by twieberneit | Jan 15, 2019 | Blog |
The suite is back. I have said and written that a good number of times in the past few years. And that is a good thing (that the suite is back, not that I said it, of course), because one of the major challenges with a best of breed approach is integration. The suite is back, but it is in an incarnation that vastly differs from what we knew about suites back in the times before cloud computing and Salesforce brought back a supremacy of best of breed over the suite. Integrating different pieces of software from different vendors into one coherent whole is easily accounting for one third to one half of project budgets. And this part of the overall cost for implementing new software is often plaid down by best of breed vendors. Which is not a crime, especially if the benefits of the best of breed software outweigh the cost of integration. However. Often it does not. And not openly addressing cost of integration backfires. Always. Believe me. If you research my background well enough you will find out why you should. Little hint: I am not only writing about things. Another strong argument in favor of the suite is the platform war that is currently going on. Why? Simply, because a platform is not only a technical platform. It is more. A platform consists of mainly four pieces: a technical platform the ability of turning data into insight, an ecosystem, and productivity support. And, very importantly, a necessary capability that is provided by the technical platform is integration. Some other aspects include the provision of...
by twieberneit | Aug 1, 2017 | Analysis, Blog |
On July 27, 2017 Salesforce announced the availability of an update to their customer service platform Service Cloud. According to Keith Pearce, VP Marketing, Service Cloud, differentiation in customer service is no more a topic within industries, but across industries. Today, customer service in companies competes against the impression gained in another industry, telco vs. banking, vs airline, vs. … you get the picture. Consequently, winning organizations are concentrating on three areas: platform productivity mobile However, this focus can potentially slow down these organizations because they normally come with trade-offs, like scalability vs. speed of deployment, ease of use vs. complete information, or mobility for customers vs. mobility for agents. Salesforce wants to address these trade-offs with this release by making the solution very easy to set up, easier to customize and enhance, easier to use and finally by offering a new mobile app for agents and supervisors. There is a scripted set up that lets admins deploy a usable application in a short time; Salesforce speaks of less than one day. A component library helps in easily adding relevant functionality via drag and drop in a simple application builder. Of course there are additional components and applications available via the AppExchange market place. Agents shall be made more productive by a clean Kanban-style UI, a tool called Community360 that helps in surfacing community content that a user reviewed before logging an incident, a federated search that is capable of searching across open search compatible providers, and the ability for agents to script tasks. Lastly, there is a new mobile app for agents and supervisors. Here is the complete...
by twieberneit | Jul 28, 2017 | Blog |
For a while now I am contemplating about why companies choose one custserv solution over another. After all the market is pretty crowded. Vendors have a hard time to differentiate themselves. Just looking at G2Crowd one finds 88 Help Desk Solutions. Larger organizations are likely to be influenced by Gartner’s Magic Quadrant on Customer Engagement Centers or the Forrester Wave on Customer Service Solutions. Smaller organizations are probably looking more at the new breed of peer-to-peer review sites, like the aforementioned G2Crowd or GetApp, TrustRadius, Capterra and others. Many companies conduct research and establish an RFP process to determine the best fit; some see a bottom-up approach from team level to corporation. A kind of ‘shadow IT’ emerges to solve a team’s particular problem. This solution over time could get corporate blessing and may even become the main solution. A clear and reliable roadmap is mandatory for all vendors, so no difference here. Same for share of mind – this has become table stakes. But what is it that makes one vendor win over another? Are there patterns? To get more insight I asked some smart people who stay unnamed here – but you know who you are! So What Are Contributing Factors? The good news is that there seem to be only a few factors. Based on the discussions I can roughly group them into six categories. Here they are, in no particular order: A particular feature is needed or desired Suite- vs. Best-of-Breed thinking Size of the customer organization Relationship building Referrals Departmental adoption Of course they are not mutually exclusive. Let me briefly dive into each...
by twieberneit | Jan 12, 2017 | Analysis, Blog |
On January 10, 2017, SAP announced a bundling of their IoT portfolio of initiatives to focus on business outcomes instead of technology while combining the set of emerging products and solutions under the brand name Leonardo – as in Leonardo Da Vinci, one of the most forward looking artists and innovators ever. This announcement substantiates SAPs commitment to invest two billion Euro in IoT over the next 5 years. The new portfolio will combine adaptive applications, big data and connectivity as packaged line-of-business solutions, covering a range of topics. It bases upon a rebranded – and repackaged(?) HANA Cloud Platform, enhanced by the micro services for machine learning that were announced earlier and which I covered here. This enhanced platform is now called SAP Cloud Platform. As per a blog post accompanying the Leonardo announcement, the high level architecture of SAPs new offering looks like below and covers, besides a set of existing applications an IoT adapter – SAP Leonardo for Edge Computing – which serves as a device independent data input layer, essentially a kind of middleware, probably built on or using HCI. a foundational layer – SAP Leonardo Foundation – which includes the IoT business services that are to be exposed, enabling rapid development of applications. This makes up the functional core. and a ‘bus’ layer – SAP Leonardo Bridge – which enables the combination of real time data with applications and processes Leonardo is accompanied by a jump-start enablement program to accompany this initiative. This program includes introductory pricing and is intended to help organizations identify and validate IoT pilots and use cases, including expert staffing...
by twieberneit | Nov 10, 2016 | Analysis, Blog |
In my yesterday’s analysis of SAP’s HANA announcement, I wondered why SAP stays silent on the AI and MachineLearning frontiers. Well, today I know. They saved this announcement for today. And the announcement is a bang. SAP will deliver what they call ‘intelligent business applications’ that are based upon SAP’s new machine learning platform. The platform itself shall be made available with SAPPHIRE NOW 2017. The first significant intelligent application by SAP that is mentioned, is a brand intelligence application that leverages deep learning to analyze brand exposure in video and images to provide ‘accurate, real-time insights into sponsoring and advertising ROI”. You may remember that SAP earlier showcased an application to reduce recruiting bias, which is based on the machine learning platform, too. According to Juergen Mueller, Chief Innovation Officer at SAP, the new machine learning platform is intended to serve SAP’s and their ecosystem’s applications with the goal of creating more business value. Consequently, there are two more aspects to the announcement. SAP launched a partner program dedicated to SAP Application Intelligence. SAP invests into education offerings, starting with a ‘massive open online course’ on Enterprise Machine Learning on their OpenSAP platform. MyPoV This announcement clearly shows that SAP is as serious about machine learning as the company is about leveraging the power of its ecosystem. As I, and many other people, have often said, SAP is a formidable organization if and when it chooses to drive a topic. This is shown here again. And SAP is absolutely on the right track by pursuing this three-pronged approach of delivering a platform with first solutions, encouraging partners, and...
