thomas.wieberneit@aheadcrm.co.nz

Public-, Private-, Hybrid Cloud – Quo Vadis?

Back in 2012 thought leader Esteban Kolsky went through the efforts of defining a pure, open cloud architecture with its three constituting layers: SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, and samples of their interactions. A core focus lies on how an open cloud model solves the issues of security, scalability, and integration. Esteban also makes it abundantly clear that it can easily take 10 to 15 years to be widely adopted. First things first: He is right – at least to quite an extent. Personally I am of the opinion that any open cloud model necessarily includes private, and thus hybrid clouds. I say this while I agree that the panacea is the open model. Private and hybrid models are at least challenged in the security aspect and, to a lesser extent, in the integration challenge with the latter usually being mitigated by maintaining a white list of ‘approved’ applications, technologies, vendors, etc. Scalability shouldn’t be an issue for most companies, given that they work with a data center provider that is worth their salt. The bigger problem of security remains, but here one could argue that it is the same as for non-cloud, on-premise implementations. To a minimum, private and hybrid clouds have their value as transition steps. In reality it is more. Just take VW implementing a private cloud based upon OpenStack, delivered by Mirantis – which are, interestingly enough, not covered by Forrester Research in their Q1 2016 Wave on Private Cloud Software Suites. But I deviate … Cloud Adoption The recent RightScale report on the State of the Cloud tells us that nearly every company uses cloud...

CRM Evolution – Some not so random Thoughts

CRM Evolution 2015 was a very vibrant conference with lots of discussion that included a number of high profile industry influencers. For me as a first time attendee it was amazing how approachable many of these people are. But then this might come with the territory. To understand these takeaways it is important to know that my reason for attending was getting into closer touch with what is going on in the CRM world outside SAP – and New Zealand. So, these are purely notes and thoughts that result from sessions, discussions with influencers, speakers and other conference attendees, and not learnings from vendor briefings. Also, this event was split into three separate conferences: CRM Evolution Customer Service Experience Speechtek I nearly exclusively concentrated on CRMEvolution and one session from the Customer Service Experience. First things first: Was it worthwhile coming all the way from NZ? This is very clearly a yes. Paul Greenberg and the team did an amazing job in lining up interesting speakers. What now are the topics that currently seem to move the industry in random order? Customer engagement (CEM), customer experience (CEX), customer journey (CJ) and how these topics relate to CRM Big Data, with a view on the Internet of Things IoT, and related to it: Predictive analytics How to do things CRM right Not surprisingly: The Future of CRM (technology as well as industry) Also not surprisingly these are all interrelated. CEM, CEX, CJ and CRM The intersection of these three topics is extremely interesting. These are also controversially discussed topics. Paul Greenberg recently, in another “stake in the ground” article, gave...