Highly Competitive - software industry insights

Connecting the Cyber-Threat Dots through Big Data

 

The managed security services market has been in play for more than a decade. Not surprisingly, it continues to show vibrant growth, fueled in part by cloud-related factors. Research and Markets, in a January 2015 report, estimated that market growth will run from $14.3 billion in 2014 to $31.9 billion by 2019 (with a CAGR of 17.3%). Growth for security services touches just about every industry, and all sizes of organizations.

Managed services providers are tasked with marrying expertise in cybersecurity and cloud with big data analytics to deliver comprehensive protection and proactive measures to their clients. Proactive cybersecurity services call for the implementation of far-reaching and sophisticated data and event management technologies and services, to improve the aggregation and analysis of security event big data. Managed security services should address the imperative for integrating many disparate sources, including big data sources, to derive event correlation that can be aligned with other analytics to continuously improve alerts, preemptive processes, and real-time reporting.

Today's cyber security threats frequently operate as patterns that usually deviate from the expected behavior for most authorized users or for activity on particular devices or IP addresses. To identify and fight such attacks, security teams need technology services that can find and analyze deviant trends. This is a natural fit for big data mining and analytics combined with state-of-the-art cybersecurity programs.

Machine-generated data provides fertile ground for using big data analytics to root out cyber security threats. Machine data lives in the IT infrastructure: network logs, event logs, firewall and security system data, web logs, email logs – anything and everything operating in the infrastructure. But machine-generated data can be quite problematic for aggregation, data mining and analytics. Such data must be processed very quickly, frequently in real-time and usually exists in large volumes that are continuously proliferating. Machine data sources are quite variable, many of which are multi-structured formats that further challenge data mining efforts.

Once data has been extracted from machine-generated sources it can be enriched with other kinds of data to establish context, and elicit patterns and trends related to cyber attacks. Managed analytics services can take on a forensics quality while searching through data for patterns of irregular or unexpected activity. For instance, realtime endpoint forensic data capture and analysis is on the rise to plug yet another hole in systems infrastructure, in order to block data breach entry points.

Situational awareness is another important aspect of fighting cyber attacks. The overarching value of situational awareness is continuously knowing what is going on around the organization, to "instantly" respond to certain events. Big data analytics strengthen situational awareness primarily through fast real-time assessments that can reduce time to decisions and actions in response to potential threats and certain anomalies. These sorts of analytics also require corroboration from subject matter experts, to help make the best decisions based on the data at hand. And this opens up yet another "cybersecurity frontier" for managed services providers where knowledge and expertise are just as important as optimally running technologies.

 

Image source: platfora.com

 

This post was brought to you by IBM for MSPs and opinions are my own. To read more on this topic, visit IBM's PivotPoint. Dedicated to providing valuable insight from industry thought leaders, PivotPoint offers expertise to help you develop, differentiate and scale your business.

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitiveand on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting

 

Moving Target: Cybersecurity and Integrated Managed Services

 

Cybersecurity continues to encompass the pressing need for detailed, broad and varied solution capabilities. Implementing, maintaining and updating comprehensive cybersecurity solutions frequently seem to be daunting tasks for organizations of all sizes. Simplifying cybersecurity solutions is appealing as a beneficial goal -- but the more useful approach right now is to streamline integrated services to handle a broad range of capabilities. Often different industries require specialized security solutions; customization requirements are often part of the mix for many organizations. Managed services providers can cost-effectively handle these sorts of individualized needs as 'business as usual'.

 

Cybersecurity and the Cloud

Like data management and analytics, the cloud impacts cybersecurity solutions on two fronts: the need to provide extensive cybersecurity capabilities for cloud-based applications and services; and the transition to security services and solutions based in the cloud themselves.

A recent article quoted a survey that revealed the problems still challenging organizations for effective cybersecurity to protect work done in the cloud:

 In the face of rapid growth of cloud infrastructure across IT, security has not been able to keep up with the pace of change. Approximately 65 percent of respondents say it takes three months or longer to deploy a new security solution for cloud infrastructure environments. The survey showed that more than three-quarters of survey respondents experience tool fatigue and nearly as many said traditional tools don't scale well in cloud environments…

The survey showed that 77 percent of security leaders say they have too many point solutions to do security well in cloud environments, and 76 percent say they lack visibility into attacks through cloud infrastructure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image source: CDN

 

 

Comprehensive integrated / bundled managed services can contribute greatly to reducing the complexity of end-to-end cybersecurity solutions, while drawing on MSP expertise in multiple technology areas that matter greatly for effective cybersecurity. MSPs need to develop integrated services that address the needs of both cloud and on-premises technologies and work processes, while utilizing elastic methodologies to better defend overall infrastructures from cyber threats.

Cloud-based cybersecurity services align well with the movement of managed services to the cloud, to increase flexibility and reduce costs in ways that pay off for clients. It's important to remember that cybersecurity is very technology-intensive and can be quite complex 'internally'. While MSPs can create streamlined services that work well for clients, the less viable notion right now is the ability to make cybersecurity "simple" (in the way that basic SaaS services are known for). It still takes well-experienced tech experts on the job to make sure everything is continuously updated and working optimally.

 

Continuous Data Management and Analytics

Data is an integral part of effective cybersecurity services, to build consolidated views across all infrastructures (cloud, on-premises) in order to locate and monitor cyber threats as they occur. Data must be analyzed, understood and put to work to continuously anticipate new threats and improve technologies and processes for better protection over time.

Data sources include big data that comes from many areas both inside and outside the firewall. Big data analytics, combined with other data sources, can process: patterns of behavior preceding attacks; attack attributes; and other analyses -- to derive invaluable context to better understand how cybersecurity services should respond to and prevent threats. Predictive analytics processes lead to crafting methods to head off new kinds of attacks. Big data analytics will take MSPs into more 'creative' services that must continuously evolve and be highly responsive to the ultra-fast kaleidoscope of cyber attacks.

 

Through integrated / bundled managed services that encompass cybersecurity, cloud platforms, and data management and analytics, MSPs can take on all aspects of comprehensive cybersecurity solutions to free up in-house IT teams for other important tasks -- particularly for proactive business technology activities that directly support the business endeavors, goals and objectives of the organization.

 

 

This post was brought to you by IBM for MSPs and opinions are my own. To read more on this topic, visit IBM's PivotPoint. Dedicated to providing valuable insight from industry thought leaders, PivotPoint offers expertise to help you develop, differentiate and scale your business.

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitiveand on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

Why Midsized Software Vendors Need the Guidance of A Generalist Who’s A Specialist

 

I love the software industry, particularly the continuous change and innovation, the unexpected twists and turns, that lead to new trajectories. I've worked in this industry for quite a while, starting off as a developer in the IT group at Texas Instruments. Over the years, I've had the pleasure to take on a variety of roles, all of which has given me a unique perspective when looking at technology and how it's used by businesses.

The world has been turned upside down for most software companies: increased and unexpected competition, uncertain global economy, customers constantly morphing, volatile and disruptive solution markets, customer-driven sales, and constant technological change. The strategic capabilities to effectively differentiate and position a software vendor are in constant flux.

Often software vendors need outside advisors and strategists to help them take on new perspectives, call out current wrong turns, and put together new competitive direction – with guidance for how to make it all happen. An outside consultant brings the advantage of not being embroiled in company politics, "drunk" on the company kool-aid, or blindly enamored of the company technology.

To truly make a difference for midsized software companies, an outside consultant should be first of all a Generalist, to pull together the optimal end objectives, and then a Specialist, to understand how to get there. The generalist meets the challenge of connecting the right dots across many domains to construct a valuable new 'big picture' of possibilities. The specialist makes sure that strategies are rooted in reality for a particular software vendor and its customers, and understands logistical issues that could impact execution.

 

'Master of Many Trades': The New Generalist

It's tempting to label today's generalist as "jack of all trades, master of none". But this clichéd phrase doesn't come close to the strengths embodied by the category-bending generalist. My generalist strengths draw on the mastery that I have in many areas – all of which come into play for upping the game for my clients. Generalists help companies do a better job of meeting customer needs, developing useful and forward-looking products, and going to market with the right mindset by understanding how these different elements have to work together to achieve success.

Generalists are driven by an insatiable curiosity: we quickly understand new ideas and concepts, continuously consume information, and usually go after research and analysis in hyper-drive. The generalist's broad diversity of perspective and experience is key to achieving innovative and creative thinking. A wide variety of knowledge combined with intelligent questioning of the status quo open new ways of seeing and doing things. As a generalist I'm wired to provide strategic context for my client projects, deliver the key points, and lay out clear guidance for actions to take and why.

The means to solve large problems and create the basis for new value usually run across multiple disciplines, lines of business, and even industries.Innovative thinking comes from connecting concepts, technologies, practices in ways not previously envisioned – with components often coming from outside the vendor's current solution domain and comfort zone. Innovation results from associative thinking or idea mashups:connecting known but frequently disparate concepts or constructs to create something new that can take companies in advantageous directions on less-traveled paths.

 

And Then There's the Specialist in Me

It's very important to develop good strategies. But it's also important to help software vendors with the execution of those strategies, with high level planning based on the realities that exist for a particular company. To give my clients the innovative ideas and strategies that will work for them and their customers, I draw on my specialist background to provide a pointed focus on how software should be developed, marketed and sold for a particular purpose that will solve real customer problems.

The specialist in me comes from:

• Hands on work in multiple software solution domains
• Different roles: technical, customer-facing, go-to-market
• IT team experience
• Entrepreneurial business experience
• Detail-oriented analytical skills (analytical abilities relate both to specialists and generalists)
• Creative bent
• Advanced communications proficiency
• Customer interactions of many kinds -- related to software solutions, specific industries and solving business problems

 

Devising Strategies for B2B Software Companies is Multi-Layered

Software solution spaces started off as silos. But it's no longer possible for software technologies to exist in a vacuum within any company. Enterprises need better integrated systems and processes. Over recent years, solutions have developed more overlap and convergence with one another. Software vendors had better understand this new playing field, as well as the endless number of new innovations for different kinds of solutions and how they are delivered to customers. The convergence of software solutions means competition can come from any direction. It also means most solution spaces are commoditized.

Software vendors and buyers alike need strategies and expert guidance to optimize how they support today's integrated enterprises: how different software applications fit together, how to evolve practices and processes for users to best take advantage of new technologies – even how to evolve cultural changes for the internal enterprise. Changes in how enterprises function affect software vendors as much as buyers.

Readers of my writing here in my blog and other publications may wonder what I do professionally, since I cover a wide variety of business technology topics. To provide real and actionable advice on strategies, I have to understand the many layers of creating, marketing, selling, and ultimately using B2B software solutions. I bring a great deal of value to the work I do for my clients because of what I know and what I have experienced from real world implementations of various software solutions and working with buyers and users.

I constantly keep tabs on:

• Specialized knowledge of many customer industries, to understand how technology makes a difference for these industries and customers
• Multidimensional knowledge of the Customer and the customer experience: how and why customers research, buy, use software solutions
• What vendors need to do to offer the solutions and experiences that best benefit their customers
• Optimal target markets and customers for various B2B software vendors
• Deep knowledge of many software solution spaces and how they fit together for most companies
• Focused insight that plays well for midsized and smaller vendors
• Activities of the overall array of B2B software vendors

 

Strong Authentic Customer Focus is Everything

Your customers are your company – period. Whether your company sells software or your company uses software, your main strategic goal should be Successful Customers. To focus on what customers need, the people of the enterprise and their technologies have to work well together. The customer-focused enterprise can achieve growth and competitiveness -- by delivering what their customers want and need, for now and the future.

But software vendors continue to struggle with prioritizing the Customer over their business-as-usual, ingrained product and self-focused strategies. I provide the guidance and expertise to help vendors look at technology solutions from customer perspectives, and build connections from their software solutions to the problems customers want to solve.

 

Why You Need Help from the Generalist and Specialist That I Am

If you're reading this article, it's likely that you work in the software industry. You may already realize that software vendors often put too much focus on technologies and features, and fail to connect with the right potential customers to meet their needs. Vendors must transform product and go-to-market strategies to focus on how their solutions help their customers improve their businesses, meet critical objectives, and work more effectively. 

Business growth strategies start with customer insights. Customers are changing, very quickly – as are solution markets. Vendors must keep up. Software companies need to get better at creating and growing the right solutions, that work they way users work. Realistic competitive differentiation comes from meeting the needs of the right target markets and customers with high quality products and services, and from making a commitment to outstanding customer experiences for every interaction.       

It would be my pleasure to be your partner in making your software company more successful, with current and future solution strategies. I'll help you re-invent your software company: from business model innovation to new services and solutions, more targeted markets, true customer focus, and effective go-to-market strategies. More information – What I Do for Vendors and Buyers

 

 

Image source: creativegeneralist.com

 

 

Related Links

B2B Software Strategies: Startups, Starting from Scratch, Re-Inventing

Internal Disruption–No Longer Business As Usual

Customer Buying Criteria - Applying customer & competitive intelligence to selling tools leads to strategic internal benefits

Three Journeys: Lifecycles of Enterprise Software Buyers & End Users

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

Strategies from Top to Bottom - Content Marketing for B2B Software Vendors

The Customer Journey: Content Marketing for B2B Software Buyers

Selling Software Solutions to SMB / Mid-Market Companies – Who and How To Target

The Irrelevance of Porter's Five Forces for the B2B Software Industry

 

 

About the author: Julie is an independent consultant and industry analyst for B2B software solutions, providing services to vendors to improve strategies for customers and target markets, products and solutions, and future direction. Julie has expertise in several solution spaces including: data integration and data quality; analytics and BI; business process, workflow and collaboration; digital marketing, WCM and social media; and the pivotal importance of user and customer experiences. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitiveand on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

 

Content Marketing for Midsized Companies: Who to Target, What to Create

 

An integral part of creating a strategy for content marketing initiatives is to identify which of your customers are the targets of your content: what are their roles in their companies, what part do they play in the buying process, what are their preferred channels for different kinds of content. Then decisions must be made for the types of content that will be created, based on the preferences of target customers and different phases of the customer or buying journey. Just as companies should be segmenting target markets and target customer roles to better connect their products to customer needs, the same segmentation should be used for content.

 

Software solutions are important tools for learning more about customers and their buying behaviors, to provide the continuous intelligence needed for effective content marketing. Advanced analytics can process data from many disparate sources, such as social media, master data and CRM systems, and provide customer insight that helps with customer segmentation, mapping customer journeys, and relating customer content preferences to specific channels for publication. Content management and marketing automation solutions enable dynamic management of the customer / content matrix as it relates to buying processes and customer desires. Various software solutions also nurture consistent customer experiences across channels, to enhance positive perceptions. Most of the above technologies provide capabilities for tracking activities and outcomes, to be able to repeatedly measure effectiveness, and fine tune approaches and processes.

 

 

What Kind of Content Should You Create?

Forcontent to provide superior customer engagement, the focus is no longer on vendor offerings and product features. It's about content that helps prospects and customers solve their problems and improve the performance of their organizations. The kind of content that attracts your customers will change on a regular basis, as media options evolve along with customer interests and needs. Companies must keep on top of these changes through different industry reports, analytics on the effectiveness of current content marketing activities, direct feedback from customers, and continuously tracking changes to buying / customer journeys.

 

Content categories that currently catch the attention of different kinds of customers include:

à Content Optimized for Mobile Consumption

Mobile is rapidly becoming a top channel for connecting to customers. To engage customers, content must be specifically optimized for the device, particularly smartphones where display real estate is at a premium. Content has to make sense for how customers use mobile devices and generally should be simple, very interesting and to the point.

à Video

Customers like video content when it covers topics relevant to their needs. High quality, sophisticated video is greatly preferred over amateurish efforts. Customer expectations for engagement look for entertainment combined with information.

à White papers and Product Information Sheets

These types of content are primarily of interest for B2B customers. White papers will only be useful if they cover topics and issues that matter to customers. Customers are strongly turned off by marketing "brochureware" masquerading as a white paper, and may well reject the vendor that created it.

à Customer Stories and Case Studies

Customers still find great value in customer stories with useful details around the customer problem and how it was solved. Include the value and benefits that were gained by the customer after solving the problem – and keep the focus on the customer, not your company.

à Interactive Elements

Engaging customers with interactive elements, such as embedded video or hyperlinks, frequently builds customer interest in your content, and can take customers further into the buying process. Be sure to overtly identify what each interactive element will do. For example, you may be losing customer follow-through on links if it's not clear what will happen when the link is clicked.

 

Content Marketing Doesn't Stop at Purchases

The bonus value of content marketing is to nurture and build positive customer experiences beyond the purchase, throughout the lifecycle of a customer. Customers and markets can change very quickly; agile and sophisticated software technologies, processes and creative practices are needed to grow and sustain positive customer relationships. Content marketing is an integral part of what it takes to positively engage customers on any channel at any time.

 

 

Image source: ironpaper.com

 

This post was brought to you by IBM for Midsize Business and opinions are my own. To read more on this topic, visit  IBM's Midsize Insider. Dedicated to providing businesses with expertise, solutions and tools that are specific to small and midsized companies, the Midsize Business program provides businesses with the materials and knowledge they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitiveand on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

Timely, Relevant and Wanted: How to Succeed with Mobile Push Marketing

 

 

Not only are people spending more time on mobile devices, much of it is dedicated to using apps. Because of the intimate nature of mobile, marketers have to take on new ways to effectively target consumers both for in-app and mobile website engagement.

Push notifications or messages only happen if mobile users opt in to activate them. These notifications focus on very specific purposes: relevant / requested vendor offers, customer service alerts, new content availability, social updates, various reminders, or notifications tied to current consumer location. Push messages require an immediate action, which has compelling value to vendors:

• In-the-moment marketing that is simple but with lots of room for creativity
• A new way for delivering memorable customer experiences
• An inexpensive way to keep in touch with already interested customers
• A highly detailed targeting and metrics tool

But marketing through push notifications comes with a serious warning. Marketers must be very respectful of the trust mobile users are extending by giving vendors access to their mobile devices – and their attention. Similar to marketing automation and content marketing, mobile users expect highly personalized relevant content. The difference is that push notifications are extremely targeted to very specific interests and actions of individual consumers, often related to the exact moment or current location. If marketers fail to deliver what consumers want in push messages, the messages are ignored and deleted – and the consumer is likely opt out of future push notifications as a waste of their time.

 

A recent JiWire study found that 75 percent of shoppers act after receiving a location-based message.

 

Consumers who are heavy app users are also the most interested in push notifications:

According to a report from Maz, consumers spend 40 percent more time reading content in apps than on Web sites, but marketers are still hesitant to ramp up in-app ad spend. At the same time, Juniper Research just put out a report that predicts that in-app advertising spend will grow to almost $17 billion by 2018, so that reality may be changing in the near future.

    

While in-app marketing is growing in importance, not all customers want to interact with a vendor through apps. Mobile websites continue to draw customers. Consumer actions on mobile websites can dynamically set off the display of personalized content, as a "push" response. And push notifications can be used to drive consumers to specific web pages.

 

Push Notification Relevance Depends on Continuous Analytics

As with marketing automation, a robotic one-size-fits-all won't cut it for consumer-personalized push messages. And as with content marketing, marketers must avoid anything that smacks of blatant sales propaganda. The focus has to be on the consumer perspective, what they need and want.

This is an interesting new direction for effective marketing. Push notifications require personalization on steroids to generate the right timely targeted offerings. This calls for continuous advanced analytics, detailed segmentation, and location-based services. Vendors should already be constructing well-informed segmentation and profiles of customers for marketing automation, content marketing and product development. Push notifications now take it deeper and add new dimensions to customer behavioral data.

Push notification processes introduce the opportunity for very detailed metrics to determine the engagement quality of the communications: what specific actions were taken, which messages were opened immediately, how many app opens occurred, the amount of time spent in the app. The preferences set by mobile users also generate useful data, particularly if the options are quite granular.Marketers have immediate intelligence about what works and what doesn't, and can make quick changes to approaches.

Beyond the specific needs of continuous improvement of push messages, this new customer intelligence should be shared with all other customer-related functions in the company. Push notifications should never exist in a vacuum, but must be part of an integrated cross-channel strategy for customer engagement.

 

The Omnichannel Customer Experience

While mobile is a unique world, mobile marketing still needs tight integration with all multichannel strategies such as a direct marketing. Push marketing must exist as a consistent component of the omnichannel experience for each customer. It should complement messaging tactics on all digital devices for orchestrated actions and engagement across channels.

The consumer intelligence gained from understanding how mobile users react to push notifications should strive to relate the impact of such messages to subsequent cross-channel behavior. As the sophistication of push notification analytics grows, many possibilities should emerge for highly engaging and creative push interactions anywhere anytime.

 

Image source: 99mobileapps.com

 

 

This post was brought to you by IBM for Midsize Business and opinions are my own. To read more on this topic, visit  IBM's Midsize Insider. Dedicated to providing businesses with expertise, solutions and tools that are specific to small and midsized companies, the Midsize Business program provides businesses with the materials and knowledge they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitiveand on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

Mobile Marketers: Think More Like Mobile Developers

 

 

Business-related mobile apps are increasingly being created by organizations, large and small. There are an abundance of developer platforms, many as cloud services, that keep costs down. The same can be said for analytics tools that monitor the various aspects of mobile user behavior. Mobile marketing also benefits from such analytics, whether the marketing effort is related to specific apps, to products and services, or to the promotion of the brand.

The success of anything on a mobile device, particularly a smartphone, is completely dependent on fully understanding how individual people use the device. Different tasks can be executed in different ways, from user to user. These behavioral patterns dictate how mobile apps, websites and marketing communications must be structured in order to quickly engage potential users and customers. And mobile user behavior continuously changes.

Marketers will fail if they approach mobile as traditional online digital marketing accessed through desktops / laptops. In some ways, to be effective as a mobile marketer you have to think like a mobile developer – you have to get "up close and personal" with mobile users and their devices, to better understand how to engage them effectively on mobile terms. With the growth of in-app marketing, thinking like a developer has even more importance.

 

Instant Quality Experiences

Mobile is all about the user experience 24/7. When shopping, using apps or interacting with brands, the mobile user experience is an instant customer experience – and it had better be outstanding. People expect access to what they want when they want it – and they want the experience across mobile devices to be consistent. Mobile attention spans are miniscule so vendors must instantly open up remarkable experiences or the potential mobile customer is gone.

Mobile users are fast and decisive when it comes to shopping and researching products. 70% of mobile searches lead to an action within 1 hour, as opposed to 70% of desktop searches leading to an action within 1 month. Often the next action for a mobile searcher is a phone call – Spafax has found that "inbound phone calls are 15 times more likely to convert to customers than an inbound web lead that downloaded a White Paper or e-book".

 

Tracking User Behavior

For marketers, mobile not just a single channel – it's extremely multi-dimensional and complex. For mobile developers and marketers alike the complexity comes from the diversity of devices, interfaces, browsers – plus deciding between mobile web or mobile app as the means of interacting with users. The high value real estate of device screen size is another dimension of complexity – everything on the display has to be of highest value to users and exactly what they need.

Analytics tools are a must to better understand mobile user behavior. Behavioral analytics provide deeper understanding of the digital life of different kinds of mobile users. Different analytics track user activities on apps and sites (taps, time spent, engaging UI elements, action sequences, etc.); other analytics track higher level events like downloads and purchases.

Mobile phones come equipped with multiple sensors that provide valuable data to behavioral analytics. Of course privacy is a serious consideration, but more and more mobile users are comfortable with always-on location sensors and sharing personal information, whenever the vendor provides the benefits and value that they want. Marketers should leverage the mobile device itself as an organic marketing opportunity.

 

With solid analytics results in hand, marketers can do more with targeted marketing on mobile devices -- including push communications -- via in-app and mobile websites. My next mobile marketing post will talk more about the value that mobile users gain from push communications – when done right.

 

Image source: technorati.com

 

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I've been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitiveand on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

Nurturing Business-Technology Hybrids

 

The demands of innovation, meeting customer needs, and rapidly changing markets are challenging many companies to work much more quickly and collaboratively than ever before. Companies should be turning attention to innovating how work is done by recognizing the need for evolutionary job roles and collaboration practices. To innovate work requires more cross-functional and cross-discipline professionals – especially business-technology hybrids, to better integrate corporate goals, strategies and business processes with the technology infrastructures needed to help make it all happen.

  

Common denominators for business-technology hybrid roles include: specific deep knowledge in multiple subject matter areas, technology astuteness, the understanding of business needs that cross traditional boundaries, belief in collaboration, even the use of social capabilities to support work processes and better communication. To be able to communicate across many teams, hybrid roles must be "multi-lingual": strategy speak, techie talk, customer voice, product and marketing lingo, as well as the lingua franca of reality checks.

 

Creative thinking, new directions, new ways of looking at the business of the company not only contribute to the positive direction of the company but also are effective for catching problems with current initiatives and strategies. Business-technology hybrid roles are frequently focused on eliminating corporate silos to achieve better results and agility, and to comprehend bigger pictures.

 

Source: chiefmartech.com

 

New hybrid roles have to become part of strategic staffing in companies. Unfortunately, most HR department gatekeepers do not understand these hybrid roles or their value to companies: hybrids simply don't fit the pre-built HR system job definitions that seem to hail from the late 1990's. Management and HR must update approaches to filling key positions by enabling inclusion of new breeds of professionals that companies need to attain more innovative thinking and change how work is done.

Upper management has to be proactive to nurture and support evolving business-technology roles, both by recognizing these new roles and reconfiguring current ones. Also needed is a much better understanding of what hybrids can accomplish for business and project goals, and the value of such accomplishments to the company.

Many organizations continue to fail to understand the function and value of business-technology hybrids and often lose their tremendously important services when these talented individuals leave due to frustration, or worse, are fired from their positions. When enterprises fail to accept and recognize the value of business-technology professionals, they will lose the broad and deep team-spanning experience and IP that so many companies seriously need.

   

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I've been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

 

The New Data-Savvy Adaptive Marketing

Originally published on CMSWire, September 20, 2012

 

Marketers for many organizations are facing evolutionary pressures to transform marketing practices and processes to the always-on state of Adaptive Marketing, a new iteration of direct marketing that wants to engender a unique brand experience for individual customers. At the heart of Adaptive Marketing is a customer-focused organization that is committed to constantly re-craft product offerings, sales initiatives and marketing tactics to match individual customer needs and wants. Adaptive Marketing is fueled by a matrix of customer intelligence analytics and maps into enabling continuously improved customer experiences.

For Adaptive Marketing to work, organizations have to transform the marketing infrastructure to accommodate the fluid requirements of being always-on. Changes are made to how media is set up and managed, agency relationships take on new purpose. Digital asset management goes to the next level to constantly dish up customer-responsive images, marketing calls-to-action, and other personalized and time-sensitive content. Agile practices have entered the marketing realm – and creativity and science are now partners.

To derive right-time customer intelligence, multiple kinds of data analytics are needed to tackle the many different kinds of customer data, as well as the variety of sources for that data. Right-time analytics are now being tapped for everyday marketing decisions, and to reflect the true nature of social and customer interactions: synchronizing the organization with customers, their interactions and their communications related to the organization and its products. Data analytics and customer intelligence are becoming invaluable to point the way to marketing solutions in real time, constantly reflecting changes in customer behavior and market trends.

  

                    
     

 

Personalized Customer Experiences

It may be through Adaptive Marketing that organizations have a powerful approach to nurturing positive customer experiences. Adaptive Marketing provides personalization at the experience level, based on customer data analysis to understand ever-changing customer needs and interests. Adaptive Marketing may be a more valuable approach for B2C companies, but there are lessons to be learned for B2B enterprises too.

Instead of seeing customers "in bulk", Adaptive Marketing pulls each customer into more individualized 'segmentation' as part of the data analytics behind personalized brand experiences. Product and experience personalization obviously can work well to increase customer satisfaction and the desire to come back again for more. Analytics technology, along with marketing management tools, can help provide quick responses to customer needs.

Marketing performance-related analytics and marketing management platforms are also part of the story for Adaptive Marketing, particularly using analytics to tie outcomes of marketing efforts to enterprise strategic goals and desired business results.

  

 

 

The Challenges of Customer Intelligence

Marketers and enterprises are now challenged to gather customer data from disparate and frequently fragmented sources. Data analysts must resolve customer identity across these diverse sources to aggregate the right data in a usable fashion to feed into analytics processes. Often, marketers are faced with tackling large volumes of data as well as multi-structured content, two forms of Big Data. Then data must be analyzed, insights derived, and decisions made as to actions to take – all of which comprise an iterative, always-on process.

Tibco Spotfire recently shared the results of a study done by the Columbia School of Business, emphasizing the value of sharing customer data across the enterprise, eliminating information silos:

A majority of senior corporate marketing executives (91%) believe that successful brands use customer data to drive marketing decisions, according to a study from the Columbia School of Business. Yet, 39% say their own companies' data is collected too infrequently or too slowly for them to turn that data into actionable information. The report notes that one of the biggest obstacles to turning data into actionable insight may be a lack of effective data sharing across departments and divisions of the company.  

In order to leverage the opportunities of big data, the report suggests marketers need to better:

• Collect meaningful customer data – including real-time data – from a variety of sources
• Link that data to metrics developed for measuring marketing ROI
• Share data across the organization, linking datasets together at the customer level
• Utilize this shared data to effectively target and personalize marketing efforts to customers

 

Marketers are also faced with deciding how to proceed with utilizing analytics. With so much data to process, at times it may be appropriate to formulate questions to be answered or problems to be solved. Other times, the right path may be to let the data point to previously unknown patterns, as is often done with Big Data analytics.

Marketers now must be dynamically responsive to change and must more quickly decide what to do. So Predictive Analytics are becoming more important to many organizations that want to derive future views that will guide their decisions, particularly those regarding potential customer behaviors and desires. Behavioral models are built based on certain objectives, such as projecting the propensity to buy particular offerings, using different customer attributes (predictors). The results are put to use to do a better a job of finding the right customers and specifically providing what they need.

 

New Work and New Roles To Do It

Adaptive Marketing holds great promise for improving understanding of customers and for enabling high quality and individualized customer experiences. But the 'guts' of Adaptive Marketing, including highly sophisticated and complex analytics processes, are placing serious demands on marketing functions. Just by itself, the work to be done to constantly collect, aggregate and reconcile customer data from so many disparate sources can be quite overwhelming and fraught with problems.

Adding in new processes, practices and management for the complete Adaptive Marketing function, quite a bit of new expertise has to be put in place. Not only are sources of customer data distributed and varied, the media landscape itself is fragmented. Tremendous efforts to orchestrate all of these aspects of Adaptive Marketing are required to make all the pieces work together and to be able to monitor and manage effectively, as well as continuously open the way for unique customer experiences.

For the analytics area, data and business analysts who are also experienced marketers are important to success with Adaptive Marketing. These roles must be adept at interpreting analytics results for things like customer behavior, and equally adept at communicating the implications to marketing and management teams. New Marketing and IT partnerships are essential to ensure that business and technology work well together.

Alignment with enterprise strategies need to take place at the C-Level for Adaptive Marketing to be successful and effective. Scott Brinker introduced the new role of the Chief Marketing Technologist in 2008; marketing organizations are slowly embracing this role as a partner to both the CMO and the CIO for creating and enacting the right marketing strategies with the right marketing technologies. Brinker sees the Chief Marketing Technologist as "an equal blend of a marketing-savvy technologist and a technology-savvy marketer".

Brinker also details some of the attributes of the 'rank-and-file' marketing technologist role:  

They cover a wide swath of technical skills, from wrangling data and analytics, authoring lightweight web features, synchronizing disparate marketing software platforms, SEO, web APIs. They're a cross between an entrepreneurial marketer and an enterprise IT manager — and with pretty good web coding chops. Think of a great technical Web 2.0 entrepreneur, and you've got a pretty good estimate of a marketing technologist.

 

From Insight to Action

The increasing importance and use of data analytics for Adaptive Marketing and customer experience improvement does not reduce marketing functions to quantitative endeavors. Data and analytics are stepping stones to more precise intelligence so that better decisions and actions can be determined more quickly and accurately, in ways that benefit both the customer and the enterprise. Improved customer 'intimacy' is likely to result. Getting closer to customers is somewhat the 'holy grail' of most marketing endeavors.

In the IBM 2010 Global CEO Study, 88 percent of CEOs said "getting closer to customers" was the top priority for their businesses over the next five years. Many company leaders see opportunities through the right analytics to understand customer needs, desires and behaviors, to improve customer attraction and retention, and to ultimately drive revenue and growth. The analytics performed by marketing from program start to post-mortem also provide the means to tie marketing activities to tangible outcomes like successful products and revenue growth.

Marketers now have to understand the interrelationships between many kinds of data, evaluate the aggregated meaning, and then determine how to take insight to action. Marketers have to be self-optimized to derive continuous insight, rapidly make effective decisions and take actions that will improve the customer experience on a daily basis. There's a lot of work to do to enact Adaptive Marketing and all the pieces that make it work, but it's time to move beyond traditional marketing approaches and basing digital marketing plans on 'gut' notions.

   

The Evolution of Digital Intelligence

                                              Source: Forrester Research, Welcome to the Era of Digital Intelligence

 

 

Related Links:

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

Perception: The Customer Journey and Business Success

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Strategies from Top to Bottom - Content Marketing for B2B Software Vendors

The Customer Journey: Content Marketing for B2B Software Buyers

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics–True Intelligence for Business

Customer Buying Criteria - Applying customer & competitive intelligence to selling tools

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands and sees the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

 

Platform is in the Eye of the Beholder

 

My friend and colleague Phil Simon recently published a new book called The Age of the Platform. I know from conversations with Phil that his new book is a personal journey to explore a very large and significant topic for which Phil has a lot of passion:  how business technology must evolve to provide the value and functionality that businesses need to move successfully and agilely into the future.

  

Exploring on the Edge of Innovation

Like many of us, Phil is an explorer. And he decided to explore a large area of business and technology – the successes and failures of companies that are based on platforms that consist of multiple offerings, ecosystems of partners and customer communities, and cultures of innovation (driven both internally and externally).

He has taken the good kind of risk in putting together The Age of the Platform – he wants to move to somewhere new in his thinking and has shared the beginnings of that process in this book. Innovation comes from taking risks, taking leaps away from where one has been -- to find new places and ideas. Phil shows that his exploration of the Platform as business model also parallels his search for what he wants to do with his life in new phases of experience.

In his forward, Mitch Joel nails what Phil is doing with his own journey:

It’s tempting to stick with what has always worked best for you, but today it’s critical to explore new platforms – and to build your own. As obvious as this sounds, it’s amazing to see how many businesses refuse to experiment with new technologies and media. They’re afraid of new platforms.

 

And Phil, after running through key questions to consider in order to decide if a platform will lead to fertile business growth, has this to say:

If these questions make you feel uneasy, don’t worry. Embrace the uncertainty.

Platforms require it.

 

 

The Age of the Platform

I recommend that if you haven’t already read The New Small, go through it before reading The Age of the Platform. In The New Small Phil talks about businesses that are forward-moving, interested in varying degrees of business innovation, reasonably tech savvy, deeply interested in customer success with their services or products, and take the life of their businesses very personally since they are usually doing something they love. These “New Small-ers” understand that technology should only come into play if it clearly benefits the purpose of the business.

The Age of the Platform provides value to businesses of all sizes that either: do not fully understand certain technology changes that are occurring and how they might impact their organizations; or do not understand how to innovate their businesses to survive and be more competitive – or both.  Reflecting what The New Small revealed, Phil’s discussion of the “change-tolerant business” is quite significant. Phil provides a quote from Robert Charnette: “A highly change-tolerant business can both adapt to and cause market turbulence for its own benefit”. Phil then goes on to explore how “knowledge is power” for achieving the change-tolerant business, especially in these times of:  burgeoning data and content, many new technologies, and many new ways to bring data and technology into a business for its benefit.

While discussing ways that a “platform” mentality can be manifested in businesses of all sizes, Phil provides an excellent case in Hubspot. Hubspot is a source of internet marketing technologies and expertise for small businesses, particularly for inbound marketing and social media. The case was co-written by my friend and colleague Kirsten Knipp, now a VP at Hubspot, who shows that Hubspot is not only a technology platform that integrates with other platforms, but a platform of knowledge and innovation, thus becoming a “virtuous” platform of openness and sharing to benefit both Hubspot, and its customers and partners. I highly recommend a thorough read of the Hubspot case to understand how a “platform” can be put into play for companies, since most companies are not Amazons or Googles.

 

  

You may not agree with everything Phil says in The Age of the New Platform but it’s likely that the book has provoked new thinking about how business and technology must evolve, and also opened up an examination of ideas and functions that may no longer be relevant for businesses that want to sustain competitiveness and innovation. Phil has invited his readers to interact with him at www.theageoftheplatform.com to continue the conversation.

 

  

Disclosure: I’m a friend and colleague of Phil Simon, I’ve read all of his books, and intend to read any new books he writes.

 

Related Links

A Review of “The New Small”

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

‘Big Data’, Intelligence and Multi-faceted Innovation

Internal Disruption–No Longer Business As Usual

Avoiding Chaos, Losing Serendipity?

A Smarter Edgier Collective: Business Technology Professionals on Twitter 

I have a confession to make: I am a Hybrid

 

  

About the author: Julie Hunt is a software industry solution strategist and analyst, providing market and competitive insights. Her 25+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services

 

 

‘Big Data’, Intelligence and Multi-faceted Innovation

 

I’m using this diagram (below) in two posts – this one and one to be published shortly. Why? The impact of what this diagram is communicating is big, and affects many aspects of enterprises that want to innovate, to be competitive, to grow, to stick around for a long while. So it deserves the extra exposure.

While the use case for this example of multi-faceted innovation is Consumer Products industry, all industries have a stake here, especially as more and more technology offerings are becoming “consumerized”, and as cloud services and mobile usage for business grow. Multi-faceted innovation has great potential to transform enterprises into agile social businesses.

 

 

IBM: Enabling Multifaceted Innovation 

 

More teams in enterprises need access to more data, information, content, and many kinds of analytics to better perform their functions, to find more ways for the business to deliver what customers want, to be more competitive, more responsive in volatile economic times and in dynamic markets. Reliable, relevant information delivered at the right time impacts how strategies and goals are realized, how innovative a company can be, or even how long a company will be around. Information does no good if it languishes in silos, whether in the cloud or behind the firewall. Sophisticated and business-oriented technologies are needed to process information from diverse distributed sources, to analyze it, and then share the results for further refinement or even disputation.

The enterprise that has truly implemented multi-faceted innovation in as many aspects of its business as is appropriate is more likely to understand how important it is to tap into as many information assets as possible, whether they are ‘owned’ by the enterprise or sitting in cloud repositories for social sites. Information-driven insights are a significant aspect of multi-faceted innovation in the enterprise.

 

Business and InformationTechnology

Early in October I had the opportunity to attend an event sponsored by the Teradata Partners User Group (TDPUG). Teradata Corp. is a global vendor of software solutions for data management and governance, data warehouse capabilities, and for a wide array of analytics offerings. Obviously user group presentations usually show the positives of using vendor offering. But beyond that, the presenters usually talk fairly honestly about how they accomplished work for their companies that made a difference. The presenters are usually the hands-on people who know the ins and outs of their projects, as well as the impact on the business.

Part of my focus at the TDPUG conference – or Partners, as many call it – was attending business-oriented sessions (rather than technical deep dives) that might help with the following: 

“Big Data’ is a major topic for Teradata, and for recent acquisition Aster Data (‘big data’ analytics).  So I wanted to see how end users are able to connect highly varied and frequently complex Data to business outcomes that matter and to innovation.

Looking at processes working with data and analytics: are enterprises combining Business, Technology, Analytical, Creative, Collaborative activities to lead to good results for the business? If yes, how are they doing this? 

New directions for Teradata: how is the company changing from promoting its offerings mostly to very tech infrastructure-oriented target markets to adding strategic focus on the impacts of BI and analytics on business goals and needs – and how is Teradata connecting to roles related to the purpose of the business itself?

From the user presentations and those from Teradata: what kinds of roles are emerging, in biz and tech, that will make a difference for enterprises when it comes to data / information and analytics? 

  

A Case in Point: Strategy, Innovation and ‘Big Data’

A few sessions showed how to connect a strategic competitive intelligence core to analytical processes. A session with Vodafone (España) revealed a model for deriving real value from ‘big data’ that feeds into processes for competitive strategies that lead to innovating consumer products and business outcomes.  Instead of falling into the trap of “battling” competitors in feature-function wars, Vodafone shows that companies should be on top of what their current and desired customers want and need.  Otherwise, the risk is falling hopelessly behind customer expectations for new and important changes in the market and products that address this market.

Vodafone bills itself as ‘customer-obsessed’ and in the highly competitive mobile phone business the company has to be. The strategic Competitive Intelligence (CI) group at Vodafone works with continuous analytical processes to feed intelligence into differentiation and competitive edge – from the customer perspective. Vodafone sees a lot of opportunity in understanding distinct customer segments and from quickly providing what each segment wants and needs. Many Vodafone target markets are highly volatile, so daily data updates and analyses are de rigueur to derive “next best actions” for Vodafone to take. Decision-making results from a convergence of analytics and intelligence in key areas: sales, marketing, competitive landscape – but revolving around deeply understanding each customer segment. This Vodafone CI approach illustrates the great payoff when business data silos are eliminated to achieve real integrated intelligence, leading to effective product and business innovation.

The Vodafone session also epitomizes many of the Partners stories: when considering ‘big data’ analytic processes, the focus is not just the data itself, but what it’s used for. The data must be reliable, timely, right sources and integrations. Vodafone ‘big data’ analysis means many sources, high volume, fast intelligence leading to fast actions, and a daily reiteration of it all. Complex EDW and analytics infrastructure are aligned to business strategy and important outcomes, with a twist: the game changes constantly.

An additional layer is the continuous re-analysis of methodologies for competitive and market intelligence processes, and of the validity of selected data sources, as well as context and the inclusion of new factors. To keep the intelligence efforts relevant, the dance steps are: change, iterate, stay agile (while knowing their competitors are likely taking similar actions as happens in highly commoditized markets).

What Vodafone is accomplishing with its market and competitive intelligence core is a move to derive from an “unexpected” and innovative use of analytics the sorts of offerings that should be made available to target customers.  A new perspective on what should be the significant issues for target customers is essential to capture customer interest.  Competitive and market intelligence can also be leveraged to ensure that the customer’s perspective is maintained as a “reality check”. It’s an ongoing sense of the impact of what could be uncovered, the ramifications of what even the smallest pieces of information could mean for the company.  It ensures that business decisions and product direction are market-driven, reality-based, and actionable.

  

Information Technology Underpins Multi-faceted Innovation

When people think about what Teradata offers, most think of a very intense technology infrastructure. But Teradata and its new acquisitions, Aster and Aprimo seem to be working hard to make clear to the business users of an enterprise how that tech infrastructure connects well to what the business needs to accomplish in every part of the enterprise. These ideas were found in many of the Partners sessions:   

Every business session that I attended continued to emphasize people (roles), process, practices -- and positioned tech in context of serving the first three – very focused on real business outcomes

Real collaboration permeated the projects described in the sessions – not called out as such but well exhibited in descriptions of what was done and why – shared passion for getting real things done in effective ways, teams working cross-departmentally

Natural collaboration happens mostly in enterprises where the company ‘culture’ is open to cross-team collaboration and working to effective goals

Purposeful and constant communication across teams is very important for the success of the projects presented

Sessions drove home that data is only valuable in context – context that is comprised of many aspects of the business and how the data is to be used

It is more and more essential for people to take time to understand their data sources and the data itself, before trying to use it, before integrating it and so on >> certainly before analyzing it and using it for decision-making

The need for excellent information flow, reliable data, accurate analytics permeates every group in the enterprise, and can help these groups find more ways to innovate internal activities, as well as innovating products and services, and relationships with customers and partners

  

Multi-faceted innovation is the basis for transforming companies into innovative, dynamic and social businesses. Most companies focus innovation activities on products and services, and on finding new markets. But to survive and thrive, companies need a strategic multi-faceted commitment to innovating throughout the enterprise, how it does business, and how it interacts with customers, employees and partners. Once such a commitment is in the works, enterprises then need to understand how information technologies play significant roles for the success of multi-faceted innovation.

  

Related Links:

Information, Intelligence and Process:  Combining Forces to Better Answer Business Needs

The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics–True Intelligence for Business

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

The incongruous worlds of “data integration” – Making data accessible for any-size companies

Custom Code or Data Integration software tools: Strategic Use of Technology for Company Competitiveness

Levels of Social – and Integration – Cut Across Enterprises 

Market Intelligence – Making Better Business Decisions at the Core of the Company

Shallow Thinking Ensures Bad Business Decisions

Software companies still fail to tap into top benefits from market & competitive intelligence programs

Connecting Data Governance to Business Outcomes That Matter

Data Management: Reaching into the Cloud

 

Disclaimer: Teradata Magazine sponsored my attendance at TDPUG, since I am doing some consulting with them.

About the author: Julie Hunt is a software industry solution strategist and analyst, providing market and competitive insights. Her 25+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services