Analysis: Siperian Acquisition Vaults Informatica Into An MDM Leadership Position
• News Analysis: Jive and Radian6 Partner – Great For Business, But Could Fragment IT Systems
• Event Report: Salesforce.com Pushes Social CRM Technology — But Don’t Expect Companies To Be Successful With Tools Alone
• Monday’s Musings: Why Every Social CRM Initiative Needs An MDM Backbone
• Personal Log: Altimeter Group – Helping Organizations Bridge The Technology Obsolescence Gap
• Monday’s Musings: 10 Essential Elements For Social Enterprise Apps

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, see the full client list on the Constellation Research website.

Copyright © 2012 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC All rights reserved.

Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs Provides Prioritization Of An Individual’s Needs

In 1943, Abraham Maslow put forward his paper A Theory of Human Motivation. Eleven years later in 1954, Maslow went into detail on his hierarchy of needs in his book titled Motivation and Personality. The framework outlined five needs from the most fundamental or “deficiency needs” at the bottom and ended in Meta motivational needs towards the top (see Figure 1.).  At the highest level – self-actualization, the individual would focus on the needs to better society.

Figure 1. Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs

Source: Wikipedia

A Business Hierarchy Of Needs Provides A Model To Prioritize Business Strategy

While Maslow’s research explained what would drive and motivate individuals, applying the model to organizations yields a powerful framework for business prioritization. Why? Today’s next gen C-level executives face an onslaught of business priorities that must address the organization’s basic needs from regulatory compliance to higher level needs that include the management of the brand.  The business hierarchy of needs uses an analogous framework to Maslow’s.  Using the framework, business priorities and related projects can be aligned with the five levels that include (see Figure 2):

1. Brand. The brand describes a promise to stakeholders. The brand is more than the collection of products or services offered by the company.  The brand encompasses an emotional value, an aspiration, and the public face of a business strategy.  The brand can be viewed as a person, product, organization, and symbol for the company.
2. Strategic differentiation. Organizations seek strategic differentiation to achieve a desired reputation, create a defensible competitive advantage, and influence preferential behaviors in the value chain.  Tools include positioning strategy, design thinking, and innovation programs.
   
3. Revenue growth. Revenue growth reflects the initiatives used to drive new customers, revenues, and market share for the organization.  Revenue growth is also known as top line priorities.
   
4. Operational efficiency Operational efficiency priorities focus on reducing costs, improving existing performance, and optimizing existing landscapes.  Operational efficiency is also know as bottom line priorities.
   
5. Regulatory compliance.  Regulatory compliance is a base need.  Organizations must comply with legal requirements.  In addition, organizations may want to avoid legal suits, causing injury, or failing to meet a commitment.

Figure 2. Constellation’s Business Hierarchy Of Needs

The Bottom Line: Use The Business Hierarchy Of Needs For Business Prioritization

As with Maslow’s framework for motivation, the business adaptation delivers a framework for all c-level execs to:

• Align projects and priorities using the five categories in the framework
  
• Budget resources, funding, and investments in a portfolio management model by type of business need.
• Craft a strategy and portfolio mix based on business models and business need
• Develop a methodology to include in overall corporate strategy
• Evaluate with regular frequency for opportunities to improve

Your POV.

Are you ready to reassess your strategy efforts by business hierarchy of need?  How do you plan to allocate your resources and time for each need?

Take the survey and find out what your peers are doing today and in 2012.  As a survey respondent, you’ll get a copy of the results.

or do it here:

The Shift From Transaction To Engagement Ushers A New Era For Businesses.

As organizations enter the evolution from transactional systems to engagement systems, a shift is happening in business (see Figure 1).  Engagement requires a different design point and business model for success.  Engagement must account for sense and response, massive social scale, conversation, new user experiences, real-time, multichannel networks, and other factors.

Next generation C-suite leaders not only build for engagement, but also design for the next era of experiential systems which apply context to deliver agility and flexibility.  These shifts have massive impacts on the societal, technological, economical, environmental, and political landscapes.  In fact, these shifts to experiential systems drive the 10 mega business trends to watch for in 2012 and beyond (see Figure 2).  Of note, they can also be aligned with Constellation’s Business Hierarchy Of Needs prioritization framework (see Figure 3).

Figure 1. Move from Transaction To Personal Fulfillment Systems

1. Regulation gets worse and more expensive. Public outrage at a slew of government policy failures, the public sector debt crises, and a global sentiment against big business around the world will drive an increase in regulations.  Despite promises by politicians around the world for less regulation, a barrage of hidden taxes continue to be imposed by government bodies around the world.  In fact, Americans pay up to $1 trillion every year in stealth regulatory taxes.  Regardless of political point of view, global adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and carbon trading proposals will also drive up costs.  Organizations must prepare for this continued regulatory assault as elected officials hope the passage of more regulations will result in their reelection.
   (Level 1: Regulatory Compliance – Business Hierarchy of Needs)
2. Consumerization of IT must be enterprise class or businesses will fail. The recent Harvard Business Review post titled, “Coming to Terms with the Consumerization of IT” (CoIT), identifies six factors for the basis of balancing enterprise class requirements.  Businesses want IT to be simple, scalable, and sexy.  While the pendulum is definitively shifting towards business, Consumerization of IT requires enterprise class IT to ensure technologies to be safe, secure and sustainable. Success requires a natural equilibrium between business needs and IT requirements for key areas such as social, mobile, cloud, big data, and unified communications.  If IT is too strict, business fails. If business fails to have a level of discipline in technology adoption, IT can not keep up with the lack of standards and scale.
   (Level 2: Operational Efficiency – Business Hierarchy of Needs)
3. Organizations who master data visualization gain the advantage of speed. New data visualization tools will improve internal and external communications.  The convergence of big data, unstructured social and mobile information, and machine to machine data will provide a treasure drove of data for business analytics.  However, the flood of data will result in poor signal to noise ratios.  Unfortunately, more data does not mean more information.  Consequently, data visualization will provide a key tool to efficiently communicate complex information to stakeholders such as employees, customers, partners and suppliers.  The systems change the future of work by allowing users to create, share, collaborate, and broadcast new visualizations models.  In this case, an image is worth an exabyte of data.
   (Level 2: Operational Efficiency – Business Hierarchy of Needs)
4. New growth comes from monetizing the complete ownership life cycle. The low margins and limited barriers of entry for many products and services force organizations to rethink their business models.  In fact, many organizations have painfully discovered that products remain excuses to sell value added services and business model disruption is now a way of life.  Consequently, new business models include value added services such as installations, after market warranties, inclusion in communities, and exclusive experiences.  New business models also take advantage of new disruptive technologies and the shift to cross channel commerce.  For example, profitability at a company such as Best Buy mostly comes from these new value added services, not the product.  Thus, the goal shifts from selling products to winning market share in the overall ownership lifecycle.
   (Level 3: Growth – Business Hierarchy of Needs)
5. Social shifts from B2B/B2C to people to people (P2P) networks. Emergence of extremely viral people to people (P2P) networks forever changes the notion of the customer. Adoption of social media, social networks, and mobility drives the death of B2B and B2C as we know it.  Why? How we interact increasingly depends on context.  For instance, a bad experience at work with a certain brand of laptop bleeds over to the consumer side.  A great experience with consumer products has driven the rise of bring your own device (BYOD) to work and Apple’s success in the enterprise.  As a result, context in the form of roles, relationships, location, business process, time, and other factors determine how we engage.  These factors drive the new rules of business based on the rise of people to people (P2P) networks.  Growth will come from how organizations manage these new P2P networks to their advantage. 
   (Level 3: Growth – Business Hierarchy of Needs)
6. Battle for growth must include new global customer bases. Market place competition requires organizations to find the largest base of growing, profitable customers.  Competition for top growth status in stagnant developed markets could result in a strategic mistake.  For example, in the burger wars, Wendy’s has gained market share on Burger King in the United States.  At first glance, Burger King may seem to be failing.  However, Burger King’s recent efforts focus on rapidly growing markets in Latin America and Asia Pacific. Why? They plan to grow in the 18 to 34 age segment.  More importantly, the US market is a shrinking market while the emerging markets provide a green field alternative for fast food and high level growth.
   (Level 3: Growth – Business Hierarchy of Needs)
7. Strategic differentiation begins with great design. Strategic differentiation provides a desired reputation, creates a defensible competitive advantage, and influences preferential behaviors in the value chain.  In a market of rapid commoditization of products, shrinking product cycle times, and global delivery of services, organizations can barely create and sustain market differentiation.  However, experiential design provides a tool for greater strategic differentiation. Organizations who invest in differentiation and integrated systems thinking can improve their brand value.  Differentiation tools include positioning strategy, design thinking, and innovation program that drive next generation customer experience.
   (Level 4: Strategic Differentiation – Business Hierarchy of Needs)
8. The corporate digital divide only grows larger. The gap in profits, innovation, and market share will continue to widen between the companies who adopt disruptive and emergent technologies and those who choose to stay the course.  In some sense, average is over and organizations who strive for average will fail to survive.  Unlike the Occupy movement, organizations should strive to be in the 1%.  Why? There’s only room for the top 3 to 5 in any market segment.  Those in the 99% will crumble under market forces and cease to exist.
   (Level 4: Strategic Differentiation – Business Hierarchy of Needs)
9. Market leaders know how to manage their innovation agenda. Market hype over disruptive technologies such as social, mobile, cloud, big data, and analytics will continue.  However, a good number of early adopters have achieved success.  Therefore, organizations must not only understand when and which technologies to adopt, but also when and which technologies to pass on.  Successful organizations will manage their innovation agenda as a partnership between business, IT, and legal.  Those who establish a governance model for innovation will succeed.  One approach is to adopt the DEEPR disruptive technology adoption framework.  The DEEPR methodology establishes a disruptive technology governance council in the “R” or realization stage.
   (Level 4: Strategic Differentiation – Business Hierarchy of Needs)
10. The brand remains king (or queen). Organizations with strong brands will continue to command greater margins, larger market shares, survive economic downturns, and higher market caps.   Consequently, organizations must redefine, defend, and continue to position their brands. The brand describes a promise to stakeholders. The brand is more than the collection of products or services offered by the company.  The brand encompasses an emotional value, an aspiration, and the public face of a business strategy.  The brand can be viewed as a person, product, organization, and symbol for the company. 
    (Level 5: Brand – Business Hierarchy of Needs)

Figure 2. 10 Mega Business Trends For 2012

Figure 3. Constellation’s Business Hierarchy Of Needs

The Bottom Line: Pace Of Change Continues To Accelerate In 2012

In business, the only constant is change.  Unfortunately, the pace of change continues to increase.  Organizations who fail to manage this change will cease to exist in the next 24 to 36 months.  The 10 mega trends reflect the seismic shift happening in society, technology, environment, economy, and politics.  Business leaders should quickly factor these mega business trends into planning for 2012.  Importantly, organizations should weigh and factor trends based on their business hierarchy of needs.

Your POV.

Are you ready for 2012? Which mega business trend appeals to you the most?  Got one we missed?  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.

Required Reading

Note: For more on these mega trends and the move to customer engagement, read the latest from Paul Greenberg. A must read for 2012!

CRM 2012 Forecast: The Era Of Customer Engagement, Part 1.

Resources and Related Posts

20110303 Harvard Business Review – R “Ray” Wang “The Four Personas Of The Next Gen CIO”

20110713 Harvard Business Review – R “Ray” Wang “Coming to Terms With The Consumerization Of IT”

20111020 Harvard Business Review – R “Ray” Wang “Moving From Transactions To Engagement”

20110822 A Software Insider’s Point of View – R “Ray’ Wang “Monday’s Musings: Balancing The Six S’s In Consumerization Of IT”

20101004 A Software Insider’s Point of View – R “Ray” Wang “Research Report: How The Five Pillars Of Consumer Tech Influence Enterprise Innovation”

Disclosure

Although we work closely with many technology 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 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) ConstellationRG (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.

Press Contacts:

Contact the Media and Influencers relations team at Press (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com
for interviews with analysts.

Sales Contacts:

Here’s how to reach our sales team:

Alexandre Mesquita
Email: Alexandre (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com.
Phone: +1.786.564.4246
Twitter: @amesquit

David Stanley
Email:David (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com .
Office: +1.719.357.7826
Twitter: @kiwigate

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.

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.

Title: Workday Predict And Prepare 2011
Start Date: 2011-12-07  11:00 am PST
End Date: 2011-12-07   12:00 pm PST
Location: Webinar Link

For the fourth year in a row, join the country’s top IT, HR and Talent Management analysts and consultants for their predictions of next year’s critical trends, plus their advice on how you should prepare for them.
Their predictions include

Welcome to an on-going series of interviews with the people behind the technologies in Cloud Computing.  The interviews  provide insightful points of view from a customer, industry, and vendor perspective.  A full list of interviewees can be found here.

Rick Nucci – Co-Founder & CTO, Dell Boomi

Biography

Rick is the founder and CTO of Dell Boomi, responsible for product management and engineering. He is considered an industry expert on SaaS & Cloud integration, multi-tenant architecture, and application programming interface (API) design and best practices. Boomi has a patent pending for its innovative Atom technology that powers Boomi AtomSphere, the company’s cloud integration platform. Rick constantly engages with customers and partners to align their business needs and Boomi’s product strategy.

Rick frequently speaks on these topics at industry and business events nationwide including Gartner Application Architecture, Integration and Development (AADI) Summit, Dreamforce, Cloud Expo and SIIA All About the Cloud..

The Interview

1. Tell me in 2 minutes or less why Cloud Computing is changing the world for your customers?

Rick Nucci (RN): Fundamentally, cloud changes the way a customer buys, builds, delivers, supports, maintains, and upgrades IT. Cloud is more than moving IT from the data center and scaling it into the cloud. Customers currently have an 80/20 paradox – 80% is maintaining the stuff you already have, 20% is getting to innovation. This paradox is a main driver for moving to the Cloud. Cloud provides the fundamentals (free trials, automatic upgrades, constant streams of innovation, reduced CapEx expenses) to flip flop the 80/20, so IT can deliver more innovation to their customers and focus less on maintenance.

2. What makes cloud computing disruptive?

(RN): Disruption is a choice word here. It really does pull the rug out from the norm as to how businesses do business today. Today, customers engage with IT vendors resulting in upfront capital expenditures followed by an army of consultants on site to make the thing work. From there, customers pay maintenance for the technology they bought. Unfortunately, most customers then customize. Once customized, customers become locked in and can’t upgrade to the next version despite paying for maintenance. Sadly, this is the norm and the biggest contributor to the 80/20 paradox.

Cloud puts the customer first. With cloud’s instant access and availability, customers are deploying systems faster and gaining immediate access and availability. Projects that used to take years now take months. Customers can even try out and validate vendor claims before buying. When customers ask how Dell Boomi’s products are different, they can see it with their own eyes. We gain their trust immediately.

Pricing transparency also improves. Customers pay for usage, not potential usage down the road. The bottom line, “Mr. Vendor if I don’t like what you are doing, I’ll leave,” means vendors must keep delivering value. It’s easier to for customers to move back from the cloud if they are not seeing the value vs. the on-premise tentacle into the enterprise. Cloud flips the customer/vendor relationship on its head and puts control back into the hands of the customer.

3. What is the next big thing in Cloud Computing?

(RN): The next big thing is standardization. Thought leaders, analysts, media, and standards bodies will culminate to drive core themes of architecture. Cloud vendors must have multi-tenancy or it won’t really work. When I upgrade, I’m upgrading my customer base, not one customer only. From your own SaaS Bill of Rights, there will be a standardization of the operational principles, how we maintenance windows; how we do SLA’s. This is the enterprise readiness of the public cloud providers. The environment is right to talk about public cloud standardization, the Bill of Rights, and getting customers comfortable with release cycles they aren’t controlling,

The good news – we’ve hit a tipping point where industries are converging around cloud. No one is saying Cloud is a fad. We’re over the hype cycle and getting into the productivity plateau. This is the pragmatic view over the next 3 years.

4. What are you doing that’s disruptive for Cloud Computing?

(RN): Dell Boomi is reinventing our part of the IT ecosystem which is integration. In the past, (remember ERP?) integration drove 10x the cost of software. We want to simplify the process and drive down the cost and complexity. We took the problem, one of the eyesores of IT and made it much more consumable with more customer success than before. Our goal is to solve integration.

How are we doing it? First, we started from the ground up. We had the opportunity in 2006 to go in and build a brand new product to address this, versus taking something that existed prior to the cloud and retooling. You have to build from the ground up to be disruptive. Second, we modeled analogies from how Salesforce.com reinvented CRM, what were the things that worked from a tech perspective: multi-tenancy, traction, goals, and the viral nature of customer success. We took all those principles and put them into integration with connectors and Boomi Suggest (data mapping suggestion engine.) We made this an open ecosystem. When compared to the old ERP vendors, they had to build it themselves and keep it up. Half of our connectors are built by the ecosystem, not by us. Boomi Suggest captures the collective intelligence of our entire customer base for faster data mapping. Customers can get value right away and quickly get the integrations they want.

5. Where do you see technology convergence with Cloud?

(RN): Ray, I’ll take a little bit of an integration slant. I think one of the areas of convergence will be with API’s. API’s provide access to data in the cloud and how we make this more accessible to other developers. Take Twitter, for example, its usage comes from multiple access paths into the API’s.

Exposing API’s is how you unlock innovation. However, API’s today lack standards around the building blocks. In one way, we are way better than we were ten years ago where API’s were proprietary to specific languages and hard to talk to. Today, it’s completely irrelevant now as programming language is now out of the equation. We have converged at Cloud API 1.0.

In the 2.0 world, we should have standardization around authentication. We standardized how to do the handshake, now we have to standardize how you have the conversation. You can expect to see this happen. Once it does, we’ll be better off and SaaS providers will be able to come to market more quickly. API’s will be following standards. I believe this is one of the key things that will help us get to the next phase of maturity.

6. if you weren’t focused on Cloud Computing what other disruptive technology would you have pursued?

(RN): My passion is around music. Nonetheless, I’m a technologist at heart. What I’d love to do is reinvent the relationship between musicians and how their music gets distributed. The entertainment industry is a mess. I’d love to create a new record label and see how to reinvent the monetization of music in the artist’s favor.

7. What’s your favorite science fiction gadget of all time?

(RN): Ray, that’s easy. It’s the flux capacitor from Back to the Future. You can go back to any time period in the world. There’s nothing like it!

(Photo: R Wang of D Chi’s Flux Capacitor)

Your POV

What do you think? Got a question for Rick?  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

The Tech Vendor series is closed.  To be considered for the Business and Tech Innovators series, please reach out to Elaine (at) ConstellationRG (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.

Disclosure

Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us. For the full disclosure policy, see the full client list on the Constellation Research website.

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

Title: Evolution vs. Revolution: Strategies to Build Stronger Collaborative/Social Organizations

Start Date: 2011-12-14  11:00 am EST
End Date: 2011-12-14   12:00 pm #ST

Join R “Ray” Wang, CEO of Constellation Research, for insights from over 100 smart businesses putting the power of social business to work. Hear why many successful collaboration initiatives start by applying a user centric approach that takes advantage of existing work paradigms such as email and builds upon existing infrastructure such as Microsoft Sharepoint.

harmon.ie co-founder and CEO Yaacov Cohen will discuss how hundreds of organizations like American Water, Amway, Continental Corporation, Swiss Air and BearingPoint, Inc. are using social email to successfully transform into social businesses. Social email employs a gradual, evolutionary approach that maximizes the investment in existing infrastructure while minimizing the changes to everyday work habits.

Join this exclusive webcast to:

• Learn why people and culture are the main impediments to achieving a collaborative/social organization
• See how to execute an evolutionary user-centric social business strategy that eases people into new technologies
• Discover how organizations use harmon.ie social documents to bring ‘social’ to every business user

Register here

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.

Selling Software and SaaS solutions in a World of Many Channels, Many Models

The software market today is driven by the rise of cloud computing, forcing independent software vendors (ISVs) to fight commoditization-driven margin pressure, expand to new channels and markets, and move to “frictionless” self-service transactions. These new delivery models have irrevocably altered how software is developed, distributed and consumed.

Featured Speaker:

R “Ray” Wang Principal Analyst and CEO Constellation Research Group R “Ray” Wang currently is a Principal Analyst and CEO at Constellation Research Group and the author of the popular enterprise software blog “A Software Insider’s Point of View“.  With viewership in the millions of page views a year, his blog provides insight into how disruptive technologies and new business models impact the enterprise.   Ray blogs at Forbes CIO Central and for Harvard Business Review.   In both 2009 and 2010, Ray was recognized by the prestigious Institute of Industry Analyst Relations (IIAR) as the Analyst of the Year, and named a top Influential Leader in the CRM Magazine 2010 Market Awards.

Welcome to an on-going series of interviews with the people behind the technologies in Social Business.  The interviews  provide insightful points of view from a customer, industry, and vendor perspective.  A full list of interviewees can be found here.

Kelly Pennock, CEO of Visible Technologies

1. Tell me in 2 minutes or less why Social Computing is changing the world for your customers.

Kelly Pennock (KP): Agility, or the ability to innovate rapidly, is increasingly becoming the key to business success. Social computing, meanwhile, is fast becoming the key to that agility.

This makes sense because commercial tastes and trends, like any other cultural phenomenon, can’t be anticipated—at least, not with reliability. Commerce is therefore like any other emergent system—the weather or the stock market or the next best-seller. Prediction, except in the shortest of time frames or most static of markets, is unreliable. So if you can’t predict the future, the next best thing is to be able to see the present clearly, quickly and deeply and be ready to adjust as needed.

Businesses are figuring this out. Business planning used to be like building a bridge—devise a detailed long- range game plan that delineates the next three years of activity. Today, it’s clearly more of an innovation game—how quickly can you learn, adapt, try something new and then do it all over again next month. The business use of social media is all about learning from millions of “experts” on your products and brands, getting out there, trying things with your messaging, interacting with those experts to win their hearts and minds, and doing it in real time, all the time.

2. What makes social computing disruptive?

(KP): Social networks and the social intelligence we can derive from understanding human behaviors are disruptive forces themselves because they can help us understand what’s happening in society and commerce at a volume and velocity never before possible. For example, on average every 60 seconds there are more than 98,000 tweets, 1500 blog posts and 655,000+ Facebook wall posts.

Social computing is disruptive in another way. Social networks are not just a reflection of what is changing in culture and commerce, they are a catalyst for change: More people communicating about more things more often drives the evolution of culture and commerce at an ever increasing pace. The more we rely on them, the faster things change. The faster things change, the more we rely on them. So if the rate of change and the unpredictability of culture and commerce are what force us away from traditional business thinking in the first place, then the reliance on and participation in social networks as a mechanism to “keep up” ends up increasing the rate of change and makes businesses even more dependent on the agility they enable.

In a way, social networks are like a laboratory experiment: We can see the battle of ideas and brands in the network, identify the viral new and the dying old memes, quantify them and their rate of change, and measure the winners and losers at any point in time. It’s fascinating – and amazing – what you can learn. But like an experiment run amok, social networks and social commerce have spread to every corner of the world and now, we’re all caught up in the experiment.

So, in a nutshell, social networks and social intelligence make the present more comprehensible than ever before, and the future even fuzzier.

3. What is the next big thing in Social Business software?

(KP): Social networks provide a lab environment, of sorts, for society as well as commerce. Weather and culture have a lot in common—a large collection of individual units, molecules and people, respectively, interacting to create a macro or large-scale phenomenon. No one can predict the weather with certainty, but over the last 40 years, with the collection of massive quantities of data and the application of big computer models to figure them out, weather predictions are much more reliable than they used to be, at least in near term.

The spread of ideas through social networks and the resulting behavior will someday be predictable like the weather is today. It won’t be perfect, but we’ll gain a lot of insight and our guesses will be much more reliable than they are today.

This means businesses will be able to predict, not just guess, which messages will be effective, which promotions will move the needle, which consumers are buyers and what offers motivate them to buy. Utilizing the power of prediction en masse over the social universe will provide adrenaline to offline and online commerce, and thus, will be a multiplying force regardless of channel.

4. What are you doing that’s disruptive for Social Computing?

(KP): We are “un-homogenizing” social networks. The word network connotes for many a mass of tangled connections, something confusing and indecipherable. People think of social media as a faceless aggregation of consumers, much like a crowd, “wisdom of the crowds” and other terms confer that kind of homogeneity. We are pulling the network apart to reveal the fine structure underneath.

At Visible Technologies, we make it possible for marketers, customer service teams, and others across the enterprise to deeply understand social conversations at scale – easily. We’re bringing the social universe to the whole of the enterprise and enabling organizations to ask very precise questions of billions and billions of complex and multilingual pieces of human communications. What we provide is:

• One part engineering: Google- or Yahoo-type architecture that can scale infinitely and deliver reliably to big companies.
• One part science: Sophisticated machine learning that can compute things like the sentiment and intent of the communication in a host of languages, the influence and demographics and geography of the participants, the pyschographics of a site, and so on. This science will enable companies to specifically target social customer segments by age or gender or interests, much like they can in the “carbon world.”
• One part user interface and workflow. These things make this mass of content and insight accessible and discoverable.

5. Where do you see technology convergence with Social?

(KP): Big data – or data and analytics at super-scale. More than 700 million Facebook users and 200 million tweets a day means a lot of data is being generated – and those are only two sources. Understanding data at scale and extracting and inferring data from that mass means massive analytics.

I’ve never trusted intuition or common sense when it comes to making decisions at scale. A lot of my career has been spent figuring out just how wrong and how often our guesses are for all sorts of things. Data can usually tell us a lot more about the right answer than our hunches will.

6. If you weren’t focused on Social Computing what other disruptive technology would you have pursued?

(KP): Predictive medicine. It entails predicting who will be prone to certain types of diseases or conditions or even injuries. Knowing this information allows you to institute preventive measures in the appropriate time frame to either prevent altogether, or at least mitigate, the impact of these issues on your health.

7. What’s your favorite science fiction gadget of all time?

(KP): The Antigravity Belt Buckle in Ultraviolet. She could change her personal gravity and so had a lot of fun walking up walls and along ceilings. She could also extend it to other objects, like her motorcycle, and make it perform the same kind of tricks. This has plenty of applications, from thrill seeking to good old fashioned self-defense.

Your POV

What do you think? Got a question for Kelly?  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

The Tech Vendor series is closed.  To be considered for the Business and Tech Innovators series, please reach out to Elaine (at) ConstellationRG (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.

Disclosure

Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us. For the full disclosure policy, see the full client list on the Constellation Research website.

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

How It All Began (One Humble Analyst’s POV)

Time flies when you are having fun.  One year ago, we launched at the E20 Conference in Santa Clara.  Our mission – focus on the disruptive technologies of social, mobile, cloud, unified communications, and Government 2.0.

It does seem like just a few months ago, I was planning an exit from Altimeter Group.  It was a critical point in time for Altimeter as there were some differing opinions on the direction of the firm and four of the original partners sought new pastures.   During that change of management, I realized I didn’t want to build the next great social media consulting firm based on open research.  So, I went back to the post I wrote on July 24th, 2010 about the 7 tenets of the next generation research firm.  I reached out to other industry analysts, bloggers, and influencers to see who’d be interested.  I was hoping to find other like-minded folks who hoped to disrupt the industry analyst business.

As luck would have it, a number of fine folks were set to show up at Oracle Open World 2010 in September.  At Moscone Center, Paul Greenberg, Dennis Howlett, Esteban Kolsky, Maribel Lopez, Oliver Marks, Vinnie Mirchandani, Sameer Patel, Frank Scavo, Alan Silberberg, Brian Sommer, and I discussed the idea of starting a new analyst firm.  The conversations were intense and valuable in shaping the original structure of Constellation.  In fact, many of the ideas were battle tested from the experience of the Enterprise Irregulars and many other great independent firms before us including RedMonk and HFS Research.

After six weeks of planning, engaging in heated debates, and agonizing over the details, we went from concept to company with six analysts: Maribel Lopez, Oliver Marks, Sameer Patel, Frank Scavo, Alan Silberberg, and myself.   Staff wise, our former Executive Admin – Elaine Chan and our former VP of Sales – David Stanley, joined us.  On the board of advisors, we were fortunate to have Paul Greenberg, Dennis Howlett, Erin Kinkin, and Esteban Kolsky on the team.  Zoli Erdos has been helping us w/ curation on the Constellation website.  A few days later we added our 13th member, Elizabeth Herrell, who had retired from Forrester/GigaGroup.  Along the way, we’ve added some great team members and have added to our alumni ranks as well.

What We’ve Accomplished

Overall, it’s been a busy, exciting, and productive year. We’ve got a lot to be thankful for including:

• 100 buy-side and sell-side clients around the globe
• 31 team members including 13 research analysts and futurists, 5 sales professionals, 6 professional staff, and 7 industry recognized board of advisors (see Figure 1.)
• 735 Open Research insightful blog posts, 25 premium research reports, 15 webinars
• A website receiving 2.4 million page views per year. Q4 page views per day have averaged above 10,000.
• Recognition by the Institute of Industry Analyst Relations (IIAR) as the New Analyst Firm of the Year in 2011.
• Creation of the Constellation Supernova Awards – the industry’s first and largest recognition of innovators, pioneers, and teams who apply emerging and disruptive technology to drive business value
• Production of Constellation Connected Enterprise – an innovation summit and best practices knowledge sharing retreat for business leaders with 102 attendees and 25 wonderful sponsors

Figure 1. The Constellation Research Team At Connected Enterprise 2011 In Scottsdale, AZ

(Photo: Ken Yeung)

Lots Of Great People To Thank.

We wouldn’t be here without great clients. We’re here for them and we are quite grateful for the clients who believed in us in the beginning and have been with us through the year.  We appreciate their expectations for a new way of thinking, a new approach to research, and a more innovative way to approach research insights.   Their interaction and participation in the Constellation community has been valuable for everyone.

Equally important, we have to thank the pioneering individuals who saw the vision of Constellation and joined us.  From board of advisors, to client staff, to research analysts, we’ve been blessed to be associated with many great people.  Start-ups are never easy.  Some estimates show that 70% of new businesses do not make it past the first year.  Our team’s commitment, passion, and sacrifices have helped build a great organization that clients can appreciate, that the team can be proud of.

What We’re Doing Next

As we’ve built out the brand this year, we noticed a shift in how our customers have been dealing with new technologies and change. We have made the decision to also shift to better address our clients needs by taking a business focus. How?

Well 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.
How come?  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.
Next Stage: Designed For Business Leaders Seeking Business Value From Disruptive Technologies
We’re moving to a business leader and business value focused approach. Consequently, Constellation now 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

Your POV.

How else can we deliver value for you? What do you wish your current research firm would do? How can we improve? Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (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.

Brussels, Belgium – November 7th, 2011
16:30 pm (GMT +1:00) Central European Time

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, announced today that Dr. Alea Fairchild has joined as a Vice President & Principal Analyst for Technology Infrastructure Strategy, Legacy Optimization, and EMEA policy.  Fairchild will provide strategy and counsel to key Constellation client types: Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers,  investment analysts, VCs, technology policy executives, and technology buyers.

Dr. Fairchild has eighteen years experience in global IT market analysis, and has worked for the major market research agencies as both an analyst and as a consultant. She has also been a consultant for the European Commission, as well as to major multinational IT companies throughout Europe.

Alea’s research will explore key business themes such as intelligent data management and the changing view of the data landscape from the Cloud, value chain data management: insuring partners’ data protection policies, n ext gen government: data privacy and best practices, Internet of things: connected real estate: facilities management as a service provider, and co-creation: time window delivery options in e-commerce.

Topic areas will include technology infrastructure strategy, including data security and privacy, innovation, governance and compliance. As our resident e-Europe specialist, Dr. Fairchild provides insight on best practices in data protection in the value chain.  She is a proven thought-leader who provides clients information and ideas backed with significant marketing expertise, specifically in banking, biotech/healthcare and the public sector.

Previous work experiences include serving as a professional technology consultant at The Constantia Institute bvba.  She is also an Associate Professor of Management at Vesalius College, as well as faculty in the Economics department of Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She was previously been a Senior Researcher at Tilburg University in The Netherlands in the Department of Information Management. Her technical expertise lies in open architectures and interoperability. Recent areas of research have included knowledge management and productivity metrics for technology. Her academic training is in the area of information economics.

Alea has authored several conference papers and articles and five books: “Interoperability for Enterprise Information Systems”, September 1996, “Year 2000 Compliance: The Guide to Successful Implementation”, May 1997, and “Reengineering and Restructuring the Enterprise”, February 1998, all published by CTR. Her book, “Technological Aspects of Virtual Organizations”, was published by Kluwer and her latest book, “Entrepreneurship: Introduction to Business Plans” was published by die Keure.

“Driving business objectives with innovative technology solutions in a dynamic market environment requires good advice and solid support”, says Fairchild.  “Joining a well -respected team such as Constellation Research is a terrific opportunity for me to mesh my work in technology policy and implementation with other experienced research professionals in facilitating enterprise technology decision making.”

Alea’s coverage addresses key themes in legacy technology optimization and innovation, next generation commerce,  for areas such as:

• Servers, storage and middleware (infrastructure)
• Information security, data security, and privacy solutions
• Process innovation in services
• Governance and compliance
• Virtual communities for governance issues (value chain),information security
• e-Europe
• Public sector
• EU technology policy

“Constellation’s EMEA clients expect significant business experience along with delivery that respects a cultural point of view”, said  R “Ray” Wang, Principal Analyst and CEO, “Alea’s ability to mesh technology strategy with both innovation and policy will help clients translate from the art of the possible to the practical and doable.  I’m personally excited to have someone as knowledgeable as Alea on board for our global client base!”

Please join us in welcoming Alea Fairchild to the Constellation Research family and our growing EMEA presence now in Brussels, London, Madrid, and Tel Aviv!

COORDINATES

Twitter: @afairch
Linked In: http://be.linkedin.com/pub/alea-fairchild/0/236/819
Geographical Location: Brussels, Belgium
Email: alea (at) ConstellationRG (dot) 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.

Press Contacts:

Contact the Media and Influencers relations team at Press (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com
for interviews with analysts.

Sales Contacts:

Here’s how to reach our sales team:

Kieran Barr
Email: Kieran (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com
Office: +1.206.409.5009
Twitter: @kierobar

Alexandre Mesquita
Email: Alexandre (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com.
Phone: +1.786.564.4246
Twitter: @amesquit

David Stanley
Email:David (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com .
Office: +1.719.357.7826
Twitter: @kiwigate

Denver, Colorado, United States – November 1st, 2011
8:31 am (GMT – 7:00) Central Time

Constellation Research Inc, a next generation research analyst and advisory firm helping clients achieve business value from emerging and disruptive technologies, announced today that Yvette Cameron has joined as a Vice-President & Principal Analyst for People Processes and People Technology.  Yvette will provide strategy and counsel to four key constellation client types: Chief People Officers, Chief HR Officers, software vendors, and professional services firms.

Yvette is a proven executive leader and visionary.  She brings over 20 years of experience in designing, developing, communicating and managing global technology solutions.  Her work enables companies to align business objectives and workforce initiatives, foster employee engagement, and create a transformational workplace.

Prior to joining Constellation Research Yvette was with Saba Software as their VP and General Manager of Talent Management solutions where she helped incubate and launch their social networking technologies, and advanced their integrated learning and talent management solutions.  Before Saba, Yvette led product and marketing strategy teams at Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP and JD Edwards.  In addition to extensive software vendor experience, Yvette brings more than decade of experience as an HR practitioner, where she honed her skills in communication, change management, and the translation of business objectives into effective workforce processes and technology strategies

“Joining the Constellation Research team gives me the opportunity to continue sculpting the future of people processes and technologies from a new perspective”, says Cameron.  “It’s a highly respected organization and I look forward to bringing my experience and vision to Constellation to make it an even more dynamic presence for our clients.”

Yvette’s coverage will cover broad themes such as the “Future of Work” and include areas such as:

• Workforce collaboration and engagement
• Social strategies and technologies for strategic people processes
• Measuring and predicting results: Workforce Intelligence
• Cultivating leaders and pivotal talent
• Next generation HR leadership
• Implications and opportunities of deployment and service platforms: SaaS, PaaS, DaaS, BPaaS

“Yvette has both the practical experience and the thought leadership required to help people professionals bridge the gap between strategy and execution.  Her experience in advocating a client centric point of view coupled with credibility as an executive at many of the HR technology vendors provides our clients with invaluable and actionable advice.  More importantly, I’m energized by her passion for disruptive technologies in people processes.”, said  R “Ray” Wang, Principal Analyst and CEO.

Please join us in welcoming Yvette Cameron to the Constellation Research family and our growing Colorado presence!

COORDINATES

Twitter: @yvettecameron
Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/yvettecameron
Geographical Location: Denver, Colorado
Email: Y (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com.

About Constellation Research, Inc.*
Constellation Research is an award winning research analyst and advisory firm guiding organizations and their leaders through the hype and buzz of the latest disruptive technologies.  Constellation takes a holistic approach in achieving business value for board members, marketing, technology, operations, human resource, and finance executives.

The firm’s analysts deliver pragmatic, creative, and impactful research focused on business value, profitability, and market differentiation.  Research analysts bring real world experience, independence, and objectivity to our clients.  Most analysts bring over 2 decades of hands-on experience in working with senior leaders in enterprise organizations.

Constellation serves the needs of buyers and end users who seek insight, guidance, and advice in dealing with a dizzying array of disruptive business models and technologies.  The firm provide the bridge between legacy optimization and future innovation.  Constellation also advises sellers from both the buyer‚s point of view and how to deliver value to their customers.

Constellation builds partnerships with its clients.  The client and their organization’s success is Constellation’s only mission.

Insight. Inspiration. 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.

Press Contacts:

Contact the Media and Influencers relations team at press@ConstellationRG.com for interviews with analysts.

Sales Contacts:

Contact our sales team

Kieran Barr

Email: Kieran (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com
Office: +1.206.409.5009
Twitter: @kierobar

David Stanley
Email:David (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com .
Office: +1.719.357.7826
Twitter: @kiwigate

The Acquisition Machine Heads To The Public Cloud

Users gathered at the Customer Summit 2011 at the Broadmoor Hotel woke up to the shocking announcement that Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) announced a $1.43B acquisition of leading SMB CRM vendor RightNow Technologies (NASDAQ: RNOW) today.  According to Thomas Kurian, “Oracle is moving aggressively to offer customers a full range of Cloud Solutions including sales force automation, human resources, talent management, social networking, databases and Java as part of the Oracle Public Cloud,” said Thomas Kurian, Executive Vice President, Oracle Development. “RightNow’s leading customer service cloud is a very important addition to Oracle’s Public Cloud.”

A quick analysis of the acquisition reveals:

• Oracle sees RightNow as an anchor in its public cloud strategy. RightNow signals the first of many acquisitions foundational to a market place strategy.  CRM plays a pivotal role.  Bozeman, Montana based RightNow brings over 2000 customers, and 10 billion transactions per year in volume.  In fact, Kurian’s press statement hints at other areas that include anything from infrastructure to apps.
  
  Point of View (POV): Oracle’s success in the public cloud will require more than just a multi-instance virtualized cloud offering.  The lack of true multi-tenancy will prove to be a detriment to both customers and Oracle.  Oracle will need to deliver a multi-tenant version of Fusion Middleware to provide customers with the full range of deployment option choices from on-premise, hosted, multi-instance, and multi-tenant.  However, investors and customers should view the public cloud as more than an offering or technology play. In fact, this is Oracle’s new merger and acquisition vehicle.

• Oracle pokes at Salesforce.com on the customer service side. While Salesforce.com would most likely not acquire RightNow, Oracle brings on a key customer service competitor to Salesforce.com and aligns it with the Oracle sales and marketing machine. Meanwhile, Oracle gains an emerging web experience and social experience product line to complement a robust contact center and solid customer experience suite.
  
  Point of View (POV): With most of RightNow’s customers coming from the customer support side of the house, Salesforce.com will feel the heat in the market place.  Despite the Assistly acquisition, Salesforce.com still has a lot of work to move the Service Cloud offering to par with competitors.  Quite frankly, this is a direct attack by Larry Ellison to Marc Benioff in this space.

• Oracle plans a long term customer experience play. Oracle’s previous acquisitions of FatWire, Endecca, ATG, and Sigma Dynamics signal a potential play to get serious about customer experience management.  Oracle will need to re-purpose assets to the core CRM team to share in the innovation.
  
  Point of View (POV): Social business, online experience optimization, and gamification represent huge holes in Oracle’s product portfolio.  RightNow brings tremendous amounts of thought leadership to the table should Oracle retain the product teams.  More importantly, the SMB focus will help Oracle bring in a new customer base.

The Bottom Line For Buyers:  Proceed With Caution

RightNow customers should shore up existing contracts and extend maintenance and subscription pricing as far out as possible.  As with most acquisitions, expect Oracle to raise rates to fund the acquisition.  Customers and prospects should seek additional guarantees in product road map commitments and service level commitments.

The Bottom Line For Vendors: This Acquisition Makes Little Sense At First.

Vendors and competitors will most likely wonder why Oracle started this process with RightNow.  As with the PeopleSoft and Siebel acquisitions in the past, competitors were caught off guard.  Expect companies such as eGain, Moxie, Mzinga, Taleo, SuccessFactors, Zuora, Xactly, and others to be targets on the buy list.  Had Oracle or another vendor rolled-up the SaaS vendors during the 2008 downturn, they would have only expended less than $1B for all the players smaller than Salesforce.com.  Instead, cloud has now emerged as threat to legacy vendors such as Oracle.  After waiting on the side lines for the right moment, Oracle now enters the ring and will do what it does best – acquire and assimilate innovation.  In the long-term, Oracle will directly compete with Dell, Salesforce.com, and VMWare for the SMB market place via cloud.

Your POV.

Does this announcement surprise you?  Are you a RightNow customer?  Will you be ready to make the leap with Oracle?  What has your experience with Oracle been post acquisition?  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

How can we assist?

Buyers, do you need help with your apps strategy and vendor management strategy?  Trying to figure out how to infuse innovation into your tech strategy? Ready to put the expertise of over 1000 software contract negotiations to work?  Give us a call!

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

• Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support
• Evaluating SaaS/Cloud options
• Assessing apps strategies (e.g. single instance, two-tier ERP, upgrade, custom dev, packaged deployments”
• Designing innovation into end to end processes and systems
• Comparing SaaS/Cloud integration strategies
• Assisting with legacy ERP migration
• Engaging in an SCRM strategy
• Planning upgrades and migration
• Performing vendor selection

Related Resources

20111024 IDG News Service – Chris Kanaracus “Oracle buys RighNow for about US $1.5B”

20111024 Wall Street Journal – Matt Jarzemsky “Oracle Buy Cloud-Based Right Now”

20111024 GigaOm – Barb Darrow “Why Oracle paid $1.5B for Right Now”

Related Research

• Understand The Many Flavors Of Cloud Computing
  
• Research Summary: Introducing The 43 Use Cases For Social Business (Social Enterprise)
• News Analysis: Bunchball Gamifies Salesforce.com And Delivers Simplified Applets
• Monday’s Musings: A Working Vendor Landscape For Social Business
• Monday’s Musings: Auction Sites Such As Deal Umpire May Level The Playing Field Among Daily Deal Sites
• Product Review: The New TweetLevel And Blog Level Provide Critical Tools For Influencer Relations And Marketing Professionals
• Product Review: Informatica Addresses The Impending Big Data Challenge With Release 9.1
• Monday’s Musings: Real Time Versus Right Time And The Dawn Of Engagement Apps
• Tuesday’s Tip: Three Quick Steps To Capture Social Customer Data
• Monday’s Musings: Mastering When and How High End Brands Should Use Daily Deal Sites Such As Groupon
• News Analysis: Salesforce.com Acquires Radian6 For $316M

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.

New York, New York, United States – October 12th, 2011
11:31 am (GMT – 5:00) Eastern Time

Constellation Research Inc, a next generation research analyst and advisory firm helping clients achieve business value from emerging and disruptive technologies, announced today that Venessa Miemis joined as a Senior Analyst and Resident Futurist in September.  Venessa will serve as Constellation’s first resident Futurist.  Her coverage will focus on the digital identity space researching core topics such as The Future of Trust, The Future of Money, and Reputation and Ethics on the Social Web.

Miemis brings a wealth of experiences as a social technologies researcher and artist, exploring the edges of communication, co-creation, and commerce in a network society.  Venessa brings structure and understanding to how social technologies and networked culture are transforming business, commerce, and collaboration.  She often synthesizes insights and analysis into video-based communications along with insightful blogs and reports.  One of her well known projects is The Future Of Money project, which provided a visionary point of view for the banking industry and was presented to over 200 global heads of banks at the SIBOS Conference in October 2010.

Venessa blogs at Forbes in addition to her own widely-followed blog, Emergent by Design.  Her cutting edge points of view have been featured in leading media outlets such as CNN, Fast Company and The Huffington Post.  Miemis’ current projects include work on the Future of Facebook, social currency, open collaboration, and p2p finance.  She currently serves as the Chief Community Officer for Contact, an innovation festival about peer-to-peer technology and networked culture.  Venessa is also a board member of the Acceleration Studies Foundation and serves in an advisory role for a number of tech startups and social change initiatives.

Venessa graduated from Miami University with a BA in Psychology.  She has a Master’s in Media Studies from the New School with a concentration in online engagement, collaboration, and trust-building.

“We’re moving towards a business landscape that’s becoming more human – where trust, reputation, and the context of relationships really matter. Technology is leaping forward, and we’re finding more robust ways to understand our desires and motivations, to make decisions, and to create value. I look forward to working with companies to navigate and define this next wave that comes after “social.” – Venessa Miemis

Venessa’s coverage area will include:

• Digital identity
• Identity from a consumer perspective touching on public sector, healthcare, and banking/finance/commerce
• Virtual goods
• Virtual currencies
• Vendor relationship management and personal data stores
• Social media marketing, branding/communications, and community building.

“Legacy analyst firms continue to fail their clients because they have chosen not to invest in talent and push the envelope.  We value Venessa’s cutting edge points of view and track record in tackling new research topics.  Her work on the Future of Money represents the future of research “, noted R “Ray” Wang, Principal Analyst and CEO.

Please join us in welcoming Venessa to the Constellation Research Family and the Business Analytics team!  Venessa joins Adrian Bowles and Barry Wilderman in expanding Constellation’s presence in the New York metro area!

COORDINATES

Twitter: @venessamiemis
Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/venessamiemis
Geographical Location: Beacon, New York, United States
Email: venessa (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com.

About Constellation Research, Inc.*
Constellation Research is a leading research analyst and advisory firm guiding organizations and their leaders through the hype and buzz of the latest disruptive technologies.  Constellation takes a holistic approach in achieving business value for board members, marketing, technology, operations, human resource, and finance executives.

The firm’s analysts deliver pragmatic, creative, and impactful research focused on business value, profitability, and market differentiation.  Research analysts bring real world experience, independence, and objectivity to our clients.  Most analysts bring over 2 decades of hands-on experience in working with senior leaders in enterprise organizations.

Constellation serves the needs of buyers and end users who seek insight, guidance, and advice in dealing with a dizzying array of disruptive business models and technologies.  The firm provide the bridge between legacy optimization and future innovation.  Constellation also advises sellers from both the buyer‚s point of view and how to deliver value to their customers.

Constellation builds partnerships with its clients.  The client and their organization’s success is Constellation’s only mission.

Insight. Inspiration. 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.

Press Contacts:

Contact the Media and Influencers relations team at press@ConstellationRG.com for interviews with analysts.

Sales Contacts:

Contact our sales team

Kieran Barr

Email: Kieran (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com
Office: +1.206.409.5009
Twitter: @kierobar

David Stanley
Email:David (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com .
Office: +1.719.357.7826
Twitter: @kiwigate

New York, New York, United States – October 10th, 2011
11:31 am (GMT – 5:00) Eastern Time

Constellation Research Inc, a next generation research analyst and advisory firm helping clients achieve business value from emerging and disruptive technologies, announced today that Barry Wilderman has joined as a Vice-President & Principal Analyst for Enterprise Performance Management.  Barry will provide strategy and counsel to four key constellation client types: CIOs, CFOs, Software Vendors, and Professional Services Firms.

Barry Wilderman has over 30 years experience as an industry analyst, researcher and consultant. He is a highly regarded public speaker, and has spoken at numerous business events around the world for financial and technology audiences.  Barry’s approach to research and consulting has been shaped by a number of critical job experiences.

At META Group, Barry managed a team of enterprise application analysts focused on issues of selecting software, selecting the best consulting firm(s), implementation strategy and success factors beyond the go-live date. This work spanned numerous industries and horizontal disciplines. His clients were both enterprise vendors and companies implementing enterprise software. In particular, he authored two ground-breaking studies that explained the relationships among TCO, Quantifiable benefits and time to benefit.  While at Lawson Software, Barry was able to apply a great deal of the META research in the practical world of an enterprise vendor. He coordinated a series of studies around Lawson’s Business Intelligence and financial solutions. He also managed a team of value consultants who helped companies model their pain points and translate those pain points into quantifiable benefits.

Early in Barry’s career, he worked at McKinsey and Company, where he managed an analytic services group, working on delivering value in client engagements. Barry also worked for Information Builders, where he helped shape its approach to third party application delivery and artificial intelligence.  Barry holds a BS from City College of New York and MS Degrees from Brown University and New York University.

“Current research indicates that 70% – 80% of companies are not effectively executing against strategy. While technology continues to improve, the success rate is appalling. Aside from my work in CFO-centered technologies and methods, this is a large scale problem that requires additional research in business intelligence, ERP, and People-centered technology. I joined Constellation Research for two main reasons. Constellation has world-class analysts that can provide the collaboration needed to tackle this multi-disciplinary problem.  And, the firm is well organized to provide continuous visibility to our work” – Barry Wilderman

Key elements of Barry’s research coverage aim to ensure successful financial/strategy outcome such as:

• Evaluating, selecting, and implementing enterprise performance management (EPM)
• Advising on strategy to budgeting (and back) business processes including strategy management, planning, forecasting, budgeting, scorecards, dashboards, and business intelligence initiatives
• Supporting CFO line functions including consolidation, financial reporting, and financial disclosure
• Addressing revenue management, activity-based costing and profit Optimization.

“Barry’s a legend in the industry for delivering client value.  I’ve not only been a client of his, but a fan when he was at META Group.  He understands what CFO’s and CIO’s need to know to be successful and can help users translate their requirements to vendors.   As our clients look at disruptive technologies, Barry will provide the confidence CFO’s need to understand the impact to the bottom line on performance.”, noted R “Ray” Wang, Principal Analyst and CEO.

Please join us in welcoming Barry Wilderman to the Constellation Research Family and the Business Analytics team!  Barry joins Adrian Bowles and Venessa Miemis expanding Constellation’s presence in the New York metro area!

COORDINATES

Twitter: @barrywilderman
Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/barry-wilderman/5/a90/620
Geographical Location: Manhasset, New York, United States
Email: barry (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com.

About Constellation Research, Inc.*
Constellation Research is a leading research analyst and advisory firm guiding organizations and their leaders through the hype and buzz of the latest disruptive technologies.  Constellation takes a holistic approach in achieving business value for board members, marketing, technology, operations, human resource, and finance executives.

The firm’s analysts deliver pragmatic, creative, and impactful research focused on business value, profitability, and market differentiation.  Research analysts bring real world experience, independence, and objectivity to our clients.  Most analysts bring over 2 decades of hands-on experience in working with senior leaders in enterprise organizations.

Constellation serves the needs of buyers and end users who seek insight, guidance, and advice in dealing with a dizzying array of disruptive business models and technologies.  The firm provide the bridge between legacy optimization and future innovation.  Constellation also advises sellers from both the buyer‚s point of view and how to deliver value to their customers.

Constellation builds partnerships with its clients.  The client and their organization’s success is Constellation’s only mission.

Insight. Inspiration. 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.

Press Contacts:

Contact the Media and Influencers relations team at press@ConstellationRG.com for interviews with analysts.

Sales Contacts:

Contact our sales team

Kieran Barr

Email: Kieran (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com
Office: +1.206.409.5009
Twitter: @kierobar

David Stanley
Email:David (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com .
Office: +1.719.357.7826
Twitter: @kiwigate

Welcome to an on-going series of interviews with the people behind the technologies in Social Business.  The interviews  provide insightful points of view from a customer, industry, and vendor perspective.  A full list of interviewees can be found here.

Bobby Yazdani, CEO and Founder, Saba

Biography

Bobby Yazdani is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Saba. He was an industry pioneer in creating the Human Capital Management category in 1997, and has grown Saba into a $100 million+ profitable enterprise software business providing premier software and service solutions for people management and collaboration.

Saba’s people platform enables enterprise learning, performance and compensation management, succession planning, and workforce planning that align, engage, develop, mobilize, and foster collaboration across employees, customers, and partners. The company has been recognized by leading industry analysts for excellence and innovation in unified people management, collaboration, and social networking, and serves a roster of over 1,400 customers with more than 19 million users across 150 countries. Saba’s solutions are available on-premise or on-demand.

Saba’s customers are global leaders across a broad range of industries and public sector organizations, and include BMW, Daimler AG, IBM, The American Red Cross, Procter and Gamble, Medtronic, U.S. Army, and U.S. Navy, among many others. Bobby is a frequent spokesperson at industry events held by organizations such as the United Nations and The Economist. Prior to founding Saba, Bobby held various senior R&D management positions at Oracle Corporation.

Bobby has a B.A. in Applied Mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley.

The Interview

1. Tell me in 2 minutes or less why Social Computing is changing the world for your customers?

Bobby Yazdani (BY): The world of work is changing – and we fundamentally believe social computing and cloud computing is at the heart of this. It impacts the speed, quality, expectations and characteristics of how we work. You can draw parallels between social computing and the effect email has had on the way we work, in terms of its transformative impact in how we engage and communicate.

Our customers who are embracing social computing are finding that it’s dramatically changing the way they interact with their employees, customers, partners and suppliers. Through social computing, they’re creating significantly more transparency, increasing the speed of business, and generating and sharing more ideas and knowledge across their entire value chain – we call this the People Network.

2. What makes social computing disruptive?

(BY): Information used to be at the center of the workplace, but now people are. This is without a doubt the single most disruptive change brought about by social computing.

Social computing is not just about sharing information but connecting people in real time – all the time – on a global and local basis. It’s essentially destroying the “functional organization” that’s based on a model of hierarchy, and replacing it with a fluid model that dramatically increases the rate of innovation, enables more intimate interaction and sharing of ideas and initiatives.

Social computing allows organizations to unleash the collective wisdom of the People Network to deliver real-time insights that effectively drive innovation and increase productivity. Work can be done wherever talent resides, increasing efficiencies and making people more effective.

3. What is the next big thing in Social Computing?

(BY): Social business is going to become both global and local. It will be prescriptive, open and organic, and will involve both public and private social connections. And content will be highly curated and personalized to the experience of the way we work. This more dynamic environment will liberate employees, create better customer experiences, and yield new values to the entire organization value chain.

4. What are you doing that’s disruptive for Social Computing?

(BY): As I mentioned, our view is that social computing is all about people – not just within the enterprise, but the entire People Network. We’re talking about more effectively organizing people and processes – in whatever language, for whatever purpose necessary – by removing every barrier to connection.

Ultimately, I want Saba to become a “recommendation engine” for how we interact, communicate and collaborate – in any language. These are the inherent benefits that social computing can bring to make people more effective.

5. Where do you see technology convergence with Social Computing?

(BY): Cloud computing and mobile technology are already converging with social, and this trend will continue as global pressures demand more flexibility in how we work, how quickly we respond and how we manage the scale of information available. We also see the convergence of personal and business information, with social computing becoming more prescriptive in nature and having the potential to curate more personalized experiences in real-time, all the time.

6. if you weren’t focused on Social Computing what other disruptive technology would you have pursued?

(BY): Learning machines or machine learning, definitely. I’m fascinated by machinery that can learn who you are, how you behave and what’s important to you. The type of technology that can become your sidekick, your agent, your butler—and help you do everything you need to do, only faster and better. An interesting company (disclosure: I am an investor) is Clever Sense. They’re all about the notion of creating a personal robot.

I’m also very keen on algorithms and large data. And I’m deeply passionate about beautiful, creative experiences that can be formed in a computing environment. A great example of this is Qwiki, which improves experiences by turning information into more inspired, interactive experiences.

7. What’s your favorite science fiction gadget of all time?

(BY): On the original “Star Trek” TV series, the ship’s medical doctor, Dr. Leonard McCoy, had a device that could tell him what was happening with a patient’s body. It could pick up vital signs and detect potential diseases, allowing people to have more insight and be more prescriptive about their health.

Your POV

What do you think? Got a question for Bobby?  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

The Tech Vendor series is closed.  To be considered for the Business and Tech Innovators series, please reach out to Elaine (at) ConstellationRG (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.

Disclosure

Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us. For the full disclosure policy, see the full client list on the Constellation Research website.

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

Welcome to an on-going series of interviews with the people behind the technologies in Social Business.  The interviews  provide insightful points of view from a customer, industry, and vendor perspective.  A full list of interviewees can be found here.

Rob Tarkoff, President and CEO Lithium Technologies

1. Tell me in 2 minutes or less why Social Computing is changing the world for your customers.

Rob Tarkoff (RT): Social computing is changing the way marketers and line of business executives interact with their customers. It’s not another channel. It’s a philosophy. It’s a key way that customers experience brand.

The larger question is: “How do you design, build, deploy and manage an effective solution in the midst of massive evolution?” And, unfortunately, there is no common interpretation of social. Some get it fundamentally wrong when they view this only as a channel. Some are enlightened with a new philosophy to serve their customers.

Today, we face an expectations-gap between the consumer world and business environment. Employees and customers yearn to experience software and offerings as social and community based, whether it’s shopping, gaming, or internal collaboration.

What’s interesting is there is a generational gap here. People are very interested in including their reference peer group in everything they are doing with recommendations and experience sharing. A slightly older demographic may see the value of social, yet have not implemented that into everything they do. They see it as a major advantage, but may not fundamentally know how they want to engage with the ongoing experience

Meanwhile, the 40 to 50 year old demographic is engaged. They have to think about social the same way they think about rich media. For this group, social media is a rich media. This medium provides new ways to interact and experience. They expect these paradigms to be designed into everything.

2. What makes social computing disruptive?

(RT): The major disruption is the change in the power balance. Consumers have the power because they can quickly amplify their experience with admiration for a brand they love or rally their connections to hear their injustice. Companies are responding as much as they are leading. We now have the customer-network effect.

With social on everyone’s mind, company authenticity gains in importance. You can’t hide stuff in a social world because everything you do is on Twitter and Facebook. The major disruption is people have all the power and expect to use the power to surface whether or not a company is authentic.

Is a company doing what it says it’s doing? Are they true to the core of what they are about?

People are more willing to tweet or post on Facebook about a bad experience than call a company to tell them they had a bad interaction. This makes the way companies must respond to customers very different. And, you need to build this competency into your call centers and at every customer touch point.

Now, the only way to differentiate yourself and experience is through service and customers experience. Some may some say this is a major challenge, but those who have embraced can make the social customer experience an opportunity to differentiate, accelerate sales, and build brand advocacy.

3. What is the next big thing in Social Business software?

(RT): We have spent years uncovering what makes communities so powerful. Today, we are working on helping business executives understand the business impact. There are a lot of start-ups and un-proven technologies in the market creating confusion. At Lithium, we’re interested in understanding the effect of communities on people’s loyalties. What makes a community tick? What makes them sustainable? What makes a visitor return? Tell their friends? These are critical aspects for business executives to understand and core to social business software.

Interactions must be much more interactive and dynamic. I can’t stress enough how important it is that companies focus on the health of their communities, guiding them to create, encourage and reward brand advocates.

Social business software also helps drive down customer service costs. But this really is so much bigger than containing costs. We’re changing the competitive dynamics across entire industries.

4. What are you doing that’s disruptive for Social Computing?

(RT): Social computing should be more then just building connections from one platform to another. We change things by building a system that is meant to strengthen ties between people. It’s the passionate fans, the ones who feel like they belong to your brand, that are changing the game. They’re offering up their evangelism, their ideas, they’re advice to other customers. Taking that kind of data and making it useful to an organization takes changes to both culture and technology. Social customers don’t care if your title is “customer service agent” or “CEO” – when they have a question, they just want an answer. ASAP. So if you can create a system where any employee or passionate fan can give information exactly when it’s needed, everybody wins.

And, unlike a general online community, Lithium has created methods for brand advocates to attain rank and reputation. These ranks are associated with their ability to view, respond, and engage with other members of the community. It’s not a volume-game. It’s based upon how others in the community value your contribution. It’s our not-so-secret sauce to encourage repeat participation and provide passionate members with a badge of honor for their knowledge and contribution.

5. Where do you see technology convergence with Social?

(RT): Companies are facing a complete transformation in how they must engage with their customers. With volume of information, people, and resources available, customers are savvier than ever. The incredible digital transformation happening across industries has created unprecedented opportunities for companies to forge deep relationships with their customers through habit-forming community experiences. Lithium empowers companies to find their biggest advocates, tap their passions, and motivate them to participate to develop deeply engaged customers and brand buzz while enabling a superior customer experience.

6. If you weren’t focused on Social Computing what other disruptive technology would you have pursued?

(RT): I’m a big sports fan and was a tennis player in college so sports play a role. For me, I’d be developing devices that retrain your neuromuscular programming to perform at the same level as 20 years ago. If I wasn’t doing this, I’d be doing stuff around energy and clean-tech. I see many opportunities in the world of electric vehicles. We’re finally getting traction. This is where Shai Agassi was ahead of his time. I see so much interesting stuff in the future of transportation that I’d be looking at these areas. Because I love the San Francisco bay area and I don’t think too much about where else I’d be.

7. What’s your favorite science fiction gadget of all time?

(RT): I would say it’d be a jet pack that I could ride to travel around Silicon Valley and avoid the Valley’s notorious traffic. Cheaper than a helicopter, and more portable.

Your POV

What do you think? Got a question for Rob?  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

The Tech Vendor series is closed.  To be considered for the Business and Tech Innovators series, please reach out to Elaine (at) ConstellationRG (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.

Disclosure

Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us. For the full disclosure policy, see the full client list on the Constellation Research website.

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

Toronto, Ontario, Canada – October 3rd, 2011
11:21 am (GMT – 5:00) Eastern Time

Constellation Research Inc, a next generation research analyst and advisory firm helping clients achieve business value from emerging and disruptive technologies, announced today that Alan Lepofsky has joined as a Vice-President & Principal Analyst.  With close to 20 years of experience in enterprise collaboration software, Alan is an expert in how social software can be used to improve the core business processes that organizations rely on.

“There is a transformation going on in the way employees connect to their peers, share information and engage with their customers. I’m excited to help companies make educated decisions as they evaluate and ultimately deploy social software. I want to make sure they choose the vendor that provides the best overall fit, instead of just looking at a check list of features.” – Alan Lepofsky

Prior to joining Constellation, Alan spent 3 years as Director of Marketing at Socialtext and before that, 14 years in a variety of roles at IBM/Lotus. He’s an active blogger and speaker in the Enterprise 2.0/Social Business community, where he shares his thoughts on the business benefits of open communication and collaboration.  Alan graduated from the University of Toronto with a B.A.Sc. in Engineering. His major was Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Business and Entrepreneurship.

Key elements of Alan’s research coverage will include:

• Evaluating the enterprise social software landscape
• Augmenting and integrating business process with social software
• Tracking the changes in modern software interfaces including activity streams, visual data representation, mobile access, etc.
• Exploring how enterprise software can adapt patterns from popular entertainment platforms such as videos games, television and movies
• Revealing the impact of new collaboration tools
• Researching the intersections of personal and group productivity
• Documenting and sharing best practices in social business

In addition to the above coverage areas, Alan will be building a social business community on social business within Constellation Research and helping the firm adapt leading practices.

“With so many social media pundits pontificating about fluffy theoretical concepts, our clients expect us to deliver visionary and pragmatic points of view. Alan brings both the industry and enterprise credibility required to delight customers and serve as a strategic advisor to innovators in the social business space.  I’m personally looking forward to the impact he’ll bring internally as we adopt leading practices”, said R “Ray” Wang, Principal Analyst and CEO.

Please join us in welcoming Alan Lepofsky to the Constellation Research Family and newly expanded Toronto office!

COORDINATES

Twitter: @alanlepo
Linked In: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/alanlepo
Geographical Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Google+: http://www.gplus.to/alanlepo
Email: alepofsky (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com.

About Constellation Research, Inc.*
Constellation Research is a leading research analyst and advisory firm guiding organizations and their leaders through the hype and buzz of the latest disruptive technologies.  Constellation takes a holistic approach in achieving business value for board members, marketing, technology, operations, human resource, and finance executives.

The firm’s analysts deliver pragmatic, creative, and impactful research focused on business value, profitability, and market differentiation.  Research analysts bring real world experience, independence, and objectivity to our clients.  Most analysts bring over 2 decades of hands-on experience in working with senior leaders in enterprise organizations.

Constellation serves the needs of buyers and end users who seek insight, guidance, and advice in dealing with a dizzying array of disruptive business models and technologies.  The firm provide the bridge between legacy optimization and future innovation.  Constellation also advises sellers from both the buyer‚s point of view and how to deliver value to their customers.

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After 11 months of behind the scenes work, CEO Charles Phillips and the Infor management team unveiled the launch of Infor 10 in New York City on September 13, 2011, to customers, industry analysts, media, and investment analysts.  The new Infor has kept busy with key management team hires, the $1.84 B acquisition of Lawson, the launch of Infor10 CloudSuite, and partnerships in CRM with Salesforce.com via Inforce.

Infor currently serves more than 75,000 customers in 164 countries. With combined revenues greater han $2.5B, Infor/Lawson is the third largest enterprise apps company. The Infor and Lawson combination brings deep industry presence in key industries such as aerospace, automotive, chemical, distribution, equipment service maintenance repair (ESMR), fashion, food and beverage, general manufacturing, healthcare, high-tech, hospitality, high tech, industrial equipment and machinery, industrial manufacturing, and public sector.

Key announcements from the September 13th launch event include:

• Reintroducing ION as the ‘the heart of Infor10. Infor’s lightweight middleware solution provides an integration tool for Infor and non-Infor applications. The intent is to provide devices such as desktops, tablets, and other mobile devices to gain access to information in existing applications. Key components behind the technology infrastructure include a common user interface, workspace, reporting and analytics, workflow, event management, master data management, localizations, mobility enablement, and packaged integration.
  
  Point of View (POV): Unlike Oracle and SAP who have spent billions addressing the integration problem through a comprehensive and heavy middleware strategy, ION take a more pragmatic approach. Through loose coupling, Ion gives the Infor family of products increased agility that matches use cases for a mobile, social, and analytical world. While ION aims to provide better integration, streamlined workflows and end to end business process integration, Constellation believes it will take at least 6 to 9 months before the first set of end to end processes span across the major product lines (e.g. Infor10 ERP Enterprise (LN) and Infor 10 Lawson M3).  The good news – Integration between Infor10 Lawson S3 and Infor EAM is planned for November, just 100 days after acquisition.
   

  On the management team side, customers and prospects will be reassured that both Infor’s second employee, Soma Somasundaram, senior vice president of Global Product Development and Dean Hager (i.e. originally from Lawson) remain key driving forces for carrying out this completed vision.

Figure 1. ION Plays A Key Role In Infor’s Long Term Strategy

Source: Infor

• Delivering a consumer grade experience. Duncan Algove, President of Products and Support introduced Infor10 Workspace. With an intention of bringing consumer world experiences to the enterprise, Infor10 WorkSpace provides a fresh start to helping users “work the way they live”. Key elements of the ION experience include role-based screens, role-based workflows, in-context business intelligence, event management, activity streams, tasks and alerts, and consumer-like search capabilities).
  
  POV: Existing customers and new prospects expect next generation applications to meet the Six S’s of Enterprise Class Consumerization of IT. Infor’s key design principles of flipping the structure of work to be data and event driven, contextual data at the point of decision, social computing metaphors, and design for mobile play a key role in making this a reality for Infor customers. This provides a compelling reason for customers to put their maintenance fees to use in an upgrade or purchase of Infor10 components.

Figure 2. Scenes From The New Infor User Experience

Source: Infor

• Bring social analytics or socialytics to the Salesforce.com offerings. Sales and Service Cloud will gain new capabilities in social media monitoring and engagement.  Today’s companies seek the tools to bring social customer strategies with existing CRM processes and organizational structures. A social media monitoring and engagement platform provides a critical tool for success in Social CRM (SCRM).
  
  Point of View (POV): The market seeks deeper and greater purpose built capabilities. Many of Infor’s acquired products provide a deep industry functionality that is unmatched. However, much of the rich functionality remains trapped in legacy technology. Customers and prospects will wait and see if ION provides the technology to expose this functionality in new paradigms such as mobile and business intelligence.

• Providing flexible deployment options. Infor10 includes new options that support on-premise, on-demand, and hybrid deployments. The Infor10 CloudSuite Platform provides a hosting capability to take advantage of cloud-based deployments.  Infor 10 CloudSuite solutions are architected for true multi-tenant SaaS.
  
  Point of View (POV): Infor gets kudos for providing choice in deployment options that provide a unified user experience and security regardless of deployment option. The good news – the same application code is used for both on-premise and cloud and integrations support two-tiered and hybrid deployments.  CloudSuite ERP, CloudSuite EAM, and CloudSuite Expense management area ll examples of true-multi-tenant offerings.  For those offerings that are not multi-tenant SaaS, Infor offers dedicated hosting, shared servers with separate copies of the application for each customer, and virtualized environments to support multiple customers.

The Bottom Line For Buyers (Users and Prospects). Infor10 Sets The Stage For A More Viable Alternative And Competitor To The Status Quo

Infor10 captures many of the elements required for the next generation of applications. It also addresses the key forces in the Consumerization of IT. But more importantly, users will sense that this new management team has the momentum and capability to take Infor to the next level. Constellation suggests that:

• Customers should assess ION in their apps strategy. ION can play a key role in consolidating legacy applications and preparing organizations for the next generation.
• Customers and prospects should consider Infor in two tier ERP deployments. Organizations with Oracle and SAP as the corporate system of record, should look to Infor for industry specific assets. Companies who have not upgraded or kept up with the latest Infor product should take the time to work with the management team to achieve reference customer status.
• Customers and prospects should see where industry specific applications play a role in core apps strategy. Dario Castello, CIO of Ferrari mentioned that they spent 7 months evaluating ERP options and ultimately chose Infor because of the depth of functionality and the future direction of the company and technology. The Ferrari decision to go from Baan 4CIV to ERPLN7 reflects how the new management team is partnering with customers to ensure success.

The Bottom Line for Sellers (Vendors): Infor may seem far behind but an IPO and new management team makes a big difference.

The combined Infor and Lawson industry expertise place Infor as a leading choice in many verticals such as healthcare, hospitality, and specialty manufacturing.  On a horizontal level, a strengthened financial suite paired with continued investment in Lawson’s HCM assets will help keep Infor top of mind in many vendor selection short lists.  Expect Infor to provide increased competitive pressure on SAP and Oracle.

After years of under-investing in products, the new management team has made the key technology investments required to take Infor to the next level. Improved user experience, a focus on verticals, and the commitment to faster time to market may be the ticket to bring Infor into the spotlight.  It appears that Charles Phillips and the management team have learned from the mistakes that Oracle and SAP have made – taking too long to deliver a product and not being innovative enough.  Time to market is the critical success factor in an era of Consumerization of IT.

Your POV.

Does this announcement surprise you?  Are you an Infor customer?  Will you be ready to make the leap with Infor10?  Have you had a good experience with Infor?  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

How can we assist?

Buyers, do you need help with your apps strategy and vendor management strategy?  Trying to figure out how to infuse innovation into your tech strategy? Ready to put the expertise of over 1000 software contract negotiations to work?  Give us a call!

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

• Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support
• Evaluating SaaS/Cloud options
• Assessing apps strategies (e.g. single instance, two-tier ERP, upgrade, custom dev, packaged deployments”
• Designing innovation into end to end processes and systems
• Comparing SaaS/Cloud integration strategies
• Assisting with legacy ERP migration
• Engaging in an SCRM strategy
• Planning upgrades and migration
• Performing vendor selection

Related Resources

20110314 A Software Insider’s Point of View – R “Ray” Wang – “News Analysis: Infor Extends $1.84B Unsolicited Offer For Lawson”

20101025 A Software Insider’s Point Of View – R “Ray” Wang – “News Analysis: Charles Phillips Takes Over As CEO Of Infor”

20100422 A Software Insider’s Point of View – R ” Ray” Wang – “News Analysis: Lawson Puts Its Full ERP Suite Into The Cloud”

20090425 A Software Insider’s Point of View – R “Ray” Wang ” Event Report: Lawson Cue09″

20090313 A Software Insider’s Point of View – R “Ray” Wang “Friday’s Feature: Snapshots in Enterprise 2.0 UI/UX – Lawson Smart Office

Reprints

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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.

Welcome to an on-going series of interviews with the people behind the technologies in Social Business.  The interviews  provide insightful points of view from a customer, industry, and vendor perspective.  A full list of interviewees can be found here.

Daniel Debow, Co-CEO,  Rypple Software

Biography

Daniel is co-founder and co-CEO of Rypple, a social performance management platform that helps Facebook, Gilt Groupe, and other innovative companies recognize great work, run fast, efficient feedback loops, and coach employees to achieve their goals. A sought after speaker on how social media is changing the workplace, Daniel is a regular contributor to Fortune.com and the Huffington Post. He’s been widely quoted in Wired, the Financial Times, the Economist and Bloomberg Businessweek. He holds a JD/MBA from the University of Toronto and an LLM in Law, Science and Technology from Stanford University.

The Interview

1.  Tell me in 2 minutes or less why Social Computing is changing the world for your customers.

Daniel Debow (DB): Ray, Social Performance Management (what we do) is changing the world for our customers because it takes a dreaded and ineffective process—the performance review—and makes it relevant again.

Over the last decade, the review process has become disconnected from real business performance. By delivering key feedback and information in real-time, rather than in six-month batches, we are helping managers and their teams work more effectively, efficiently, and collaboratively. At the end of the day, this is the core promise of any type of business software: improved business results.

More generally, social computing is effective because in many cases, it is more efficient. While it may seem like an oversimplification, large corporations have succeeded by standardizing the delivery of products and services as they scale. These large-scale standardizations of “process” work incredibly well when it comes to managing supply chains or product pipelines. But when it comes to the management of people, standardization of process has translated into enterprise applications that suck. They remove the “human” from the workplace, and are major contributors to the alienation of people from their work.

In order to get people to the next level, we have to bring the “human” back into the work place. A huge amount of value-creating work gets done outside standard process—through social interaction. Today’s enterprise applications don’t model the corporation this way. But social computing does.

Social computing is about taking the metaphor, modelling the reality, and moving faster. It recognizes that when it comes to people, companies are not simply processes moving mechanistically. Instead, the social computing metaphor reflects more accurately what companies actually are: groups of people talking—and coordinating—with each other to deliver productive goods and services in a highly non-standard world. By recognizing this more accurate representation of the corporation, social computing has the potential to make companies more efficient by optimizing the faster, more natural flow of information between people.

In our case, we’ve found that the interactions related to human performance and getting the most out of people are absolutely social. They involve helping people talk to each other in a more collaborative and real-time way: How do we recognize people in real-time? How do we help managers and teams collaborate on people performance. How do we recognize and account for the reality that managers aren’t omniscient about team performance? How do we get one-on-one’s with the boss to be high impact and frequent? How do we create agile goals that reflect changing business reality rather than reality as it existed six months ago? The answer is social computing, which views a company not as a static org chart and a number of interconnected process flows—but rather as a social network with ad-hoc and ever changing relationships and interactions.

This is the essence of social computing.

2. What makes social computing disruptive?

DB: As with all disruptive technologies it meets three key criteria:

1. It attacks a problem in an orthogonal way.  Almost all social technology appears at first to be a toy.  Customers don’t asking for them, yet they spread into companies like wild fire.  Users say, “I’d never do this in the enterprise.”
2. It breaks the price-performance curve on a different scale. In many cases, Rypple included, we make it cheaper to deploy than existing technology.
3. It appears as an incomplete solution from the perspective of incumbents.  Incumbents will state you don’t have the 1000 features they have.

The telegraph, the phone, and email all changed the number of nodes of communication and improved the flow of information between people. Social technologies take communication to the next level. This isn’t just a technological shift; it’s a societal one. We are taking the same metaphors of openness and transparency that have been used to describe the web and applying them to organizations.

When you value results above internal politics and velocity over caution, you create a more innovative, less hierarchical—and ultimately disruptive—organization.

3.  What is the next big thing in Social Business software?

DB: Recently I was on a panel on the future of the workforce, where I talked about two huge developments on the horizon. The first is the shift from an economy of companies to an economy of individuals, as everyone’s reputation and personal brand moves to the cloud. It will be interesting to see what this means for consumer brands like Nike and Pepsi, and how people interact with them.

The second big shift is the ability of social media to create more meritocratic systems for rating true influence and power within organizations. Cloud-based social applications are asking people to rate one another and provide opinions based on far more objective data than the vague subjective impressions that often determine influence.

As that data migrates to the cloud and becomes portable, it will have profound changes on the labor market. It will transform how we look for talent, where the power resides, and potentially the very nature of the corporation.
As reputation becomes a more objective measure, it will force companies to become more fluid in their hiring practices and their operations.

4.  What are you doing that’s disruptive for Social Computing?

DB: Rypple is trying to live by the values we’ve been talking about—the values that our service provides to customers: transparency and visibility. We sell and market the product in a disrupitve way. You can try our product for free and decide on your own whether it has value. Our approach to marketing is to be as human and authentic as we can. We are helpful to people instead of being shills.  Without faking, we want you to buy our product.  We work hard to pull in all the key data people need to complete their jobs.

Just as important, we want to make the way people communicate at work more seamless and efficient—to surface all the data currently living in CRM, support, and product development and bring it into people’s daily work flow. This will lead to improved communication, collaboration, and ultimately business performance.

We are reinventing the way people manage their performance at work. The world has changed in the past 50 years,taking advantage of new technologies to bring a more efficient, just-in-time philosophy to so many parts of the organization. Yet performance management remains the same.  For the most part, it is conducted on pieces of paper—forms that may or may not have been automated for the desktop. We want to help companies deliver that  feedback immediately, when it can impact performance, rather than six months from now, when it’s too late. And we are changing the paradigm to consider how to make this process more social, more natural, and more relevant to business leaders, HR professionals, managers, and individual employees.

We don’t pretend to be creating Utopia. Organizations still need to implement and follow the best practices of engaging, coaching, and motivating their employees. We’ve just made that process far more efficient, intuitive, and fun.

You’ll see more announcements in the next few months.
5.  Where do you see technology convergence with Social?

DB: Today, we have many outside repositories such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter that work in concert with inside repositories. You no longer have to own the platform to create value. In our case, we’ll follow the Zynga strategy.  Find the platform people are using to interact at work—and build on top of it where there’s value.

We expect to move further in that direction with the information and knowledge contained in workforce process flows, such as support tickets and supply chain management. Beyond a simple automation of existing processes, we see a real opportunity to incorporate these sources of information into performance.

6. If you weren’t focused on Social Computing what other disruptive technology would you have pursued?

DB: Personally, it’d be music.  I’m passionate about music.  Can we find a way for students to learn faster, better, and share?  We need new learning mechanisms to help people accomplish this.  Can we create the right feedback loops? Part of what makes social software better is that it makes social feedback loops more effective.

Transparent decision making ties back to learning.  Take how John Boyd changed the effectiveness of fighter jets and military strategy through decision loops.  The team with the fastest decision making loops wins.

7.    What’s your favorite science fiction gadget of all time?

DB: If I had to pick one gadget, it would be the time machine. The classic HG Wells type. I’ll need one that works and I’d just want to ensure I could get back to our time.

Your POV

What do you think? Got a question for Daniel?  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

Additional interviews will be added and updated!  To be considered for the series, please reach out to Elaine (at) ConstellationRG (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.

Disclosure

Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us. For the full disclosure policy, see the full client list on the Constellation Research website.

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