Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how major new trends and technology are translating into disruption, and for the innovative business -- opportunity.
A Tale of Two IT Departments, or How Governance is Essential in the Hybrid Cl...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a Briefings Direct discussion on how two organizations have been improving their application’s performance via total performance monitoring and metrics.
'Extreme Apps’ Approach to Analysis Makes On-Site Retail Experience King AgainDana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how technology providers have teamed as an ecosystem to develop new dynamic and rapid analysis capabilities for the retail industry.
DevOps by Design -- Practical Guide to Effectively Ushering DevOps into Any O...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a Briefings Direct discussion on some powerful best practices on making DevOps an accelerant to broader business goals, but at the level of a multigenerational IT activity.
With Large Workforce in the Field, Source Refrigeration Selects an Agile Plat...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a nationwide company has harnessed the power of mobile applications to increase the productivity of its workforce.
A Tale of Two IT Departments, or How Governance is Essential in the Hybrid Cl...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a Briefings Direct discussion on how two organizations have been improving their application’s performance via total performance monitoring and metrics.
'Extreme Apps’ Approach to Analysis Makes On-Site Retail Experience King AgainDana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how technology providers have teamed as an ecosystem to develop new dynamic and rapid analysis capabilities for the retail industry.
DevOps by Design -- Practical Guide to Effectively Ushering DevOps into Any O...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a Briefings Direct discussion on some powerful best practices on making DevOps an accelerant to broader business goals, but at the level of a multigenerational IT activity.
With Large Workforce in the Field, Source Refrigeration Selects an Agile Plat...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a nationwide company has harnessed the power of mobile applications to increase the productivity of its workforce.
How INOVVO Delivers Analysis that Leads to Greater User Retention and Loyalty...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how advanced analytics drawing on multiple data sources provides wireless operators improved interactions with their subscribers and enhances customer experience through personalized insights.
Internet of Things Brings On Development Demands That DevOps Manages, Say Exp...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on how continuous processes around development and deployment of applications impact and benefit the Internet of Things trend.
Putting Buyers and Sellers in the Best Light, How Etsy Leverages Big Data for...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how Etsy uses data science to improve their buyers and sellers’ experience as well as theiown corporate destiny.
Using Testing as a Service, Globe Testing Helping Startups Make Leap to Cloud...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on how Globe Testing is pushing the envelope on Agile development and applications development management using HP tools and platforms.
Building a Modern Marketing Organization in a Multi-Channel WorldDana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how social medical and business networks have taken the lead in shaping perceptions about brands, products, and companies.
SAP Ariba Chief Strategy Officer on The Digitization of Business and the Futu...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how advancements in business applications and the modern infrastructure that supports them portends new and higher degrees of business innovation.
DevOps and Security, a Match Made in HeavenDana Gardner
Transcript of a Briefings Direct discussion on the relationship between DevOps and security and exploring the impact of security on compliance, risk, and auditing.
How HTC Centralizes Storage Management to Gain Visibility, Reduce Costs and I...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on why bringing a common management view in to play improves problem resolution and automates resource allocation more fully.
Need for Fast Analytics Across All Kinds of Healthcare Data Spurs Converged S...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how a triumvirate of big players have teamed to deliver a rapid and efficient analysis capability across disparate data types for the healthcare industry.
How INOVVO Delivers Analysis that Leads to Greater User Retention and Loyalty...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how advanced analytics drawing on multiple data sources provides wireless operators improved interactions with their subscribers and enhances customer experience through personalized insights.
Internet of Things Brings On Development Demands That DevOps Manages, Say Exp...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on how continuous processes around development and deployment of applications impact and benefit the Internet of Things trend.
Putting Buyers and Sellers in the Best Light, How Etsy Leverages Big Data for...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how Etsy uses data science to improve their buyers and sellers’ experience as well as theiown corporate destiny.
Using Testing as a Service, Globe Testing Helping Startups Make Leap to Cloud...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on how Globe Testing is pushing the envelope on Agile development and applications development management using HP tools and platforms.
Building a Modern Marketing Organization in a Multi-Channel WorldDana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how social medical and business networks have taken the lead in shaping perceptions about brands, products, and companies.
SAP Ariba Chief Strategy Officer on The Digitization of Business and the Futu...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how advancements in business applications and the modern infrastructure that supports them portends new and higher degrees of business innovation.
DevOps and Security, a Match Made in HeavenDana Gardner
Transcript of a Briefings Direct discussion on the relationship between DevOps and security and exploring the impact of security on compliance, risk, and auditing.
How HTC Centralizes Storage Management to Gain Visibility, Reduce Costs and I...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on why bringing a common management view in to play improves problem resolution and automates resource allocation more fully.
Need for Fast Analytics Across All Kinds of Healthcare Data Spurs Converged S...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how a triumvirate of big players have teamed to deliver a rapid and efficient analysis capability across disparate data types for the healthcare industry.
Yahoo! is one of the most-visited web sites in the world. It runs one of the largest private cloud infrastructures, one that operates on petabytes of data every day. Being able to store and manage that data well is essential to the efficient functioning of Yahoo!`s Hadoop clusters. A key component that enables this efficient operation is data compression. With regard to compression algorithms, there is an underlying tension between compression ratio and compression performance. Consequently, Hadoop provides support for several compression algorithms, including gzip, bzip2, Snappy, LZ4 and others. This plethora of options can make it difficult for users to select appropriate codecs for their MapReduce jobs. This talk attempts to provide guidance in that regard. Performance results with Gridmix and with several corpuses of data are presented. The talk also describes enhancements we have made to the bzip2 codec that improve its performance. This will be of particular interest to the increasing number of users operating on “Big Data” who require the best possible ratios. The impact of using the Intel IPP libraries is also investigated; these have the potential to improve performance significantly. Finally, a few proposals for future enhancements to Hadoop in this area are outlined.
Speaker: Govind Kamat, Member of Technical Staff, Yahoo!
This is an exclusive opportunity offered by ResultsPositive and HPE to provide your organization with an onsite overview of the latest and emerging technologies from HPE!
NoSQL Now: Postgres - The NoSQL Cake You Can EatDATAVERSITY
The path to creating a single view of your customers or your transactional systems is overflowing with high costs and complexity. Major vendors have built massive, million-dollar systems that are too expensive and too complicated for most. NoSQL-only solutions seem to have promise, but simply do not necessarily have what you need. Learn what Postgres can do for you that NoSQL-only solutions can't.
Using a NoSQL-only solution and dumping gigabytes of data from multiple disparate systems into gigantic documents is complicated. And it forces tough choices—group all data by customer, by transaction, or by policy? You must choose, and this can be a hard process for some organizations. And almost always, organizations later learn they need relationships among the data, which NoSQL-only solutions cannot support.
Postgres eliminates the complexity and the pain of creating a single view of the customer. With recent advances, Postgres can support semi-structured, unstructured and structured data in the same environment, employing relational qualities and ACID compliance.
During this presentation, Marc Linster, SVP Products & Services, will review: ·
How to do more with Postgres
Open source alternative to RDBMS and more...
The NoSQL Conundrum
Why do developers like NoSQL Only solutions?
Problems and fallacies of NoSQL (only)
Data Standards
Data Islands
NoSQL Data Models include data access paths
Not Only SQL - Technology Innovation on a Robust Platform
Document Store
See JSON Examples
360 Degree view of the customer
Data Integration
Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise EditionESRI Bulgaria
Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g (OBIEE) is a comprehensive business intelligence platform that delivers a full range of capabilities - including interactive dashboards, ad hoc queries, notifications and alerts, enterprise and financial reporting, scorecard and strategy management, business process invocation, search and collaboration, mobile, integrated systems management and more.
Building a Production Grade PostgreSQL Cloud Foundry Service | anyninesanynines GmbH
Slides to the talk held at the Cloud Foundry Summit in Santa Clara 2016 about building a on-demand provisioning PostgreSQL Cloud Foundry Services being able to deploy dedicated PostgreSQL servers and 3-node-async-replicating clusters using Bosh.
The slides cover important design decisions such as single PostgreSQL server vs. PostgreSQL clusters, shared vs. dedicated PostgreSQL servers, pre-provisioning vs. on-demand provisioning of vms, the right choice of the automation technology as well as a draft of a resulting architecture.
Dive deep into specific OSS packages to examine the top issues in the enterprise with two of our most qualified OSS architects, Bill Crowell and Vince Cox walkthrough: Their day-to-day work in OSS packages; ways to fix reported issues; why you can’t expect in-house developers to handle issues in OSS packages.
Strata Conference + Hadoop World NY 2016: Lessons learned building a scalable...Sumeet Singh
Building a real-time monitoring service that handles millions of custom events per second while satisfying complex rules, varied throughput requirements, and numerous dimensions simultaneously is a complex endeavor. Sumeet Singh and Mridul Jain explain how Yahoo approached these challenges with Apache Storm Trident, Kafka, HBase, and OpenTSDB and discuss the lessons learned along the way.
Sumeet and Mridul explain scaling patterns backed by real scenarios and data to help attendees develop their own architectures and strategies for dealing with the scale challenges that come with real-time big data systems. They also explore the tradeoffs made in catering to a diverse set of daily users and the associated usability challenges that motivated Yahoo to build a self-serve, easy-to-use platform that requires minimal programming experience. Sumeet and Mridul then discuss event-level tracking for debugging and troubleshooting problems that our users may encounter at this scale. Over the course of their talk, they also address building infrastructure and operational intelligence with anomaly detection, alert correlation, and trend analysis based on the monitoring platform.
Less Is More: Novel Approaches to MySQL Compression for Modern Data Sets - Pe...Ernie Souhrada
As data volume grows, finding ways to slow the growth velocity becomes more and more important. We want to do everything possible to maximize the efficiency of our hardware before we spend the money on more storage, so one way to do that is with compression. These slides discuss compression theory and compression options in MySQL, ending with some benchmark data that compares column-level compression in InnoDB with other available compression technologies. Presented at Percona Live 2016.
Procurement in 2025: The Future Looks Bright Dana Gardner
Transcript of a discussion on how rapidly evolving technologies impact the future of procurement and the professionals who will drive it to a new plane of greater influence and impact.
How Enterprises Like McKesson Digitize Procurement and Automate Spend Managem...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a discussion on how leading enterprises are digitizing procurement and automating spend management to reduce inefficiencies, cut manual tasks, and streamline the entire source-to-pay process.
How Digital Transformation Navigates Disruption to Chart A Better Course to t...Dana Gardner
A discussion on how HPE Pointnext Services advises organizations on using digital transformation to take advantage of new and emerging market opportunities.
ChainLink Analyst on How Cloud-Enabled Supply Chain Networks Drive Companies ...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a discussion on how technology innovators and new services from such suppliers as Tradeshift are translating advances in procurement and finance into business impacts.
Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022.docxAdvance Tech
Strategic technology trends can be difficult to predict, but many technology observers think that the 2024 Olympics and the autonomous cars of the 2020s are inevitable.
Regardless, strategic technology trends can inspire companies and entrepreneurs looking to maximize their exposure and reach, increase their revenue, and drive new products and services.
Several technologies will be an important part of the 2022 strategy of any large firm, including software, cloud computing, and mobile technology.
A discussion that the following is the main focus on the impact of these technologies on the business functions of large firms and their future strategies. We finally brought together the sectors that will largely influence the future world economy in this post.
Strategic technology is the combination of strategic thinking, best practices, and financial effectiveness.
https://advancetech.info/gartners-top-10-strategic-technology-trends-for-2022/
Using digital technology to your advantage. Should you focus on improving customer experience or new products and services or your core business operations?
HP Vertica Provides adMarketplace with Big Data Warehousing SolutionDana Gardner
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how an intent search company is able to handle massive amounts of data and analyze it quickly with HP Vertica.
Platform 3.0 Ripe to Give Standard Access to Advanced Intelligence and Automa...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how The Open Group is working to stay ahead of challenges organization face with an increase in data volume and sources.
In the first interview in this series, which kicks off PwC’s 2018 CEO Survey, chief executive Safra Catz explains the broad culture shift brought on by AI and cloud technologies.
Similar to How New Technology Trends Will Disrupt the Very Nature of Business (20)
DevOps and Testing slides at DASA ConnectKari Kakkonen
My and Rik Marselis slides at 30.5.2024 DASA Connect conference. We discuss about what is testing, then what is agile testing and finally what is Testing in DevOps. Finally we had lovely workshop with the participants trying to find out different ways to think about quality and testing in different parts of the DevOps infinity loop.
Welcome to the first live UiPath Community Day Dubai! Join us for this unique occasion to meet our local and global UiPath Community and leaders. You will get a full view of the MEA region's automation landscape and the AI Powered automation technology capabilities of UiPath. Also, hosted by our local partners Marc Ellis, you will enjoy a half-day packed with industry insights and automation peers networking.
📕 Curious on our agenda? Wait no more!
10:00 Welcome note - UiPath Community in Dubai
Lovely Sinha, UiPath Community Chapter Leader, UiPath MVPx3, Hyper-automation Consultant, First Abu Dhabi Bank
10:20 A UiPath cross-region MEA overview
Ashraf El Zarka, VP and Managing Director MEA, UiPath
10:35: Customer Success Journey
Deepthi Deepak, Head of Intelligent Automation CoE, First Abu Dhabi Bank
11:15 The UiPath approach to GenAI with our three principles: improve accuracy, supercharge productivity, and automate more
Boris Krumrey, Global VP, Automation Innovation, UiPath
12:15 To discover how Marc Ellis leverages tech-driven solutions in recruitment and managed services.
Brendan Lingam, Director of Sales and Business Development, Marc Ellis
Pushing the limits of ePRTC: 100ns holdover for 100 daysAdtran
At WSTS 2024, Alon Stern explored the topic of parametric holdover and explained how recent research findings can be implemented in real-world PNT networks to achieve 100 nanoseconds of accuracy for up to 100 days.
The Metaverse and AI: how can decision-makers harness the Metaverse for their...Jen Stirrup
The Metaverse is popularized in science fiction, and now it is becoming closer to being a part of our daily lives through the use of social media and shopping companies. How can businesses survive in a world where Artificial Intelligence is becoming the present as well as the future of technology, and how does the Metaverse fit into business strategy when futurist ideas are developing into reality at accelerated rates? How do we do this when our data isn't up to scratch? How can we move towards success with our data so we are set up for the Metaverse when it arrives?
How can you help your company evolve, adapt, and succeed using Artificial Intelligence and the Metaverse to stay ahead of the competition? What are the potential issues, complications, and benefits that these technologies could bring to us and our organizations? In this session, Jen Stirrup will explain how to start thinking about these technologies as an organisation.
Essentials of Automations: The Art of Triggers and Actions in FMESafe Software
In this second installment of our Essentials of Automations webinar series, we’ll explore the landscape of triggers and actions, guiding you through the nuances of authoring and adapting workspaces for seamless automations. Gain an understanding of the full spectrum of triggers and actions available in FME, empowering you to enhance your workspaces for efficient automation.
We’ll kick things off by showcasing the most commonly used event-based triggers, introducing you to various automation workflows like manual triggers, schedules, directory watchers, and more. Plus, see how these elements play out in real scenarios.
Whether you’re tweaking your current setup or building from the ground up, this session will arm you with the tools and insights needed to transform your FME usage into a powerhouse of productivity. Join us to discover effective strategies that simplify complex processes, enhancing your productivity and transforming your data management practices with FME. Let’s turn complexity into clarity and make your workspaces work wonders!
Generative AI Deep Dive: Advancing from Proof of Concept to ProductionAggregage
Join Maher Hanafi, VP of Engineering at Betterworks, in this new session where he'll share a practical framework to transform Gen AI prototypes into impactful products! He'll delve into the complexities of data collection and management, model selection and optimization, and ensuring security, scalability, and responsible use.
PHP Frameworks: I want to break free (IPC Berlin 2024)Ralf Eggert
In this presentation, we examine the challenges and limitations of relying too heavily on PHP frameworks in web development. We discuss the history of PHP and its frameworks to understand how this dependence has evolved. The focus will be on providing concrete tips and strategies to reduce reliance on these frameworks, based on real-world examples and practical considerations. The goal is to equip developers with the skills and knowledge to create more flexible and future-proof web applications. We'll explore the importance of maintaining autonomy in a rapidly changing tech landscape and how to make informed decisions in PHP development.
This talk is aimed at encouraging a more independent approach to using PHP frameworks, moving towards a more flexible and future-proof approach to PHP development.
SAP Sapphire 2024 - ASUG301 building better apps with SAP Fiori.pdfPeter Spielvogel
Building better applications for business users with SAP Fiori.
• What is SAP Fiori and why it matters to you
• How a better user experience drives measurable business benefits
• How to get started with SAP Fiori today
• How SAP Fiori elements accelerates application development
• How SAP Build Code includes SAP Fiori tools and other generative artificial intelligence capabilities
• How SAP Fiori paves the way for using AI in SAP apps
Observability Concepts EVERY Developer Should Know -- DeveloperWeek Europe.pdfPaige Cruz
Monitoring and observability aren’t traditionally found in software curriculums and many of us cobble this knowledge together from whatever vendor or ecosystem we were first introduced to and whatever is a part of your current company’s observability stack.
While the dev and ops silo continues to crumble….many organizations still relegate monitoring & observability as the purview of ops, infra and SRE teams. This is a mistake - achieving a highly observable system requires collaboration up and down the stack.
I, a former op, would like to extend an invitation to all application developers to join the observability party will share these foundational concepts to build on:
Climate Impact of Software Testing at Nordic Testing DaysKari Kakkonen
My slides at Nordic Testing Days 6.6.2024
Climate impact / sustainability of software testing discussed on the talk. ICT and testing must carry their part of global responsibility to help with the climat warming. We can minimize the carbon footprint but we can also have a carbon handprint, a positive impact on the climate. Quality characteristics can be added with sustainability, and then measured continuously. Test environments can be used less, and in smaller scale and on demand. Test techniques can be used in optimizing or minimizing number of tests. Test automation can be used to speed up testing.
GDG Cloud Southlake #33: Boule & Rebala: Effective AppSec in SDLC using Deplo...James Anderson
Effective Application Security in Software Delivery lifecycle using Deployment Firewall and DBOM
The modern software delivery process (or the CI/CD process) includes many tools, distributed teams, open-source code, and cloud platforms. Constant focus on speed to release software to market, along with the traditional slow and manual security checks has caused gaps in continuous security as an important piece in the software supply chain. Today organizations feel more susceptible to external and internal cyber threats due to the vast attack surface in their applications supply chain and the lack of end-to-end governance and risk management.
The software team must secure its software delivery process to avoid vulnerability and security breaches. This needs to be achieved with existing tool chains and without extensive rework of the delivery processes. This talk will present strategies and techniques for providing visibility into the true risk of the existing vulnerabilities, preventing the introduction of security issues in the software, resolving vulnerabilities in production environments quickly, and capturing the deployment bill of materials (DBOM).
Speakers:
Bob Boule
Robert Boule is a technology enthusiast with PASSION for technology and making things work along with a knack for helping others understand how things work. He comes with around 20 years of solution engineering experience in application security, software continuous delivery, and SaaS platforms. He is known for his dynamic presentations in CI/CD and application security integrated in software delivery lifecycle.
Gopinath Rebala
Gopinath Rebala is the CTO of OpsMx, where he has overall responsibility for the machine learning and data processing architectures for Secure Software Delivery. Gopi also has a strong connection with our customers, leading design and architecture for strategic implementations. Gopi is a frequent speaker and well-known leader in continuous delivery and integrating security into software delivery.
Transcript: Selling digital books in 2024: Insights from industry leaders - T...BookNet Canada
The publishing industry has been selling digital audiobooks and ebooks for over a decade and has found its groove. What’s changed? What has stayed the same? Where do we go from here? Join a group of leading sales peers from across the industry for a conversation about the lessons learned since the popularization of digital books, best practices, digital book supply chain management, and more.
Link to video recording: https://bnctechforum.ca/sessions/selling-digital-books-in-2024-insights-from-industry-leaders/
Presented by BookNet Canada on May 28, 2024, with support from the Department of Canadian Heritage.
How New Technology Trends Will Disrupt the Very Nature of Business
1. How New Technology Trends Will Disrupt the Very Nature
of Business
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how major new trends and technology are translating
into disruption, and for the innovative business -- opportunity.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Sponsor: SAP Ariba.
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re
listening to BriefingsDirect.
Our next technology innovation thought leadership discussion focuses on how major new trends
in technology are translating into disruption, and for the innovative business
-- opportunity.
From invisible robots, to drones as data servers -- from virtual reality to
driverless cars -- technology innovation is faster than ever, impacting us
everywhere, broadening our knowledge, and newly augmenting processes
and commerce. We'll now explore the ways that these technology
innovations translate into business impacts, and how consumers and
suppliers of services and goods can best prepare.
To learn more about the future of business innovation, we’re joined by two guests, Greg
Williams, Deputy Editor of WIRED UK, and Alex Atzberger, President of SAP Ariba.
Greg, as we see a lot of trends happening, a lot of change in the industry, people talk about the
pace picking up quicker than ever. What are some of the major disrupting trends that you see in
technology, and then which of those do you think are going to be the most impactful for
businesspeople?
Greg Williams: You listed a whole bunch of things, which are all incredibly important in
moving forward. They're near-term in ways that sometimes people don’t consider
them to be near-term. Technology shifts tend to be almost things we don’t notice.
They're not happening slowly any longer; they're happening quickly, and we're
almost not seeing them.
We talk about something like robotics. Now, you can see all kinds of incredible
things. You can see in Japan a robot caregiver that can lift elderly people out of
their beds and can care for them in that way. You can see slightly sinister videos
from Boston Dynamics of robot dogs running along that look pretty scary. But
what most innovation looks like are things that we almost don’t notice are there.
Gardner
Williams
2. For instance, and this is a boring example, an ATM is kind of a robot; a vacuum cleaner is; an
elevator is. Those are things we don’t necessarily notice. They're not as dramatic as we think.
I should just caveat that and say that everything is moving very, very quickly right now That's
why it’s hard to make very clear predictions.
The other thing that’s important is this joining up of lots of different technologies. That’s the
biggest trend that I see right now. We can talk about satellites and drones, which are effectively
servers in the sky or we can talk about autonomous mobility and augmented reality, but it’s all
about connecting the dots.
Technology players
One thing that's interesting now is the way that car manufacturers are all technology players.
Every automotive manufacturer is figuring out that what they have is a computer on wheels.
They have to figure out how, when people drive into a parking lot, they make an automatic
payment via the vehicle. How can the vehicle know that people’s groceries are ready to be
picked up at a certain point.
Although it’s nice to list robots and autonomous vehicles and other clear technological shifts, the
thing that we're really seeing is the speeding up and this coming together, this joining and
connecting of the dots. Basically, all are based on three things: ubiquitous computing, mobile
technology, and the cloud. Those three things underpin pretty much everything that we're going
to be talking about in the next 20 minutes.
Gardner: Alex, when I hear Greg, I'm thinking business networks, although people in the
consumer space might not think of them as business networks. It’s the network effect, it’s
intelligence shared, it’s linking things up and allowing the pace to increase and people to share
knowledge and activities. What do you see as the crossover from the consumer space in the
behaviors and culture of technology and then how does that translate to the business idea of a
network?
Alex Atzberger: I was recently in Dubai, and they have a Museum of the Future that they're
launching this year. In the Museum of the Future, you can see what it would be
like to be going to a doctor to get a new body part to jump higher or move
faster. You look at these types of ideas, and the business embraces the same sort
of idea. How can I augment my business to actually run smarter and be better?
What are things on which I can augment myself to use data better?
You can no longer be an island as a company. You need to share ideas and
innovation with others. You need to be connected, and when you're connected,
you can transform your business, you can do new things, you can take on new
capabilities, and you can augment your business.
Atzberger
3. Companies ask us, "Now that I'm connected to a network, how can I get data out of that network
to improve my business processes and do things better?" That's what they basically call the
augmented enterprise, to get augmented intelligence to that business.
Gardner: We're seeing different patterns, not only in adoption, but expectations. People are
seeing a mobile device tied to a cloud that has deep learning capabilities, and feedback loops that
are applying the data back and forth. People are becoming ready for the next move. They want
the technology to guide them. And they also don't want to take the time to learn a process; it has
to be intuitive to them.
So how do these human behavioral aspects of anticipating a proactive technological helping hand
impact both us in our consumer space, as well as what we would expect in our business
environment?
Simplicity is key
Williams: Simplicity is absolutely key to all technology. We have to think about the end user.
The end user or the customer is always the most important thing in any kind of technology
process.
Going back to what Alex was talking about in terms of artificial intelligence (AI), what it’s going
to allow us to do is be a lot more predictive in terms of consumer behavior and customer
behavior.
If you look at something like natural language processing now, some of the startups in that space
who are working with automotive manufacturers, to go back to my previous example, they will
look at trends on social media and elsewhere. They can look at import and export data maybe
and they can look at those predictive trends and make predictions about General Motors, their
sales in the next quarter.
From the sky, we can look at parking lots at malls like Target, Costco, and Walmart and we can
make predictions about how the quarterly earnings report for Walmart or whatever is going to be
pretty strong this quarter.
What we are looking at is this constant connecting of the dots, and to Alex’s point, this incredible
accumulation of data. That’s the real tough thing for businesses right now. I don’t think there’s
any business out there that doesn’t understand the value of data. This phrase "big data" is one
that you'll hear at every single conference, but how can we possibly parse value out of that? How
can we use that data in a predictive way, rather than as a lagging indicator?
Most businesses have used data as a historical indicator. So, it's looking at sales reports or
whatever other data is important within your organization. How we can use all those external
factors is going to become increasingly important for businesses. Can we see how our
competitors are doing by looking at the job postings that they have maybe? How can we see
4. what their next move is in terms of manufacturing by looking at their import/export data? Can
we look at the amount of money they're spending on Google AdWords and see what keywords
they're spending money on?
As I said previously, it’s about connecting of the dots and bringing this information together, and
also figuring it out, having someone within your organization who's not going to get
overwhelmed by this data, but is curating it, and knows what’s important and what’s not
important to the enterprise, because a lot of it isn’t.
Gardner: User experience plays a huge role in how we can consume and make good on this
technology, on this data, on this analysis. What Greg said about simplicity can be deceiving. It
might seem simple to the end user, but an awful lot has to happen in order for that effect to take
place.
So Alex, one of the interesting things I've seen with SAP Ariba recently is this notion of "Guided
Buying." I love that word "guided," because you're anticipating the user, heading them off on
complexity, but what does it take behind-the-scenes to actually make that happen?
Guided Buying
Atzberger: There’s a whole lot that it takes to get this going. The idea of Guided Buying was
always that simplicity that all customers are asking us for. It’s really about how I make the user
feel empowered and give the power to the user, but at the same time, embed intelligence in the
software.
In our cloud applications, we thought through every step of the process, starting with monitoring
how users were behaving with the system. So it’s a design thinking approach, and it starts off
with deep empathy with the user. That’s the first point.
The second point is understanding what the business actually wants to accomplish, because the
business actually runs a business. They have rules, methodologies, things that they want to
achieve.
I was with one CPO who told me, "Alex, I look at this beautiful software, but you're making it
too easy to buy. I don’t want people to just go out and buy stuff." That’s absolutely a good point,
but what we're doing is embedding the logic of the buying in the enterprise into Guided Buying.
That’s the difference between B2C and B2B.
In B2C you can have that beautiful experience. You just want to make the experience so seamless
that you drive commerce. In B2B, you want to guide the commerce, to be more relevant and fit
your company goals. That requires a slightly different approach to how you solve that problem.
We're obviously deeply committed to solving that problem in the context of giving users as much
freedom and choice as possible while enabling the business to achieve their goals.
5. Williams: Alex used a really great phrase and it’s one that we actually had a discussion about in
the office, which is the importance of design thinking within organizations. When you think
about software or any technology, the user experience is your brand. So, it’s the people
experiencing it.
Pretty much in every organization now, the "design brief" is a really important part of the
organization. Maybe designers need to be brought in, whether they're software designers or in the
B2C space, UX designers. They need to have a seat at the top table these days, because they're
such an integral part of defining any kind of brand.
Atzberger: We hire a lot of designers into SAP Ariba, but interestingly, a lot of the engineers
come and say they need to think about design as well. So, it’s not like design is still a separate
department. At one point, design becomes part of what we call a scrum team that basically builds
the software, and an engineer should have a point of view as well in terms of what is good
design.
You could argue that there are some sites that don’t necessarily look pretty, but they're really easy
to use. So, it’s not just about the visualization and the fonts, etc.; it’s about also how many clicks
and the logic behind it. That’s where product people want to be product people. They don’t want
to just be engineers or just designers.
Important element
Gardner: I suppose another important element to this is not only that user experience where
one-size-fits-all, but a user experience where customization is brought to bear, and because of the
technology, because of the intelligence, access to a cloud infrastructure, we can do that. There are
examples of customization at the individual worker level, where role-based and policy-based
approaches can do that.
We're also seeing with the SAP Ariba cloud, you're bringing master data, vendor data, for
example, into the cloud, cleansing it, making it usable, but still keeping it germane to that
particular company, so that this isn’t just a business app for everyone. Let’s delve a little bit into
this idea of customization specifically to a company and then even down to the individual user.
How is that so important now in business applications, Alex?
Atzberger: The premise of the cloud was always speed. What you gave up for the speed was the
ability to customize, especially in enterprise systems. What we're now saying is that you can
have a level of individuality and things that are important to you, either through configuration or
through extending the platform that you're on.
That’s the power of the technology that comes to bear when you look at platforms today. If you
look at Amazon Web Services or what SAP is doing with the HANA Cloud Platform, it’s
essential, because it gives the capabilities to companies to actually customize further.
6. At the same time, we have a concept of the private and the public persona, because at the end of
the day, there is some data that’s private to a company and then there's data that's publicly shared.
We need to be very sensitive of what data is relevant and in what context.
Gardner: Greg, to me. one of the areas where business perhaps can get out in front of the
technology curve, where the consumer side is typical where we think they're going to be fast and
agile and innovative, is this idea of customization and anticipatory or predictive analytics’
benefits? It seems that we're only scratching the surface here. When I go on Netflix, they still
can’t pick shows that I really want to watch. When I go to Amazon and they have My Box or My
Stuff, it's really just things I already bought with a little bit of augmentation.
If we can take this to the full potential of customization, and I think businesses can because they
have access to the data and they can be policy-based and in probably a better way than a mass
consumer environment could, what’s the potential here, when the machines can really start
getting us customization, predictive analytics, and apply that to how we get productive in our
business sense? It strikes me as something quite significant?
Williams: Yeah, it is. I was talking to someone in a California startup who is developing a sales
tool. This person worked for many years in a very large enterprise that builds CRM software. His
new business is very interesting because he's trying to do what you described. He's trying to do it
almost being a search engine for the entire business Internet. I know this has to be verified, but
their claim is that they are much more efficient than regular salespeople.
Say you're trying to sell your software product into a telco. You'll spend a lot of time learning
about the person who purchases, those services. You'll go to conferences, read blogs, develop
networks, and put a lot of effort into this process.
His startup suggests that they'll be able to not only identify the companies that you're able to sell
into, but they'll be able to identify the actual individuals. It will become a lot more detailed in
terms of this is what they're interested in and this is what they're not interested in. This is the
conference that they've been to. Increasingly, we'll have more-and-more intelligence on people,
their habits, their preferences, their interests, and their connections.
Creative business
Take your Netflix example. Netflix moves simply from being a content delivery service to
being a creative business by looking at this kind of Venn diagram of its users interests. They saw
that there was a sweet spot that overlapped with Kevin Spacey, David Fincher, and the original
House of Cards from the UK. They saw that there’s this huge amount of people who love those
three things. They said, "Great. Let's commission this series."
Every time that users interact with the service, it's helping to improve it. Netflix knows what you
watch, when you watch it, where you stop, where you don’t finish, where you fast-forward, and
where you rewind. So, they're collecting huge amounts of data that can be used not just to
7. understand consumer behavior, but also to get insights that can be used for decisions around
content.
Gardner: So, Alex, translate this to the business environment, the business network that your
company is aligned with can be the determiner of how effective this new trend towards
customization, anticipation and being more of a science than an art for sales for example that
Greg mentioned is. This to me says the right network with the right information is a crucial
decision for you. How does that work in terms of companies differentiating themselves based on
who they work with in their ecosystem?
Atzberger: First of all, any company that engages in a network and then captures the data to
make better business decisions is already on that journey. If you look at the social networks
today, if you like three things on Facebook, Facebook knows more about you than your best
friend. If you like more than 10 things, Facebook knows more about you than your spouse.
That’s the logic, and the same happens in business networks as well.
What we see a lot is that businesses are connecting to networks to conduct global business, to
find new market opportunities, and become much better at actually mining and understanding
that data to become more pointed in terms of what solutions they actually want to provide to the
market.
But we're still at the very beginning of this trend. We're working with companies on enabling
Data as a Service, where they leverage the data itself to create more insight into their business,
pursue better business opportunities, change their product offering actually and innovate with
their supplier base. If we do that, we're impacting real change, and that's absolutely feasible
today, but we're still early on.
Gardner: Any examples, Alex, of companies that really get this and that are showing some
demonstrable benefits, that are really tagging on innovation to what their businesses were
traditionally, but taking it in a new direction based on some of these technological benefits that
we’ve talked about -- poster children for innovation perhaps.
Atzberger: When I think about poster children for innovation, I think about companies that are
really looking to the network as infrastructure. What are the other things I can do through this
network in order to change my business or add new capabilities?
What I love is when we have customers who talk about the fact that they can actually change
their industry. Or their entire supply chain. We have a one high-tech manufacturer who thinks
about how they can get demand signals much faster to their supplier base so they can actually
impact the end customer. I like that thinking a lot.
Gardner: Greg, last thoughts on what's to come, how technology and business combine to
transform how we get things done and perhaps even improve our quality of life?
8. Solving big problems
Williams: That’s obviously the fundamental end result, one hopes, of all technological change
-- that people have better lives and we solve big problems. Looking forward, we're going to see,
as Alex has been describing, a real joining of the dots. There aren’t necessarily going to be things
that are dramatic, but we're going to see increasing amounts of AI, for instance, offering us
insights in industries such as healthcare that only machines are capable of determining because
of the sheer volume of data that they can analyze.
I was talking to a guy who worked in the security industry recently. They do a lot of work for the
Pentagon. He was telling me that they did an analysis of tweets about ISIL during one week in
August last year and they noticed that most of them were about security or the security situation
in various parts of Northern Iraq and Syria, account promotion, religion, and strategic updates,
but then they came across an outlier that they never noticed before.
The official ISIS accounts were re-tweeting any mention of female fighters or women in ISIL --
there was clearly a big push by ISIL to recruit women. What happens? Six weeks later, we had
the first female suicide bomber in Europe in Paris. Now, those things probably are not linked, but
I think we're able to see things in the data now that we have never been able to see before and I
think they increasingly will be putting those things to use.
Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. You’ve been listening to a BriefingsDirect
thought leadership podcast discussion on how major new trends and technology are translating
into disruption, and for the innovative business -- opportunity. And we’ve heard how technology
innovations translate into business impacts, and how consumers and suppliers of services and
goods can best prepare.
So please join me in thanking our guests, Greg Williams, Deputy Editor, WIRED UK in London,
and Alex Atzberger, President of SAP Ariba.
And a big thank you too to our audience for joining this SAP Ariba-sponsored business
innovation thought leadership discussion.
I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator. Thanks
again for listening, and do come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Sponsor: SAP Ariba.
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how major new trends and technology are translating
into disruption, and for the innovative business -- opportunity. Copyright Interarbor Solutions,
LLC, 2005-2016. All rights reserved.
You may also be interested in:
9. • SAP Ariba Chief Strategy Officer on the Digitization of Business and the Future of
Technology
• Procurement in 2016 -- The Supply Chain Goes Global
• Is 2016 the Year that Accounts Payable Becomes Strategic?
• Winning the B2B Commerce Game: What Sales Organizations Should Do Differently
• Can Great Design Really Impact Global Commerce?
• Ariba’s digital handshake helps Caesars up the ante on supply chain diversity
• Detecting and Eradicating Slavery and Other Labor Risks Across Global Supply Chains
through Business Networks
• Ariba elevates business user experience with improved mobile apps and interfaces
• Ariba's product roadmap for 2015 leads to improved business cloud services
• Networks: The new model for B2B business, a panel discussion
• Big Data Meets the Supply Chain -- SAP's Supplier InfoNet and Ariba Network Enable
Companies to Predict and Manage Supplier Risk