By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 19th June 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

Bizagi have announced a new version (2.5) of their freeware process modelling tool that incorporates simulation capabilities. The simulation capabilities have been provided through collaboration between Bizagi and Lanner. The Lanner Group was formed by an MBO from AT&T in 1996 and is now recognised as a leading business process simulation and optimisation organisation. Lanner's WITNESS simulation modelling technology has helped over 5,000 organisations worldwide that span the manufacturing, service and government sectors.

Bizagi and Lanner have already worked together as part of WfMC's Business Process Simulation Working Group (BPSWG) in creating the new BPSim standard, and this partnership is seen by both as another milestone for the two companies in their quest to challenge the status quo, and take genuine innovation out to the market.

"Both Lanner and Bizagi share a belief that process technologies can substantially improve the way in which organisations operate and service their customers. Bizagi's ethos of challenging the way things have traditionally been done, combined with Lanner's innovative approach to simulation, represents a powerful proposition in developing joint value for our customers", commented David Jones, CEO, Lanner.

The first output of the partnership sees Lanner's predictive simulation capability added to Bizagi's process modeller.  This allows business users to be able to input information through the simple Bizagi interface. The Lanner simulation engine is then able to generate results which can ascertain the impact of a particular change to a process within the business. These predictions can help business managers to make more robust, confident decisions about business change and because it is freeware there is no need to invest heavily in technology.

As a Bizagi user myself, I look forward to trying this new capability out on my own projects. I will let you know what I find.

By: Laurie McCabe, Partner, SMB Group Posted: 18th June 2013 Copyright SMB Group © 2013

In the first post in this series, Seeing the Light: How SMBs are Using Data and Insights to Get Ahead, I shared the motivations that prompted three SMBs (BGF Industries, Oberweis Dairy and Twiddy & Company) to replace spreadsheets and intuition with a more sophisticated, analytics-driven approach.

But what factors do you need to assess in order to select an analytics solution that will work best for your business? In this post, I examine the factors that these decision-makers view as make or break considerations to guide the analytics selection process and ultimately, drive successful outcomes.

What information do you need to understand and measure?

As Albert Einstein, said, “The important thing is not to stop questioning.” After you’ve determined the business requirements you need to solve, the next step is to identify the specific questions you need to answer to solve these requirements. For instance:

• Oberweis Dairy initially wanted to determine why customers were discontinuing home delivery service so it could get that business growing again. But the scope quickly broadened. According to Bruce Bedford, VP of Marketing, “We have three channels of business—home delivery, ice cream and dairy stores, and distribution partners. We realized we had to understand customer buying behaviors across these channels to answer questions such as, how do we increase revenue per transaction, improve customer retention, and increase market penetration.”
• Twiddy & Co. needed to maximize occupancy and revenues for vacation homeowners while still providing an optimal vacation experience for its guests. As Clark Twiddy, Director of Operations explained, “We asked what do we want this solution to show us, and what would we do with it once we had it?” For instance, Twiddy wanted to be able to scan for safety related items so it could immediately dispatch resources to correct them. We also wanted to track costs and performance in different vendor categories. I wanted to know what the median cost is, for example, for carpet cleaning, what each vendor charges, and who does the best job—sort of like a private Angie’s list.”
• BGF Industries had millions of lab testing records that it could use to improve quality control, but lacked an effective way to extract insights from them. Notes Bobby Hull, Corporate QA Manager,” We needed a system to quickly comb through all these records, generate control charts, and flag anything that might be an issue before it becomes an issue for our customers. We also wanted to build a knowledge repository to make key findings readily available if an issue comes up again.’’

Where will the data come from?

Most SMBs start with wanting to analyze internal company data. But odds are that corporate data is in different 'silos,' such as an internal financials application and a cloud-based HR or CRM solution. Data silos are usually inconsistent, expensive to support and a source of contention in companies. Bringing siloed data together into an integrated data store is the foundation to build a 'single version of the truth' to run reports, build dashboards, and create visual or mobile user interfaces.

BGF was fortunate. It had already built a data warehouse for its lab testing data when it decided it needed a more powerful analytics solution. But Twiddy and Oberweis faced a dilemma more common to SMBs. For example, “Our Ice Cream and Dairy Stores operate in a completely different IT environment than our Home Delivery and Wholesale businesses,” explained Bedford. “For timely, accurate reporting and analysis of cross-channel purchase behavior, we needed to start by bringing all of our consumer and inventory data together into a single data warehouse.”

Look for solution providers who can help consolidate and standardize data from different sources and formats to build an integrated, rationalized data store. This foundation will enable you to derive deeper insights, better metrics and the confidence you want from your data.

How much data do you need to analyze?

Big data isn’t only applicable to large businesses. In fact, the "big" in big data is relative—relative to the amount of information that your organization needs to sift through to find the insights you need, when you need them.

BGF was storing over 5 million lab testing data points in a data warehouse. “Many of the solutions we looked at couldn’t handle the data volume, they would choke after a couple of million data points. We needed a solution to power through this with the speed we needed,” according to Hull.

Consider both current data volumes and what’s coming down the pike. Oberweis’ Bedford notes, “We wanted to start with market analysis, but knew that down the road that we would want also improve inventory management and gain more predictive inventory control, which would bring more data into the picture.”

It’s a safe bet that the volume and variety of digitized data relevant to your business will continue to rise exponentially. You may need to bring in new, unstructured data from company emails, from external sources such as social media, or machine generated data from processes that you automate.

Select a solution that will be ready when you need it to crunch through more data, from more places, more quickly. Analytics solutions that take advantage of new technologies, such as Hadoop and MapReduce, make it possible to run analyses that used to take days or weeks in minutes, and to weave new, external data sources into your analysis as required.

How do you make data actionable?

To have value, data needs to be accessible, consumable and actionable. People must be able to interact with it, and get the information they need, when and how they need it, to perform their jobs most efficiently.

Consumability was top of mind for Twiddy & Co. “We wanted something that would not only help our executive team to make decisions, but also shape information that we could disseminate to front line managers and the field,” notes Twiddy. Executives needed planning and forecasting capabilities to help maximize occupancy for almost 1000 properties, and manage service costs among 1100 providers. “But we also needed to bring together information from different sources into one simple document for our cleaning crews who clean and inspect the homes. Our data challenges were often to make our complicated data systems clear, understandable, and most importantly actionable.”

BGF’s Hull required “a daily report of issues, divided by market segment, that segment managers could pull up and start taking actions on immediately.” BGF also wanted to augment control charts with a commentary field to capture knowledge about how to resolve issues. “One of my mentors recently retired with 52 years of service. When someone like that logs something, you want to keep it and pass that knowledge on in case the issue comes up again.”

Get clarity around who needs to use the data and how. Is it executives, front line managers, people in the field—or all of the above? Business users may need visualization capabilities to make it easier to explore large amounts of data. Executives might want mobile solutions so that they have information at their fingertips at the airport. Get broad input from stakeholders upfront to deliver information in the most actionable format.

What internal capabilities do you have and what help will you need?

Like most SMBs, these companies had small IT staffs, ranging from 2 to 4 full-time people. They had varying degrees of analytics expertise. Oberweis’ Bruce Bedford is a PhD and has an analytics background. BGF’s Hull had experience with desktop analytics, but had to juggle his day job as Corporate Quality Assurance Manager while implementing a server-based solution. And Clark Twiddy had to help move the company off spreadsheets while fulfilling his duties as Director of Operations.

If you lack IT staff and/or in-house analytics expertise, select an experienced solution provider who can fill in the gaps with consulting, implementation, training and support services. Since analytics is a major investment for most companies, and your requirements will evolve over time, look for a provider that will really listen to what you are trying to do, work with you to overcome internal challenges and constraints, and provide a solution that will grow with your business. “Don’t be over-confident about simply buying a solution… in hindsight, we should have purchased a training plan and initial setup consultant upfront. It would have saved a lot of time.”

Perspective

With all the hype surrounding analytics today, it’s easy to get derailed from your objectives by buzzwords and the next new feature. But you can stay on track if you remember that the end goal of all metrics, reports, dashboards, alerts or any other features that an analytics solution provides is to answer your business-critical questions.

Evaluating key questions at the front of the solution assessment cycle proved critical to enabling these SMBs to choose the analytics solutions and providers that would be the best fit for their companies.

If you take time upfront to lay the groundwork with a thorough internal assessment, you will dramatically increase the odds of selecting an analytics solution and solutions provider that will help you get the insights you need to grow the business and stay ahead of the competition.

In the third and final post of this series, I’ll look at how careful planning paid off for these three SMBs, and how they are using analytics to help their companies grow.

This is the second of a three-part blog series by SMB Group sponsored by SAS that examines why and how SMBs are moving from spreadsheets and intuition to a data-driven approach to grow their businesses.

By: Angela Ashenden, Principal Analyst, MWD Advisors Posted: 17th June 2013 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Using technology to support collaboration in business is far from a new idea – the reason email is so well-entrenched, for example, is that we’ve been using it for decades. However, historically, business collaboration generally meant a small team working together, typically in a single location. And so collaboration tools focused on simply providing a central location where information could be shared among the team, as well as including traditional features such as discussion forums. In today’s globalised business market though, teams are spread across locations, indeed often across continents and time zones. It’s not unusual for team members to have never met before, and sometimes to have never even heard of each other before joining the team. And so we are starting to look for new ways to connect our employees better – not just for the purpose of working on a specific project, but to recreate that togetherness that exists in a co-located organisation.

Social collaboration tools bring a new set of capabilities that are designed to open up the organisation and facilitate communication and awareness of what is going on around you, and they have some fundamental characteristics to support and enable collaboration:

• Everyone has a voice. A fundamental feature of social tools is their open, non-hierarchical approach to collaboration; every user is able to post content, ideas or suggestions, and comment on others’ posts, and all content is attributed to the individual who posted it. What’s more, everyone has a profile in the system, so you can easily find out more about someone, giving further context to their comments.
• Easy to use. One of the key success factors for tools such as Facebook and Twitter is that they have extremely simple and intuitive user interfaces, and are easy to use, even for the less technically-minded individual. Business-focused social technologies take the same approach, borrowing many of the UI characteristics and features that we have become familiar with in using these technologies outside the business context.
• Embedded into day-to-day activities. A major weakness in traditional KM tools was that sharing knowledge was something that you had to explicitly set aside time to do, formally documenting processes in a written report, or conducting post-project reviews, for example. In social collaboration tools, process knowledge is captured in situ, as it happens, through the documenting of discussions that take place within a team as part of completing the task itself.
• Information is accessible to the whole organisation. As a result of the non-hierarchical nature of social collaboration tools, combined with powerful search, content recommendations engines and tagging features, information is no longer locked in silos such as email, file stores or people’s heads; instead it is accessible and findable across the entire organisation, providing a platform for sharing best practice and enabling reuse of work already done.
• Surfacing experts and enthusiasts. Because they capture information about who posted what and who is talking with who, social tools are able to build a picture of where expertise lies across the organisation, supporting traditional approaches of self-nomination with evidence of discussions an individual has participated in, or documents they have posted on a particular topic. This has many consequences; for example, through technologies such as analytics and recommendation engines, people with similar interests or skills can be introduced to each other to enable communities of practice to develop.
• Enabling cross-organisational collaboration and co-operation. Through social networking features, social collaboration tools can surface existing relationships between individuals across the organisation, providing a platform for different teams and departments to connect more deeply to support cross-organisational teams and cross-company collaboration.

Of course, for all the benefits they offer, social collaboration tools are not a solution in and of themselves – as I discussed in my post If you build it, will they really come?, improving collaboration is as much a cultural issue and demands a corresponding business change programme if it is to have any significant long-term impact. But without these new tools, it would be extremely difficult to achieve enterprise-wide collaboration in today’s global organisation.

(A note from the editor: This post was originally published on the AIIM community blog, where Angela posts monthly as an invited ‘Expert Blogger’.)

By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 17th June 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

I've been to a couple of analyst events in the last two weeks focused on analytics: with SAS and IBM. One of the things I am interested in right now is the Internet of Things and one of the important application areas around this is for preventative maintenance. Yet neither of these companies - and I would expect them to be the market leaders - talks about preventative maintenance, instead referring to (predictive) asset optimisation. And, yes, I can see that that all of these words apply and they might imply something broader than preventative maintenance but why not use plain English?

The difficulty with preventative maintenance is rather like those applications that require ontologies - you need to have customised input because the parts or processes you will be monitoring will be different across industry sectors - and that slows down implementation. In due course, I expect the vendors will come out with templates or models for specific verticals such as chip manufacturing or oil wells or pipelines, which can then be customised by individual companies according to their own needs but for the moment it is very much a question of bespoke applications based upon a platform of pattern recognition and analytics. Nevertheless, I get the clear sense that this is an area that is ramping up and we may get to see these templates sooner than you might think.

In the context of big data, preventative maintenance is one area where I am a big fan. It's not that we couldn't do preventative maintenance before but it was very hard and very expensive - now it's a much more realistic proposition. Now it is more reasonable on a cost basis, thanks to Hadoop - and, I believe, it is set to become much easier as vendors develop more and more standard vertical applications. IBM, for example, is targeting the telecommunications, aerospace, automotive, chemicals and petroleum, and electronics sectors while SAS has implementations in pipeline (valve) monitoring and in chip manufacturing, amongst others.

Actually, the chip manufacturing example is interesting because it is not really preventative maintenance but is actually asset optimisation (I'm denying my own argument!): chip manufacturers typically produce a batch of products and then randomly test samples - if there are too many failures they throw the whole batch away. The application here is to determine early on that faulty chips are being produced so that the batch can be stopped at an early stage, thereby reducing wastage. So preventative maintenance is about identifying patterns that predict failures and, on top of that, we have what we in the IT industry might call "agile production" - test early and often - involving changed manufacturing/business processes in conjunction with the preventative maintenance to accomplish asset optimisation.

So, asset optimisation is a superset of preventative maintenance. I don't think that's immediately obvious and I think it would be more useful, and easier for users to understand, if both sets of terminology were used in relevant presentations rather than just relying on the rather more opaque "asset optimisation".

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 17th June 2013 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2013

HP's innovations in its Converged Cloud portfolio, announced recently at HP Discover 2013 in Las Vegas, are aimed at better ushering large enterprises from legacy to hybrid cloud environments.

Despite the great interest in SaaS and cloud, many large enterprises are still grappling with the right mixture of on-premises, hosted and various cloud deployment models for their applications, infrastructure and data. And the formula for picking which apps and assets should run where will be a changing one, as business goals, economic pressures and technology advances all conspire to make last year's IT model obsolete. Ongoing.

HP officials say the next phase of a common OpenStack-based architecture for HP’s private, managed, and public cloud offerings recognizes this dynamic environment. Not only does one-size cloud not fit all, no company can predict what their risk path is nor how well cloud will work for them in coming years. That's why choice and operating environment standardization—and not just price—must be the critical requirements for cloud adoption.

"You should have your choice of operating system, database, and application development environment, whether it's Java or .NET, you shouldn’t have to compromise when you're looking at cloud technology," said Chief Evangelist at HP Software, Paul Muller. "We have focused on ensuring that the cloud infrastructure, the workloads, the automation, the compliance tools, everything around that, are focused on optimizing the application experience."

Cloud makes sense
But HP also acknowledges that where cloud clearly makes sense, a quick path to its benefits must be made. And so HP also announced new software and services to accelerate time to market for private cloud implementations, and unveiled new capabilities in HP’s managed and public cloud solutions under the Converged Cloud banner.

Research commissioned on behalf of HP predicts that by 2016, some 75 percent of enterprise IT will be delivered across private, managed and public clouds. Further, half of the respondents believe that open standards are important in the emergence of cloud computing. This indicates that customers want an open, hybrid cloud solution to generate new opportunities, drive competitive differentiation and lower the cost of operations, said. HP.

HP Cloud Operating System (OS) is therefore an open and extensible cloud technology platform that leverages the community strength of OpenStack technology to enable workload portability, simplified installation and enhanced life cycle management across hybrid clouds, said HP. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts. My travel to HP Discover 2013 was paid for by HP.]

HP CloudSystem, HP’s private cloud offering, already embeds Cloud OS technology. To help customers get started quickly with an initial private cloud deployment, HP also is offering the HP CloudSystem Enterprise Starter Suite. This solution allows organizations to get started with rich application cloud services, and reduces up-front costs by up to 20 percent with the bundled offering.

Christian Verstraete, Chief Technologist for Cloud Solutions at HP, explained the importance of Cloud OS. "What we want to do across the different clouds that we offer—private cloud, the managed cloud, and the public cloud—is a capability to be able to port workloads very quickly to build some consistency around them," he said. "Cloud OS is all about that. It’s about building a consistent infrastructure environment or infrastructure management environment to do that. And that's where we are using OpenStack."

Open Stack distribution
"So what is cloud OS? Cloud OS is nothing more than HP’s internal OpenStack distribution, with a set of additional functionality on top of it, to provide a second-to-none infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) delivery that can then be used for our private cloud, our managed cloud, and is already used for our public cloud," said Verstraeta.

But while HP is making an OpenStack-based cloud platform environment, it is bundling hardware and software-defined infrastructure so that the ease of deployment—similar to appliance benefits—makes those seeking openness a value and simplicity offer they can't refuse.

Inexpensive and energy-stingy HP Moonshot servers also will be offered with HP Cloud OS, providing simplified provisioning and management for specific cloud workloads such as dedicated hosting and large-scale websites. HP Cloud Services also leverages HP Cloud OS technology. To encourage customers to evaluate and understand the benefits of an OpenStack-based architecture for their cloud needs, HP is offering HP Cloud OS Sandbox for experimentation at no cost.

Forty-three percent of respondents in the HP-commissioned survey said that finding the right strategic partner to get them started was a barrier to cloud adoption. So to help guide customers, HP introduced the HP Converged Cloud Professional Services Suite.

HP announced such new services designed to help customers take advantage of the cloud. These new offerings include HP Converged Cloud Support, HP Cloud Design Service, HP Cloud-ready Networking Services, HP Proactive Care for CloudSystem, and HP Cloud Security Risk and Controls Advisory Services, as well as enhancements to HP Applications Transformation to Cloud Services.

"From a consulting perspective, you need to have a strategy and understand the challenges and complexities of that hybrid type of delivery or that hybrid consumption, and establish some type of design for how that's going to be used and presented. So consulting becomes very important the more you start to consume or present cloud-based type services," said Tom Norton, Vice President for Big Data Technology Services at HP.

"This is not just a technology decision that you need guidance on. It's structuring contracts and understanding how to deal with termination of service— what happens to the intellectual property (IP) you have in the cloud. That's where having advice from seasoned experts can help you avoid some of the pitfalls of cloud adoption," said Muller.

"With our own experience, across the spectrum, building on-premise and private, working in the managed infrastructure places, we have public cloud experience and we also have the experience of the integration across all of those," said Norton.

HP Enterprise Services has enhanced its portfolio of cloud service offerings to address increased customer needs for mobile and enterprise applications. These include:

• HP Enterprise Cloud Services for Enterprise Applications that give clients choice and flexibility when integrating and deploying applications in the cloud while maintaining business continuity and ensuring data security.
• HP Mobile Enterprise Cloud Solution that provides a fully managed and integrated set of mobile consulting and management services to securely enable applications and data sharing from many device types.
• HP Enterprise Cloud Services - Private Cloud that enables clients to quickly adopt cloud services by designing, building and managing a complete Infrastructure as a Service that creates the foundation for an enterprise-wide shared IT services model.
• HP Cloud Security Risk and Control AdvisoryServices, a new offering in the HP professional services portfolio that helps clients safeguard their information, manage potential for data breaches and remain compliant while transitioning applications to public, private and hybrid clouds.  

Engaging customers
In addition, HP Autonomy introduced the Autonomy Marketing Cloud, a cloud-based version of the Autonomy Marketing Performance Suite, enabling organizations to understand, attract, engage and convert customers in real time.

New HP Cloud Services capabilities make it easier and faster for enterprises to simplify the development and deployment of applications in the public cloud. Enhancements include:

• Access to new, larger instance types that enable users to run big data analytics and high-performance computing workloads in the public cloud.
• New virtual private cloud network functionality, powered by software-defined networking that provides advanced security when connecting their public cloud to on- site networks.
• New custom image uploading that increases customer productivity by simplifying the set up and deployment of instances with images unique to their business requirements.
• A new Bulk Import Service that speeds application delivery by allowing users to provide hard drives for direct data upload into HP Cloud Block Storage and HP Cloud Object Storage.

In other infrastructure news at Discover, HP unveiled Project HAVEn, which leverages HP’s analytics software, hardware, and services to create big-data ready analytics applications and solutions. HAVEn pulls together the growing army of HP analytics technologies and capabilities—from Autonomy to Vertica to ArcSight and more— allowing all kinds of data and information to be exploited in unison, with the dependencies and relationships mappable and hidden insights attainable across sources.

By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 17th June 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

OSLC (Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration), a set of open specifications for integrating different tools, is a very welcome initiative and the news that IBM has just transferred its management to OASIS (an independent open-standards organisation) is very welcome. Perhaps more non-IBM tools vendors will now support OSLC and there will be less need for Enterprise Development ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) "rip-and-replace".

However, is there something missing from OSLC? Shouldn't there be a data model for ALM behind OSLC? So that when you mine the data that ALM processes should produce (to track defects reducing over time, perhaps; or to asses the effectiveness of various tools at finding defects; or anything else associated with "fact-based" management of the ALM processes), you are using constant terminology and aggregating consistent entities.

Unfortunately, a formal ALM data model appears to be the missing part of OSLC, according to Dave West (once a Forrester analyst and now Chief Product Officer at Tasktop), and he's trying to do something about it, assisted by Tim Mulligan (ALM Architect, Fidelity Investments - and that's a novel job title). Both presented at the lifecycle management track at Innovate 20113 and seem to have a little "special interest group" going (which NOT an OSLC development group) - contact Dave West at dave.west@tasktop.com to join. West is actively pushing for the ALM data model to become an official part of OSLC at OASIS.

According to Martin Nally (once Rational CTO and now working on delivering a new product for IBM), OSLC is founded on a data model. In my opinion, it's just that it's not one that is terribly useful for analytics across ALM processes/tools.

The OSLC data model is RDF (this lets it create Linked Data), although OSLC only uses a subset of the RDF model; this is all about the internal structure of OSLC and its operation. This is only one of the possible OSLC data models; it doesn't really help you make sense of analytics against ALM processes across different ALM tools linked via OSLC. If I type "OSLC data model" into Google, by the way, all I get is some documents from the EU Cesar project ("CESAR" stands for "cost-efficient methods and processes for safety relevant embedded systems"; it's a European funded project which meets similar issues to those addressed by OSLC).

This, it seems to me, all represents an example of a common standards issue—standards often allow tools to communicate or interoperate, even though the semantic results of this communication may not make sense—further "semantic standards" are needed. The example I usually use is "customer data"—there are lots of standards that allow different databases collecting customer data to interoperate and even combine datasets. However, if process A defines "customer" as "a defined legal entity with which we have an audited commercial relationship including credit ratings and so on" and process B defines "customer" as "anyone who logs into our website and gets a password by typing unverified information into our 'customer account' form", any analytics program that operates across the consolidated "customer database" from Process A and Process B will deliver very misleading results.

OSLC, it seems to me, has a similar issue. It allows tools to interoperate, in a way that is useful to people who know what they are doing and understand the semantics of the different interoperating tools. However, if you want to run smart analytics against the whole ALM process, running on tools linked by OSLC, then you need something more (probably the ALM data model Dave West talks about) if the smart analytics are going to make sense. The view of IBM's OSLC team seems to be that the OSLC "data model continues to be enhanced, and all parts of the OSLC community are encouraged to help in this; Dave West's activities can be seen as part of this". Which is fine, as that is how standards are supposed to evolve, but is does suggest that there is room for another OSLC data model.

Success for a new ALM model that is useful to users of OSLC-connected tools will come, I think, if or when it delivers tangible benefits for organisations exploiting ALM data for analytics-based insights into the whole of the ALM process they use across projects. According to Dave West, "without an ALM Data Model, each project's implementation of its own model makes the value of a cross project data view almost pointless. I believe that the data model will come out of the need for reporting/data warehouses and that will lead us to a consistent lexicon for ALM".

And, I think, that's really just enabling another Big Data project and, as usual, Big Data is more about finding people with the creative insight to exploit radically different data sources than it is about having more data (and the metadata needed to make sense of it) provided by some new tool. Nevertheless, I think that exploiting the data associated with the systems development lifecycle across ALM tools will be found worthwhile—and that then the availability of a formal ALM data model may make all the difference to practical applications.

By: Neil Ward-Dutton, Research Director, MWD Advisors Posted: 14th June 2013 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

A swaggering Pegasystems put on its annual customer event in Orlando last week. An audience of over 2,000 customers, partners and employees came together to dodge thunderstorms, play ping-pong and soak up some pretty compelling stories of large-scale business-technology transformation. With an eye to the future, though, some things at Pega are going to have to evolve… 

PegaWORLD is always a great event for me. Why? Because a very big proportion of the presentations (and there were 7 or so parallel tracks for most of the conference, so that’s a lot of sessions) are from the company’s customers. What’s also great is that these customer presentations don’t just talk about technology – people talk about the business context, business results and the challenges they’ve faced along the way. If you’re a student of how businesses drive change with help from technology you’re going to be a happy bunny at PegaWORLD.

When it comes to the keynote sessions Pegasystems always pulls a couple of corkers out of the bag; stories that make you go “wow”. We heard from Lloyds Bank, which has invested in Pega technology to implement over 200 change projects; AIG, which is using Pega to transform its entire business model from federated (with 91 separate worldwide businesses) to hybrid (with increasing back-office consolidation); and Cisco, which is using Pega technology to help it quickly create new operating companies to help it do business more effectively around the world. The presenters talk about business models, transformation, capabilities, corporate governance approaches. The numbers they talk about have at least nine zeros on them.

The thing that’s curious is that when Pegasystems’ CEO Alan Trefler takes the stage, it’s like we’re at a completely different conference. Within a few minutes of taking the stage Trefler had run through ‘Direct Capture of Objectives’, the ‘Situational Layer Cake’ and ’6R Work Automation’. He’d made a geek joke about COBOL, Benedictine monks and Java. It’s worth remembering that Pegasystems is Alan Trefler’s baby, no doubt about it: he owns over 50% of the company’s shares.

Pegasystems is a really successful software company in the BPM segment it’s best known for today (though with the acquisition of Chordiant it’s also known as a CRM vendor, naturally). Its Pega 7 release brings some great improvements to the table that address some of the challenges that frustrated customers with previous versions – most particularly a much slicker (and cross-platform friendly) UI framework; a much more streamlined application security model; scalability and availability enhancements; and a new in-platform persistence layer to simplify the business of managing data within applications. It also brings a new ‘stage-based case management’ modeling approach that ties abstract modeling much more directly into technical development and so helps customers minimise the code they have to write and maintain (as long as they stay within the ‘guide rails’).

In many ways Pegasystems is well positioned to take advantage of the mainstream opportunities that BPM presents today as the market continues to mature and evolve. Its application-focused approach to selling and packaging its technology and the way it explains itself (referencing more general, mainstream development and architecture concepts like agile development, model-driven development, component reuse instead of focusing on how its tools deliver for BPM initiatives) means it can appeal to pragmatic businesses that never quite swallowed the BPM proposition. Its laser-focused account targeting and reference selling help it seek out the big, hairy transformation programs that it can address well with its very sophisticated, but also pretty expensive, technology platform.

Here’s the challenge, though, in a nutshell: how is Pegasystems going to grow towards and beyond $1bn in revenue?

The company doesn’t really do any marketing, certainly in the corporate sense. It does sales. It has some really really good salespeople who know their industries and can bring in big deals; they can talk to senior business leaders and make the case. But can this approach scale, particularly when the heart of the company is so strongly technology-led rather than marketing-led? Can this approach scale as the company continues to de-emphasise BPM and tries to explain a broader proposition to a broader marketplace? I think this is something Pegasystems needs to get its head around quite soon.

Now don’t get me wrong: I certainly don’t see Pegasystems going away or decreasing in its capability or market influence any time soon. But it has very big ambitions. Achieving them means creating a more rounded ‘centre’ in the company; dialing back the tech talk and finding a way to scale conversations to a much broader target market that link the technology to business problems and business value. It also probably means letting partners drive much more of the market conversations, rather than being primarily used as solution implementers.

We need to see slightly less talk about the ‘situational layer cake’. It would be a shame if the ping-pong tables went, though.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 13th June 2013 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2013

The next edition of the HP Discover Performance Podcast Series brings together three HP executives to dig into one of the biggest news events at the HP Discover 2013 Conference this week in Las Vegas, the Project HAVEn unveiling.

There has been a lot said about big data in the last year and HP has made a big announcement around a broader vision for businesses to help them gain actionable intelligence from literally a universe of potential sources and data types.

To learn how, BriefingsDirect assembled Chief Evangelist at HP Software, Paul Muller; Chris Selland, Vice President of Marketing at HP Vertica, and Tom Norton, Vice President for Big Data Technology Services at HP. The panel was moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Fairly recently, only critical data was given this high-falutin' treatment for analysis, warehousing, applying business intelligence (BI) tools, making sure that it was backed up and treated almost as if it were a cherished child.

But almost overnight, the savvy businesses, those who are looking for business results, are more interested in all the data of any kind so that they can run their businesses better, and find insights in the areas that they maybe didn’t understand or didn’t even know about.

So what do you think has happened? Why have we moved from this BI-as-sacred ivory tower approach to now more pedestrian?

Competitive issue

Selland: First-and-foremost, it’s really become a competitiveness issue. Just about every company will pay attention to their customers.

Selland

You can tell senior management that this data is important. We're going to analyze it and give you insights about it, but you start realizing that we have an opportunity to grow our business or we're losing business, because we're not doing a good enough job, or we have an opportunity to do better job with data.

Social media has been the tip of the arrow here, because just about all industries all of a sudden realize that there is all data out there floating around. Our customers are actually talking to each other and talking about us, and what are we doing about that? That’s brought a lot of attention above and beyond the CIO and made this an issue that the CMO, the CFO, the COO, the CEO start to care about.

Big data is about far more than social media, but I do think social media gets a lot of the credit for making companies pay a lot more attention. It's, "Wait a minute. There is all this data, and we really need to be doing something with this."

Muller: In the conversations that I'm having consistently around the globe, executives, both CIOs, but also non-IT executives, are realizing that "big" data is probably not the most helpful phrase. It’s not the size of the data that matters, but it’s what you do with it.

Muller

It’s about finding the connections between different data sets to help you improve competitiveness, help you improve efficiency if you are in the public sector, help you to detect fraud pattern. It's about what you do with the data in that connected intelligence that matters.

To make that work, it’s about not just the volume of data. That certainly helps, not having to throw out my data or overly summarize it. Having high-fidelity data absolutely helps, but it’s also the variety of data. Less than 15 percent of what we deal with on a daily basis is in structured form.

Most of the people I meet are still dealing with information in rows and columns, because traditionally that’s what a computer has understood. They’ve not built for the unstructured things like video, audio, images, and for that matter, social, as Chris just mentioned.

Finally, it’s about timeliness. Nobody wants to might be making tomorrow’s decision with last week’s data, if that makes sense. In other words, with a lot of the decisions we have to make, it’s usually done through a revision mirror, which is not helpful, if you're trying to operate today’s thoughts as well.

Variety of systems

Selland: I have a love-hate relationship with the term "big data." The love part is the fact that it really has been adopted. People gravitate to it and are starting to realize that there is something here they need to pay attention to. And that’s not just IT.

And this is really what’s driven the HAVEn initiative and the HAVEn strategy. We have this tremendous portfolio of assets here at HP -- from software to hardware to services -- and HAVEn is about putting that portfolio behind these different analytic engines – Vertica, IDOL, Logger, and Hadoop -- that complement each other.

Broad strategy

So how do we bring this together under a single broad strategy to help companies and global enterprises get their hands around all of this, because it’s a lot more than big? Big data is great. It’s great that the term is taken off, but it’s a lot bigger than that.

Norton: Both Paul and Chris mentioned that data platforms and data analysis have been around for years, but this is still a shift.

Norton

The traditional systems or platforms that IT is used to providing are now becoming legacy. In other words, they're not providing the type of service level to meet the workload demands of the organization. So IT is faced with the challenge of how to transform that BI environment to more of a data refinement model or a big data ecosystem, if you want to still hang on to big data as a term.

So the business is now demanding action from IT.

The ability to respond quickly to this platform transformation is what we want to help our customers do from our technology services' perspective. How can we speed the maturity or speed the transformation of those traditional BI systems? Business have to have relevant and refined information available to them at the time they need it -- whether it’d be 1.5 seconds or 15 hours.

The business needs the information to be able to compete and IT needs to be able to adapt, to have that kind of flexible, secure, and high-performing platform that can deal with the different complexities of raw data that’s available to them today.

Gardner: Let’s get back to the news of the day, Project HAVEn. What it is?

Selland: I talked about the tip of the spear before. In this case the tip of the spear are our analytic engines, our analytic platforms, the Vertica Analytics Platform, Autonomy IDOL, ArcSight Logger. HAVEn is about taking this entire HP portfolio and then combining those with the power of Hadoop.

There are a number of Hadoop distributions, and we support them all. It's taking that software platform, running it on HP’s Converged Infrastructure, wrapping HP’s services around it, and then enabling our customers, our channel partners, our systems integrators, and our resellers to build these next-generation analytic-enabled solutions and big-data analytic-enabled solutions.

Changing the business

When you're talking to businesspeople, you can't talk about platforms and you can’t talk about speeds and feeds. When you say Hadoop to a businessperson they usually say, "God bless you," these days.

You have to talk about customer analytics. You have to talk about preventing fraud. You have to talk about being able to operationally be more effective, more profitable, and all of those things that drive the business. It really becomes more-and-more a solutions discussion.

HAVEn is the HP platform that provides our customers, our partners, and of course, our consultants, when our customers choose to have us do it for them, the ability to deliver these solutions. They're big-data solutions, analytic-enabled solutions. They're the solutions that companies, organizations, and global enterprises need to take their businesses forward and to make their customers more satisfied to become more profitable. That's what HAVEn is all about.

Gardner: How then do you put this into business terms, so they can get just how powerful this really is?

Muller: That’s ultimately the question. Let me just give you an example that we talk about and that I share with people quite frequently, and it usually generates a bit of a smirk. We’ve all been on the telephone and called a company or a public service, where you've been told by the machine that the call will be monitored for quality of service purposes. And I am sure we’re all thinking, "Gosh, if only."

The scary part is that all those calls are recorded. They're not only recorded, but they're recorded digitally. In other words, they're recorded to a computer. Almost all of that data is habitually thrown away, unless there is an exception to the rule.

If there is a problem with the flight or if there is some complaint about the call that escalates the senior management, they may eventually look at it. But think about how much information, how much valuable insight is thrown away on a daily basis across a company, across the country, across the planet. What we've aimed to do with HAVEn is liberate that information for us to find that connected intelligence.

In order to do that, we get back to this key concept that you need to be able to integrate telemetry from your IT systems. What’s happening inside them today? For example, if somebody to send an email to somebody outside of the company, that typically will spawn a question that asks who they send that email to? Was there an attachment there? Is it a piece of sensitive information or not? Typically that would require a person to look at it.

Finally, it's to be able to correlate patterns of activity that are relevant to think about revenue, earnings, or whatever that might be. What we're able to do with the HAVEn announcement is combine those concepts into one integrated platform. The power of that would be something like in that call center example. We can use autonomy technology to listen to the call, to understand people's emotions, and whether they’ve said, "If you don't solve this problem, I'm never going to buy from you again."

Take that nugget of information, marry that to things like whether they are a high net worth customer, what their spending patterns have been, whether they're socially active, are they more likely to tell people about their bad experience, and correlate that all in real-time to help give you insight. That's the sort of being the HAVEn can do it, and that's a real world application that we're trying to communicate in business.

Norton: I have one more example of what Paul has just indicated. Take healthcare, for example. We're working with the healthcare providers. There are some three-tier healthcare providers. A major healthcare organization could have as many as 50 different business units. These separate business units have their own requirements for information that they want to feed to hospital systems.

Centralized structure

So you have a centralized organizational IT structure. You have a requirement of a business unit within the organization that has its own processing requirement, and then you have hospital systems that buy and share information with the business unit.

Think about three-tiered structure and you think of some of the component pieces that HAVEn brings to that. You have IT which can manage some of those central systems that becomes that data lake or data repository, collecting years and years of historical healthcare information from the hospital systems, from the business units, but also from the global healthcare environment that could be available globally.

IT provides this ecosystem around the data repository that needs to be secured, and and that data pool needs to be governed.

Then, you combine that with information that's coming publicly and needs to be secured. You have those corner pieces which are natural to the Hadoop distributed system inside that data lake that keeps that repository of healthcare information.

The business unit has a requirement because it wants to be able to feed information to the healthcare providers or the hospital systems, and to collect from them as well. Their expectations of IT is that they may need instant response. They may need a response from a medical provider in seconds, or they may look at reporting on changes in healthcare in certain environmental situations that are creating change in healthcare. So they might get daily reporting or they might have half-day reporting.

Within HAVEn, you look at Vertica, to drive that immediate satisfaction of that query that comes from the hospital system. Combine that with Hadoop and combine that with the kind of data-governance models that Autonomy brings. Then, look at security policies around the sensors from patients that are being sent to that hospital system. That combination is a very powerful equation. It's going to enable that business to be very successful in terms of how it handles information and how it produces it.

When we start looking at that integration of those components, that's what's driving IT, because they need that very flexible and responsive data repository that can provide that type of insight that the hospital systems need from that from the business unit that's driving the healthcare IT organization itself.

Those are the fits even in a large enterprise, where you can take that platform and apply it in an industry sense, and it makes complete sense for that industry overall.

Gardner: HP has, of course, been a very large company with a long heritage, but are we really stepping outside of the traditional role that HP has played? It sounds as if HP is becoming a business-services company, not a technology services company.

Bridging the gap

Selland: Yes and no. First of all, we do need to acknowledge that there is a need to bridge the gap between the IT organization and the business organization, and enable them to talk the same language and solve problems together.

First of all, IT has to become more of an enabler. Second, and I mentioned this earlier and I really want to play this up, it's absolutely an opportunity for our partners. HP has a number of assets, but one of our greatest assets is HP's partner network -- our partner ecosystem, our global systems integrators, our technology partners, even our services providers, our training providers, all of the companies that work in and around the global HP.

We can't know every nuance of every business at HP. So the HAVEn initiative is very much about enabling our partners to create the solutions we're creating. We're using our own platform to create solutions for the core audiences that we serve, which in many cases, are things like IT management solutions or security solutions which are being featured and will continue to be featured.

We're going to need to get into all of these different nuances of all of these different industries. How do these companies and organizations compete with each other in particular verticals? We can’t possibly know all of that. So we're very reliant on our partners.

The great news is we have, we have what I believe, is the world's greatest partner network and this is very much about enabling those partners and those solutions. In many cases, those solutions will be delivered by partners and that’s what the solutions are all about as well.

Gardner: Now that we put together the various platforms, given the whole is greater than the sum of the parts in terms of a business value, what's the vision beyond that to making these usable, exploitable?

Are there APIs and tools or is that something also that you are going to look to the partners for, or both? How does it work in terms of the go-to-market?

Selland: There absolutely are APIs and tools. We need to prime the pump, to some degree, with building and creating some of our own solutions to show what can be done in the markets we serve, which we're doing, and we also we have partners on board already.

If you look at the HAVEn announcements, you'll see partners like Avnet and Accenture and other partners that are already adopting and building HAVEn-based solutions. In many cases, we've started delivering to customers already.

It's really a matter of showing what can be done, building what can be built, and delivering them. I mentioned earlier the crossing-the-chasm moment we're having. The other thing that happens, when you get into this market, is you're moving from its being purely a CIO decision to where the business starts getting involved.

Great ROI

There is great return on investment (ROI), there's this big data analytic solution we're going to enable, and we are going to build to deliver better customer loyalty. We are going to better customer retention and lower churn. The first thing I need to say is, "Okay, show me the numbers, show me the money." Those are Jerry Maguire terms, and the best way to do that is show examples of other companies that have done it.

You've got to get that early momentum, but we're already in the process of getting it, and we've already got partners on board. So we're really excited.

Gardner: Given what we've now seen with the HP Discover announcements with HAVEn, how HP is uniquely positioned in big data?

Muller: Insight without action is a bit like saying that you have a strategy without execution. In other words, it’s pretty close to hallucination, right?

The ability to take that insight and then reflect that into your business rapidly is critical. I have a point of view that says that almost every enterprise is defined by software these days. In other words, when you make an insight and you want to make a change, you're changing the size. If you are Mercedes, you're changing one of the 100 million lines of code in your typical S class. Some of the major based around the planet now hire more programmers than Microsoft has working on Windows today.

Most companies are defined by software. So when they do get in an insight, they need to rapidly reflect that insight in the form of a new application or a new service, it’s typically going to require IT.

Absolutely critical

Your ability to quickly take that insight and turn that into something a customer can see, touch, and smell is absolutely critical, and using technique like Agile delivery, increasing automation levels, DevOps approaches, are all critical to being able to execute to get to that.

Selland: It's not just big data, but helping our customers be successful in leveraging big data is a core focus and a core pillar of HP strategy. So first of all it’s focus.

Second of all, it’s breadth. I talked about this earlier, so I don’t want to repeat myself too much. The software, hardware, and converged cloud assets, capabilities of services, and of course their service’s portfolio -- all of the resources that the global HP brings to bear -- are focused on big data.

And it’s also the uniqueness. Obviously, being an HP Software Executive, I'm most familiar with the software. If you really look at it, nobody, none of HP’s competitors, has anything like Vertica. None of HP’s competitors have anything like IDOL. None of HP’s competitors has anything like ArcSight Logger. None of HP's competitors has the ability to bring those assets together and get them interoperating with each other and get them solving problems and building solutions.

Then, you take our partner channel, wrap it around that, and you combine it with the power of open-source industry initiatives like Hadoop. HP has very much openness of the core of everything we're doing.

You’ve got to have a broad enough portfolio to know that you’ve got the confidence and the assets to eventually solve the problem, but at the same time start with understanding the problem, the industry, and solutions. This is where our service is, and this is where our partner ecosystem comes into play. And having the breadth of the portfolio of software/hardware and cloud services to be able to deliver on it is really what’s it’s all about, but there is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question we just asked.

Norton: HP actually has, from a services' perspective, a unique approach to this. You've seen it before in the cloud and you've seen it before in the days of IT transformation, where we started looking at that transformation experience.

Through our services' groups within HP, we have the ability from an information management and analytics approach to work with companies to understand the business value that they're trying to drive with information, and ideally try to understand what data is available to them today that is going to provide that business aligned information.

Through the Big Data Discovery Experience workshops, we're able to ask, "What is the business I am capable of doing with the data they have available to them today, and how can that be enhanced with alternative data sources that may fall outside of the organization today?"

As we mentioned earlier, it’s that idea of what can be done. What's the art of the possible here that is going to provide value to the organization? Through services we can take that all the way down, then say, now once you have got the idea, that says I’ve got a road map for analytical value and the management of the information that we have, and we could have made available to the businesses.

Then, you can align that, as I mentioned before, through IT strategies where you do the same thing. You align the business to IT and ask how IT is going to be able to enable those actions that the business wants to take on that information.

Entire lifecycle

So there's an entire lifecycle of raw material data to business-aligned and business-valued information through a service’s approach, through a consultative approach, that HP is able to bring to our customers.

That’s unique, because we have the ability through that upfront strategy from business value of information to the collection and refinement of raw materials and meeting in the middle in this big data ecosystem. HP can supply that from end to end, all the way from software to hardware to services, it's very unique.

Muller: I’ve got to summarize this by saying that the great part about HAVEn is that you can pretty much answer any question you could think of. The challenge is whether you can think of smart questions to ask.

Selland: Let me give you a tangible example that I was reading about not long ago in The Wall Street Journal. They were talking about how the airline industry is starting to pay attention to social media. Paul talked before about intersections. What do we mean by intersections?

This article in The Wall Street Journal was talking about how airlines are starting to pay attention to social media, because customers are tweeting when they're stuck at the airport. My flight is delayed, and I am upset. I'm going to be late to go visit my grandmother -- or something like that.

So somebody tweets. Paul tweets "I'm stuck at the airport, my flight is delayed and I am going to be late to grandma’s house." What can you really do about that besides respond back and say, "Oh, I'm sorry. Maybe I can offer you a discount next time," or something like that? But it doesn’t do anything to solve the problem.

Think about the airline industry, customer loyalty programs or frequent-flyer programs. Frequent-flyer programs were among the first customer loyalty problems. They have all this traditional data, as well which some might call customer relationship management (CRM). In the airline industry, they call it reservation systems.

I gave the example before about a jet engine throwing off two terabytes of data per hour. By the way, on any flight that I'm on, I want that to be pretty boring data that just says all systms are go, because that’s what you want.

At the same time, you don’t want to throw it away, because what if there are blips, or what if there are trends? What if I can figure out a way to use that to do a better job of doing predictive maintenance on my jets?

Better job

By doing a better job of predictive maintenance on my jets, I keep my flights on time. By keeping my flights on time, then I do a better job of keeping my customers satisfied. By keeping my customers more satisfied, I keep them more loyal. By keeping my customers more loyal, I make more money.

So all of this stuff starts to come together. You think about the fact there is a relationship between these two terabytes per hour of sensor data that’s coming off the sensors on the engine, and the upset customers, and social media tweeting in the airport. But if you look at the stuff in a stove-piped fashion, we don’t get any of that.

How do we start to bring this stuff together? This stuff does not sit in a single database and it’s not a single type of structure and it’s coming in all over the place. How do I make sense of it?

As Paul said very well, ask smart questions, figure out the big picture, and ultimately make my organization more successful, more competitive, and really get to the results I want to get to. But really, it’s a much, much bigger set of questions than just "My database is getting really big. Yesterday, I had this many terabytes and I am adding more terabytes a day." It’s a lot bigger than that.

We need to think bigger and you need to work with an organization that has the breadth of resources and the breadth not just inside the organization but within our partnerships to be able to do that. HP has got the unmatched capability to do that, in my view, and that’s why this HAVEn initiative is so very exciting and why we have such great expectations from this.

HAVEn is really about the future, the competitiveness of the business, and IT becoming an enabler for that. It’s about the CIO, really having a chance to play a key role in driving the strategy of the business, and that’s what all CIOs want to do.

We have these inflection points in the marketplace, the last one was like 12 years ago, when the whole e-business thing came along. And, while I just used a competitor's tag line, it changed everything. The web did change everything. It forced businesses to adapt, but it also enabled the lot of businesses to change how they do business, and they did.

Now, we're at another one, a very critical inflection point. It really does change everything, and there is still some skepticism out there. Is this big-data thing real? We think it’s very real and we think you're going to see more-and-more examples. We're working with customers today or showing some of those examples how it really does change everything.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 13th June 2013 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2013

The next edition of the HP Discover Performance Podcast Series brings together three HP executives to explore the implications and business value from the Converged Cloud portfolio updates announced at HP Discover 2013 in Las Vegas.

There's no hotter topic -- and nothing more top of mind these days -- than cloud computing. Not surprisingly, HP has made that a major focus at day two of Discover.

To put some context around it all, BriefingsDirect assembled Chief Evangelist at HP Software, Paul Muller; Christian Verstraete, Chief Technologist for Cloud Solutions at HP, and Tom Norton, Vice President for Big Data Technology Services at HP. The panel was moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Christian, tell us about the state of the market before we get into HP’s response to it.

Verstraete: What's happening in the market today, is that on one end, you have startups that are rushing to the cloud very quickly, that use cloud and don't use anything else, because they don't want to spend a penny on building up an IT department.

Verstraete

On the other extreme, you have very large corporations that look at all the things that are unknown around cloud and are sticking their toe in the water.

And you have everything possible and every possible scenario in the middle. That's where things are getting interesting. You have forward-looking CIOs who are embracing clouds, and understand how cloud can help them add value to the business and, as such, are an important part of the business.

You have other CIOs who are very reluctant and that prefer to stay managing the traditional boat, if I can put it that way, in keeping and providing that support to our customers. It's a interesting market right now.

Muller: The challenge that both vendors and consumers have is that one size does not fit all. When you find yourself in that situation, you only have two responses available to you.

Muller

If you're a one-trick pony, if you have only got one technology, one approach, then it's one size fits all. Henry Ford, one of your fellow countrymen, once said that you can have the car in any color you want, so long as it’s black.

It's a great idea in terms of simplifying what your choices are, but it doesn't help you if you're an enterprise that's struggling to deal with complexity and heterogeneity.

We believe that there are three absolutely critical priorities that anyone looking into cloud should have. The first is confidence. Confidence, because you are moving typically mission-critical services in it. Even if it's develop and test, you're counting on this to work.

The second is consistency. There is absolutely nothing to be gained by having a cheap cloud service, on one hand, and then having to retrain people in order to use that, because it's completely different from your internal systems. It's just moving costs around. So consistency is absolutely critical.

Giving users choice

The third piece we talk about all the time, choice. You should have your choice of operating system, database, and application development environment, whether it's Java or .NET, you shouldn’t have to compromise when you're looking at cloud technology. So it's those three things -- confidence, consistency, and choice.

Gardner: Here at Discover, we're hearing a lot about a variety of announcements for Converged Cloud. Let's look at a couple of these major aspects of the announcements and then delve into how they come together, perhaps forming a whole greater than the sum of the parts.

The first part, Christian, is this real emphasis on OpenStack and the Cloud OS. So give us a quick overview of where HP is going with OpenStack and Cloud OS and how that relates to some of the requirements that we've just discussed?

Verstraete: What we want to do across the different clouds that we offer -- private cloud, the managed cloud, and the public cloud -- is a capability to be able to port workloads very quickly to build some consistency around them.

Cloud OS is all about that. It’s about building a consistent infrastructure environment or infrastructure management environment to do that. And that's where we are using OpenStack.

So what is cloud OS? Cloud OS is nothing more than HP’s internal OpenStack distribution, with a set of additional functionalities on top of it, to provide a second-to-none infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) delivery that can then be used for our private cloud, our managed cloud, and is already used for our public cloud.

That’s the first thing that we announced. We are building on top of that. It’s an evolution of what we started about a year-and-a-half ago with Converged Cloud. So we just keep moving and working around with that.

We also announced that we not only support Cloud OS in our traditional blade environment and our x86 servers, but also on the newly announced HP Moonshot servers. That combination may become interesting when we start talking about the "internet of things" and a number of other things in that particular area. It will also provide our customers with the capability to test and play with Cloud OS through a sandbox. So there's a lot of emphasis on that.

Gardner: It also seems that you are expanding your support of different virtual machines (VMs), so heterogeneity is supported. As Paul Muller pointed out, it's supporting all the various frameworks. Is there something fundamentally different about the way HP is going about this cloud support with that emphasis on openness vis-à-vis some of the other approaches?

One-trick pony

Verstraete: Many of the other players, many of our competitors, have what Paul mentioned earlier, a one-trick pony. They're either in the public space or the private space, but with one hypervisor. Where we're starting from, and that’s the essence of Converged Cloud, is to say that a company going to cloud is not one size fits all. They're going to need a combination of different types of clouds to provide, on one hand, the agility that they need and, on the other hand, the price point that they're looking for.

They'll put some stuff in their private cloud and they'll put some other stuff in the public cloud. They'll probably consume software-as-a-service (SaaS) services from others. They'll probably put some things into a managed cloud. It’s going to be a combination of those, and they're going to have to handle and live with that combination.

The question is how to make that easy and how to allow them to access all of that through one pane of glass, because you don’t want to give that complexity to the end users. That’s exactly where Cloud OS is starting to play. Cloud OS is the foundation for us to do that.

Gardner: Tom Norton, seeing that this field is very diverse in terms of the needs and requirements, it seems like a perfect fit for lots of consulting, professional, and support services, but we don't often hear about them in conjunction with cloud. Tell us a little bit about why the market is ripe for much more emphasis on the services portion here?

Norton: As you start to take advantage of the varying services that are available through the cloud, or that you want to present to the cloud, the varying presentation formats, the varying architectures are an issue for whether you're a startup or in the enterprise.

Norton

From a consulting perspective, you need to have a strategy and understand the challenges and complexities of that hybrid type of delivery or that hybrid consumption, and establish some type of design for how that's going to be used and presented. So consulting becomes very important the more you start to consume or present cloud-based type services.

When you start thinking of that design and that whole approach from balancing across the network, to balancing the infrastructure component pieces, you need to have some kind of consistent support structure. One of the most expensive parts of this is going to be how you support those different environments, so that if you have an issue, you're not doing component-based support anymore. You need a holistic-based cloud support.

For organizations truly to transform themselves as an IT organization and be able to present their service, which in many cases is an application, that app may be something presented internally to business units because the business units are getting some value, or even externally to a customer or to a customer’s application.

Those apps are designed, in many cases, in either a more mainframe-based environment or also in the distributed environment. When you start thinking of presenting it as a service, there are other considerations that need to take effect.

You start looking at how that application performs in terms of more virtualized and automated environments. You also think about how you can manage that application from a service perspective. How do you monitor the application? How is it metered in terms of the presentation? How is that application presented within a service portfolio or a service catalog? How do you then manage and monitor the application for service operations? The user demands an end user experience for meeting a certain service level.

When you think of modernizing applications to a cloud-based presentation, there are multiple layers that have to be considered to even address the applications. When you think about the application piece and the work that needs to be done, you also have to think about the management component pieces of it.

That’s why you'll hear of services around, say, cloud design services that will enable us to take a look at that service portfolio, look at the service catalog, and understand the application presentations and how you can ensure quality delivery and ensure that you're meeting those service levels, so that business can continue to take advantage of what that application provides to them.

So from an application perspective, you have both the cloud design piece that’s referred to that, but, at the same time, you have to address the complexities of the application.

Verstraete: Tom, allow me to add one point. You talked about the application, but the next point associated with that is, on what device am I going to consume that application? Increasingly, we're seeing bring your own device (BYOD), and it’s not just PCs, but also tablets, phones, and all of the other things.

Managing devices

We have to have the capability to manage those devices and make sure that we have the appropriate security levels and that they're compliant, so that I can run my enterprise applications on those devices without any trouble. That complements all of this.

Dana, to go back to a question that you had earlier, this is where all of these things are starting to come together. We talked about Cloud OS and the infrastructure and the environment, so that I could build on my applications. We talked about the Application Transformation Services, which allow us to put those applications on top of that. And we're talking about the other extreme, which is consuming those applications and the devices on which we are starting to consume those applications.

Regardless of whether this is in a private cloud, a managed cloud, or a public cloud, that’s where you start seeing the different parts and the different pieces coming together.

Gardner: Why is the hybrid model so important with HP strategy?

Verstraete: Whether companies like it or not, most large enterprises today already have a hybrid model. Why? Because they have a lot of shadow IT, which is consumed outside the control of IT. It's consumed from external services, being in most of the cases public clouds. So that’s already a fact of life.

Why is that used? Because there's a feeling from the business user that the CIO can’t respond fast enough. So the CIO had better understand the potential issues related to the security and compliance of what is happening, and start acting on it.

He can't speed up his delivery of what the business is looking for by developing everything himself and taking the old fashioned approach. I choose an application. I test the application for six months. I install the application. I configure the application, and two years down the road, I deliver the application to the business users.

What becomes clear quickly to a lot of CIOs is that if they take a hard and cold look at their workloads, not all workloads are the same. Some of them are very specific to the core of what the enterprise is doing. Those should stay within their private cloud.

There are a bunch of other things that they need to deliver. Frankly, they are no different from what their competitors are doing. Do those need to be in a private cloud or could they be in another type of environment, a managed cloud or public cloud? That automatically brings you to that hybrid environment that we're talking about.

New core competency

Gardner: Paul Muller, how is hybrid perhaps the new core competency for IT, managing hybrid processes and hybrid systems and managing the continuum?

Muller: Again, Dana, you get to the core of the issue here, which is that it’s about a shift. This is a generational shift in how we think about building, buying, and integrating IT services in the service of the business or the enterprise, depending on where you work.

It’s about a couple of key shifts. It’s about the balance of power shifting from IT to the business. We have probably said this countless times over the last three decades, but the simplicity, the focus on user experience, the ease with which competitive services can be procured from outside by laypeople from an IT standpoint has created a symmetry in the relationship between business and IT that no one can afford to ignore.

The second generational shift is the speed with which people expect response to their ideas. Techniques like agile and dev-ops are changing the way we think about building and delivering services.

Finally, to your point, it used to be that you either build or you buy, you either outsourced everything or you did it all yourself. Now we live in a world where you can consistently do both. I don’t believe that the majority of IT professionals are ready for that new reality in terms of processes and people, not to mention the software stack, the infrastructure stack, on which they're building services.

There's a lot of work to be done. It sounds daunting. The good news is that if you take a smart approach, some of the work that Tom and our Professional Services and Technologies Services team have been working on, it helps ease that transition and avoid people repeating the mistakes of some of the early adopters that we have seen.

Gardner: Tom Norton, as we factor what Paul said about transitioning the organization from supporting technology to supporting the continuum of a hybrid approach, how big a change is that for an organization?

Norton: It's a significant change, when you think of how traditional support structures have been. When you look at more complex systems, and you can think of a hybrid cloud environment as being a complex cloud system itself, traditionally support structures have been component-based and they've been infrastructure-based, or application-based. So you look at a storage support solution, or you may look at a network support solution or a compute solution itself.

When you start thinking of a complex system, like a cloud model, and especially a hybrid cloud model, where you have varying delivery mechanisms and varying supporting structures, supporting that can be a very complicated issue. It's one that many organizations are unprepared to do, especially if they're going to try to approach it strategically, as opposed to being a opportunistic-type cloud environment.

Access to expertise

What IT is trying to do today and the question they keep asking is how they can view this as being that kind of ecosystem that has a singular support structure to it, where they can get access to expertise.

That's what HP is stepping up to do. With our own experience, across the spectrum, building on-premise and private, working in the managed infrastructure places, we have public cloud experience and we also have the experience of the integration across all of those.

The benefit from a services perspective for our customers is that we can help break down those isolated barriers in singular cloud services that a customer is consuming and give them a support structure that bridges all of those and truly approaches a converged support structure for managing that hybrid environment. That's what we're working towards and that's where our announcements have been all about.

Gardner: What is the most important change that HP has brought to the cloud landscape with this series of announcements?

Verstraete: Two things -- first, and you hit the nail earlier, the whole concept of hybrid cloud, looking at multiple ways and multiple clouds to address the needs of the business. And second, within that frame of hybrid cloud, making sure that there is consistency across the different clouds, and that's where we're using OpenStack.

Gardner: Paul Muller, what's different in your mind about what HP has been doing this week?

Muller: It is all about accelerating the introduction of applications and improving the user experience. It is not about technology for technology’s sake. The single biggest difference.

Differentiated

Gardner: And lastly, Tom, what jumps out at you as a differentiator in terms of the market in general and what HP is doing?

Norton: I think the market is looking for someone that can help with the integration component pieces of it. As the hybrid and heterogeneous deployments continue to grow and more and more services are offered that way, organizations need help consolidating that into a more integrated approach, so they have that kind of overall cloud concepts that give them the value they are looking for. So it's becoming more and more about integration.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

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By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 12th June 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

We recently completed a survey of the ISV market and I thought it might useful to summarise our findings.

Perhaps the most interesting statistic was that 75% of ISVs were still just concentrating on traditional applications that improve current processes rather than on developing applications that enabled new ways of working. This perhaps accords with their use of [{page:Big Data:big data}]: less than 20% thought that leveraging unstructured or machine-generated data was a strong benefit. In fact the numbers that thought machine-generated data was in this category was less than 5% though, conversely, if you combined strong and moderate benefit then machine-generated was regarded as more important than unstructured data.

I think there are probably a couple of things going on here. The first is that the survey was conducted largely in the UK and perhaps the ISVs surveyed are behind the curve when it comes to things like the Internet of Things and the Smarter Planet. And, secondly, that software houses view unstructured data as very important for a limited set of applications but not so much otherwise, which makes a certain sort of sense.

The major trends identified by the ISVs were support for cloud-based implementations and mobile device support. I think this also reflects a sector that is perhaps not as fast-moving as some others. While cloud and mobile are obviously important they have almost become passé - there was cloud and that was followed by big data and now the latest big thing is the Internet of Things - but then, this is life on the bleeding edge and ISVs don't tend to cater for this constituency. Indeed, while cloud was the most commonly cited requirement only 50% of the companies surveyed had a cloud strategy. This was somewhat surprising so we asked the half of the survey that didn't have a cloud strategy why not. The answer to this question was similarly surprising: a mere 8% had security concerns while all the remainder felt that there was no business case for cloud deployment: which again suggests that these organisations (or, at least, some of them) are not as innovative in their thinking as they might be.

More prosaically, ISVs want the sort of things you would expect them to want: a supplier that provides good service and support, that will work with them in developing products and markets, that they can trust, that have industry sector knowledge, and so on and so forth. The biggest negative factors were poor support and a lack of focus on ISVs as a sector - there were far too many comments about their providers not caring about the software houses. Given that 60% of those who answered the relevant question were developing on a Microsoft platform this is perhaps a reflection on the boys from Seattle.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 12th June 2013 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2013

HP's new data analytics platform, announced today in Las Vegas, is designed to help organizations overcome the roadblocks to big data success and reap the rewards of data analysis.

Unveilved at HP Discover 2013, Project HAVEn leverages HP’s analytics software, hardware, and services to create big-data ready analytics applications and solutions.

HAVEn tackles some very big issues, both for the IT market and for HP. For the market, data and information remain fragmented, uncoordinated and hard to manage. At the same time, enterprises want to be able to use all the data they can access to better understand their businesses, users, and markets.

So HAVEn pulls together the growing army of HP analytics technologies and capabilities -- from Autonomy to Vertica to ArcSight and more -- allowing all kinds of data and information to be exploited in unison, with the dependencies and relationships mappable and hidden insights attainable across sources. And that insight can come from any type of information or content (Autonomy), with great speed and scale (Vertica) and associate with machine and IT systems data (ArcSight).

For HP, HAVEn shows the analytics whole is greater than the sum of the product parts, and presents a rationalization and uber value from its business intelligence, data and big data acquisitions and developments of the past five years. It also shows an agnostic approach to Hadoop, and an inclusive architecture alignment across analytics products and technologies, which is welcome.

According to a study commissioned by HP nearly 60 percent of companies surveyed will spend at least 10 percent of their innovation budget on big data this year. The study also found, however, that more than one in three organizations have failed with a big data initiative. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts. My travel to HP Discover 2013 was paid for by HP.]

HAVEn combines proven technologies from HP Autonomy, HP Vertica, HP ArcSight, and HP Operations Management, as well as key industry initiatives such as Hadoop, enabling clients and partners to:

• Avoid vendor lock-in with an open architecture that supports a broad range of analytics tools.
• Protect investments with support for multiple virtualization technologies.
• Speed time to value with highly optimized hardware solutions.
• Gain value from 100 percent of information, including structured, semistructured and unstructured data, via HP’s portfolio of more than 700 connectors into HAVEn.

Chris Selland, Vice President of Marketing at HP Vertica, explained the initiative: "The tip of the spear are our analytic engines, our analytic platforms, the Vertica Analytics Platform, Autonomy IDOL, ArcSight Logger. HAVEn is about taking this entire HP portfolio and then combining those with the power of Hadoop."

The first integrated big data analytics solution built on HAVEn is HP Operations Analytics, which delivers insight into all aspects of IT operations. The solution allows organizations to consume, manage, and analyze massive streams of IT operational data from a variety of HP products, including HP ArcSight Logger and the HP Business Service Management portfolio, as well as third-party sources.

HP Enterprise Services has introduced HP Actionable Analytics Services. These solutions will enable clients to implement analytics and extract insight hidden within big data, as well as streamline key organizational processes, such as customer offers, procurement, supply chain and inventory operations.

Paul Muller, Chief Evangelist at HP Software, explained the value of analytics: "It’s not the size of the data that matters, but it’s what you do with it. It’s about finding the connections between different data sets to help you improve competitiveness, help you improve efficiency if you are in the public sector, help you to detect fraud pattern. It's about what you do with the data in that connected intelligence that matters."

Big-data consulting

HP Technology Services has also expanded its Big Data Consulting Practice to ensure optimal IT infrastructure performance as well as support for increasing big data demands. New offerings include IT Strategy and Architecture, System Infrastructure, and Protection services that enable clients to align their IT infrastructure to organizational goals, while achieving compliance with industry standards and government regulations.

"The traditional systems or platforms that IT is used to providing are now becoming legacy. In other words, they're not providing the type of service level to meet the workload demands of the organization. So IT is faced with the challenge of how to transform that BI environment to more of a data refinement model or a big data ecosystem," said Tom Norton, Vice President for Big Data Technology Services at HP.

"The ability to respond quickly to this platform transformation is what we want to help our customers do from our technology services' perspective. How can we speed the maturity or speed the transformation of those traditional BI systems which are more sequential and more structured to be able to deal with the demands of the business to have relevant and refined information available to them at the time they need it, whether it’d be 1.5 seconds or 15 hours," said Norton.

HP also announced two additional products to help that effort:

• The HP Vertica Community Edition—free, downloadable software that delivers the same functionality of the HP Vertica Analytics Platform Enterprise Edition with no commitments or time limits, allowing clients to analyze up to one terabyte of data before investing in an enterprise-wide solution.
  
  
• The HP Autonomy Legacy Data Cleanup—information governance solution that helps clients analyze legacy data, lower costs, and reduce risks while driving value from big data. With this solution, organizations can access, understand and classify, as well as defensibly dispose of outdated and unnecessary legacy information, while retaining data deemed valuable for production applications.

Selland summed up the initiative this way, "You have to talk about customer analytics. You have to talk about preventing fraud. You have to talk about being able to operationally be more effective, more profitable, and all of those things that drive the business. It really becomes more-and-more a solutions discussion.

"HAVEn is the HP platform that provides our customers, our partners, and of course, our consultants, when our customers choose to have us do it for them, the ability to deliver these solutions. They're big-data solutions, analytic-enabled solutions. They're the solutions that companies, organizations, and global enterprises need to take their businesses forward and to make their customers more satisfied to become more profitable. That's what HAVEn is all about, the fundamental story behind the HAVEn initiative."

In other infrastructure news today at Discover, HP expanded the company's Converged Storage portfolio with a solid-state optimized all-flash HP 3PAR StoreServ system. It has also announced a StoreOnce Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) that promises to cut the cost of small site backup by 65 percent.

The HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450 Storage system delivers more than 550,000 input/output operations per second with less than 0.7 millisecond response time. Flash-specific caching algorithms dynamically adjust read/write granularity to reduce latency and speed transactions. In addition, HP 3PAR Priority Optimization software assures performance for specific workloads to improve overall productivity.

HP StoreOnce VSA deploys as a virtual machine on existing industry-standard servers, eliminating the need for customers to purchase dedicated hardware. It enables backup as a service offering for hosting providers and lowers costs for enterprise remote office protection. In addition, HP StoreOnce VSA reduces physical hardware requirements by up to 50 percent and energy costs by up to 70 percent.

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By: Laurie McCabe, Partner, SMB Group Posted: 11th June 2013 Copyright SMB Group © 2013

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend Sapphire 2013, SAP’s annual user conference. As is the norm for these events, SAP opened the fire hose to reveal new directions, product and solution announcements, and partner and customer wins through a myriad of meetings and sessions.

Rather than attempt to drench you with the full blast, I’ll focus this post on what I see as most relevant for SAP’s direction in the small and medium business (SMB) space.

HANA for All

SAP is betting big on its HANA platform, which began life in 2010 as an in-memory database and has quickly evolved to become SAP’s “development platform for innovation,” for both SAP and third-party developers.

At Sapphire, SAP underscored that HANA isn’t just for big business. The vendor discussed several initiatives to bring the benefits of HANA’s data-crunching power to SMB analytics and online transaction processing (OLTP) requirements. For instance:

• SAP Business One on HANA. Business One is SAP’s ERP solution for small businesses and for departments in larger companies. The solution integrates core business functions, including financials, sales, customer relationship management, inventory, and operations, and includes embedded analytics and reporting capabilities. SAP offers Business One both as an on-premises offering or via a cloud-based subscription model. In September 2012, SAP announced SAP Business One analytics, powered by SAP HANA. This solution provides a Linux-based HANA analytics appliance for companies running SAP Business One on a Windows server with Microsoft’s SQL database. At Sapphire, SAP introduced a new offering, Business One, version for HANA,  slated for availability later this year. This version runs directly on HANA, enabling both the transactional (ERP) and analytical applications to run on the same Linux-based server. By running both ERP transactions and analytics on a single platform, Business One version for HANA speeds access to information for analytics, reporting and search, without slowing down transactional processing.

• SAP Startup Focus Program, which enables startups to build solutions for small businesses. SAP has engaged over 430 startups to use HANA as a platform to develop user-friendly real-time analytics and advanced predictive solutions. For instance, Vish Cancron, CEO of Liquid Analytics, talked about his company’s cloud-based, mobile analytics applications for iPhone, iPad, Blackberry and Android users.  As Vish explained to me in this video discussion at a prior event, Liquid Analytics uses gamification and predictive analytics to help make it easier, quicker and more fun for wholesale industry sales reps to place orders and set and meet sales goals.

• SAP HANA One. SAP has partnered with Amazon’s Web Services Cloud to offer a pay-as-you model for trying and using HANA. SAP claims that users can import data and get up and running with HANA cloud in as few as 5 minutes. HANA One is designed for analytics professionals, SIs and ISVs, supports up to a 30 GB compressed data set, and is priced at one dollar per hour per user. While most SMBs don’t have analytics professionals, HANA One gives SIs and developers an accessible, affordable mechanism to develop and test new HANA apps for SMB customers. SAP has also created an online and community support network to help SMBs get started and navigate their way through a HANA One instance.

Cloud Front and Center

SAP’s journey to the cloud has been underway for several years. Though the company has seen a few setbacks, almost all of SAP’s solutions are now available in the cloud, including:

• Home-brewed SAP ERP solutions such as Business One, Business All-in-One, Business Suite  and of course, cloud-only Business ByDesign.
• Acquired cloud solutions such SuccessFactors and Ariba.
• Afaria, SAP’s mobile management platform, which SAP announced at the event is now available as a cloud-based service, branded as Afaria in the Cloud.
• SAP HANA One Premium, an advanced version of SAP HANA One with the same data compression rate but with greater accessibility to SAP source data, all SAP backend systems, data integrators and full SAP Support.

SAP also offers customers a choice of running some of its ERP solutions in either a public or private cloud environment, and a choice of cloud providers as well. For instance, customers can choose to run Business One in Amazon’s AWS, or in SAP’s HANA cloud center, an SAP partner’s cloud, or in a private on-premises cloud.

Notably, SAP revealed that it’s own HANA Cloud Center has the capacity to accommodate all of its current installed base customers. This gives existing customers a convenient on ramp both to move ERP solutions to the cloud and gain the power of HANA in one fell swoop–and underscores just how important the cloud is to enable SAP’s HANA strategy.

Upgrading the User Experience

Let’s face it, SAP is not known for user-friendly software or contracts. But the company is on a quest to improve customer experience by making its solutions more accessible and user-friendly. SAP is also expanding its portfolio of rapid deployment solutions (RDS), which offer fixed cost, fixed scope preconfigured software, best practices and implementation services that give customers everything they need to get up and running on midmarket solutions such as Business All-in-One in just a few weeks. SAP currently offers over 900 rapid-deployment solutions across its product lines. In addition to developing more appealing and streamlined user interfaces, SAP is trying to simplify pricing and contracts.

When it comes to new solutions, SAP is aiming to get accessibility and ease of use right from the get go. For instance, SAP’s newly minted Afaria for the Cloud solution for mobile management sports a streamlined user interface and is priced at 1 Euro per user per month. At that price, the solution should be attractive for even very small businesses that need to manage mobile devices get an affordable solution. It also opens the door for SAP to prove its worth, develop a relationship, and sell other solutions to new small business customers.

Shining the Spotlight on Ariba

Attracting new customers, growing revenues, and increasing profitability are perennial challenges for all SMBs. As revealed in SMB Group’s 2012 SMB Routes to Market Study, about one-quarter of SMBs sell goods and services to large enterprises. These B2B SMBs want a bigger share of the billions of dollars that large businesses spend annually on goods and services. SAP is shining the spotlight on its Ariba business commerce network as a means to help them reach this end. SAP provides all of its Business One customers with a free connection into the Ariba network, and any company, whether an SAP customer or not, can enroll as a Supplier on the cloud-based Ariba Network. Once enrolled, SMBs can connect and collaborate customers, partners, peers, and prospects. Ariba gives SMBs another way to provide more value to its existing SMB customers, and an additional entry point to bring non-SAP SMBs into the SAP fold.

Perspective

We’ve all seen how quickly innovative, fast-growth start-ups can become marquee brands. SAP understands that the creation-destruction cycle for businesses in hyper-drive, as underscored by the story of Under Armour, a featured customer and keynote panelist at Sapphire. Kevin Planck, Under Armour CEO, discussed how he founded the company in his basement in 1996 to design T-shirts that would wick moisture to help athletes stay cool and dry. He also talked about how Under Armour has evolved and grown, and how SAP has helped the company achieve twelve consecutive quarters of 20%+ growth.

SAP is betting big on becoming the leading IT solutions provider for these high-growth SMBs, which SMB Group call Progressive SMBs. Progressive SMBs are growth driven, and more likely to invest in and use technology to gain market and competitive advantage than other SMBs. Our data shows that Progressive SMBs are also much more likely to anticipate revenue gains than peers whose tech investments are flat or declining. SAP’s strategy to target  Progressive SMBs with leading edge technologies that provide clear business benefit should help it to tap in more deeply to this segment.

As important, SAP seems to be making an authentic effort to consumerize the SAP experience by reducing friction in choosing, buying and using SAP solutions. In our 2012 SMB Routes to Market Study, 42% of small businesses rate “solution is easy to use” as the top reason to put solutions on their short lists. SAP is addressing this challenge with a commitment to the cloud, tight integration to HANA within business applications, and focus on bringing new, easy to buy and use applications to market.

Although SAP isn’t likely to become the volume leader, the company is charting a leadership course to engage fast-growth SMBs–who also have the potential to become high-value SAP customers–with a differentiated and compelling story.

By: Helena Schwenk, Principal Analyst, MWD Advisors Posted: 11th June 2013 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Last week Salesforce.com raided its piggy bank by announcing not one but two acquisitions. It started the week with news of its impending $2.5 billion purchase of marketing software vendor ExactTarget and then soon after it announced the purchase of BI and analytics startup EdgeSpring for an undisclosed amount. So what’s behind both Salesforce acquisitions? And equally, are they related in some way?

At $2.5 billion ExactTarget is Salesforce’s largest acquisition to date, further underlining the company’s commitment to servicing the needs of the CMO and marketing organisation. It will also complement its previous two acquisitions of Buddy Media and Radian6 and help flesh out the company’s Marketing Cloud offering by providing marketing automation as well as email, social and mobile digital campaign capabilities. It’s clear the company has big plans for its Marketing Cloud having previously stated it wants it to become a $1 billion revenue line for company. With its revenues currently around $100 million that’s an aggressive target – and considering it has shelled out roughly a 8x multiple for ExactTarget (whose reported 2012 revenues were around the $290 million mark) it will obviously need to move quickly to integrate the company and leverage its size and scale to facilitate ExactTarget’s contribution to meeting this target.

While the sum paid for ExactTarget maybe a surprise, the fact that Salesforce has picked up a marketing software vendor is perhaps less so. The company needed to flesh out it offering particularly around marketing automation and email campaigning if it was going to credibly sell to the CMO – and this is where ExactTarget fitted the bill. Not only that, the company was already a partner of Salesforce and the two companies shared a number of ExactTarget’s 6000 customers. But this acquisition also has a competitive flavour to it since Salesforce isn’t the only vendor vying for the budget of the CMOs: other IT vendors, including Oracle – who incidentally recently snapped up marketing automation vendor Eloqua for $871 million – and Adobe are both building out Marketing Cloud offerings of their own. Similarly other information management vendors such as Teradata and IBM have picked up digital marketing acquisitions,  with Teradata acquiring Aprimo and eCircle and IBM buying Unica and Coremetrics.

While Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud has always had a social theme, both Buddy Media and Radian 6 for example support social media marketing capabilities – Buddy Media on the advertisement and publishing side and Radian 6 (as we have written previously about here) on the social listening, measurement and engagement side. ExactTarget brings a deeper email marketing flavour to its offering, something that no doubt was a major draw for Salesforce. As we recently wrote about here, email marketing often gets overlooked in favour of newer (and dare we say it sexier) marketing communication channels such as social and mobile, but it still remains a core discipline in any marketer’s armour. By acquiring ExactTarget Salesforce can build out its marketing platform to more fully support social channels, alongside and integrated with e-mail, text, mobile and the web. The challenge as always is to manage the integration all of these different software components into one marketing platform as quickly and as efficiently as possible while continuing to drive growth for the company.

Although ExactTarget is very much a marketing-orientated acquisition, EdgeSpring on the other hand brings Salesforce an analytics platform with a more cross-purpose flavour in mind. In particular its platform includes a data store called EdgeMart and a dynamic visualisation engine called Lens Framework that help users build analytic applications and allows business managers and operational workers to make sense of their semi-structured and structured data. The company has recently emerged from stealth mode and has previously raised $11m in Series A venture funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Lightspeed Ventures.

Salesforce’s cloud platform on the other hand has never really been built with analytics in mind; in fact, its existing BI and analytic capabilities are best described as basic, with many companies choosing to rely on third-party partners such as Birst to extract, integrate and report on Salesforce data. EdgeSpring therefore provides Salesforce the potential to develop and embed a more robust analytics offering across its entire portfolio that takes into account a range of structured and semi-structured data sources. The pressure to manage and exploit all forms of data is only likely to get more intense over the coming years as organisations recognise its value in becoming more competitive – that’s why building out and enhancing Salesforce’s analytics story is, we believe, a good move for the company.

By: Laurie McCabe, Partner, SMB Group Posted: 6th June 2013 Copyright SMB Group © 2013

At a time when information is proliferating at an unprecedented rate, companies that effectively gather, create and use information can gain dramatic market advantages over those that don’t.  SMB Group’s 2012 Routes to Market Study shows that SMBs that have deployed business intelligence and analytics solutions are 51% more likely than peers to expect revenues to rise. Likewise, in a survey from the MIT Sloan Management Review and SAS Institute, 67% of respondents report that their companies get a competitive advantage through analytics.

Most small and medium business (SMB) decision-makers understand this at a conceptual level. But let’s face it—few have in-house business analysts and data experts. Consequently, it can be daunting just to think about moving beyond spreadsheets to a more innovative analytics-driven approach.

A Tale of Three SMBs

But it doesn’t have to be. In this three-part series, I explore the journeys that three SAS customers–without armies of IT people–have taken to get more accurate, timely, usable insights for their businesses. And note: not one is a venture-backed tech or digital media start-up from Silicon Valley! In fact, all three are from traditional industries, with a combined 146 years of history behind them:

• BGF Industries is a leading manufacturer of 2,000 high-performance Kevlar, fiberglass, and carbon products used in industries such as aerospace, marine, filtration, automotive, and ballistics. BGF was the first weaver of fiberglass textiles in 1941 when it was part of Burlington Glass Fabrics, and became a subsidiary of the Porcher Groupe of Badinieres, France in 1988. Today, BGF employs 800 people at six facilities in three states. With over 35 patents for specialized finishes and processes, BGF’s mission is to deliver excellent products and exceptional customer experience.

• Oberweis Dairy began in 1915, when Peter J. Oberweis had too much milk and started selling it to neighbors. The Oberweis family began delivering fresh milk to homes on horse-drawn carts in 1927. Now, Oberweis continues its “Simply the Best” tradition as a family owned and operated business in Aurora, IL. Oberweis has also significantly expanded its product line, and opened 47 retail stores where customers can buy milk and enjoy its ice cream. It still delivers milk in glass bottles, although today it uses trucks instead of horses.

• Twiddy & Company manages a portfolio of individual, privately owned vacation homes on the Northern Outer Banks of North Carolina.  Family owned and operated, Twiddy & Company employs 110 people year round and almost 500 during peak vacation season. Although the vacation rental market has changed over the years, Twiddy’s mission has remained constant throughout its 35-year history: Offer the very best selection, service, and successful experiences to both homeowners and guests. 

This post chronicles why these companies decided to bring more robust analytics capabilities into their organizations. In the second, I look at the key considerations that came into play in their search for a solution and how they decided which solution to use. The third post examines how analytics are helping their companies thrive and grow.

Triggers for Change

The vast majority of SMBs use spreadsheets and intuition for analysis and decision-making, even as spreadsheet errors proliferate, time is wasted, and trends are missed. So what drives some SMBs look for alternatives to “spreadsheet management”?

This quote from Albert Einstein sums it up nicely: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Faced with an “aha” moment that they could no longer ignore, each of the three companies we spoke with decided it was time for a change.

Creating a Competitive Edge with Better Owner and Guest Services

In 2009, Clark Twiddy, Director of Operations and son of founder Doug Twiddy, came home to the family business after serving in the Navy. He saw that Twiddy & Co. was “swamped in transactional data. We rent 900+ properties 25 times a year, with multiple and varied service transactions every week on each unit. We struggled to keep up with delivering great service to homeowners and guests.”

Twiddy must keep track of many variables. It needs to ensure each property is clean, safe and serviced properly for each visitor; optimize occupancy and rates for property owners; and negotiate better pricing from plumbers, carpet cleaners, electricians and other service providers.

As big, nationwide rivals entered the market, Twiddy recognized that “getting our information faster, more valuable, and easier for people who needed to act on it right away” was critical to the company’s future. “Keeping track of all the variables with Excel proved problematic. People sat behind desks and researched data for hours or days trying to find trends or just answer pretty simple questions.  For example, it was too easy to get blindsided because we didn’t spot a safety issue that should have been addressed.  The risks of unmanaged data became something we had to act upon.”

Stabilizing and Growing the Flagship Business

Survival of the home delivery business triggered a fresh look at alternatives at Oberweis Dairy, According to Bruce Bedford, VP of Marketing, “In 2010, we recognized that we had to stabilize and grow our flagship home delivery business, which accounts for about a third of revenues. We had to understand why customers would discontinue the service, and then take corrective marketing action to turn that around.”

At the time, Oberweis was using “very complicated” Excel spreadsheets, Visual Basic macros and pivot tables. “Although best efforts were made to figure out what was happening, it wasn’t cutting it,” explains Bedford.

Preventing Costly Process Errors

Corporate QA Manager Bobby Hull and other managers at BGF had relied on individual, PC-based versions of SAS to monitor data and processes. As Hull noted, “That worked for a while, but we were growing so much, we had so much product diversity, the customer base and their demands were changing. We had to be quicker, better, faster, leaner and deliver higher quality.”

In the mid-2000s, a customer spotted a trend in a BGF product that Hull says, “We should have spotted ourselves. We had all of the information in our systems, we measured everything we could measure, but we had no good way to extract and use it.”

After investigating the issue, Hull notes that, “In hindsight, pulling the data out after the fact and looking at it, the trend was there…we should have spotted that. It was scary…these are technical fabrics going into complex, high-end industries and you can’t afford to drop the ball because it can get expensive really fast.”

As a result, BGF decided they needed “a serious way to dig into information quickly, easily and to surface it. We’d invested so much money to collect the information, but its dead money unless we do something with it.”

Perspective

Data is the new business capital. But just like financial capital, you have to invest wisely to reap value from it. As these three customer stories illuminate, making the investment to move beyond spreadsheets to an analytics-driven approach generates a very positive return on investment for the business.

Is it time for your business to make this investment? Think about what keeps you up at night. Can you put your finger on the pulse of information about operations, customers and processes–when, where and how you need it? Is your business out in front of customer trends, or playing catch up? Are you able to spot potential problems before they result in lost revenues and/or brand damage? How would you reimagine your business if you could take the pulse of key metrics more readily and easily? Thinking through the answers to these questions will help you answer this question and chart a more effective course to using data to make better business decisions and gain market advantages.

The next step is to assess internal capabilities, desired outcomes, and what you’ll need from a solution provider to reach your goals. In the second post in this series, I’ll discuss how BGF, Oberweis and Twiddy tackled this crucial phase.

This is the first of a three-part blog series by SMB Group and sponsored by SAS that examines why and how SMBs are moving from spreadsheets and intuition to a data-driven approach to grow their businesses.

By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 5th June 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

As usual with any major vendor conference there are various new product releases and announcements. The most interesting from Informatica World are the release of new Informatica PowerCenter Express Editions and the introduction of Vibe.

The Express Editions are for one and up to five developers respectively with the former being free and the latter inexpensive. Informatica doesn't necessarily expect to get rich from this though a reasonable revenue stream is certainly plausible. However, it will be interesting to see how successful this is. While I certainly think it makes sense for Informatica to move downmarket the problem is that PowerCenter is perceived to be an expensive, sophisticated tool that is relatively complex. That may not be true in reality but I think that's how the non-cognoscenti view Informatica. In which case, I'm not sure that PowerCenter is what you would first think of as a freemium product that you wanted to try out - wouldn't you first go for something open source? As I say, it will be interesting to see how this pans out.

Vibe is an altogether different kettle of fish. It isn't actually a product or, at least, it's not a product yet. Vibe is the engine that underpins PowerCenter as well as a number of other Informatica products and it is what allows you to construct a mapping and then deploy that on the platform of your choice without the developer having to know anything about that platform. Thus Vibe, for example, is the secret sauce that has allowed Informatica to move quickly and easily to Hadoop support.

Now, Vibe has been the underpinning of PowerCenter since the last century but Informatica hasn't made much noise about it. But that's changing: rather like a "powered by Intel" marketing campaign. The company is doing this both to emphasise Vibe as a differentiator and also because it plans to expand Vibe's availability to OEMs and others who might want to embed such an engine in their own products. Indeed, Vibe has already made its way into some cloud applications via OEM relationships, and the roadmap calls for Vibe to eventually be embedded into devices and sensors as the Internet of Things matures. Moving forward, I think that's an interesting possibility and I shall look forward to seeing what use cases emerge.

By: Neil Ward-Dutton, Research Director, MWD Advisors Posted: 4th June 2013 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Bonitasoft launches version 6 of its BPM platform tomorrow – and there’s a lot of new code and capability on show. A completely new runtime engine and a new work portal are both reflections of the fact that the company is seeing bigger and more demanding deployments.

Along with Theo Priestley (@ITredux) I attended a ‘pre-launch’ event for Bonita|BPM 6 held at the very swanky Corinthia Hotel in London today. It’s part of a series of small seminar-style events designed to introduce prospective customers and partners to Bonitasoft as well as showcasing the new platform.

As Theo says, the Bonita project has now had well over 2m downloads, and there are over 600 customers paying Bonitasoft for enterprise subscriptions. I don’t have revenue figures to hand, but I do know it signed around 900 contracts in 2012; and of the 550 customers it had at the start of 2013, nearly half of these were new customers in 2012.

Bonita|BPM 6 represents a substantial rewrite of the platform and tooling – something that the company didn’t undertake lightly. There’s a completely new runtime engine that Bonitasoft claims is significantly faster (I think 4x was mentioned, but I need to double-check that). But just as importantly, the new engine’s service-based architecture means that it’s possible to do quite a lot of reconfiguration of an application without having to redeploy it, or restart any servers – you can make organisational model and connector changes, for example.

On the work portal side there’s a much revised look-and-feel that follows responsive design principles, and this is coupled with a mobile HTML/CSS version that enables process participants to track work and complete tasks from mobile devices.

From a design perspective the other significant introduction is support for ad hoc creation and assignment of subtasks. This is interesting in itself, but it also looks to be a precursor to a more general flexible work co-ordination approach being explored for future releases.

Taking all this together, my impression is that Bonitasoft is tooling up to meet the needs of ever more demanding clients. Its customer roster is certainly eye-catching, and as it continues to expand in big enterprise accounts it’s going to continue to come across requirements that need to be met with the ability to scale, to deploy changes quickly, and so on.

There’s more that Bonitasoft can and needs to do – for example at the moment there’s really not much of a business rules / decision management story, and monitoring and optimisation capabilities are modest. But it’s a serious challenger already.

By: Fran Howarth, Practice Leader, Bloor Research Posted: 4th June 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

The attacks being experienced today on computer networks are increasingly targeted and sophisticated. Attackers carefully research their victims and increasingly write one-off exploits that are highly unlikely to be caught using traditional rules and signature-based security controls. There are a variety of technology vendors coming up with innovative ways to prevent those attackers from being successful.

One such vendor is Light Cyber, a relatively young company founded in Israel but that is setting its sights on wider international markets. It states that its mission is to enable organisations "to effectively detect subtle anomalies in the network and identify targeted attackers at early phases of attack, before real damage has been done."

What makes Light Cyber's approach innovative is that its technology develops and maintains profiles of every user and device on a network to identify unique patterns of behaviour associated with each as behavioural patterns can vary widely from one role to another. For example, a user from the engineering department will operate in a manner vastly different from a user from human resources and will have different needs in terms of the applications that they use. What is considered normal behaviour for one user may be considered to be suspicious for another.

The technology works by constantly monitoring and tracking all user and device behaviour in real time and comparing activity to the behaviour profiles that have been developed for each user and device in order to detect when a user is behaving differently to that expected. It does this without the use of rules or signatures that can identify known threats and exploits or that block specific types of traffic. Rather, it passively monitors all traffic and looks for anomalous behaviour, such as an attacked who is reconnoitring the network, looking to perform activity outside of what is considered to be normal, such as looking to elevate privileges or move laterally across the network.

In this way, the technology provides an automated means of identifying malicious behaviour-something that has long been done by human analysts as part of incident response teams-and is a tool that can be used by anyone, not just analysts. It provides a means of detecting an attacker at an early stage of an attack so that networks can be protected against even the most advanced threats. Further, it can also be used to forensically investigate any incidents that have occurred to learn from such incidents to prevent them occurring again. As such, it is a light touch tool that can help organisations to protect and defend against even highly targeted, sophisticated attacks and improve the overall security posture of their network.

By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 3rd June 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

A clear theme at the Salesforce.com Customer Company Tour I went to recently was the power of a Collaboration team - including the power to sell things to customers, especially if the team included a previous, and highly delighted, customer.

Obviously, this isn't going to work for long unless all concerned trust each other, and trust the resilience and integrity of the platform, so that was another theme of the event: respect for Identity, Privacy - and, of course, all participants' Money. And, I guess, no-one in the collaboration wants to fall foul of the law and, in particular, EU privacy directives which makes Salesforce.com's announcement, at the event, of a European data centre in Slough (which can be used to ensure that EU data doesn't leave the EU) very welcome. Interestingly, Salesforce.com says this is largely to allow it to attract customers in EU government organisations and that it isn't of much interest to commercial organisations; but Philips (its sample customer) said it was extremely important to them, too - my guess is that it'll matter to others in the commercial space after they take legal (not IT) advice, since (for example) a collaborative marketing team may well want to use data that can be identified with individuals (see my articles on the EU data directives here and here).

The rise of the collaborative team is why the announcement of Salesforce Company Communities may be important - there's a FAQ here. According to Salesforce.com, "New Salesforce Communities will enable customer companies to create social communities with business data and processes embedded at the core, eliminating the trade off between legacy portals and social point solutions".

What this really means I think, is vendors, customers and so on, all collaborating altruistically on doing things better, with Salesforce.com getting its money from providing the infrastructure required; and its customers benefiting from a share of the improved commercial opportunities collaboration creates. Involved customers are probably loyal customers and, at least, an involved vendor should get to hear about any complaints and issues in time to do something about them - or, at least, in advance of the Press or poor sales making the issues obvious.

Are Communities a good idea? Yes, I think so. Is this idea naively optimistic? I hope not, but it does require a degree of maturity - and trust - and I've heard someone from a B2B vendor express some doubts about putting its customers in a common forum where they can talk to each other and gang up on the vendor! Still, Salesforce.com has customers (such as the US Food and Drug Administration) that claim to be making a success out of using Communities.

Salesforce.com is becoming a "customer company", as it sees it. Isn't everyone? But Alex Dayon, (President of applications and platform, Salesforce.com) does "define his terms" a bit when he says that, "the next generation of enterprise apps are social with business data embedded at the core and accessible from any device. With Salesforce Communities, customer companies can connect with customers, partners and employees in entirely new ways and from anywhere". which is a bit more than what some companies mean by being "customer focussed". Perhaps "connected customer company" describes Salesforce.com's aspirations better.

"Salesforce is a platform company that sells CRM apps", says Mike Rosenbaum (EDP Platform). "Its Secret sauce", he says, "is that it's built for developers AND business users; [which] promotes a collaborative relationship". One area that might benefit, as an unexpected outcome, from a Community collaboration is apps Governance. New apps on the Salesforce.com platform are easy to write and the platform enforces data access rules - as long as you set the right ones. But "easy to develop" can mean that something goes live without some issues being addressed properly. A developer (and I think developers should be part of a Community, alongside business stakeholders) who wants to use just a little bit of personal data from production in test, to help develop an app to fix an immediate issue, might benefit from a Community where people outside of IT; and, possibly, even outside the company (customers and the like) can explain exactly why breaking data protection rules might be a very bad idea. Put all the stakeholders in a business outcome in a forum and they might just all learn to respect each others' points of view and needs - beyond the simple functional requirements.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 3rd June 2013 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2013

On Thursday, June 6, The Open Group will host a "tweet jam" examining Platform 3.0 and why the concept has great implications for businesses.

Over recent years a number of technologies -- cloud, mobile, big data, social -- have emerged and converged to disrupt the way we engage with each other in both our personal and business lives. Most of us are familiar with the buzz words, including "the Internet of things," "machine-to-machine (M2M)," and "consumerization of IT," but what do they mean when they act in concert? How can we treat them as separate? How can we react best?

I was early to recognize this confluence as more than the sum of its parts, back in 2010. And Gartner was early too to recognize this convergence of trends representing a number of architectural shifts which it called a "Nexus of Forces." This nexus was presented as both an opportunity in terms of innovation of new IT products and services and a threat for those who do not keep pace with evolution, rendering current business architectures obsolete.

Understanding opportunities

Rather than tackle this challenge solo, The Open Group is working with a number of IT experts, analysts and thought leaders to better understand the opportunities available to businesses and the steps they need to benenefit and prosper from Platform 3.0, not fall behind. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

So please join the burgeoning Platform 3.0 community on Twitter on Thursday, June 6 at 9 a.m. PT/12 p.m. ET/5 p.m. GMT for a tweet jam, moderated by me, Dana Gardner (@Dana_Gardner), BriefingsDirect, that will discuss and debate the issues and implications around Platform 3.0.

Key areas that will be addressed during the discussion include: the specific technical trends (big data, cloud, consumerization of IT, etc.), and ways businesses can use them – and are already using them – to increase their business opportunities.

All are welcome, including The Open Group members and interested participants from all backgrounds, to join the one-hour online chat session and interact with our panel's thought leaders. To access the discussion, please follow the #ogp3 and #ogChathashtags during the discussion time.

You may also be interested in:

• The Open Group Conference Panel Explores How the Big Data Era Now Challenges the IT Status Quo
• Complexity from big data and cloud trends makes architecture tools like ArchiMate and TOGAF more powerful, says expert panel
• Using the Cloud for Big-Data Requires a New Recipe
• Big Data Success Depends on Better Risk Management Practices Like FAIR, Say The Open Group Panelists
• The Open Group Keynoter Sees Big-Data Analytics Bolstering Quality, Manufacturing, Processes
• The Open Group Trusted Technology Forum is Leading the Way to Securing GLobal IT Supply Chains
• Corporate Data, Supply Chains Remain Vulnerable to Cyber Crime Attacks Says Open Group Conference Speaker
• Open Group Conference Speakers Discuss the Cloud: Higher Risk or Better Security?

By: Laurie McCabe, Partner, SMB Group Posted: 31st May 2013 Copyright SMB Group © 2013

In the first post in this series, I examined the underlying trends driving the buzz around big data and its relevance for SMBs. In the second, I discussed how three IBM business partners (FYI Solutions, LPA Systems, Inc. and Waypoint Consulting) are helping SMBs take a pragmatic approach to successfully apply analytics and big data solutions to solve business problems.

In this third and final post, I’ll talk about how to determine business readiness for big data solutions, and considerations to keep in mind as you help your business move ahead in this area.

Big Data Readiness

Today, even small companies are generating and accumulating staggering amounts of data. The question is, can you turn this data into reliable, accessible and actionable information that you can apply to solve business problems and make better decisions?

Many SMBs rely on Microsoft Excel to generate information and reports. If you’re in this category, you can get ahead simply by taking advantage of analytics tools built into the financials, HR, CRM and other core systems that you use. Taking it a bit further, combining Google Analytics data from your website with CRM data can offer you fresh insights about who’s coming to your website, from where, and what they’re doing when they get there.

But as business complexity grows, data and reports are spread across more databases, spreadsheets and applications, and stored on servers, personal computers, mobile devices and in the cloud grows as well. Using disparate data sources and tools to answer key questions such as “what products can I price at a premium” and “what are the best ways to increase repeat sales?” becomes difficult, time-consuming and burdened with inconsistencies.

“When customers approach us, the top reason is because they don’t trust their data and reports. Too time-consuming always comes up as well. They are also struggling to get an enterprise-wide view of their data,” according to Joe Rodriguez, Software Practice Leader, FYI Solutions.

If you answer yes to the questions in Figure 1, your business probably needs to integrate key data sources into a central repository. As Brendan McGuire, Managing Partner, Waypoint Consulting puts it, “You need to pull data from the cloud and on-premise applications into an integrated, rationalized data store. You can do this on your own systems, or you can do it in the cloud in a subscription model.”

Figure 1: Big Data Readiness–Key Questions to Ask

With a core foundation of common, trustworthy and accessible data is in place, you’ll be able to get deeper insights into operations and customer behaviors and preferences. Companies typically start out with “descriptive” business intelligence (BI) tools to dig in and get more visibility into key metrics such as those noted in Figure 1, and make better decisions. For instance, if you’re a retailer, these tools can provide analysis to pinpoint optimal locations for new stores, more accurately forecast customer demand, minimize inventory or negotiate better pricing from suppliers.

Moving Up the Curve

Until recently, having solid analytics capabilities for internal, structured data was enough to give many businesses an edge. But, with more data and different kinds of data pouring in from more places, companies are looking for new ways to help them access, analyze and use data to gain market and competitive advantages.

In broad-brush strokes, big data helps do this in two ways. First, big data technologies crunch through both structured and unstructured data exponentially faster than was ever possible before. Examples of technologies that enable this super-charged data crunching power include hardware with increased memory and parallel processing capabilities, and Hadoop and MapReduce, which harness the power of multiple, distribute computers for problem solving.

Using this kind of technology, you can run analyses that used to take days or weeks in minutes. This make it possible to analyze data that you may have collected for years, but were never able to analyze before, or to weave new, external data sources into your analysis.

In addition, new kinds of analytics tools and solutions make it easier to explore data in more accessible, actionable ways, including:

• Mobile business intelligence. Nowadays decision-making is as likely to happen in an airport or at a customer site as in headquarters. Mobile solutions let users see, share, report, and analyze data on smartphones and tablets. They take advantage of native, user-friendly mobile interfaces, such as touch screens, and give users the ability to make smarter, faster decisions regardless of location.

• Visualization. You may be able to look at a hundred of rows of data and make sense of it, but can you look at thousands of rows and figurer out what’s going on? Visualization solutions help people to see what’s happening across hundreds of thousands of data points quickly and easily.

• Sentiment analysis. Social media and digital sites have given customers and potential customers a much bigger and louder voice. Sure, you can easily tell how many followers or fans you have, but do you really know what it means to your business? Sentiment analysis identifies the user attitudes towards a brand, product or event by using variables such as context, tone and emotion.

• Predictive analytics. Using mathematical algorithms, predictive analytics helps you to spot what’s likely to happen next. With predictive tools, you can examine large amounts of historical data (internal and external, structured and unstructured) to identify hidden patterns to alert you to future trends and stay ahead of the market.

• Prescriptive analytics take things a step further, actually guiding you to a course of action, via options for what you should do next. Prescriptive analytics solutions can fine-tune themselves as they take in new data to continually improve your decision alternatives.

Choosing Your Big Data Path

Where you go next depends on where you are today, and your business goals, as discussed in Putting Big Data To Work For SMBs. Often, explains Brendan McGuire, “the greatest opportunity is to make data more consumable…making it easier for the business person to have conversations with the data, whether its structured or unstructured, through better mobile solutions, or visualization.”

Meanwhile, LPA Systems is helping hotel chains use forecasting and planning solutions to get a better idea of expected occupancy rates based on historical transactional data mixed with external information about upcoming events and other factors to optimize pricing and marketing initiatives.  As Jesse McNulty explains, “Now they can better assess if they’re going to be overbooked on a weekday in July, and charge more, or if they’re going to have occupancy issues, and need to do a promotion”.

Although prescriptive analytics is still further out on the horizon for most companies, Joe Rodriguez sees customer interest in this area growing. “Just like your GPS provides you with alternate routes, tells you where to go, and what turns to make in your car, prescriptive analytics can be like a crystal ball to help predict outcomes and improve decision-making for the business.”

Perspective

As revealed in the IBM Institute for Business Value and Said Business School, University of Oxford, three out of five midmarket respondents report that analytics, information and big data solutions “create a competitive advantage in their industry,” representing a 66% increase since 2010. Given the rapid rate and pace of change in business and technology, this gap will widen.

While turning information into insights isn’t easy, the good news is that vendors are increasingly recognizing that big data isn’t only for big businesses. Whether you are just starting to think about the relevance of big data for you business, or you have some of the basics in place, more vendors, including IBM, are focusing on SMB customers. Not only are they building more solutions tailored to SMB requirements, they are also developing educational materials to help you learn how more about applying big data solutions to real world business problems. As important, they are growing and training their business partners to help you get up the learning curve, implement solutions and optimize the value you gain from them.

So do your homework. Assess your company’s key challenges, we’re you’re at today, and were you want to go. Talk to colleagues and business advisors you trust. Start developing a strategy to get the wisdom you need to grow your business and stay ahead of the competition.

This is the final post in this blog series by SMB Group and sponsored by IBM that examines big data and its implications for SMBs. The first post, Is Big Data Relevant for SMBs?  parses through the underlying trends and hype surrounding big data, and what is important and relevant for SMBs. The second, Putting Big Data To Work For SMBs looks at how IBM business partners are helping SMBs take practical steps to put big data to work for their businesses.

By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 31st May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

The Internet of Things is starting to get almost as much hype as big data although in this case I am not sure that it is misplaced.

The Internet of Things was first described by Kevin Ashton in 1999. He wrote that "computers - and, therefore, the Internet - are almost wholly dependent on human beings for information. Nearly all of the data available on the Internet was first captured and created by human beings - by typing, pressing a record button, taking a digital picture or scanning a bar code. Conventional diagrams of the Internet ... leave out the most numerous and important routers of all - people. The problem is, people have limited time, attention and accuracy - all of which means they are not very good at capturing data about things in the real world. And that's a big deal. We're physical, and so is our environment ... You can't eat bits, burn them to stay warm or put them in your gas tank. Ideas and information are important, but things matter much more. If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things - using data they gathered without any help from us - we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost. We would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling, and whether they were fresh or past their best. The Internet of Things has the potential to change the world, just as the Internet did. Maybe even more so."

Basically, the idea is that virtually everything can be instrumented and the information generated by sensors, meters, log files and so on can be analysed to support what IBM has for some time been calling the Smarter Planet.

However, there is a caveat - and that caveat is that the term "Internet of Things" is something of a misnomer. This is because the collection and analysis of data doesn't have to go via the Internet. Call detail records are not, for example, collected via the Internet. Indeed, in some cases it might be better if we didn't use the Internet. For example, suppose that you have online sensors on an aeroplane monitoring the flight control and engine status in real-time. You would not want this system connected to the Internet - if you did that then the system could be hacked and, bearing in mind that modern aircraft have fly-by-wire and autopilot systems, then, potentially, a terrorist could remotely take control of the plane: and we can all imagine the consequences of that. So, yes you want real-time monitoring but that needs to be isolated to the plane's environment and you also want to analyse the results once the flight is over (to help with things like fuel efficiency, preventative maintenance and so on), but that needs to be handled differently.

There is a brighter side. As Robin Bloor has pointed out, what we are doing with the Internet of Things is to make existing things smarter: retro-fitting intelligence into what we have already got or, in some cases, simply making extended use of the information that was already been collected but then thrown away. Going further forward there is potential to build things better: a lot of things (Robin quotes the example of sluices to prevent flooding) in our world have simply been constructed by rule of thumb and based on experience but the Internet of Things provides the opportunity to build things smarter: to have intelligent flood prevention, for example; or to have intelligent speed limits that reduce speed limits to 20mph during the school day but not at 3.00am in the morning, or which adjust according to weather and traffic conditions.

The Internet of Things is really only starting but I think Kevin Ashton was right: it will change the world.

By: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 30th May 2013 Copyright Quocirca © 2013

Paper-based information is not often thought about in today's Big Data picture, which tends to focus on the proliferation of unstructured data from sources such as blogs, social media and video that is growing at exponential rates compared to traditional enterprise data. Yet paper documents are an important part of corporate business operations, often containing valuable information that must be captured, stored, organised and analysed. 

Despite all the talk of the paperless office, organisations still rely heavily on paper documents. Every day businesses receive and print thousands of paper documents, mail, email and faxes that need to be captured and transformed for entry into business processes. Whilst some businesses have transitioned to electronic forms and transactions, many mission-critical business processes—such as billing, claims-processing and accounts-payable—are paper based. This reliance on paper is costly and inefficient and paper documents can be a huge liability. 

As organisations try to reduce costs, improve process efficiency and establish compliance with various government legislation and industry regulations (e.g. PCI DSS, SOX, HIPAA, Data Protection Act), digitising paper documents through document capture is an important first step in business process automation. Document capture solutions are designed to remove the bottleneck paper creates at the onset of many business processes today.

When captured at the point of origination, paper documents can be directly integrated into business-critical processes. The full capture process includes scanning, data extraction from scanned images, document classification and sharing of content across electronic content management (ECM) systems. Documents become more accessible and easier to find, distribute and track. This increases productivity and streamlines processes, while supporting record retention, document security, and privacy requirements. Consequently, paper documents become part of the wider big data picture, enabling organisations to extract value from information to support faster decision making, for instance through business intelligence or big data analytics.

However, the challenge of document capture and processing can be daunting for many businesses, requiring specialist skills and resources. Despite the clear benefits of integrating all types of information into business processes and eliminating paper from these processes, employee attitudes and existing departmental systems can make it difficult to know where to start. Most organisations are resource constrained today, so many turn to outsourcing providers in order to focus on their core business.

The benefits of using an outsourced service include improved customer service, reduced business costs, compliance and greater efficiency. Outsourced services allow for easy scalability and can minimise infrastructure costs and disruption. One area where such business process automation is becoming more prevalent is in the managed print services (MPS) market. MPS is a proven approach to reducing printing costs by optimisating complex printer fleets, and deploying tools and technologies to minimise wasteful printing. As businesses move to next generation MPS engagements and are looking for further cost and efficiency improvements, many are working with their MPS providers to digitise paper workflows. With many organisations having already invested in multi-function printers (MFPs), working with MPS providers enables them to leverage these devices as sophisticated document capture and processing hubs.

Although many MPS providers are now competing in the wider and highly competitive BPO market, providers such as HP, Lexmark, Ricoh and Xerox have mature industry-specific services to automate manual processes such as electronic invoicing, mortgage application processing and health records management. With the core MPS services becoming commoditised, such business process services (BPS) are becoming key to differentiation amongst leading players in the MPS market.

Whilst big data and MPS may not have immediately obvious connections, many MPS engagements are advancing beyond the realm of device consolidation to encompass business process improvement. By accelerating the transition to digital workflows, paper based information becomes better integrated with enterprise data enabling organisations to extract business value from all data—both paper and digital.

Read Quocirca's MPS 2013 Report at http://www.quocirca.com/reports/835/managed-print-services-landscape-2013

By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 30th May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

Why go to a conference these days? After all, all the information one could possibly need is on the web, isn't it, probably with a nice video to go with it? Well, it's the story, dammit. Before you start a new technology initiative you worry about the technology not working; when it fails it's almost always because of issues with the people (or the issues people have with the technology you're using). People issues come alive with stories and stories on the web tend to be either unrealistically optimistic or unrealistically pessimistic - depending on whether people people are trying to big themselves up or excuse their failures and blame the technology (although some blogs are honourable exceptions, it sometimes hard to know which).

A classic example of a real story is the DevOps book I blogged about here. And, in a F2F conference you get stories from the horse's mouth and you can push back - and this can make the issues live.

What about this story from Michel Delran, who will be presenting on 'How a CMDB can save you millions' at the CMSG Conference 2013: "On a cold late December day, when Christmas tree lights are flickering and the spider webs sparkle with the frosty sun, an alarm suddenly goes off at the head offices of a well-known mobile phone distribution company near London. As employees rush out into the cold streets, the fire sirens scream and the water pipes are unwound. Soon the fire is out. Then the first bad news: the small data centre in the basement got very wet and isn't working any more. Well, nobody seems to worry too much, as this was a very small data centre, that was due to be relocated next month, anyway. Then bad news strikes again: it seems that the company's high street shops in London can't process their chip and pin requests any more. They cannot sell any phones and Christmas is next week. Wait a minute, it's not only London, but all of the UK, and the whole European operation isn't working very well, and some shop staff are writing down credit card details "for later processing" in a very insecure way, and the company is suddenly at risk of going out of business!"

To me, that makes the reasons for adopting configuration management real, but nobody sensible is going to put the details behind that story in print, even on the web - but I'd love to ask Michel over a glass of wine whether it's true; and, if so, who it was! And if you want to hear practitioners talk freely remember that BCS CMSG hospitality is legendary (and that, allegedly, what's said in BCS HQ stays in BCS HQ.). You can register for CMSG 2013 here.

By: Fran Howarth, Practice Leader, Bloor Research Posted: 28th May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

The new mantra today is that it is not if your organisation will suffer a security breach, but when. In a recent survey released during Infosec Europe 2013, 93% of large organisations reported that they had been breached in the past year, as did 87% of small organisations. And the report also shows that they are being breached more often with every passing year.

The security threats that we face are getting ever more serious. They are no longer random, but are highly targeted and sophisticated, using a range of mechanisms in combination in an attempt to make the attack more likely to succeed. It is no longer sufficient to address each threat vector in isolation given the fast growing number, and severity of, blended, targeted threats.

Join Bloor Research Thursday 30th May at 2pm GMT/3pm CET for a webinar that discusses these issues and what organisations should do to protect themselves, including the elements required in a unified, cloud-based security platform.

Click on this link to register for the event: Webinar on responding to blended security threats.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 27th May 2013 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2013

Big data is proving to be like the proverbial 800-pound gorilla—big and powerful, but difficult to tame and control.

While nearly 90 percent of business and IT leaders agree that big data can be useful in making intelligent business decisions, only one-third of companies have implemented big-data initiatives. That's the finding from a recent International Data Group (IDG) survey, sponsored by Kapow Software.

Furthermore, more than 50 percent of survey respondents said that they had only lukewarm success with getting big data to deliver value in terms of competitive advantage, differentiation, top-line growth, strategic insights, employee productivity and effectiveness, among other business metrics.

Respondents reported that big data projects take too long, cost too much, and aren't delivering a sufficient return on investment (ROI). Part of this is because these projects require expensive consultants or hard-to-find data scientists. Yet, while this lag in adoption continues, the mass of data from a variety of sources is growing.

Among the barriers to drawing value out of big data, according to survey respondents, are:

• High cost and complexity. Many business leaders believe such projects require a prohibitively expensive infrastructure. Sixty percent said projects take 18 months or more to complete.
• Employee workarounds. Respondents said employees often take matters into their own hands, but without effective solutions, are resorting to manual aggregation. This is putting pressure on IT to automate these efforts.
• Poor data accessibility. Nearly half of IT leaders said they find it difficult to find, access, and integrate the right information, which is often unstructured and spread among a wide variety of sources.
• Lacking skills and tools. Big data is proving to be inaccessible by employees without special training, again putting pressure on IT to pave the way.

Despite the current low reliance on big data, adoption is expected to increase over the next 12 months, as business and IT leaders turn to user-centric tools such as those provided by Kapow Software. With such tools, IT leaders anticipate improved productivity and a better relationship with the business leaders.

Business leaders surveyed are looking for a variety of benefits from an increased use of big data. They say the following are either "critical" or "very important:"

• More informed business decision - 80 percent
• Increased competitive advantage - 71 percent
• Improved customer satisfaction - 68 percent
• Increased end-user productivity - 62 percent
• Improved security or compliance - 60 percent
• New products and services - 55 percent
• Monitoring and responding to social media in real time - 33 percent.

For more information on the survey results, go to http://www.slideshare.net/Kapowmarketing/kapow-idg-bigdataidg051513 or http://www.kapowsoftware.com/. [Disclosure: Kapow Software is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

By: Neil Ward-Dutton, Research Director, MWD Advisors Posted: 24th May 2013 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Back on February 15, Informatica almost silently acquired BPM technology specialist Active Endpoints. Although the BPM vendor built most of its business by selling a traditional on-premise product (ActiveVOS), Informatica was largely lured by the company’s more recent Salesforce.com extension proposition, Cloud Extend.

Informatica’s cloud-based integration business is consistently managing the integration of over 2bn records daily; but although it had a strong data integration foundation to offer, it was missing the kind of co-ordination layer that comes in so useful when you’re trying to deal with more challenging integration requirements around matching, reconciliation, aggregation and so on.

So as well as continuing to offer Salesforce Cloud Extend, Informatica is also offering the multi-tenant process automation platform within its Informatica Cloud as Cloud Process Automation. Was this a good deal? Well, as Active Endpoints was not a public company, Informatica has not disclosed how much it paid. But adding the Cloud Extend capability to its own cloud should help to ensure that Informatica can keep pace as other big middleware platform players like IBM, Software AG and TIBCO ramp up their own cloud integration efforts.

What about the on-premise ActiveVOS? Although there’s no published post-acquisition roadmap for it yet, the company is clear that it will continue to develop this part of its business.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 24th May 2013 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2013

This latest BriefingsDirect podcast, from the 2013 Ariba LIVE Conference in Washington, D.C., explores Ariba's product and services roadmap and future strategy insights unveiled at the recent user event.

Our guest is Chris Haydon, Vice President of Solutions Management for Procurement, Finance, and Network at Ariba, here to explain the latest conference news, and to offer insights into how Ariba will be broadening its services procurement management value, mobile push and AribaPay roll-out.

The interview is conducted Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: Ariba, an SAP company, is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Where we are now with Ariba in terms of some of the big news at LIVE?

Haydon: We have some really exciting innovation coming in the near-term to Ariba in a couple of areas. First, let's talk about Network RFQ or the Spot Buy. We think this is part of the undiscovered country, where, according to The Hackett Group, 40-plus percent of spend is not sourced.

By linking this non-sourced spend to the Ariba Network, we think we're going to be able to address a large pain-point for our buyers and our sellers. Network RFQ or Spot Buy is a near-term solution that we announced at LIVE, and we're bringing that forward over the next six months.

The next exciting innovation is at the other end of the process. That’s a solution we call AribaPay. AribaPay is what we think is a game-changing solution that delivers rich remittance and invoice information that’s only available from the Ariba Network through secure, global payment infrastructure.

Gardner: It seems to me, Chris, that you're going to the mid-market. You're creating some services with Spot Buy that help people in their ad-hoc, low-volume purchasing.

You're providing more services types of purchasing capabilities, maybe for those mid-market organizations or different kinds of companies like services-oriented companies. And, you're also connecting via Dell Boomi to QuickBooks, which is an important asset for how people run small businesses. Are we expanding the addressable market here?

Haydon: We are, and that’s an excellent point. We look at it two ways. We're looking to address all commerce. Things like the Spot Buy, AribaPay, services, procurement, and estimate-based services are really addressing the breadth of spend, and that applies at the upper end and the lower end.

There are important pieces that you touched on, especially with our Dell Boomi partnership and the announcement here for QuickBooks. We want to make it accessible to grow the ecosystem and to make the collaboration across the network as frictionless as possible.

With Dell Boomi announcing QuickBooks, it enables suppliers specifically with that back-end system to be able to comply with all the collaboration of business processes on the Ariba Network, and we're really only just getting started.

There is a massive ecosystem out there with QuickBooks, but when we have a look around, there are more than 120 prominent backend systems. So it's not just the SAPs, the Oracles, the JD Edwards, and Lawsons. It's the QuickBooks and the Intuits. It's the Great Plains of the world.

Think about at it as back-end agnostic. We want our customers on both the buy-side and the sell-side of their partners to make their own choices. It's really their own choice of deployment.

If they want to take an integrated business-to-business (B2B) channel, they can. If they want to come to a portal, they can. If they want to have an extract that goes into their own customized system, they can do that as well, or all of the above at the same time, and really just taking that process forward.

Gardner: How does AribaPay work? Is this a credit card, a debit card? Is this a transactional banking interface?

Haydon: Number one, it's brand-new. First, let's talk about the problems that we had, and how we think we are going to address it. More than 40 percent of payments in corporate America are still check-based. Check-based payments present their own problems, not just for the buyers, but also from the sellers. They don’t know when they're going to get paid. And when they are getting paid, how do they reconcile what they're actually getting paid for?

AribaPay is a new service. It's not a P-Card. It's leveraging a new type of electronic payment through an ACH-styled channel. It enables buyers to take 100 percent of their payments through the Ariba Network. It lets the suppliers opt in to be able to match and move from our paper-based payment channel check, to an electronic channel that is married. This is the interesting value prop for the network. That is married with their rich information.

So that’s the value. We think it's very differentiated. We're going to be leveraging a large financial institution provider who has great breadth and penetration, not just here in the United States, but globally as well, and that's via Discover Financial Services.

We announced this at LIVE this month, and I know they're as excited as we are. Discover has the wherewithal to bring the credibility and the scale to the payments channel, while Ariba has the credibility in the scale of the supply base and the commercial B2B traffic. We think that that one plus one equals three and is a game changer in electronic payment.

Gardner: Moving on to the future or vision that you're painting, what should we expect in the roadmap of the next two or three years for the Ariba Network?

Haydon: We're really excited about the Ariba Network and we have four or five themes. One piece of big news is that we're getting into and supporting supply chain and logistics processes, and adding that level of collaboration. Today, we have 10 or 11 types of collaborations that you can do on the Ariba Network, like an order, an invoice, and so on.

Over the next several releases, we're going to be more than doubling that amount of collaboration that you can do between trading partners on the network. That’s exciting, and there are things like forecasting and goods receipt notices.

I won’t go into the specifics of every single transaction, but think about doubling the amount of collaboration that you can do and the visibility in that. The ability to apply your own business rules and logic to those collaborations is massive.

The second thing we're doing on the network is adding a new spend category, which we call services invoicing. This is estimate-based spend and this is another up market, down market, broad approach, in which there are a whole heap of services.

This is more of an estimate-based style spend where you don’t necessarily know the full cost of an item until you finish it. Whether you're drilling an oil well or constructing a building, there are variations there. So we're adding that capability into the network.

Another area is what we call Network 2.0, and this is extending and changing not just the user interface, but extending and adding more intrinsic core capabilities to the network. Ariba has a number of network assets and we think it's important to have a single network platform globally. It's the commerce internet, the network.

So our Network 2.0 program is a phase delivery of extending the core capabilities of the Ariba network over the next couple of years in terms of order status, results, requests in terms of goods receipt notices, advanced shipping notices, more invoice capability, and just growing that out globally.

Last but not least is just more and more supply collaboration, focusing on the ability for suppliers to more easily respond, comply, and manage their profiles on the Ariba Network.

Gardner: The Ariba applications themselves, what should we expect there?

Haydon: We have a whole raft of capability coming across that whole application suite. We can break that into two or three areas. In our sourcing, contract management, supplier information management, and supply performance management suite, we're doing functionality enhancements on one of the exciting pieces.

In the spend visibility area, we're going to be leveraging the SAP In-Memory technology HANA. What we are doing there is early for us, but there are some very exciting, encouraging results in terms of the speed and the performance we've heard about from SAP. Running our own technology on that and seeing the results is exciting for us and will be exciting for our customers.

As we move more into our procurement suite, we're introducing a new look and feel, a consumer-like look and feel, to our catalog and our search engine. The more Amazon-style search touches more users than anyone else. As you can imagine, that’s how they need to requisition tools. So making that a friendly UI and taking that UI or user experience through to the other products is fantastic.

One of the other most exciting areas for us is services procurement, a very large investment for us. Services procurement is our application to be able to support temporary or contingent labor, statement of work or consulting labor, print, marketing and also light industrial. This really is one of the underpinning differences for Ariba, and this is where we're bringing it together.

We're not just building applications any more. We're building network-centric applications or network-aware applications. It means that when we're launching our new services procurement solution, we are going to have a brand-new, refreshed, modern user interface, which is very important.

We're going to be able to leverage the power of the Ariba Network to provide differential insights, into standard day-to-day services procurement on-boarding. That will be looking at average labor rates in the area for the type of service that you're buying and using the network intelligence to give you advice, to give you instruction, to help you manage exceptions on the network.

Gardner: What’s really interesting to me is all of your vision so tightly aligns with the mega trends of today, from cloud to mobile to big data. Tell me little bit about the potential.

Haydon: Absolutely. When we think about the networked economy, the networked apps, the network-centric apps, the network itself, one should be able to connect any demand generating or receiving system. We touched on that with Dell Boomi, but it's seamless integration across the piece. We want to be comprehensive, which is adding more collaboration.

The interesting thing about this collaboration is that it starts driving at some levels a critical mass of data. The trend is that the network is intelligent. It's actually able to piece together not just the transaction itself, but who you are. We're quite excited, because this is the massive differentiator of the network. You talked about apps. We have not just the transactional data, but we have the master data, and we can also take other sources of information.

That could be weather, location, stock reports, SEC filings, Dun and Bradstreet writings, whatever you like, to intersect.

So this data plus knowledge gives you information. With SAP, it's a very exciting technology. SAP InfoNet, Supplier InfoNet, is able to leverage network data. Today, it has over 160 feeds. It's smart, meaning it's smart intelligence. It can automatically take those feeds and contextualize.

And that's the real thing we're trying to do—knowing who the user is, knowing the business process they are trying to execute, and also knowing what they are trying to achieve. And it's bringing that information to the point of demand to help them make actionable, intelligent, and sometimes predictive decisions.

Where we would like to go is, heaven forbid there is another tsunami, but let's just work through that use case. You get a news alert there is tsunami in Japan again, a terrible event. What if you knew that, and what if 80 percent of your core, raw material inputs came from there? Just that alert of that to notify you to saying you've got to know that you might well have a supply problem. What are you going to do?

And by the way, here are three or four other suppliers who can supply this material to you, and they're available on the network. What is that worth? Immeasurable.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

By: Helena Schwenk, Principal Analyst, MWD Advisors Posted: 23rd May 2013 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Last week Teradata ran its Integrated Marketing Management conference – Connect 2013  - in London’s O2. The event attracted around 1000 attendees combining prospects and customers from both Aprimo and eCircle (two former acquisitions )and overall delivered a mixed bag of presentations. Some, in my opinion, were too technically- or product-focused, but equally others (especially the customer presentations) seemed to resonate well with the predominately marketing-based audience.

However it was the last presenter of the day, Matt Macgregor from Blue State Digital – Director for the digital rapid response team for President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign – who in my opinion, delivered some of the most compelling content of the conference. His thought-provoking presentation provided an insightful overview into how digital was an influential and integral marketing communication channel for the presidential campaign, in particular for incentivising voter registration, corralling people in fundraising efforts, activating supporters and engaging with voters.

Social and mobile raise your game but don’t forget email

There were a number of interesting takeaways from Matt’s talk. Firstly, and perhaps not surprisingly, social played a big part in campaigning in terms of a medium for sharing voter stories and leveraging its connectedness to make it easier for advocates to share those with other ‘persuadable’ voters. Secondly, Matt revealed that around 25% of the Obama’s campaign’s website traffic came from mobile devices, so as a result the team invested in a responsive site design to maximise conversions and content consumption. Similarly the Quick Donate program allowed supporters to donate easily via SMS, mobile, email or the site and was responsible for raising a staggering $75 million for the campaign.

But while social and mobile – not surprisingly – featured highly in Matt’s presentation, it was a response to a question from the audience that provided an equally revealing insight. When asked what the top 3 digital channels were in the Obama campaign, he replied “email, email, email”. This will no doubt resonate with the conference organiser, Teradata, whose eCircle group is also a provider of email marketing solutions. But it also anecdotally highlights how email still has an important role to play and shouldn’t necessarily be regarded as the poor relation in the digital marketing family.

A/B testing proves its worth

Although it isn’t necessarily new and sexy like social media, email still remains one of the most straightforward and effective ways of communicating with an audience. But more importantly when used in conjunction with analytics it can form a highly persuasive and targeted form of personal communication. During the 2012 campaign for example the campaign team used A/B testing to underpin its email campaigning to understand the impact of different subject lines, different senders and formatting on response and fundraising rates. As can be seen in this article here, the  email campaign was highly successful in raising most of the of the $690 million Obama accumulated online, but interestingly it also highlighted how most people have a nearly limitless capacity for e-mail and often don’t unsubscribe no matter how many they’re sent – a resilience that can’t always be said for other types of online communication channels such as Twitter.

The good news for Teradata, however, is that the company is well placed to take advantage of the interest in email marketing generated from the presentations at Connect 2013. When it acquired eCircle about a year ago it got its hands on a robust email messaging platform and a European-centric customer base. But equally the company has the potential to utilise its background in data warehousing to marry these capabilities with the detailed analytics to help organisations build out sophisticated, highly segmented and targeted email campaigns. If all of its customers saw the same levels of results as Obama 2012, mixing email marketing and analytics will seem like a no-brainer.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 23rd May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

Active Endpoints has been acquired by Informatica. The news was buried in a press release announcing Informatica's latest cloud-based product, which is dated February 20, 2013. It's not immediately clear when the acquisition happened.

The announcement introduced Informatica Cloud Spring 2013, the latest release of its Informatica Cloud family of cloud-based integration and data management applications. The product delivers:

• A new Informatica Cloud Data Masking service to reduce the risk of data breaches during application development and testing.
• A new Informatica Cloud Extend workflow service for advanced business process creation and management in the cloud.
• Enterprise-class cloud integration security and administration enhancements.
• Expanded cloud contact validation and master data management (MDM) applications.
• New Cloud Connectors and Get it Now Cloud Integration Templates on Informatica Marketplace.

Informatica Cloud Spring 2013 delivers Informatica Cloud Extend, technologies that Informatica obtained through the acquisition of Active Endpoints to deliver workflow capabilities for salesforce.com customers. Available today on the AppExchange, this cloud-based application enables sales, marketing and support professionals to:

• Encapsulate and automate best practices across business processes and human workflows.
• Create and maintain workflows composed of data in Salesforce CRM and other applications in the cloud or on-premise.
• Take advantage of guidance trees, a new programming paradigm for non-programmers, to create and publish business process workflows users can access in Salesforce screens, websites and mobile devices

So departs another new innovative entrant to be swallowed by an acquisitive big boy of the software world.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 21st May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

The change of season and, of course, the weather from snow to sunshine here in the UK seems to have coincided with the production of 2 reports on ERP from 2 of the major Magazines aimed at the manufacturing vertical. Logistics Manager article[i] looked at whether ERP has kept time with the changes in supply chains. Manufacturing and Logistics IT article[ii] was a review of ERP with particular emphasis on the views of vendors on mobility and the cloud. Having read these articles, I thought it appropriate to pull the thoughts and views contained in these articles with my own thoughts.

What has changed in the business side of manufacturing? Logistics Manager made a very important point that supply chains depend on the IT systems that support them, in fact it is a critical dependency. Supply chain management has changed considerably over the last decade with networks replacing chains, internationalisation leading transport distance becoming an issue, particularly now in this energy aware and green conscious world. Additionally the collaboration between a company and its suppliers, customers and partners has become much tighter and closer whilst at the same time having to be agile and flexible to changes in the market. The key to supply chains is that they are process and event driven. Now if ERP packages have moved in the way I suggested in 2010 then they should be able to cope with the changed world. What has happened, mostly due to the recession, is that investment in IT has been pretty stagnant and this is particularly true in North America and Western Europe, where budget constraints and legacy systems are more expensive to maintain. However, in the areas of IT infrastructure immaturity, such as Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia/Pacific, there is an increase in software spend. If ERP is still seen as the price of entry for companies, then this means, as I see it, that the SME market (where the future large enterprises are likely to come from) is the area where ERP vendors have to win their footholds. The other key point that comes out of this Logistics manager article is that with geographical dispersal of supply chains, executives need to be able to access information from anywhere, on lots of different devices, so mobility access is the key and that means security associated with this has to be there.

All the major ERP vendors see that it is very important to provide mobile support for the business functions of customer relationship management, call management, transport and route management and inventory management. Mobility is changing the way people work and utilise business information in the field. There is a great quote in the report from Phil Lewis, Business Consulting Director for Infor, "Today's approach to Mobility is aiming for information without boundaries. The ability to work from a mobile device, be it a laptop, tablet or even a smartphone, should not be compromised." Innovation surrounding mobility is set to continue, especially as vendors see more user interfaces converting to HTML5. However a word of warning here; standards on devices are great for application vendors but as far as device vendors are concerned, they restrict their ability to differentiate.

What about the cloud? The introduction of cloud (SaaS) ERP solutions provides a further degree of choice as to how to implement and, as well, opens up opportunities for SMEs to exploit the benefits business control given by ERP. What is interesting to note is that the view of the importance of the cloud by vendors is directly related to whether or not they have the capability! Let me say that cloud is not the right solution for everyone, you have to be able to offset its advantages against a more rigid adherence to the solution provided by the vendor (though they are getting better) as being really assured about availability and security of your data over the ether. In The Manufacturing and Logistics article, it was interesting to note that some vendors had seen a tendency for certain ERP modules to be more likely implemented over the cloud - one of those mentioned was CRM. I think this suggests that what is likely in the future is a hybrid where some modules of the ERP are run in-house whilst other are run in the cloud. An interesting dilemma then for the ERP vendors as to how to make this seamless! The statistics on adoption show that it is still slow, certainly for the manufacturing sector. One thing the cloud does do is offer a really good way to carry out a proof of concept.

The next big issue is big data (didn't really mean that as a pun!). The Manufacturing and Logistics report made a very interesting comment that big data had been heard about by IT but not by manufacturing business users. Anyone who has been involved in the implementation of sensory devices such as bar-codes or RFID knows that the data collected by these devices can be enormous and one of the issue is what do you do with it? Back in the early 2000's I presented a paper at a BI conference on the issue of RFID data positing that the value of data could increase over time rather than decrease and how is it to be handled?. So there is a large amount of data in manufacturing collected in real time coming from sensory devices on the shop floor, in the warehouses and even from customer and supplier locations so there is a need for big data technology to analyse this. I see big data becoming an important issue to manufacturers and retailers as the economy picks up. There is a need to be able to seamlessly integrate internal and external data whilst maintaining that you are comparing apples with apples. To do this requires an effective metadata repository with business rules to decide how to do the comparisons.

What then about social networking? I like this comment that I found in The Manufacturing and Logistics article that social networking is about bringing the consumer IT world into the workforce. Although I would replace the word workforce by business community, as I see it this is being driven by new entrants into the workforce of organisations, who are very computer literate and used to 'Tweeting' and 'Facebooking' information to their friends and associates. Social networking is, in my view, heavily associated with today's mobile never off-line workforce. I see the first key use of social networking in business is to enable multimedia communications within and without an organisation to get assistance on solving an issue. From a marketing viewpoint, social networking also would appear to be an effective broadcasting media for certain types of blanket marketing campaign. The big challenge that I see for ERP vendors is do they create their own social networking capability or do they create secure interfaces to work with the major social networking vendors?

So, why should an organisation consider ERP as a solution in this decade? ERP solutions still solve their original aims of providing a seamless integrated environment between application modules that support the business so that you only have to input the information once - this is particular true as they relate to finance and resource planning. So if you are thinking of purchasing for the first time, or of upgrading or switching to an alternative, the reason and rationale has to be a business one, which will solve specific measurable issues in your business, not an IT one. When you evaluate the different products what you will find is, with a few exceptions, not a lot of difference in functional support. The solutions in the marketplace support al the major functions of Finance, Human Resources, Production Planning, Product and Service management, Inventory Management, Customer and Supplier Management. In addition there is a heavy verticalisation available from all the major solutions to support verticals from machinery to mining, from oil production to aerospace. So where should you look for difference? My suggestions would be:

1. The underling infrastructure - as this is what makes the product agile, flexible and easy to use.
2. Business Intelligence - not just data warehousing and analytics, but also the ability to incorporate contextual information about the data in terms of the process instance that created it.
3. Ability to build a long term relationship with the vendor - selecting an ERP is not a short term arrangement, we are talking of anything up to 20+ years of association. When I am involved in a selection process I always incorporate a chance for the selecting organisation to visit and meet the vendor people (i.e. more than just the sales team) and also to meet or talk to some current customers.
4. My final suggestion for looking for differences is to look at how the ERP vendor supports mobility and the cloud. This is all about being not necessarily at the bleeding edge but at the forefront of the peloton.

[i] Too old to work. Logistics Manager, April 2013

[ii] ERP spreads its wings. Manufacturing and Logistics IT , March 2013