Paul Wallbank – Communications Professional
Comms, journalism and writing
An agreement between the US and China to curb commercial cyber espionage is welcome but difficult to see working
Presidents Obama and Xi have agreed to curb economic cyber espionage between the two countries during the Chinese Premier’s state visit to the United States today.
It’s a welcome move, but one suspects neither country will resist the opportunity to get a commercial advantage and increasingly the divide between a state and corporate interests has become blurred.
Startup Orion shows the value in mining IoT data
How do companies analyse the data coming off wearable devices? At the Las Vegas Splunk.Conf, the developers of wearable communications device Onyx showed off how they use data to enhance their business.
A lightweight push to talk device that can be clipped to a shirt, jacket or bag strap the Onyx is designed for teams to easily communicate. The device has a microphone, speaker and GPS that tethers with a smartphone, which in turn connects to Orion’s cloud network and communicates with groups defined by the user.
“Our goal and mission at Orion is to make this as easy and seamless at possible,” says Dan Phung, the company’s software engineer. “Technology is something you shouldn’t have to deal with.”
Some of the data Orion collects are the battery levels in the devices, time spent on conversations and volume levels that gives the company insights into useage patterns. One of the big benefits they’ve found as a startup is in tracking what operating systems are being used, enabling them to carry out what Phung calls “data driven engineering decisions”
As a startup with a team of 35, they managed to get the Onyx to market in a year, having that ‘operational intelligence’ has allowed the startup to focus its scarce resources in the areas where the device is being used and not waste time developing for systems that are less popular.
The Orion Onyx is a good example of how a business can get valuable information from a limited data set from a relatively simple device, their use of Splunk also shows the value of being able to analyse that data quickly.
Paul travelled to Splunk.conf in Las Vegas as a guest of Splunk
An investigation shows online advertising is not as effective as television.
Click fraud is costing US advertiser 6.4billion dollars a year reports Bloomberg Business.
The promise of internet advertising was that it could provide much more targeted audiences with far better, precision results.
It turns out the truth is different, with Bloomberg citing Heineken US who did a detailed analysis of their advertising returns to find, as the company’s Brand Director Ron Amram says, “giving money to the mob.”
While that news is bad, although not altogether surprising, for the digital media industry there’s even an even worse revelation from Heineken.
Digital’s return on investment was around 2 to 1, a $2 increase in revenue for every $1 of ad spending, compared with at least 6 to 1 for TV. The most startling finding: Only 20 percent of the campaign’s “ad impressions”—ads that appear on a computer or smartphone screen—were even seen by actual people.
That major brands are television is three times more effective than digital puts online advertisers in a bad position, although social media gurus have long argued companies can’t measure return on investment from their efforts.
Ultimately though the Bloomberg story shows we need a new model, applying broadcast advertising conventions to online services isn’t working. We’re still waiting for a new David Sarnoff to come along.
Uber shows how opportunities arise when systems are broken
“Taxi drivers are good people, they are just treated badly”, Uber founder Travis Kalanick told Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at Dreamforce last week.
Kalanick flagged how in most cities around the world the taxi industry is broken. Nowhere is that more true than in Australia and a piece I wrote for Business Spectator about the disruption to the nation’s taxi industry illustrates that well.
The success of Uber in disrupting those markets – although it should be noted the company is far from becoming profitable – shows the real opportunities lie where existing markets are broken or distorted.
If you’re benefiting from a broken market then this is a risk to your business. For outsiders, it’s an opportunity.
Can Splunk use data analytics to make IT sexy again?
“We’re early in the marathon but making good progress”, opened Godfrey Sullivan, the CEO of Splunk, as he opened the company’s annual conference in Las Vegas today.
Helping businesses understand their data has proved lucrative for Splunk with the analytics company seeing a 46% increase in year on year revenue to $148 million for the last quarter with the organisation narrowing its losses over the same period.
As with all tech conferences, the focus in the opening keynote is on new product announcements. For Splunk, the main release is its latest enterprise version of Splunk Enterprise 6.3 billed as delivering faster results, better analytics and tying into the masses of machine data being collected from the Internet of Things.
That IoT data is a key part of Sullivan’s strategy of “making machine data more accessible usable and valuable to everyone.” The company also highlights their alliances with IoT data consolidator services such as Xively and Octoblu.
Security is another focus of Splunk with the launch of Splunk User Behavior Analytics (UBA) that analyses usage patterns on networks to identify risky or suspicious activity and a version upgrade of their their Enterprise Security.
The original business of Splunk was to monitor server log files and that IT focus remains with their new IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), an improved IT monitoring and analytics service.
Sullivan’s key message was that IT departments can be offering ‘operational intelligence’ as they gather and analyse data from all aspects of a business. “IT departments have to earn a seat at the table”, as Splunk’s CTO Snehal Antani says and providing rich data analytics, in his view, enable this.
Antani cited one of his previous clients, a bank which would ordinarily would deal with ten million dollars of deposits a day so an alarm had been set for when less than half of that had been received by midday.
One day that alarm sounded, and the IT department assumed there was a problem with the bank’s systems. After checking, they found everything was running normally so flagged deposits were unusually low to senior management.
It turned out to be a competitor had launched a successful campaign to open new accounts which had caught the bank by surprise. “The CMO acted as if he’d been hacked,” Antani recalls.
Antani’s anecdote illustrates how business data is no longer just the concern of the IT department and a small group of geeky business analysts, with real time information every part of an organisation can improve its performance.
For Splunk, using data to improve all aspects of business its key message to the market and one it hopes to drive its business forward although it’s highly unlikely they’ll achieve Antani’s hopes of “making IT sexy again.” That would take much more than a marathon.
Paul travelled to the Splunk.conf in Las Vegas as a guest of Splunk
Xero starts its serious push into the US cloud accounting market
Last month I wrote a piece for Business Spectator on how competition in the Australian cloud accounting market was hotting up with the re-entry of Intuit and Sage.
One of the divides between vendors was whether online accounting services scale globally with one group – including MYOB and Reckon – saying that deploying services in different jurisdictions added complexity while others believed a global product was necessary to achieve scale.
The most obvious member of the global scale camp was Xero, the company that has pioneered the growth of cloud accounting software. Two years ago we interviewed the company’s founder Rod Drury about his ambitions for the company and the direction of the cloud accounting market.
For Xero though, growing globally isn’t easy. While its most successful market has been in Australia, that country has many similarities with Xero’s native New Zealand and the company has found the UK and US markets tougher.
To deal with a much bigger and diverse market, the company appointed Russ Fujioka, a veteran of Dell, Abode and the various venture capital companies, to lead its revamped operations in the United States and Decoding the New Economy caught up with Russ recently at Xero’s San Francisco office.
For Fujioka, the key to growth in the United States market is the small business sector with the US recording nearly half a million new business registrations across the nation each year.
“You see the M in ‘SMB’? We don’t want to be playing to that market,” says Fujioka in emphasising the Xero’s focus on the small business sector.
Fujioka also sees opportunity in what he calls the ‘pre-accounting’ sector, the roughly 18 million self employed contractors and freelancers who don’t need a full fledged accounting service but need access to basic bookkeeping, invoicing and expense tracking.
While the 28 million US small businesses represent a huge opportunity to Xero, the market also presents challenges with, unlike the New Zealand, Australian and UK markets, hundreds of banks and thousands of different state and local tax regimes.
To deal with the complexity of local tax and employment rules, Xero announced a partnership with Avalara to provide the data feeds for calculating sales taxes and payroll obligations, something that is essential to Xero’s business plans, “payroll is fundamental to our offerings.” Fujioka says.
Also fundamental are accountants and book-keepers where co-opting them as sellers of the service has been part of Xero’s success in Australia and New Zealand with Fujioka seeing a fifty-fifty split between those businesses signing up directly and those going through advisers.
Like the rest of the world, the accounting profession is going through major changes as much of the transactional work becomes automated, Fujioka sees this as an opportunity for companies like Xero to add value to the industry and help individual firms become more akin to system integrators and technology advisers to their clients.
The ultimate aim for Fujioka is to make Xero the site, or app, that every small business starts and ends their day with, “we really want to be that single pane of glass for small business – you start your day with us, you end your day with us and during the day you check your status on your Apple Watch.”
For Xero, the key to global success is cracking the US market. The challenge for them is to capture a new generation of business owners and accountants.
Paul travelled to San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce and Splunk
Salesforce head of wearables Lindsey Irvine lays out the future of wearable technologies
One of the most interesting aspects of is that we are entering an age of what designer Gadi Amit calls an era of unlimited screens.
This is coming about because almost everything is becoming a computer including everything we wear.
At last week’s Dreamforce 2015, I caught up with the head of Salesforce Wear, Lindsey Irvine, to discuss the future of wearables.
“There’s a whole big connected world out there, it’s daunting.” says Irvine. “We’re going to help companies how to use these technologies in new and different ways in this space.”
Irvine sees industries where it’s easy to show a business case, like retail and sales, being the earliest business adopters of wearable technologies.
Earlier this year Salesforce launched their Putting Wearables To Work that surveyed how enterprises are using wearable technology. Which gave the company the pointers for the direction of their business strategy.
“We did a few things, one is we connected a range of different devices. Not all, but the ones gaining the most traction,” Irvine says. “We connected these devices to the platforms so that no company would no longer have to build one off apps for each device.”
Irvine sees sectors like real estate and health care being big areas off opportunity and in the longer term she sees smart materials and biometrics becoming more common.
The key with the future of wearables are that devices will become smaller and less intrusive, “you aren’t going to see people wearing five devices on their wrists or two sets of glasses.”
Paul travelled to Dreamworld as a guest of Salesforce
There are five key questions every business leader has to answer for their venture to be successful says Salesforce founder Marc Benioff
Probably the best regular session of the annual Dreamforce conference is the final session where Salesforce founders Marc Benioff and Parker Harris answer questions from the attendees.
As with any open microphone session, some of the questions are silly but many highlight frustrations Salesforce’s customers have and some give the opportunity for an insight into Parker and Benioff’s thoughts away from the scripted glitz of the main keynotes.
One questioner asked Benioff and Parker what their advice would be to someone in their position of 16 years ago with a new business.
“Don’t think about the tools or the technology,” said Harris. “Thing about the problems you can solve. Stay focused and work hard and build a great company.”
While Parker also emphasised a great team is another important element, Benioff flagged an element of luck in building a successful business, “we got the timing right.”
Ultimately though it came down to making the jump from a comfortable, if frustrating, corporate job to a risky startup.
“I remember I was working in a big company for a long time, very unhappy.” Benioff recalled and noted the decision to strike out on your own is very much a personal decision, that can only be done when you are convinced it is time.
Knowing when that time has arrived comes down to five questions, Benioff believes.
“It all starts with you, you have to get clear about what is it that you really want, what is really important to you, how are you going to get it, how will you know when you’ve got it and what is preventing you from having it.”
“When you can answer all those five questions you’ll have clarity in your direction. The problem with most small businesses – and big businesses – is they can’t answer those questions.”
“If you can answer those questions then you can break out.”
Ultimately Benioff and Parker flag focus as the key individual attribute and being able to focus on answering those five questions is a very good first step to having a successful business.
The era of ad blocking isn’t going to be good for readers
The latest release of Apple’s mobile operating iOS with an inbuilt ad blocker has again raised the issue of blocking website advertising.
Some see it as good for the advertising industry, believing it will force advertisers to think beyond intrusive pop up ads while others point out that ad blocking will devastate most of today’s online publishers.
While both views are probably right, it underscores how the media world is still waiting for a modern David Sarnoff to appear as the current model that sees publishers’ revenues declining is clearly not sustainable.
In the meantime though we’re almost certainly going to see more aggressive ‘native content’ – adverts posing as articles – as publishers try to find revenue and advertisers attempt to get their message across readers can expect more desperate attempts to get attention.
Those cheering for the end of the current advertising model should be careful of what they wish for though, the scramble for revenue and eyeballs is going be unseemly as we enter the era of the blocked advert.
Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella seems genuine in his push for cloud services and alliances, but there’s still a lot of marketing speak wrapped up
“Why does Microsoft exist?” Asked the company’s founder Satya Nadella at the Dreamforce 2015 conference.
Nadella has asked this question before and his answer at the San Francisco event was that Microsoft exists to empower people through technology, something that Bill Gates and Paul Allen envisaged in the mid 1970s when they founded new startup.
To show how he sees Microsoft’s position in the modern workplace, Nadella gave a not completely flawless demonstration of Microsoft’s integration with Salesforce.
The products Nadella pushed were Windows Phone and Windows 10, which he claims to be part of a major change in businesses with data transforming the way we work.
Interestingly, he framed the Windows 10 IoT strategy around endpoint security. While there are millions of vulnerable devices, it’s not clear shipping them with Microsoft’s firmware will resolve the problem.
“What’s the big technology shift? It’s how we use the data.” Nadella proclaimed in laying out how he sees a data culture transforming the places we work.
Microsoft itself is dealing with a cultural transformation with the company shifting across to cloud based subscription services. “The thing that it’s done for us is it’s not a one-for-one move. It’s not like we’re just moving Exchange on premise to Exchange as a Service, it changes the value proposition for the customers.”
Nadella sees those cloud services as an opportunity to sell more products – and add more value – to customers, particularly small businesses.
A business’ success relies upon its culture and Nadella sees the role of the CEO as being about curating that culture, “I always ask what it is that defines us.”
Part of that culture is about becoming customer focused which involves thinking outside of one company’s products or silos, “how is our industry going to succeed? It’s going to succeed if we can add value our customers. Our customers are going to make choices that aren’t homogenous.”
Those varied choices are what’s driving Microsoft’s current push into alliances. “If we are going to realise the power of technology, then these partnerships will amplify that,” says Nadella.
While there were nuggets of truth in Nadella’s presentation, there was also a lot of truisms and somewhat meaningless slogans. While Microsoft’s push onto the cloud and into alliances that were once considered unholy might be genuine, it’s hard not to think there’s still a lot of marketing speak wrapped around it.
Managing the data deluge is where Salesforce is focusing its efforts in a competitive market
One of the world’s biggest tech events – if not the biggest of the vendor shows – is Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual spectacular that this this year attracted a 150,000 attendees to San Francisco’s Moscone Center.
Every year sees the company – which now holds the title of the world’s fourth biggest software company – and its CEO, Marc Benioff, defining the direction of the company in the face of a rapidly changing market. Despite being a pioneer in cloud computing, the company is as vulnerable to disruption as anyone else in a rapidly changing marketplace.
This year, the focus is on analytics and automation along with a strong leaning towards the Internet of Things and app development on the Lightning platform they announced last year.
With the Thunder platform, Salesforce is offering a service that allows businesses to connect devices onto their platform where users can build up rules based business automation. One notable part of this is the integration with Microsoft Office 365, another example of Microsoft’s reaching out to previously hostile companies.
For Automation, Salesforce is building upon its RelateIQ acquisition from last year, now branded as SalesforceIQ. The company says “Relationship Intelligence technology that utilizes advanced data science to analyze company relationships and drive actions.”
The Wave analytics service, which was also announced at last year’s Dreamforce, is a key part of the the business automation and IoT services in providing the insights into the data being collected. In many respect, Wave is going to be the glue that holds most of the products being announced this year.
Complementing the Wave, Thunder and SalesforceIQ products is the Lightning platform, again announced last year, that allows users to use the company’s AppCloud to quickly build business applications.
For Salesforce, the direction being laid out from this Dreamforce conference is in making helping customers deal with the masses of data coming into the enterprise. As Tod Neilsen, the company’s Executive Vice President of the App Cloud says, “we’re look at making the data usuable for spreadsheet users.”
As businesses struggle to manage and understand the masses of data flowing into their organisations, this may well be a powerful selling point for Salesforce.
Paul travelled to Dreamforce 2015 in San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce
Changes to the world of design are going to have an effect on all businesses
“I always believe small companies usually illustrate big shifts faster than larger companies. In many ways big companies are responding to the shifts being driven by smaller businesses,” says Andrew Anagnost, the Senior Vice President of Industry Strategy and Marketing at Autodesk.
Anagnost was talking the Dreamforce media contingent after a tour of his company’s San Francisco Gallery where possibilities of today’s design and manufacturing tools are displayed.
Those possibilities are changing business, not just in design but across most industries as the means of financing and building new projects changes along with consumer demand as production methods change.
Anagnost breaks these changes into four major trends – the way things are designed, how they are produced, the nature of demand in a world where things can personalised and the very notion of what a product is.
“What people expect in from products today is very different.”
“Every generation brings something new to design,” says Anagnost. “Imagine the generation that grew up with social media, online gaming, all the things that previous generations did not grow up with.”
This generation will be more collaborative and the idea of working in fluid, unstructured groups where many of the members will never physically meet anywhere.
Cloud computing is the other factor Anagnost sees as changing design as “it puts a supercomputer behind every screen”, which brings to the desktop great power in testing designs. “The designer gets a chance to explore options they couldn’t access before.”
That supercomputer at your fingertips changes all businesses, giving them processing power to carry out complex analytical tasks and modelling in all industries.
Another change to the production process is how people are financing their products. Increasingly platforms like Kickstarter are creating new ways for entrepreneurs to raise funds and also to test the market for a product before investing money and time.
“Before people would have to pitch their ideas to a larger manufacturer, an investor or a VC but now they can pitch it to anyone,” says Anagnost. “The means of financing products is now changing.”
‘Fabless manufacturing’ promises to change manufacturing by reducing the need for massive factories as micr0-factories start to change the economics of making products. These miniaturised robot factories are easily configurable and can be located locally rather than across the country of oceans.
Coupled with 3D printing, again it becomes cheaper and quicker to bring products to market and changes the dynamics of getting goods to market. “When it gets cheaper to deliver a complex product, the field gets levelled and more people can deliver innovative products to market,” says Anagnost.
The other trend within manufacturing is prefabricated assembly. While nothing new, improved design tools and manufacturing methods are making it easier and more efficient to assemble things like buildings onsite, coupled with 3D printing this is going to see massive changes in sectors like the construction industry.
Changing manufacturing and designs creates changed consumer expectations, as design becomes more accessible and personalisations easier customers are increasingly going to want products that meet their specific tastes and needs.
Another aspect to this is generational change, where younger consumers expect personalised products and don’t identify the same way with major brands as their grandparents and parents did.
“We’re going to see a move from rampant consumerism to a more selective consumerism,” says Anagnost.
This means markets are going to be far more volatile as the brand loyalty erodes in the face of a demanding customer. You’re only as good as the last conversation you had with your customer and if they aren’t happy they’ll go elsewhere.
The final factor Anagnost sees is the world of connected devices, increasingly consumers will demand products that have online functionality built in.
Increasingly we’re seeing this with motor cars and in the near future we’ll be seeing devices as diverse as motorcycle helmets and light bulbs being shipped with networked capabilities.
“Everything in your home is going to be connected in some way and people are going to have that expectation they will be,” says Anagnost. “Sensors are getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. There’s an assumption of connectivity.”
What Anagnost and Autodesk are flagging is business is changing, barriers we thought were unsurmountable are increasingly falling. For every industry, easily accessible computing and manufacturing power is changing the competitive landscape.
Paul travelled to San Francisco as guest of Salesforce.
