Big data’s big payoff arrives as customer experience insights drive new business advantages

The power of big data technology is being successfully applied to understanding such complex unknowns as consumer sentiment and even intent. And that understanding then vastly improves how retailers and myriad service providers manage their users' experiences -- increasingly in real time.
Fortunately, today's consumers are quite willing to share their intents and sentiments via social media, if you can gather and process the information. Hence the rapidly developing field of social customer relationship management, or Social CRM.

Listen to the podcast. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

Part of the equation for making Social CRM effective comes from properly capturing the natural language knowledge delivered through the many social channels available to users. But even that is but a first step to being able to gain ever-deeper analysis, and rapidly and securely making those insights available where they pay off best.

And so the next BriefingsDirect thought leader discussion brings together customer analytics services provider Attensity, with its natural-language processing (NLP) technology, and HP Vertica, with big data analytics capabilities, to explain how to effectively listen to the social web and rapidly gain valuable insights and actionable intelligence.

Our guests are Howard Lau, Chairman and CEO of Attensity, and Chris Selland, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at HP Vertica. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner:  Sellers and marketers worldwide have always wanted to know what their customers are anticipating or what they want next. I guess we could go back hundreds of years with these questions.

But as someone said recently, it seems that the ability to know what customers want and how to respond to them rapidly has changed more in the last 5 years than in the past 500. Do you agree with that? And why is that the case? What’s so new and different?

Lau: What has happened and emerged in the past 10 years or so, especially in the world of Twitter -- Twitter has been around since 2006 -- is that consumers are finding a voice to express their opinions about companies, products and brands. They can express their voice immediately through social channels.

That’s one of the new emerging things where, not only are they finding their voice online, but they’re also realizing that they’re able to amplify that voice by connecting with their friends and their followers.

JetBlue Case Study

NY-based JetBlue Airways created a new airline market category based on value, service, and style

Goals:

• Provide a unique flying experience that truly satisfies each individual customer and improves services quality
• Better understand and meet customer needs, as amenities such as its individual TVs and spacious leather seats are no longer enough to set them apart from the competition

Solution:

• Attensity Analyze, powered by HP HAVEn with HP Vertica Analytics Engine

Results:

• Instituted Customer Bill of Rights
• More clearly understand what customers need and are able to make improvements and be proactive
• Track complaints by plane’s tail number, allowing the customer service organization to see which planes have the most and fewest  issues

See more at:
http://www.attensity.com/2014/04/02/jetblue-airways/

Gardner: Why is that making such a big difference in how we know what customers  want? I understand that the social part is new and innovative, but how is this changing marketing?

Lau: The way things have happened before is that companies, as they engage with consumers, controlled the conversation. Whether you fill in an online form or you call an 800 number for customer service or purchase, you’re greeted initially with an automated prompt, and the whole prompt system navigates your engagement.

Lau

What makes Social CRM so unique and empowering for consumers is that, for the first time, it’s transferring the control and ownership of the conversation to the consumer, the customer. What that means is that the customer now controls what they want to talk about, where they want to talk about it, and what channel they want to use to communicate their needs or issues.

They don’t want to do it in a predefined form, where you check off boxes or answer specific prompts. They want to express their interests more organically and use the company’s branded channels on Facebook and Twitter and non-branded channels on industry forums and communities. That’s what’s key about Social CRM and that’s what’s so unique about this new generation of products to analyze the social web.

Gardner: Let’s go to Chris Selland. Chris, HP Vertica is dealing with a lot of organizations that are trying to do new and innovative things with marketing. Do you also agree that marketing and what we can do have shifted just dramatically in the last five years? Has it really changed the game?.

Selland: There’s been a very dramatic shift in the last five years in marketing. That’s driven, not exclusively, but certainly heavily, by what’s been going on in the social-media world -- Twitter and other channels, Facebook, LinkedIn, and so forth.

Selland

It has had two impacts. First, it has amplified the voice of the customer. I always remember that commercial about I will tell two friends and she will tell two friends, and so on. Customer voice has always had an impact, but the impact of customer voice these days is dramatically amplified by social media.

The other thing that’s really changed the game entirely is that now organizations that are seeking to understand their customers can no longer exclusively rely on internal data, and by internal data I mean things like customer relationship management (CRM).

In the past, when I, as a marketer, or any customer-facing exec running support or something else, wanted to understand my customer relationships, as long as we have had computers and applications had been able to look at something like my CRM system to see when my customer called the call center or when they bought something. Or I can view my transaction logs with them.

But what I haven't been able to look at and analyze is what they are doing when they’re not interacting with me, when they are interacting with the world, or when my customer is tweeting or on Facebook. Obviously, there is a very rich vein of data there. There is also a lot of noise to screen through, but if you do it right, there is potentially a very rich vein of data to help enhance relationships.

As I said, companies can choose to ignore that, but generally that would be strategically disadvantageous to do. Most companies recognize that there's a tremendous amount of data out there that doesn’t belong to me and that’s not necessarily all about me, but I can certainly use it to understand my present and future customers better.

If you interview a typical consumer, when are you more truthful, when you are interacting directly with the company or when you are actually tweeting or making recommendations to your friends or liking something on Facebook, a lot of the real information is outside of the walls of traditional IT. That’s what’s really changed things dramatically as well.

Quite a challenge

Gardner: Of course, that’s also provided quite a challenge when the information is in the form of sentiment or intent that we see through social interactions. It's more difficult to attain that and assess it.

Let’s go back to Howard. What are some of the challenges when it comes to getting information, maybe through NLP in order to extend it into this analysis capability?

Lau: When people go online in a social realm, they don’t think about their intent. They just express themselves. So the challenge is letting people communicate the way they choose to communicate and then try to figure out and infer what is their intent and their sentiment.

Trying to determine that is what we do using NLP in an effort to understand what the chatter is about and what the sentiment is about that chatter.

When you get down to what people are talking about, you have to understand from which domain they’re talking.

Gardner: In doing so, have you developed limits in terms of what you can do with the technology? It seems like this is a fairly a vast amount of information?

Lau: It's vast, and it's also very domain specific. There’s different terminology based on the domain. For example, in the hospitality and travel industry, when you use the word “service,” service means the service you are getting from the hotel or from the airline.

But when you use word “service” in the telecommunications space, that means something totally different. It means, your service plan, how many minutes you have, do you have text, and so forth.

So when you get down to what people are talking about, you have to understand from which domain they’re talking, infer their meaning and understand their sentiments.

Gardner: So there is a difficult issue in terms of language issues and then there are also technology issues around scale and depth, but let’s stick to the ones about NLP. What is it that Attensity does in order to solve that problem?

Ingesting data

Lau: First thing is that we ingest a tremendous amount of data. Most of it is social, but we also ingest company’s internal emails, customer notes, employee notes, and online surveys.

Then, we analyze it and annotate it. Part of the annotation is trying to explain the meaning of a sentence or a sentence fragment. The way we do annotations is driven by our proprietary NLP technology.

One of the first things we do is figure out who is this person and what he’s talking about. We’re trying to find the right industry domain that they are talking about and then distill that into the actual meaning -- the intent, as well as the sentiment.

Gardner: Howard, tell me a little bit more about how your relationship with HP has evolved. You have been working with Vertica for a while. Tell us a little bit about why Vertica was of interest to you as you’re trying to accomplish your goals with NLP.

Lau: With the annotations, we generate a lot of intelligence, a lot of metadata. Prior to our relationship with HP, we basically serviced the online surveys and certain internal notes and customer notes for corporations. As we embraced social, we had an explosion of content and annotations.

We’re trying to find the right industry domain that they are talking about and then distill that into the actual meaning -- the intent, as well as the sentiment.

For us, our relationship with HP was indispensable. HAVEn is not just a product; it's a platform. And it's a platform that scales well, not just handling the process of injecting large amounts of data, but also creating stores, a large store for us, as well as customer stores for each of our clients.

There’s absolutely no way we could have scaled our solution to address the continuing growth of the social realm without this relationship and partnership we have with HP and on the HAVEn platform.

Gardner: Just to be clear, HAVEn, of course, includes quite a few things. Maybe you could just help us understand which elements of HAVEn you’re using and which ones are the most beneficial to you?

Lau: First, it's Vertica. We use Vertica for every customer we have for analytical tools. Vertica sits behind that. Then, for managing the whole ingestion and the storage of the documents that we get from the social space, we use Hadoop and HBase from Hadoop. That’s how we embraced the HAVEn platform.

Gardner: Chris Selland, what is it about the Attensity use case that you think demonstrates some unique characteristics of Vertica and perhaps even more elements of HAVEn?

Complementary nature

Selland: First of all, it demonstrates the complementary nature of Vertica and Hadoop. The Vertica platform has been built to do very high-performance analytics on very large volumes of data. That’s really what we’re all about.

Obviously, Hadoop is also built to scale for very large volumes of data, and so we have bidirectional integration, actually huge integration and increasing convergence with Hadoop. Attensity is doing a great job of showing that.

Then, as we were talking about, it’s just the massive volumes of data that they’re managing. When you’re in the realm of the social world, again, it's not just the volume. I always say that big data is not just big, but it's the velocity, the variety, the ability to ingest very fast, and interpret, analyze, and produce results very fast. That’s really what the Vertica engine is all about, and it’s doing that with very high performance.

It's a very important market segment for us, and it's great to have partners. Vertica is a platform. We rely on our partners to provide solutions to run our platforms. It's social CRM and social analytics and all the kinds of solutions we’re looking to highlight. We love it when we have great partners like Attensity bringing those to market, being successful, and making our joint customers successful.

The Vertica platform has been built to do very high-performance analytics on very large volumes of data. That’s really what we’re all about.

Gardner: Of course, Howard, your customers are probably not so much concerned about what’s going on underneath the hood, whether it's Vertica, HAVEn, or Hadoop. They’re interested in getting results. I’d like to go back to that Social CRM aspect of our discussion and help people understand why that can be so beneficial, which then of course makes it clear why the technology that supports it is so important.

Can you give us any examples, Howard, of where people have used Social CRM, where they have leveraged NLP and Attensity and what that’s done for them in real business terms?

Lau: Absolutely. Some of the industries we service include industries such as telecommunications, hospitality, travel, consumer electronics, financial services, and eCommerce. We provide the services, the tools for our customers and they implement them for very different use cases based on their priorities.

One of the leading prepaid mobile phone providers use Attensity’s deep semantic approach to analyze sentiment about their service and alert the brand management teams to their unique voice of the customer (VoC). 

Attensity effectively measures the overall experience for each brand taking into account their different products and services to determine the accurate wants and needs of the customer. Their whole return-on-investment (ROI) story is how can they use what’s going on in the social realm to manage their install base and minimize customer churn.

Focusing on that, they were able to achieve a 25 percent reduction in customer churn. Now, in the mobile telco space, that directly translates into a 25 percent increase in revenue. Keep in mind that this company is somewhere between half a billion to one billion dollars in revenue. That’s a very sizable return on investment.

We also have other cases where we have an insurance company in the financial services space, and they focus on fraud detection. They use our technology, not only in social space, but also reviewing claims. They were able to reduce workers’ compensation pretty dramatically, to a tune of over $25 million annually, just using our technology, and using our NLP to analyze the data and then figure out which ones they could go after to manage their fraud cost.

Looking toward the future

Gardner: Where do we go next with this, Howard? We have a capability to deal with large data and the variety of data. We certainly have a great treasure trove of information available from the social media and social web. Combining that with the traditional datasets in CRM, where do you go next? Are you looking for even more datasets and what do you have your eye on?

Lau: Getting more datasets is always helpful. The more you get, the more complete your analysis is, but the view right now is just analyzing big data. We are finding that, within that big data, there are tremendous amounts of individual voices. So the goal is to figure out where these individual voices are and how to build relationships with ones that are important to you.

I’m going to go back to a book that Malcolm Gladwell wrote way back called The Tipping Point. He talks about mavens and the influence of mavens. In the social chatter, there are all these people that have outside influence on other people. The next step in applying our NLP technology in the social realm is uncovering these mavens, so that companies can build relationships with these outside influencers. So that’s one of the next things that we’re really excited about.

Gardner: Tell us also where you are going in terms of services for business. Obviously we have talked about marketing, but are their other aspects -- maybe product development? How deeply does this extend into how it can influence a business, not just on the selling and marketing, but perhaps even knowing where their business should be going, a strategy level?

Having an analytical store where you can do what-if scenarios after the fact is incredibly useful for them.

Lau: When people hear about social, the first thing they do is listen, but there is a whole model for how people adopt business solutions in the social realm. We have a model we call LARA, and it stands for Listen, Analyze, Relate, and Act.

The first thing that a lot of companies do is become aware that they need to pay attention to what’s being discussed socially. So they put out these listening posts and they use us to ingest all this information and analyze it for them. The benefit of that is sentiment analysis on companies, on brands, and products. They want this type of sentiment in real time, and we’re able to deliver it in real time.

The next thing companies want to do is analyze the data they have accumulated, and it's for variety of different use cases. I mentioned fraud detection and customer churn. They also want to surface emerging trends. Having an analytical store where you can do what-if scenarios after the fact is incredibly useful for them.

Once they have the store of customer data and they’ve analyzed and segmented their customers, they want to define how they want to relate to the customers, in aggregate or in smaller segments.

The last and final thing they want to do as part of the whole consumer experience is figure out how to engage with the ones that are important to them.

As an example, if someone tweets that they like this phone, that’s great  sentiment. But if somebody else tweets that they don’t like the service they’re getting from this mobile phone provider, if that mobile phone provider is an Attensity customer, we actually take that tweet, route it into their customer-care organization, route it to the proper person, and respond to someone in the social realm.

This ability to kind of close that loop, from a person just tweeting generally to his friends about an experience, and then actually getting the customer to hear them and respond to them is incredibly powerful for organizations.

Following the path

Gardner: For companies that see the value here pretty readily, what steps should they take in order to be in the position to follow that path, that LARA path? Do they need to gather this data themselves? Should they try to ramp up how social media interactions are focused on their products or services? Are there any steps that companies should take in order to better leverage something like Attensity, that’s built on something like Vertica, to get these really powerful insights? Howard?

Lau: That’s part of the value that we bring. All the customer needs to do is recognize that social is important for them. We’re not just talking about corporations that are in the B2C space, but also in the B2B. Once they have that recognition, we’ll handle it for them afterwards.

Part of our products and services offering is that we ingest all this data for them, whether from the social sphere or in the companies emails or customer service notes. We ingest all that information, and they're all defined by one common trait, which is that they are unstructured data. We apply our NLP technology to provide an understanding of the big stream of data and then we create the analytical store for them.

All companies need to do is recognize the importance of wanting to hear their customers, listen to the customers, and ultimately, engage with them socially. They just have to have that motivation, and we will work with them as a partner to realize that solution for them.

Part of our products and services offering is that we ingest all this data for them, whether from the social sphere or in the companies emails or customer service notes.

Gardner: Chris Selland, I’m thinking that organizations that are sophisticated about this will go to a company like Attensity and get some great value, but eventually they’re going to want to try to get that holistic view of analysis. That means that, not only would they leverage what services and insights that Attensity could provide to them, but they’re going to want to share and correlate and integrate that with what they have going on internally and across many other systems.

Is there something about HAVEn that we should bring out for them in terms of open standards and integration capabilities that allows, over time, for more and more of these different data activities to relate to one another, so that we do get a whole greater than the sum of the parts?

Selland: HAVEn certainly provides a very broad platform of which, as we mentioned, Vertica is obviously a key part, the V in the middle. Yes is the short answer. The solutions ultimately need to be part of a much broader data architecture and strategy around how to leverage all sorts of different types of data, that’s not even necessarily customer data.

Just to give you an example and to make that tangible, there was an airline that I was engaged with not too long ago, probably about a year-and-a-half ago at this point. I can’t name them, but it's a well-known airline, and it was one that didn’t have a particularly good reputation for customer service.

They were working on their social-media strategy and trying to figure out how to make customers who were tweeting unhappily that they hated the airline say nicer things -- so how to analyze and respond more quickly.

What they quickly discovered was the reason so many of these customers were angry and saying they hated the airline was that their flight wasn’t on time. What they also realized was they had an awful lot of data on their maintenance operation, and sensor data from the planes, and so on from their fleet.

Predictive maintenance

They saw that by maybe doing a better job of predictive maintenance, keeping their flights on time, and keeping their fleets better maintained, they would actually have much more impact on customer satisfaction than responding to the tweet from the customer who was stranded, which kind of makes sense, if you think about it.

I just bring that example out because that’s an example of data that has nothing to do with the customer. It might be a sensor on an engine, or it might be a performance data of some sort, but it's related obviously to customer satisfaction.

So ultimately, yes, there needs to be a data infrastructure and a data strategy that spans the different solutions. It's not to say you don’t absolutely still need Social CRM solutions and all sorts of different solutions, predictive maintenance solutions and operational, financial analytic solutions, but ultimately the data infrastructure needs to be unified.

That’s really where this is going next. In many leading organizations that’s where it's going already, which is, these solutions absolutely play a key role, but they can’t be 24/7. So there needs to be an infrastructure and a strategy behind them that is very, very holistic.

What he’s driving towards is a world where it's really the Internet of Things, where everything is wired to the Internet and they broadcast messages or communicate messages related to their purpose and their focus. 

We're talking about the competitive bar moving here, and that’s the direction that the competitive bar is going to continue to move in.

Gardner: Howard, do you have any reaction to what Chris has said in terms of seeing a value of a holistic data architecture, not only from what Attensity can do, but extending it across many aspects of business?

Lau: I totally agree with what Chris just said. What he’s driving towards is a world where it's really the Internet of Things, where everything is wired to the Internet and they broadcast messages or communicate messages related to their purpose and their focus. 

Where we provide our value is that before we get to the world of Internet of Things, there is the Internet of People. People need to express themselves the way they normally do. Where we add value is trying to understand, distill the customers in a person’s voice, and have that complement the future of the Internet of Things.

I totally agree that having an integrated architecture, integrated approach to data management, big data management is crucial going forward.

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Modern supply chains — How innovative sellers engage customers in entirely new ways

The next BriefingsDirect case study interview explores the new face of customer engagement and procurement modernization by examining how MSC Industrial Supply is improving how they define and relate to their customers in the manufacturing sector.

MSC has been using the Ariba Network to innovatively bolster customer engagements, and to provide new solutions to their customers based on increased collaboration, information flow and buying trends analysis.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Ariba, an SAP company.

BriefingsDirect had an opportunity to uncover more about about such new, agile business services at the recent 2014 Ariba LIVE Conference in Las Vegas when we spoke to Erik Gershwind, President and CEO of MSC Industrial Supply in Melville, New York. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: What procurement pressures are your customers facing? Why are they looking to change things? What's wrong with the status quo?

Gershwind: Most of our customers are North American manufacturers. One of the sea changes that we have seen occur, particular since the 2008-2009 global recession, is if you look back for the past two decades, there was a heavy focus by procurement, supply chain, and finance organizations on price, on cost.

Gershwind

Of course, that's still critically important, but since the 2008-2009 recession, businesses around the world, and certainly manufacturers in North America, now have a much greater awareness on the importance of cash flow and speed through the supply chain.

That's probably the biggest thing that we’ve seen in the past few years. Our customers are telling us that speed of the supply chain, getting to market faster, so they can have more of their products into their customers’ hands faster, is becoming a much bigger priority.

Gardner: So to be swift, agile, and lean in the way you go to market requires that you look at your internal processes, and get lean there. Is that right?

Gershwind: Dana, that’s exactly right. Leaner supply chains turn into shorter lead times. Shorter lead times mean faster speed to market. And all of that requires really tight dependency from every single link in the supply chain.

What we’ve found is that everything that’s happening in our supply chain right now is driven by the end-user, what's happening with the customer, but that customer’s needs are working their way back very quickly.

And collaboration, which is enabled by technology, is making it critically important in order to be effective in leaning things out.

Gardner: I certainly want to learn more about how you’re modernizing procurement and bringing benefits, but first, tell us a little bit about MSC, for those of our listeners and readers who are not familiar with you.

Over a million items

Gershwind: MSC is a distributor of industrial supplies. We sell over a million items, primarily into manufacturing or any maintenance environment. That could be anything from a safety glove, to an abrasive, to the most advanced metal cutting tools that are used in the manufacturing process.

We exist so that we can help businesses focus on their business. We do that by ensuring that supply chains run smoothly. Our small part in that bigger mission is around taking the complexity, the obstacles, and the inefficiencies out of maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) materials.

We were founded over 70 years ago in a tiny storefront on the lower East Side of Manhattan, and everybody at MSC, including myself, has been part of what's been an amazing growth story.

We focus on anything that's an indirect part of a production process. So not the raw materials, not the direct stuff, but all of the other things that keep plants running. That’s what we specialize in.

We focus on anything that's an indirect part of a production process.

Gardner: Another thing that’s going on, in addition to business pressure to be lean and agile, are some technology improvements over the past several years. One of those is a topic of the day, a hot topic, big data and the analytics that you can derive from more and more types of content and gain more and more insight.

How do you get information or acquire insights or analysis that can allow you to then bring better approaches to your customers in helping them be lean and efficient?

Gershwind: Historically, when I look at the core assets of MSC as a distributor, there were three things I would highlight: our people, first and foremost; our inventory; and our distribution centers, our physical assets.

What we’re quickly realizing is that there's a fourth one that’s every bit as important as the other three assets. That's information. You’re absolutely right. With every transaction that occurs, especially because of technology now, there's learning in there.

Drive improvements

To answer your question, we’re using technology to help us harvest that data, use it to drive improvements within our own four walls, but more importantly, with our customers and with our suppliers.

I’ll give you two examples of how we’re employing technology. One is Ariba. Ariba is the perfect platform for connecting buyers and sellers. It's a network, but it's a network that leaves footprints. With every transaction, there’s a footprint left behind that’s waiting to be mined for operational improvements.

Another example is our vending initiative. We at MSC will take a little piece of ourselves and put a vending machine on the plant floor of our customers to store tools and let them take responsibility for procurement. Certainly, one advantage is security and inventory optimization, but there is information to be mined in each one of those machines, and we’re using that to help our customers.

Gardner: Tell me about your history of working with Ariba. How long have you been doing it, and what are some of the chief benefits that you see in using Ariba's Network and various cloud-based services to conduct your own procurement and tighten up your own processes?

Gershwind: MSC has been a seller on the Ariba Network for well over a decade. If you’ll bear with me, I’ll share a quick story, a trip down memory lane. One of our very first Ariba interactions was close to 15 years ago. One of our customers at the time, a big manufacturer, asked us if we could get up and running on the Ariba Network in less than a month's time.

It’s bringing business networking to happen faster, more efficiently, and more frequently.

The three partners together -- the customer, MSC, and Ariba -- rolled up our sleeves. We had teams working on the same side of the table for a month straight. It was a great example of collaboration.

And I still remember us huddled around the computer screen, waiting for that first transaction to go through. I’m proud to say that that customer relationship is one of the best we have still today.

In terms of the benefits that we as a seller see, there are three things I would point to.

Number one is certainly enhanced revenue growth. Number two is cost savings, because transactions are now done electronically. But I would call out the third one as the most important. Ariba is helping us collaborate. It’s bringing business networking to happen faster, more efficiently, and more frequently. And those collaborations are resulting in innovations to our supply chains collectively and are driving improvements.

Gardner: Erik, I’d like to return to this notion of the vending machines that, as you said, was an extension of your business into the actual physical plant of your customers. This reminds me of what happens in technology on the Internet. For big bundles of objects and data, rather than going from the server of the originator down to the individual user, we have what we call content delivery networks (CDNs), where we put those objects out as far toward the last mile as possible.

It seems to me that this is an interesting development for physical goods, and you also, of course, get the data back on how they are used. Explain to me your rationale and how far you’ve taken this into the market, this concept of the extension of your physical distribution capabilities into the very physical plant of your customers.

Critical element

Gershwind: Vending and the idea of extending ourselves into our customers’ supply chains is a critical element of fulfilling our mission of helping supply chains run more effectively.

I’ll share a quick example with you. This is a customer that uses vending machines for us. This customer has about 150 vending machines installed as part of an MSC system across 75 locations in North America, and that system is yielding tremendous benefits for them.

Recently their MRO category manager was in New York and shared with me that at one site in Alabama, one of this company’s locations, their people were doing a mile-long walk there and back just to get to a centralized storeroom and get a supply replacement or part of a tool.

Think about that for a second, a mile walk. If somebody is doing that just once a day, and by the way, many are doing it multiple times a day, they’re walking a marathon by the end of the month. So by bringing inventory closer to where work is getting done, this company is saving time and they are translating that time savings into real dollar savings.

There's no such thing anymore as "my" supply chain and "your" supply chain. It’s one supply chain.

Gardner: I suppose there is also a common thread here with mobility, where people can use their mobile devices or smartphones to conduct businesses, activities, and processes and allow for check-offs, okays, and so forth, reducing that last mile and compressing the distance.

It also reminds me of being able to, in a sense, cross organizational boundaries. They become fuzzy. Your organization is inside another, for example.

Let's take this to a theoretical level. As we look three, four, or five years down the road, is the nature of buyer and seller changing? Are we really combining them into a common supply-chain ecosystem, where there isn’t necessarily an adversarial relationship, but something different, more collaborative?

Gershwind: Dana, you just hit the keyword. It's collaboration. The way we look at it, we’re all part of one supply chain. There's no such thing anymore as "my" supply chain and "your" supply chain. It’s one supply chain, and we are all interdependent parts of the one bigger supply chain. The reality is that we can't be effective without each other, and that's how business is going to be run. The beauty of Ariba, more and more, is that it's making that collaboration happen faster, more efficiently, and more effectively.

Gardner: Now, what about the data, returning to that subject. It’s okay with you to share data with Ariba and Ariba to share data with you. Then, we extrapolate that across industries, verticals, and go global. The amount of information we’re gathering, even anonymized and private, gives us great insights. We can start to be more predictive. That is to say, you know your supply chain, what your customers will demand maybe quite a bit before, or we can identify risks when things go amiss, sooner rather than later.

So do you have any thoughts about the future of analysis and intelligence when we apply it to the supply chain equation?

Information business

Gershwind: It goes back to the idea that, as a distributor, we used to think of ourselves as being in the hard goods business, and of course, we still are, and always will be, but we’re also in the information business.

The biggest change and trend that I would point to is the idea that information is now being used beyond our own four walls. At MSC, we always did a fairly decent job of mining our own data for supply chain improvements, forecasting, and understanding what to purchase.

What’s now happening, and it all starts because of our customers’ needs, that’s working its way back through the supply chain, is data and information is now being used to help our customers, and even our suppliers run their businesses better.

So the vending example I gave you is a great one. As I said, each one of those electronic transactions is a footprint. It’s the same thing with our website. E-commerce now represents nearly 50 percent of MSC’s revenues. Every single one of those transactions leaves behind little breadcrumbs that give us insights that we can then use and share with our customers and further back in the supply chain with our suppliers.

I don't think anybody can do it alone anymore.

Gardner: It seems to me, Erik, that it requires a third party like the Ariba Network to aggregate and bring intelligence to bear on this massive data. I know that they’re leveraging the HANA platform from SAP more and more to do that sort of big-data analysis and intelligence gathering.

How important is it for you to look at that third party and see them in a trusted fashion? Could you do this alone, and are there many other organizations that can fill the role like Ariba Network is?

Gershwind: I don't think anybody can do it alone anymore. That's really the nature of the supply chain that we just talked about. What Ariba does is bring businesses together.

Think of it as a virtual networking forum. It used to be that, in the old days, you were able to network when you got together maybe once a quarter. Ariba is letting that happen in real time, all the time.

Are there others doing it? Maybe, but none that we trust more than Ariba. As I said, we’ve been doing it for well over a decade with them and we view them as an extension of ourselves into our customers.

Gardner: We’re about out of time, but let’s look to the future. Do you have any ideas about what you’d like to see from your unique position in the supply chain business, in manufacturing, and in indirect goods? What would you like to see for the next revolution?

Indirect materials

Gershwind: The one thing I would point to that we haven't talked about is the opportunity that’s sitting right in front of procurement and supply chain, when it comes to indirect materials. For the last decade or so, procurement has done a wonderful job cleaning up direct materials, getting clear line of sight, optimizing the supply chain, and taking cost out.

Earlier this morning, in the general session, I referred to direct materials as the garage of the house, because everybody goes in, it’s a high profile spot, everybody is in it, it’s core to your operations, and it’s gotten a lot of attention.

Indirect materials is like the attic of your house. If it's anything like my attic, it’s neglected, the light bulb hasn't been replaced. So it’s dark and you can't see what's going on.

What we do know is that today, sitting in North American businesses, is $145 billion of MRO inventory alone, let alone broader indirect materials. We also know that 70 percent of that is likely never to be used.

So sitting in front of procurement is a $100 billion opportunity. It's not just the job of procurement, but all of us as a supply chain. It's sitting there waiting for us.

So sitting in front of procurement is a $100 billion opportunity. It's not just the job of procurement, but all of us as a supply chain. It's sitting there waiting for us.

Gardner: What do you mean? How do we attack this problem, clean up the attic, as it were? Do we need to have better inventory? Do we have just-in-time supply chain, ordering and fulfillment? What is it that we need to bring to indirect that’s missing?

Gershwind: There are three things that we want to bring to indirect procurement and get at the attic. Number one is looking for time. The natural bias is to focus on cost, but what we’ve come to learn with our customers who are doing it well is that, if you focus on time savings, the cost savings does follow. That's number one.

Number two, we need light. We need light up there and we need to bring a flashlight with us. That flashlight is technology -- technology like Ariba. Use technology as the flashlight.

And the third thing, and we’ve been hitting on it all morning here, is collaboration. Get another set of eyes. It's hard to see things by yourself. You can't be successful on your own. So bring partners in and help you attack that $100 billion.

Gardner: So we are really talking about modernizing indirect procurement in ways that we have already established. We know these things work and we just have to establish the will and then bring it into that part of the business.

Gershwind: That’s it. It’s about taking what we have already done in the garage and applying it to the attic. That’s right.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Ariba, an SAP company.

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Microsoft SharePoint at a crossroads — opportunities and challenges abound for users to advance productivity

The next BriefingsDirect panel discussion explores one of the most broadly deployed collaboration platforms, Microsoft SharePoint, to determine how it's rapidly evolving from local network portal roots into the new cloud and mobile era.

Delivering information as an actionable asset in a widely collaborative and increasingly mobile environment has clearly become a top business priority. Business architects need the agility enabled by such unshackled information sharing and contextual collaboration to keep pace with distributed services and a boundaryless enterprise approach to their operations and commerce.

This is why IT leaders worldwide recognize that they must better manage knowledge, share information more safely, and yet rapidly and securely enable mobility among workers and their activity.

Listen to the podcast on iTunes. Download a transcript. Sponsor: harmon.ie.

We’ve assembled a group of recently selected top SharePoint influencers to learn where they think Microsoft SharePoint is headed, along with newer services like Office 365, to gauge how companies can best exploit and extend such productivity services.

To better understand how enterprise collaboration and document management are being transformed by new cloud and mobile requirements, the expert panel consists of Christian Buckley, Director and Chief Evangelist at Metalogix Software in Redmond, Washington; Yaacov Cohen, Co-founder and CEO of harmon.i.e; Joel Oleson, Director of Marketing and Technology Evangelism at ViewDo Labs in Salt Lake City, and Laura Rogers, Manager of SharePoint Consultants at Rackspace Hosting.

The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: SharePoint was designed quite some time ago to play a somewhat different role. Organizations need to start thinking about cloud, or even clouds -- and learn how to manage across them, to do collaboration and safely shared documents. How well suited is SharePoint to take on this new role?

Rogers: It's interesting, because some of the bread-and-butter of SharePoint is being able to collaborate on documents. One of the main things that people have done with SharePoint over the years is in moving from file-shares to SharePoint. So that’s just getting things from file-shares to being able to collaborate with them easier.

Rogers

Now, a lot of things are moving to the cloud. Everything that people do in their daily lives is based on the cloud. People are used to being able to pick up their iPhone and have a FaceTime conversation. They’re used to being able to pick up their phone and check Facebook.

All these different applications are in the cloud, and it's part of people’s daily life. Now, they have this expectation of being able to have all this live information and collaboration going on with what they're doing at work as well.

Microsoft is moving to Office 365 and is doing a lot with the integration between Office 365 and the Office apps, being able to take files, quickly edit them on the phone, and then quickly upload them to SharePoint. In general, people have expectations of being able to collaborate wherever they are.

That’s where the pressure is coming from for enterprises to either physically move their data to the cloud and go to Office 365, or at least upgrade and keep all of their on-premises technology up-to-date, so that the end users have that seamless experience.

But that gets more and more complicated, because of all the different servers you would need to have involved -- like the latest version of SharePoint, the latest version of Exchange, the latest version of Lync. As it gets more and more involved to do those things on-premises, that’s where some companies are saying, “Let's just go do it in the cloud. It might be easier.”

Gardner: Christian, given the fact that we’re seeing increased complexity, it's one thing to move storage to the cloud and share documents across a cloud service. It's something quite more complex to bring a process into the cloud, manage the process, and have it extended across the boundaries of the organization. Are companies yet progressing to that point?

Buckley

Buckley: You've hit on the complexity of what actually moves across. Look historically at intranets. I started getting involved in the intranet knowledge management space in the mid ’90s, and organizations approached building out those intranets and building the complexity of their work processes into digital form. That’s why automation, whether it's your dashboarding, workflows, and all those capabilities, fit into how SharePoint has been built out.

What's changed is that as all of these consumer-based technologies, which are primarily out in the cloud, have progressed, organizations want to focus less on infrastructure and focus more on actual business systems. End users on the other side of that want their corporate solutions to match more closely to their personal habits, to their personal tools. They're doing everything in the cloud, everything via a mobile phone.

Just want access

As you look at those changes to the traditional intranet model, how you approach and develop those solutions, build and maintain an infrastructure, and all the complexity, the difficulty is that end users are ahead of the curve. They want to have everything in the cloud flexible, dynamic, and real time via their phone or their tablet. They're out on the road. No matter how they're accessing the information, they just want access to it.

The difficulty is that not all of the technology is yet at parity with what you have on-prem, and that’s where SharePoint is at this crossroads. That’s what we’re starting to experience. The consumer is driving what's happening within the corporation, rather than corporate IT driving what end users have access to. That’s a huge change.

Gardner: Joel, it sounds as if we have businesses seeking agility and trying to find any way to improve the speed of doing business, but that there is tension between allowing on-premises systems to catch up, versus leap wholesale out to a cloud. Is that how you see it and how does that portend the future of SharePoint?

Oleson: There's an interesting transition happening right now where there is a big move to the cloud and a lot of companies are looking out at things, asking, "Is this Tinkertoys? Is this something that’s a trend? Is it something bigger? Do we need to invest here?"

Oleson

In the beginning, it was seen as more of a hosting move where there are companies that are doing this hosting, and now Microsoft wants to do hosting, and there are these various companies that are out there doing hosting. What we’re seeing now is a transition of a technology, where it’s this trend of "cloud first," and where the actual product is being developed and the features are showing up first in the cloud.

This trend of hitting features a year ahead of time and being able to validate and get richer experiences in the cloud that may never have come on-premise, is really making customers look at it quite differently. There are business solutions that enable, in terms of making it easier, and someone else is taking care of upgrades and someone else is taking care of your infrastructure needs. So you really focus on your business value from that perspective.

Also, when you look at it from the perspective of this approach of cloud first, on-premise second, on-premise comes across as the second-class citizen. A lot of these arguments that have held people back are around security, such as not wanting other people managing your data, and that bigger concern around how to best handle the situation. With SharePoint, that trend is going to continue.

Gardner: Yaacov, thinking about the complimentary nature of cloud services and mobile devices, we’re seeing not just an interest in going to cloud for cloud's sake, but being able to better deliver services across boundaries and out to mobile devices -- maybe even to bring-your-own device (BYOD). After listening to our panelists, our top influencers, how do you see something like the on-premise world readily adapting to both the needs of the cloud and mobile?

Cohen: Our panelists talk about these very significant transitions. Not only is Microsoft at a crossroads, but the customers and the large SharePoint shops are also at a crossroads. It's about a "cloud first" for Microsoft, and now with the recent announcements, it's also about "mobile first."

Now, we see that Microsoft is very serious about iOS, about the iPad, and also about Android. Your question was well pointed. There are two different types of scenarios when you're accessing the cloud and Office 365 for mobile devices. I know we're talking SharePoint, but in fact, there are two different products now: the OneDrive which earlier used to be SharePoint Online, and the SharePoint On-Premise.

Different scenarios

There are two different business scenarios where a lot of what Microsoft is looking at, including on mobile access, is more of a document-saving, document-storage, document-sharing capacity. It's very consumer centric, very competitive to Dropbox, and may also compete with Box, and be very easily accessible from mobile devices.

Cohen

Now we have Office on the iPad. That’s really a huge statement from Microsoft’s standpoint. But then, there is a totally different scenario looking at SharePoint as a knowledge center, as a record management center, and as the core of the business processes for the enterprise.

That’s not quite addressed right now by Microsoft with the "cloud first" and "mobile first" approach. With the "mobile first" approach, there's no real attempt by Microsoft to try to continue to support Office 365 or SharePoint Online as a knowledge center. We've also made our data and tags and taxonomy.

The focus is much simpler. They want to be a Microsoft-centric Dropbox, providing very easy access for mobile devices. So we're talking about two very different scenarios. This is a pretty interesting time also for end users. They need to be a lot more accurate in the business requirements they're trying to solve either with OneDrive for document sharing or SharePoint for knowledge management.

Gardner: It seems to me that having the ability to compete with Dropbox and share documents is really table stakes at this point. The larger proposition is enabling a hybrid transition and enabling better management and control over the complexity, even as we expand the extent to which we’re collaborating.

Laura, as users begin to think about how to not just deal with this tactically, but to think about that larger hybrid cloud capacity -- where the control remains internal with the best of cloud access -- how do you think they're viewing SharePoint? Is there a change in the perception of what SharePoint does?

Now we have Office on the iPad. That’s really a huge statement from Microsoft’s standpoint.

Rogers: The perception of SharePoint is changing a little bit, but it depends on who you are, where you are coming from, and what type of organization you are in.

For some people, especially smaller companies that are a little bit more flexible as to where they can store their data and how fast they can get their data moved, their perception is that if they can't move to Office 365, they want to quickly figure out a way to get hosted SharePoint and get all of their data into the cloud.

So they're analyzing Office 365 and they're figuring out if it will do everything they need it to be able to do. Of course, if you're a smaller or a mid-size company, you're a little bit more flexible, because you might have fewer custom applications and things like that. So they're analyzing that, they're analyzing other methods of putting things in the cloud, and they are comparing them.

When it comes to bigger organizations, and organizations that have more restrictions such as governments and healthcare and things where you have to have HIPAA and different regulations considered, they have a whole different perspective.

Very hesitant

They're thinking how they can keep SharePoint where it is right now in a lot of cases. Then, they're researching to see how other companies that have their same sort of stipulation and are going into the cloud. They're going to be very hesitant.

The perspective is going to be that the cloud to them is a little bit more dangerous and scary, because they don’t want to have anything happen to their very sensitive data. But they're researching and figuring out all the different ways that they can do hybrid environments, so they can still have some of their intranet in the cloud and have it connected to their on-premises solution. So there is going to be a lot of hybrid situations going on as people gradually get weaned over to the cloud.

They're going to have combinations of some information here and some information there. The trick is going to be to make it look seamless to the end user and have them be able to just go to SharePoint, whatever SharePoint happens to be, wherever it happens to be, do a search and have the search come up with everything.

So it's "SharePoint wherever" in all the different locations that it might be, have it just look like a seamless interface to end users, and have everything that they do in that environment be seamless. Because when it comes to the IT people and the decision makers, they have a lot of things to worry about when it comes to where to put the data, how to migrate it, and how to be able to get to it for backups and things like that.

As long as those decision makers don’t forget that the end users just want to be able to do their jobs and not have everything be more complicated than it needs to be.

They have to keep remembering that the end user wants to be able to have something simple, that they know where to go, the interface is familiar, and then just be able to do their jobs. As long as those decision makers don’t forget that the end users just want to be able to do their jobs and not have everything be more complicated than it needs to be.

Gardner: Christian, it seems that the opportunity for Microsoft here is to make SharePoint the entry point, the face, if you will, of both hybrid cloud activities and mobile collaboration activities. It's a tremendous opportunity for them.

How do you feel about the perception of people in the field, those users and those managers at enterprises? Are they seeing SharePoint as the potential silver bullet for managing this complexity, or do they see it more as a steppingstone to something else?

Buckley: There are a couple of things. We're talking about perceptions, right? There's some talk within the expert community about SharePoint as the brand, when I talk about going out to my SharePoint system. You're hearing the word SharePoint less and less. It doesn’t mean that the technology is going away. It's more that it's becoming ubiquitous.

When you think about the various Microsoft properties that they’re building on top of, OneDrive, Yammer, and within Office 365, a lot of those various components, where there is content and where there is a process or workflow and other things that are related.

When you're talking about some of the PowerBI, the dashboarding capability, you're talking about SharePoint. That’s where the data is stored behind that. It's the unifying technology underneath the platform.

Current perception

Backing up a bit, the perception is about the control, administration, compliance, auditing, and all those options. The perception is that that you have less of an ability to do those things out in the cloud.

Government bodies, highly regulated industries, went to SharePoint and on-prem because they had that level of control and the ability to go in and configure and customize and add-on and extended all those things. SharePoint grew so rapidly, because of that ability, but they are very correct in some of those perceptions about not having the same degree of control out in the cloud.

There is not yet parity when you think of it in those terms. The tools need to mature. The application programming interfaces (APIs) need to be expanded. On the flipside, those perceptions of what you can and can't do and control out in the cloud is because many organizations have overbuilt SharePoint. End-user adoption is a serious issue, as it is for every enterprise collaboration solution out there. Any competitor in the space that tells you otherwise is marketing to you.

The reality is that end users want something that is streamlined and that’s simple. They want to click once, twice at the most, get in, and get their jobs done. They don’t care what the brand is. Microsoft needs to extend and add, increase the parity between Office 365, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, the SharePoint Online, version of the on-prem version, get that parity across it.

Microsoft still has some messaging to improve on to help change some of those perceptions of what SharePoint is, where it's going, and how people can make that transition.

They need to make it easy to access, easy to invite people in, easy to click once or twice, get to the information that you need through the interface that you’re most comfortable with, whether it's Exchange or Yammer or OneDrive or going into SharePoint, going into your intranet or an extranet, with all of those things. SharePoint underlies all of those things.

Microsoft still has some messaging to improve on to help change some of those perceptions of what SharePoint is, where it's going, and how people can make that transition.

Gardner: Joel, thinking about a more practical approach for the user organization, rather than waiting for Microsoft to simplify SharePoint, maybe reduce some of this overbuilding, making it more appropriate for cloud activity, what can organizations do to take the best of what SharePoint can do, leverage the investments they’ve made and yet still be able to break out across boundaries, into cloud, into mobile?

Is there some basic blocking and tackling advice you can offer for using SharePoint, but in this new environment?

Oleson: Some advice for customers ... They really need to dip their toe in the water. Some customers, when they decide they want to go Office 365, go all in and then they have second thoughts. It's not that people shouldn’t invest in Office 365, but they need to be cautious about understanding some of those limitations around customizations and some concerns that other departments may have: IT, for example.

So there's a cautious approach, and a pilot needs to happen. OneDrive, as an example, is an amazing way to start getting involved with the cloud. Yammer, as well, is a great way to get into the cloud and also to, all of a sudden, be able to support with mobile devices  great conversations with fellow employees.

Taking advantage

But part of that approach is getting the right kind of policies and procedures in place that can support the users and the departments that want to, and need to, take advantage of the new technology.

But I don’t think that it's throwing everything out there willy-nilly. There's that approach of going service by service. Another example is people who are going to move their email. It's a no-brainer to move your email out there, but there is some identity work that has to be done, and the budgets have to be right to be able to understand the investments and the time it's going to take.

But that hybrid process of moving things out there is a multi-year approach, and the investment that’s going to be required has to be a conscious decision in having the right engines firing on all cylinders and making that transition. It takes all eyes open as you make that transition.

Gardner: Yaacov, what advice do you have for organizations that are in SharePoint deeply, who want to continue to leverage that investment, recognize that their users are getting a lot of value from it, but also want to start extending their activities using hybrid approach to more application by application transitions, as Joel mentioned?

The “cloud first”/"mobile first" marketing is very nice, but it's not ready yet to deliver a sole business solution.

Cohen: Joel had some good points about the progressive approach, looking service by service. Also, it's about defining your business requirements and, for example, to differentiate between collaboration scenarios, which are more ad hoc, more social, and which say more about project management and not so much about knowledge management. So in this case, Office 365, OneDrive, and Yammer is a great way to go. We're already investing a lot of preparation in taxonomy and the information architecture.

But if you're looking at more enterprise-wide projects to share knowledge across multiple business lines or you're trying to reduce the liabilities with record management, that’s where you probably need to take a more comprehensive approach with more preparation and design. You need to know that the “cloud first”/"mobile first" marketing is very nice, but it's not ready yet to deliver a sole business solution.

Gardner: Laura, tell us about what you’re doing as a SharePoint Consultant Manager and what Rackspace Hosting is doing vis-à-vis collaboration and SharePoint Services?

Rogers: At Rackspace around SharePoint we have a couple of major divisions. We have people that support our hosted SharePoint environments and we also have SharePoint consulting. A lot of our hosted SharePoint customers will make use of the consulting services. But we also provide consulting services to people who aren’t necessarily hosted at Rackspace.

We have different types of hosting that you can get there. We have a per-user environment, which basically means you're buying site collection, and it's similar to Office 365 and there is one big farm that’s managed in a central place. You’re not necessarily in control of your SharePoint environment.

Different levels

There is also one where you can have your own SharePoint server. So there are all different levels of being able to have a hosted environment. As consultants, we can take care of those clients.

But we get a lot of clients that come to us and say they're looking at Rackspace hosting and also looking at Office 365. They ask why they should do one or the other. We go through their requirements and what they want to be able to do in SharePoint. Then, we help them to talk about the pros and cons. We explain "You have this custom app over here and you wouldn’t necessarily be able to do that in Office 365."

They have all this super custom branding, little technical things that they have, and we go through some of the tradeoffs they might have to make, one way or the other.

We have different groups of consultants. I manage the group that deals with business solutions. We have a group of developers. We have a group of branding guys, and then my business-solutions guys have out-of-the-box functionality, business intelligence (BI), user adoption, governance,  documentation, and things like that. Business solutions includes things that don’t involve custom code and things that don’t involve branding. I also teach at SharePoint 2013 Power Users class online for a week each month.

There are all different levels of being able to have a hosted environment. As consultants, we can take care of those clients.

Every Wednesday at 11 Central, my team and I get together and we have a free YouTube broadcast, where we just talk about some business-solution topic, do demos, and things like that. That’s the SharePoint at Rackspace YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/sharepointrax.

Gardner: Christian at Metalogix, tell us a little bit about what you do there, and what your organization does in the SharePoint community, or eco-community.

Buckley: My role is Chief Evangelist. So I sit across multiple areas. I work very closely with product management and product marketing. I work very closely with our partner and alliance management team. I do a lot of meeting with customers, meeting with partners, and setting up and investigating various technology partnerships.

From a community standpoint, I'm also very involved in helping organize various community efforts and, in that way, spreading goodwill for the brand out there within the community. I've helped launch about a dozen SharePoint Saturday events primarily out in the Western U.S. states.

Then, I travel around the world speaking at conferences, sharing perspective, usually to the IT business decision-maker and executive crowd. I do events where I travel on behalf of our partners and meet with their customers. I try to help fill the pipeline from a sales perspective and help partners on my own sales team close on deals and things that people traditionally expect an evangelist to do.

Metalogix is the largest, fastest growing SharePoint ISV. Two areas that we are really known for are migration and governance and administration solutions. I write a lot of content around those topics, as well as things like storage optimization and replication.

Helping people

We're very much involved in working with Microsoft and with our partners in helping people manage and migrate between SharePoint environments, as well as moving people from on-prem into Office 365.

We're the only ISV that has a solution that migrates Exchange, public folders, file shares, and SharePoint content to Office 365. So I'm doing a lot of promotion and talking about those options out there on a regular basis.

Gardner: Joel, tell us similarly about yourself and ViewDo Labs as well.

Oleson: ViewDo Labs is focused on Yammer analytics. My role has been working with the community around writing, speaking, and blogging.

I've gathered a group of influencers in the enterprise social space. We get together and talk about various topics around enterprise social and take on the biggest challenges. I participate in a lot of conversations, Tweetups, and variety of activities as they relate to enterprise social, moving forward maturity around enterprise social as it relates to Yammer and other technologies in that space.

Basically, we wanted to bring a customer-like user experience to the enterprise world. We've built a one-screen user experience across emails, mobile devices, and cloud.

As an example, Christian talks about his travel. Travel is something that’s been a big passion of mine, connecting with folks around the globe and building communities. Just a week ago I was in Jamaica running a SharePoint Saturday, but also launching a user group. I’ll be speaking at a European SharePoint conference. Following that, I'll be doing some travel in Central Asia and launching a community in Uzbekistan.

A passion of mine is expanding global reach and connecting communities that otherwise would never meet people that are on the top tier speaking circuits. I try to go to those locations where they’re underserved markets, you could say. But the big focus is on enterprise social and working transparently, working like a network, and just getting excited and working with businesses around how that big transformation is happening.

Gardner: Yaacov, tell us a little bit about why you co-founded harmon.ie and what harmon.ie does and how that fits into the SharePoint ecosystem?

Cohen: We founded harmon.ie in 2008. Basically, we wanted to bring a customer-like user experience to the enterprise world. We've built a one-screen user experience across emails, mobile devices, and cloud.

We provide a suite of connected apps on mobile devices like iOS, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry. Within Outlook, we provide an Outlook plug-in, delivering the same consistent user experience across on-premise SharePoint, Yammer, and Office 365.

The idea is to help the business users to get a complete view of their network and their colleagues’ network in order to be more efficient at the enterprise level in the ways they manage knowledge management, knowledge centers, record management, and how they can really evolve into more of a social enterprise, which is really collaborating and working like a network. That’s what we try to do.

Social collaboration

Gardner: I’d like to just address one more issue before we sign off, and it's the impact of social collaboration. People are now looking at the walled interface, being used to things like Facebook, and LinkedIn, and Twitter, and then recognizing that that’s a powerful way to get knowledge transferred and allow for people to work together, but now also recognizing that more and more people are using mobile devices.

And so there's this combination, this Reese’s cup of peanut butter and chocolate, when it comes to mobile and social. How do you all think that this is going to be driven into use -- will the technologies keep up with the demand on the user experience and behavior?

First to you, Christian. What do you foresee as the methods that the IT department will have to adopt and the technologies that they will have to exploit in order to start allowing users to do what they want on a mobile device and be more collaborative in a social type of way?

Buckley: It's evolving so rapidly. To say what technologies they need to start considering, I take a very pragmatic, project program management approach to this. That’s a lot of my background. Working with customers, it would be to fully understand what you are trying to accomplish for the business.

If you're recognizing that your end users are requesting more social and mobile capabilities and yet you have certain constraints, compliance and auditing, regulatory requirements, sometimes legal requirements that you need to make sure all systems comply with, you just need to make sure that the solutions that you are building out, the technologies that you go investigate, can comply with those needs.

You need to ask those questions and then make some decisions, which could mean paring back on your requirements.

And certainly, if you go with Office 365 and social through Yammer, whether a standalone Yammer or Office 365, and if you're going to build a hybrid solution, these are questions you need to ask and understand, which may determine how you configure the platform or which options you choose.

We're not at a place where you can plug and play, even in the Microsoft stack, any of those tools and just assume that you're going to meet all of those standards that you need to be held to. You need to ask those questions and then make some decisions, which could mean paring back on your requirements. It may be a phased approach, as you wait for further advances, but it's just something. Ask the questions and go into it with your eyes wide open.

Gardner: Joel, the same question. How do you see organizations being able to manage this risk-and-benefit balance between allowing users to get what they want for functionality and collaboration, but also keeping it inside the organization and limiting them in some other way? How do you balance this best, and how will that balance perhaps change over the next few years?

Oleson: Well, that’s really interesting. This is really a battle between wills. Microsoft is making some major bets, and some of those bets aren’t just with the IT department. It's the business departments that are really going to make and drive some of these decisions. And if the IT department essentially holds back the business, they may find that they are going to go around.

So there are going to be some pros and cons and cost benefits, especially as it relates to licensing, but I think you'll find that some of the businesses are needing these technologies, and so it will essentially be business IT units that will test the waters and may drive ahead of the IT department in some cases.

IT as the enabler

It's not going to be everybody all nodding their heads at the same time. There's going to be some pilot theory happening and it's going to be the proof is in the pudding. Where it's going is that IT is the enabler. Are they going to be helping us make that transition and move, or is it going to be marketing, or is it going to be HR or some of these other business departments that essentially make that first bet in making some of those decisions?

I'm finding that some of the IT environments are actually more conservative and more cautious, where some of the business departments see the benefits and they see that it's going to be easier. It gives them more of that device approach that they need, and they may get out ahead of IT. I expect that to happen in many organizations.

Gardner: And Laura at Rackspace, is it "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, adopt the cloud, and let IT figure out how to catch up later?" Or from strictly a cloud perspective, do you think that you can give those users what they want in terms of social and mobile collaboration and keep the risk at a managed level?

Rogers: Joel brought up a great point about the technology and people just going around it if they don’t have what they need. Not necessarily Rackspace, but a lot of companies are coming across financial restrictions, because they might decide that they do need x, y, z technology.

Because people are going to go around and they are going to figure out a way to do something with whatever the latest technology is, even if the company doesn’t provide a way to it.

They need to have their own private Yammer network and actually purchase the enterprise versions of that. Or they might need to purchase the enterprise version of SharePoint or Box.net or whatever they happen to be using, and it might be cost restrictive for them.

So this is going to be a case where when you think about all of the people that might go around and use different technologies, like using their personal OneDrive to share things with people outside the company. That’s not very secure. Neither is using other technologies they might come across on random apps on their phone or on the web and start using that with business information.

So when companies are thinking about technologies like this for the enterprise and how cost restrictive they are, how expensive they are, I think it's more something where you have to weigh what could possibly happen with people uploading sensitive information to all these uncontrolled locations and what's the risk there compared to what you benefit from going ahead and purchasing that enterprise level product or whatever it happens to be, and just pay for it, and therefore you will be able to have a lot more control over that data.

Because people are going to go around and they are going to figure out a way to do something with whatever the latest technology is, even if the company doesn’t provide a way to it.

Gardner: Yaacov, it seems that regardless of whether the IT department leads or the business leads and whether they use internal or external services, getting these services visible and usable across any and all needed screens and devices is going to be essential.

So, given that it's still an open question as to how mobile and collaboration and document sharing and social interactions evolve and become delivered, what do you think is an important part of being able to be in front of that and maybe accommodate whatever the outcomes are on the back end?

What's appropriate

Cohen: This is really a good point. When I work with IT, I advise IT to start thinking differently about their job. Rather than being the gatekeepers, they need to become enablers. They need to become like a systems integrator and a service provider within their own organization. And they need to take a look at mobile and cloud and see how they can take these technologies and package them in a way that is appropriate for their business users.

They need to look at the lines of business or the departments as their customers and they need to act and market solutions to these customers. This transforms also our relationship as a vendor with IT. Rather than selling to IT, we are partnering with IT in order to help them package and sell solutions internally, mobile solutions in order to improve the business experience and, as such, to boost the business initiative, collaboration, and mobile.

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