Customer Experience – It is all in the Data. Really?
A while after my earlier discussion with Abinash Tripathy from Helpshift about the value for customer experience of bots in customer support he contacted me with some exciting news about what he and his team are doing now. Believe me, it is interesting – but read for yourself. Our conversation, of course, led on to another vivid discussion about things to come and things that in our opinions should come. The bottom line is that we live in a data driven, always on, real-time world, where prediction of events or the ability to suggest an action is becoming increasingly a differentiator … be it in a B2B- or a B2C world. Think of Rolls-Royce selling uptime of their engines, entire airplanes nearly continuously sending telemetry data “home”, or the massive amount of data that a Formula 1 car continually sends in order for the team to take proper real-time decisions. Any car already collects a lot of data – it just needs to get connected to allow for prediction of maintenance to prevent failures. Or think of entire power grids that are already instrumented in a way that allows the operator to predict a failure several days in advance, so that the affected element can get fixed before it fails. It is all in the data? The secret is in having the data. And in the algorithms, be they event- and rule based, or more sophisticated and using machine- or deep learning. Neither data nor algorithms alone are the goal. Because what is needed is actionable insight. Actionable insight emerges only if the right algorithms are applied to the...
Clash of Titans – SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Oracle Quo Vadis?
Following all those announcements of AI, machine learning, IoT, IaaS, PaaS and what not over the past months, I was beginning to wonder where the big business software vendors are going. What is the game plan of Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP? How does newcomer Adobe fit in there? Maybe Amazon and Google, too; or Facebook. It is a time for another Quo Vadis – this time: Quo Vadis, industry? Clash of Titans In the last about 2 – 3 years we have seen a strong acceleration of innovation, or at least talk about it. Cloud computing, offering nearly unlimited scalability and elasticity of computing resources has become main stream. Cloud computing also allows for nearly 100 per cent uptime Since the advent of the iPhone (yes, I know this was earlier than 2013) the proliferation of sensors has increased a lot, resulting in them becoming cheaper and cheaper, allowing for an increasing number of data rich applications This has also driven fast mobile connectivity, which has become nearly ubiquitous; maybe except a few blessed spots on this planet, which will be covered soon, too. Think of Google’s Balloon project or Facebook’s drone Memory has become dirt cheap, and fast In-memory technologies, No-SQL databases, Hadoop, Spark, and improvements of analytics algorithms make it possible to work with huge sets of data in real time The (re-)emergence of AI technologies, progress in machine learning and deep learning, enabled by the now available computing power, help in pattern recognition that allows machine driven suggestion, prediction, and prescription of actions, based upon huge amounts of data Data, be it machine-generated or human created...
Microsoft and Adobe announce a WOW partnership
Today Microsoft and Adobe announced a deep strategic partnership. Adobe will make Microsoft Azure its preferred cloud platform for their Marketing, Creative, and Document Clouds; Microsoft in turn will make Adobe Marketing Cloud its preferred marketing service for the Dynamics 365 Enterprise Edition. Wow! That is a game changer in the CRM world. It takes the other tier one players, especially Salesforce, and Oracle, following their AI announcements, plus SugarCRM, head on. While I expect some AI driven marketing functionality being announced near term the initial benefit is a leading marketing tool being accessible for Microsoft. This partnership is also a blow to Oracles IaaS story as it drives load to Azure where Oracle seems to focus on their existing customer base. Well, and then there is AWS, too … And it should be highly beneficial for both companies. Not talking about the benefits of running on a powerful cloud platform Adobe with Cortana gets access to and likely will be integrated into a leading AI and machine learning platform. Conversely, the so far not too strong marketing functionality in Dynamics CRM gets a significant boost by getting integrated with one of the hottest marketing clouds that are around at the moment. The synergies that can be generated by tightly integrating a powerful real time analytics and AI platform, powerful productivity applications, and a strong marketing platform can hardly be overestimated. This is very good news for Microsoft Dynamics customers once the systems actually are running on a harmonized data model. Till then the prospects are highly exciting. As a result, as per the announcement, customers will be able...