The Three Pillars of IoT Success

May 26, 2017 by Leave a comment

B. Shimmin

B. Shimmin

Summary Bullets:

  • How can technology vendors guard enterprise IoT buyers against the dangers of cost and complexity?
  • They should endeavor to solve specific IoT problems through readily consumable, outcome-based IoT services.

As my compatriot Kitty Weldon pointed out in a blog post earlier this week, the success or failure of an IoT project isn’t something you stumble on a year or two after rolling out a solution. A recent Global Data Technology IoT Enterprise Survey of more than 1,000 IoT buyers showed that failure happens very early on during the investigation phase of a given deployment and more often than not centers on the cost and complexity of the project at hand. Read more of this post

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Genesys Jumps on the AI Bandwagon, Invites Others Along for the Ride

May 24, 2017 by Leave a comment

B. Shimmin

B. Shimmin

Summary Bullets:

  • At its annual user conference, customer experience management player Genesys introduced Kate, a personified artificial intelligence (AI) platform tailored to augment and automate multimodal customer interactions.
  • Genesys Kate, however, is not meant to compete with AI platforms such as IBM Watson or Salesforce.com Einstein. Instead Kate seeks to blend its own capabilities with those offerings, serving as an open platform.

Personified AI platforms – suddenly every technology vendor seems to have an AI persona that’s eager to strike up a one-on-one conversation. There’s of course IBM Watson, Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant, Salesforce.com Einstein, and Adobe Sensei, but that somewhat lengthy list doesn’t even scratch the surface of what’s available when you bring AI bots like Mitsuku, Poncho, Melody, Rose, and my personal favorite, Dr. AI. And now we have Kate, a personified AI platform introduced by customer experience manager Genesys this week during its annual user conference. Read more of this post

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There’s a New Informatica in Town That Wants to Unleash the Power of Your Data

May 16, 2017 by Leave a comment

B. Shimmin

B. Shimmin

Summary Bullets:

  • At its annual user conference, Informatica quietly introduced an entirely new brand identity, which is designed to free the company from its ETL roots and target enterprise cloud data management.
  • To reach this goal, however, the company intends to do far more than merely switch up its logo and mission statement.

It is not uncommon for a technology vendor to make a break with the past by rolling out a new brand identity. Such efforts typically involve an extravagant launch party, an extensive marketing campaign, and of course, an extremely expensive logo retrofit. On average, these rebrands aren’t a good thing, at least not initially, since they’re often undertaken in response to an existing or anticipated threat. The idea is to create some cognitive dissonance among existing and potential customers, severing existing perceptions and creating new associations that are in tune with current (and hopefully future) market ideals. Read more of this post

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Red Hat Summit 2017: IT Automation Takes One AWS-sized Step Closer to Business Innovation

May 10, 2017 by Leave a comment

Brad Shimmin – Research Director, Business Technology and Software

Summary Bullets:

• Red Hat’s re-energized partnership with Amazon and its continued investment in Red Hat Insights smartly emphasizes AI-driven IT automation as a way to root out the foibles of human-mediated decisions in optimizing hybrid cloud/premises environments.

• Beyond automation, however, Red Hat’s growing focus on big data points to a distinct need within the industry to bring both operational and business analytics together within a single pane of glass.

At Red Hat’s annual customer event in Boston, Massachusetts last week, the industry’s leading purveyor of all things Linux rolled out a series of announcements relating to analytics-driven IT automation and private cloud enablement – two topics that are impactful on their own but superb when combined. Read more of this post

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Huawei Analyst Summit 2017: Huawei, More Open Than You Think When it Comes to Big Data

April 13, 2017 by Leave a comment

B. Shimmin

B. Shimmin

Summary Bullets:

• At its annual Huawei Analyst Summit 2017, Huawei spoke of solutions built on top of two pillars: an open IaaS/PaaS cloud platform paired with an open ecosystem of partners.

• The vendor’s premise? Let Huawei handle the infrastructure (the cloud, pipes and devices, as Huawei puts it), leaving the rest to those who know business outcomes the best.

At its annual Huawei Analyst Summit 2017, the Chinese powerhouse took a surprising turn. At past events the vendor emphasized its ability to squeeze more performance from its sizable portfolio of predominantly hardware-based data center and networking offerings. The objective was simple: demonstrate a better cost/value ratio for high value workloads like video. That approach remains a solid strategy, one that is all too familiar to rival firms like Cisco. This is especially true for vendors seeking attention from the still lucrative telecom operator marketplace.
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Redefining the Law of Data Gravity, One Cloud at a Time

March 31, 2017 by Leave a comment

B. Shimmin

B. Shimmin

Summary Bullets:

• The seemingly immutable law of data gravity, which has kept most large-scale data stores tucked safely away behind the corporate firewalls, is no more.

• Cloud platform providers of all shapes and sizes are actively redefining such laws, showing that even the largest data warehouse can live happily in the clouds.

While attending the aptly named Domopalooza conference in Salt Lake City earlier this month, what struck me the most wasn’t the number of concerts, ski parties, parties and after party parties put on by the host, cloud-borne BI vendor Domo. Oh, that sort of thing is quite normal for the unconventional vendor from American Fork, Utah. I was instead dumbstruck to learn of the vendor’s seemingly crazy, all you can eat cloud business model. That’s right. Domo doesn’t care how much data you dump into its proprietary data warehouse or how many calculations, transformations, joins, etc. you perform upon said data. There’s just one price to pay, and that’s a simple, per user fee.
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AI and Machine Learning Need Developers More Than Data

March 9, 2017 by Leave a comment

B. Shimmin

B. Shimmin

Summary Bullets:

• Google wants to democratize AI and operationalize machine learning (ML) with the release of Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine, a platform that includes developer-friendly APIs and pre-trained data models.

• But what the company really needs isn’t just data, algorithms or even data scientists but instead a new breed of developers, who can build software that can anticipate outcomes.

It’s always the same at the end of a company’s keynote address. After all of the important messages have been conveyed and all of the product announcements have been made, a mid-level corporate mouthpiece will take the stage and provide the audience with some positive reinforcement of what went before. It’s like the closing credits of a film, something that may contain a nugget of interest to the cinephile. More often, it serves as filler, a thematic soundtrack to accompany attendees as they make for the exits.

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What Should Avaya Do Next?

February 21, 2017 by Leave a comment

B. Shimmin

B. Shimmin

Summary Bullets:

  • Assuming Avaya exits Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the next few months, what should the company do to succeed going forward? We entertain five changes we feel necessary for Avaya not just to continue, but to thrive within the rapidly changing unified communications and collaboration market.
  • We emphasize a focus on the public cloud and advanced analytics as well as a return to a more unified product portfolio.

A few days have passed now since I returned from my visit with Avaya at its annual user conference (Avaya Engage) last week in Las Vegas, Nevada. And my opinion hasn’t changed substantially. Avaya is in trouble. However, there is light at the end of the tunnel of its self-administered Chapter 11 filing with the bankruptcy courts. The question, of course, concerns the type of light that awaits Avaya. Will it be the warming rays of our modest sun, or will it be the blinding glare of an oncoming train? I believe it will be the former. I believe that Avaya can succeed long-term within a marketplace that is undergoing a highly disruptive change from hardware to software and services. Read more of this post

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Is BlackBerry Your Next Enterprise IoT Platform Vendor?

January 25, 2017 by Leave a comment

B. Shimmin

B. Shimmin

Summary Bullets:

  • BlackBerry appears to have risen from its own ashes and now seeks to put its intelligent mobile device expertise to work within the ultra-lucrative (and ultra-competitive) IoT marketplace.
  • With a unique set of resources and technologies at the ready, BlackBerry is capable of building an end-to-end platform, but the trick will be for the vendor to work with, not against, established enterprise IoT platform players.

It’s not often that a company is able to rise from its own ashes. Like Mother Nature, the great crucible of modern capitalism doesn’t often grant a stay of execution for those found wanting. See: TWA, Atari, DeLorean Motor Company or Enron. Once-dominant forces to be reckoned with, those companies are no longer with us. For a while, it seemed that the beloved brand BlackBerry was about to join their ranks. Read more of this post

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IoT for Air Quality, Behold the Power of Cooperation

December 21, 2016 by Leave a comment

Brad Shimmin - Research Director, Business Technology and Software

Brad Shimmin – Research Director, Business Technology and Software

Summary Bullets:

• There may be no such thing as true altruism, but it’s safe to say that the multifaceted demands of IoT are creating a perfect storm of advantageous cooperation among technology and service providers, data producers and insight consumers.

• Case in point is IoT environmental sensor network vendor Aclima, which is using Google Street View cars to measure pollution levels within key urban areas in California. Aclima’s use case reveals how companies, residents and governments can help one another by sharing facilities, personal and environmental data.

Maybe it’s just the holiday spirit talking, but I think I “almost” believe in altruism. Don’t get me wrong. I remain a card carrying realist. To me, acts of kindness are indeed kind because they happen to benefit both giver and receiver. There’s nothing wrong with that, really. We give because it makes us feel good, because we anticipate some future reward or reciprocation, or because we feel obligated, which is oddly how one feels both giving and receiving a holiday fruitcake. Read more of this post

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