Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • The future of wearables

    The future of wearables

    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

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  • Marc Benioff’s five key business questions

    Marc Benioff’s five key business questions

    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.

    Forget the tech

    “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.

    The five questions of business

    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.

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  • Publishing in an ad blocker world

    Publishing in an ad blocker world

    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.

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  • Reinventing Microsoft in the age of cloud computing

    Reinventing Microsoft in the age of cloud computing

    “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.

    A Grand Pivot

    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.

    The CEO’s role

    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.

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  • Managing the data stream

    Managing the data stream

    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

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