Author: maribellopez

  • 104: AI Edition of Reimagine Hybrid Work with IBM’s Lisa Amini

    AI is moving fast. Maribel speaks with one of IBM’s premier researchers, Lisa Amini, to discuss her research and trends in the AI field. A key takeaway is that tools for automation and simplifying AI are on the horizon.

  • 103: Digital Transformation: HP Inc’s Anneliese Olson speaks on changing business practices for a shifting workplace

    COVID-19 taught us that markets can change overnight. For this episode, Olson and I discussed how enterprise business practices changed during the pandemic, how HP Inc. pivoted to support new needs, and what it takes to build a corporate culture in a distributed work world. You can learn more about Anneliese here https://www.linkedin.com/in/annelieseolson/ and https://twitter.com/anneliese_olson. You can follow me here https://www.linkedin.com/in/maribellopez/ and https://twit…

  • 102: Episode 102: Poly’s Tom Puorro Shares On How Collaboration and The Workplace Will Change In A Post- Pandemic Work

    EVP Products Tom Puorro talks about the changing technology expectations, collaboration requirements and new return to office workplace trends.

  • 101: Blake McConnell of ServiceNow Discusses Creating a Safe Workplace & the Importance of Employee Communication

    Blake McConnell, ServiceNow’s EVP of Products, shares insights and advice on how companies are navigating return to the office.

  • Interviewing Poly on the Future of Work

    The future of the workplace dominates virtual board rooms across the globe. Every executive Lopez Research speaks with has plans to restructure physical workplaces and digital remote work scenarios. These new hybrid workplace strategies reimagine three categories of work that include full-time remote work, full-time return to the office and nomadic work. A nomadic worker is an individual who spends a portion of their time at an office and a part of their time working remotely. Any of these workers will also be individuals that travel, work in coffee shops, or otherwise need connectivity to corporate services on the go.

    Image of Tom Puorro, the EVP and GM at Poly
    Poly’s Puorro shares insight on audio and video technology requirements for hybrid work

    While the categories of work haven’t changed, how organizations design their technology and work policies to support these scenarios will change in a post-COVID world. Recently I interviewed Tom Puorro, executive vice president and general manager of products at Poly, to get the company’s take on how this new hybrid workspace will evolve. Poly provides a wide range of hardware assets such as headsets, phones, and video devices. What may be lesser known is that Poly provides extensive management, software, and analytics to support work from anywhere. Given Poly’s heritage in producing inbuilding audio and video conferencing rooms, I was particularly interested in how the company sees the future of work in a post-COVID world.

    Now more than six months into the pandemic, it’s clear that flexible hybrid working locations are a part of our permanent new normal.  With the initial wave of “remote-lite” strategies behind us, companies are focusing on a hybrid approach that provides the policies, technologies and services to support safely and securely working anywhere. Puorro spoke of the three phases of technology deployments pre-pandemic, during the pandemic and post-pandemic.

    In the pre-pandemic phase, the discussion focused on how companies could deploy ubiquitous video. Companies were purchasing IP desk phones and phone service was slowly moving to the cloud. Huddle rooms that provided smaller, more affordable equipment were the hot item. Organizations, especially the federal government, were rolling out on-premise video equipment. The office concept was growing by leaps and bounds. Poly was providing headsets that allowed employees to focus and tune out the sounds around them and tools for collaborating around the office and at home. There was also a sense that there would be a migration to the cloud, but it would take time to manage that transition. Puorro said some customers were looking at between 1.5 to 3 years to make the transition to the cloud.

    The second phase, during the pandemic, ushered in a rapid move to the cloud for voice, video and collaboration services. Organizations rapidly bootstrapped solutions for the pandemic, but IT needs to move beyond quick and dirty, to long-standing hybrid workplace solutions.  Lopez Research calls this the move from remote-lite to remote-right. During this phase, an organization must revisit the tools it provides to its employees. With audio and video conferencing at an all-time high, businesses need to provide employees with better PCs and peripherals such as headsets, audio and video equipment. This is where Poly comes into the picture.

    Both during and post-pandemic Puorro said organizations have a better appreciation for how a specific physical environment changes a company’s technology requirements. Employees need solutions that deliver the right audio, visual and lighting quality to get the job done, regardless of location.  For example, employees need headphones that support all-day use and bi-directional noise canceling. Employees need high-quality cameras. Companies also need to upgrade their aging fleets of PCs with newer PCs, Chromebooks, or other devices that have the performance characteristics to support video.

    Looking and sounding good on video calls is a new business imperative. Another lesson learned during the pandemic is that there’s no “one size fits all” collaboration solution. A business needs to purchase hardware that will work well with all of the video services because you’re going to be on Google Meet, LogMeIn, Microsoft Teams, Cisco’s WebEx and Zoom. Even if your company standardizes on a collaboration solution, a firm still needs to communicate across companies. For example, Poly mentioned that one of its consulting client’s needs collaboration hardware that works with whatever software their client’s using. Poly noted how it’s been delivering hardware that’s optimized to support cross-company and cross-service collaboration. Puorro said audio and video flexibility, high comfort and high-quality experiences are part of the new digital workplace imperative.

    Reimaging the work and collaborative experience 

    Going forward, Poly believes group environments, such as conference rooms and huddle rooms, won’t go away. However, some of the dynamics may change and technology will play a key role in the return to the office. For example, conference rooms will have fewer people in them to support social distancing. Meanwhile, huddle rooms will convert to personal video-enabled offices. Puorro said in the post-pandemic world, companies will create a clear distinction between group experiences and personal experiences. Group experiences, such as conference rooms, will offer dedicated devices experiences where you walk into a room and use your personal device or voice to join a video call or start an audio conference without touching any equipment. The industry was discussing this vision pre-pandemic, but these interaction models will be commonplace in the post-pandemic world.

    Puorro also spoke about recreating collaborative and open spaces. He noted open environments would change to be adaptive spaces, such as glassed-in public areas where you’re physically separated but visually together. In this scenario, Puorro described how companies need to rethink equipment requirements, such as offering headsets to support acoustics in highly reflective environments. Additionally, Puorro said Poly designed its hardware to support frequent cleaning, which many customers are requesting today. Customers are also asking for features to support social distancing, such as notifying IT if a room has exceeded capacity.

    A new imperative: supporting many networks of one

    Lopez Research expects the future of work to evolve from managing networks and services at the building level to managing services based on a user’s location. Lopez Research calls this supporting the “many networks of one vision.” It’s clear from my conversation with Poly that it agrees. Puorro talked about balancing the needs of IT while creating a compelling user experience. He said, “Technology must demonstrate value. The end-user experience must offer high-quality and ease, but the IT administrator also needs to ensure security interoperability, compliance and manageability of those products. Poly says it will is focused on balancing those two ends of the spectrum going forward.”

    Poly says it’s designing holistic, plug and play solutions with management and analytics to support what that many networks with one vision. Poly’s goal is to provide employees with a plug and play experience, that works effectively, and gets upgraded without the user doing anything. On the back end, the system needs to monitor each user’s experience and alert IT of any current or potential issues. New intelligence services will provide insight into what parameters have changed; proactively suggest changes to improve performance and offer recommendations to resolve performance issues for impacted users.

    From my discussions with Puorro and others, several things are clear. Remote work is here to stay, and companies will reimage workspaces for safety and collaboration. Cloud-resident services will enable the change to a hybrid workspace and video will have a more significant role than we ever imagined. As Puorro said, “Successful companies won’t mandate that everyone returns to the office. On-premise services will erode over time, whether it’s a Private Branch Exchange (PBX) or a Multipoint Control Unit (MCU), as organizations migrate to cloud services. Moving to the cloud is still a heavy lift, but it’s no longer a nice to have. Cloud migration is a business imperative.”

    It’s an exciting but challenging time for all organizations. Despite the dire times, Puorro ended our conversation with a note of optimism. “The opportunity for businesses is endless. There’s so much capability available through these new services. It just comes down to how fast you can adopt the technology to seize the opportunity.”

    A version of this was posted on my contributor column at Forbes.com

  • 3 Ideas For Rethinking Leadership In 2020

    Given the turmoil of the past several months, it’s clear that we’re entering a new era in our history. Organizations have the opportunity to refresh their company’s mission, products and practices during this transition. What should we be doing and whom will we look to for leadership during these times? Several technology leaders come to mind. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella inspires us with a mission “to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We strive to create local opportunity, growth, and impact in every country around the world.”

    Microsoft has done wonders recently in terms of creating accessibility in technology, defining standards for AI ethics and focusing on products to support what it calls first line workers. Additionally, in June, it took on the looming skill gap crisis when it launched a skills initiative program to help 25 million people worldwide acquire the digital skills needed in a post-COVID-19 economy. It will use its treasure trove of data to identify in-demand jobs and the skills required to fill them. It provides free access to learning paths and content to help people develop the skills these positions require. The program also offers low-cost certifications and free job-seeking tools to help people who develop these skills pursue new jobs. While financial aid may assist individuals in the short run, we must reskill individuals for a future of work that is technology-driven.

    Key takeaway 1: Every organization should define a strategy for upskilling their existing employees.

    Diversity and inclusion take center stage

    Chuck Robbins, the CEO of Cisco Systems Inc., provides another example of an executive we can look to for inspiration in these times. At the recent Cisco Live event, Robbins took the opportunity to address the world’s issues with the pandemic and equality.  For many years, Cisco’s mission statement was to “to shape the future of the internet by creating unprecedented value and opportunity for our customers, partners, shareholders, and employees.” Its vision statement was, “Changing the way we work, live, play, and learn.” Today, companies like Cisco are evolving their efforts. At Cisco Live, Robbins spoke of how the company’s purpose had evolved to “powering an inclusive future for all”.

    Another inspirational leader, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook, shared how Apple created the Racial Equity and Justice Initiative. At the WWDC event, Cook announced Apple will distribute $100 million to “challenge systemic barriers that limit the opportunity for communities of color in the critical areas of education, economic equality and criminal justice.”

    Tech companies such as Dell, Intel and many others have also made financial commitments to various organizations to support equality. In non-tech sectors, companies such as Walmart announced that it would contribute $100 million over five years to create a new center for racial equity.

    While committing dollars to a cause is beneficial, real change occurs when a company makes systematic changes throughout its organizational processes. It starts with the language of the business and moves up from there. Cisco announced the company would rewrite its documentation to eliminate words and phrases that imply bias such as white list and blacklist or master and slave. Github also announced similar efforts.

    Many companies, including Cisco, have Corporate Social Responsibly (CSR) programs. These programs started with a heavy emphasis on sustainability. Many efforts also extended to deeper commitments that support the fair and ethical treatment of labor globally and creating equal pay within roles. However, these promises are useless if an organization doesn’t develop a system for uncovering inequalities and holding themselves accountable to take action.

    In 2016, Cisco was one of 28 companies that signed the White House Equal Pay Pledge along with Airbnb, Amazon, Glassdoor, GoDaddy, Salesforce, Slack, Spotify and others. To drive accountability and auditing, Cisco built an internal pay parity framework using analytics to identify factors and root causes influencing pay equality and proactively monitor disparities over time.  In another example, Apple, AT&T, and AutoDesk were among 13 companies to pledge support for CA Equal Pay Pledge, a new initiative designed to help achieve pay equality for women in 2019.

    In Cisco’s last CSR report, it defined these efforts as a “Conscious Culture that provides an environment where trustworthiness and ethical conduct are expected and supported. Conscious Culture means being aware of the environment we’re part of, and feeling accountable, empowered, and expected to contribute to a culture where we feel safe and can thrive.”

    Michael Dell provides another example with the inclusivity goals listed in Dell Technology Inc’s Progress Made Real report. Within that timeframe, Dell has committed to developing a workforce where 40% of global people managers are women, 25% of the company’s U.S. workforce and 15% of U.S. people managers would be comprised of black/African American and Hispanic team members. It plans to educate 95% of all team members on an annual basis about unconscious bias, harassment, micro-aggressions and privilege. It’s also added systems to track its progress.

    Key takeaway 2: Diversity combined with meritocracy can create better business outcomes. Inclusivity is a business imperative everyone should embrace. Put teeth behind it with metrics and measurement tools.

    Bridging the gap where ethics and technology meet

    Yet, as we embark on a world where AI fuels all of our systems, we face a new set of challenges where leaders need to proceed thoughtfully. For example, we must be aware of the unconscious profiling that we’re building in systems. AI may factor biases into models that derail your company’s effort to hire diverse talent.

    When we’re building models to make critical decisions that involve people, we need to ensure these models are explainable and ethical because you’ll need to explain why that individual didn’t get a loan, a job, or a promotion. We need to consider that we may be training systems with a biased set of data and attempt to rectify the situation by augmenting data sets. We’ll need to test our models routinely to ensure a malicious security attack didn’t corrupt them.

    As we look at contract tracing and social distancing solutions, we need to consider the privacy aspect of collecting and managing data. If we’re handling personally identifiable information, we can’t be lax about our security policies for that information. As we build customer profiles, we need to be selective about what data we want to collect and why. The more information you gather, the more complicated it becomes to safeguard it and create obfuscations that protect a person’s privacy.

    Your company may choose to use computer vision analytics within a facility or track the time your employees spend on various tasks to improve efficiency. As leaders, you need to understand the psychological impact those analytics will have on your employees. As business leaders, we must take responsibility for the effects of the technology we build and use.

    Key takeaway 3: Responsible use of technology is a new frontier. Get ahead of the problem.

    What should you do?

    The workplace has evolved in more ways than the need to support remote work. The struggle for quality talent is real. Individuals wants to work for organizations with missions they believe in. A mission must be more than a hollow statement that lives on a hallway at your headquarters. A mission that matters isn’t synonymous with operating a non-profit, nor attempting to save the world.

    It means that you are delivering a product or service for profit but you’re doing it in a way where you treat people with dignity, respect and empathy. It means you try to do the right thing and will correct mistakes when they inevitability happen. It means you will use technology responsibly and consider the consequences. It requires asking questions such as, “Yes, we can do this, but should we? Does it make sense and what are the long-term ramifications of these actions?” We’re entering unchartered territory. As a business leader, you must act fast, monitor the situation routinely and course-correct quickly.

    A word about role models.

    Are any of the company’s mentioned in this article perfect? No, then again, none of us are. Are these examples of companies trying to make a profit while being better citizens in the world? Yes. These are also just a small subset of companies that are evolving their businesses. As we reevaluate the processes and technologies we put into place over the next several months, it’s an opportunity to reimagine our mission, products and practices. Now is the time for every business leader to define how you’ll reach your new goals in an ethical, empathetic and responsible way.

    A version of this article was orginally posted on Forbes.com

  • HPE Bets Big On Software To Help It Win The Cloud Wars

    Digital transformation moved from buzz word to reality within a matter of months as companies responded to the COVID-19 crisis. Antonio Neri, CEO of HPE, speaking at the HPE Discover keynote said, “The future everyone talked about before the pandemic is now here, ahead of schedule.” He went on to say the enterprise of the future will be edge-centric, cloud-enabled, and data-driven. Most importantly, Neri said we’re evolving from the Information Age to the Age of Insight. For this, HPE said it’s focused on building an edge to cloud platform that connects, protects, analyzes, and acts on data, whether it’s in the cloud or at a company’s site.

    The push to strategic vendor

    HPE wants to position itself as one within a handful of strategic partners that IT leaders look to during and after the pandemic. To do this, the company has amassed a set of assets that span everything from on-premises wireless and data center services to cloud computing offerings. It’s earmarked $2 billion in financing to help customers and partners with financial hardships during the pandemic. Additionally, it upgraded and integrated a series of assets to deliver a more solutions-based approach, which is all the rage with cloud computing providers at this time.

    HPE GreenLake got a significant expansion during the HPE Discover conference. The company announced new cloud services that span from containers, virtual machines and Machine Learning Ops (MLOps) to the storage, compute, networking and data protection. The move to a more solution-based approach means HPE is offering workload-optimized preconfigured hardware and software solutions that the company claims can get a customer up and running within 14 days.

    Ezmeral: The new gem of HPE’s cloud portfolio

    Software is one of the welcome returns to the HPE portfolio. After a massive divesture of its software portfolio to Microfocus for over $8 billion in 2016, HPE has returned to the software game with a set of cloud-native assets that it believes is more suited to designing a modern cloud environment.  The conference ushered in an umbrella brand for the company’s software, HPE Ezmeral, which includes assets from its acquisition of MapR and BlueData. It offers five broad categories of services, including IT automation and AI Ops, container management, AI/machine learning and data analytics, security and cost control.

    By bringing all its software assets under HPE Ezmeral, it can offer customers solutions instead of point products to help IT modernize and containerize applications. IT can leverage parts of the portfolio to optimize, manage and run infrastructure with automation and AI as well as provide security for that data. HPE Ezmeral can be licensed to run on any infrastructure, on bare metal or on VM, and on HPE or non-HPE hardware. Ezmeral can run on any cloud or data center on the edge. All of the HPE sessions I attended focused heavily on providing IT with options of where and how to run various parts of the cloud stack. Most importantly, software is where differentiation gets built in cloud computing offerings. Without a software stack, HPE would be relegated to the land of box vendor.

    How do we get to multi-cloud?

    Neri noted that IT leaders face the challenge of two divergent operating models, one in the cloud, and one on-premises requiring companies to pay to maintain both. Neri said the market will shift from a cloud-first mandate to a cloud-everywhere mandate, and usher in the next wave of digital transformation. The goal is to deliver the benefits of the cloud (such as self-service, pay per use, scale-up/down and providers managed) with the ability to have part of your apps and data on-premises. HPE GreenLake offers the choice of connecting to multiple clouds, which is essential for specific enterprise buyers.

     

    HPE aims to provide one consistent operating model with visibility and control across an enterprise customer’s public clouds and on-premises environment for cloud-native and non-cloud native applications and workloads. As IT looks to support a hybrid cloud and multi-cloud world, this vision may be more appealing.

    Public cloud services offered many benefits but at least one significant drawback. Organizations had to decide what apps and data could go into a public cloud. Data gravity, app entanglement, cost and security prevented organizations from moving all of their precious data to the cloud. Today, HPE claims that approximately 70% of a company’s data assets currently reside on-premises.

    Cloud providers, understanding the companies didn’t want a binary choice, started creating a set of on-premises services that are tethered to their clouds.  For example, Amazon has AWS Outposts, which is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to any data center, co-location space, or on-premises facility for a consistent hybrid experience.  Microsoft offers Azure Stack, which extends Azure services and capabilities to your environment of choice. Google Cloud offers Anthos GKE on-prem (GKE on-prem) which is hybrid cloud software that brings Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to on-premises data centers.

    GOOGLE CLOUDAnthos GKE on-prem overview | Google CloudHPE acknowledges that these efforts resolve specific customer pain points, such as where and how to store data and integrate with public clouds. The problem is these solutions were architected to work mainly with one cloud and are tethered to a specific cloud provider’s control plane. During Discover, various HPE sessions illuminated the issues with these solutions and discussed how it felt it’s GreenLake solution offered a more open and flexible solution to the problem.

    It’s a solid start, but it won’t be easy

    With its latest offerings, HPE both competes and partners with cloud providers and vendors such as VMWare. HPE is doing a delicate dance where it wants to enable its customers to use any cloud, but it also wants to provide you with an as a service offering.

    HPE’s offering promises to allow you to use whatever cloud you want, but also an HPE managed on-premise environment. However, the strategy is not without its challenges. For customers to truly achieve all of these benefits, they’ll need to re-engineer their processes to work with an HPE software and service stack. Change, no matter how beneficial it may be, is hard. In general, cloud computing vendors underestimate how difficult it is to migrate from one solution to another. There is the inertia of the staff, limited technical expertise in the new solution, time and cost. Also, competitors’ pitches, such as Google’s Anthos vision of writing once and running anywhere, sound quite similar.  Migration assistant solutions are absolutely essential for any cloud vendors that wish to steal share from its competitors.

    The good news, HPE has picked the right problem to solve. While the COVID-19 pandemic has forced many IT leaders to rapidly adopt cloud computing services, you can’t get everything over to the cloud. After more than a decade of public cloud services, it’s clear that IT leaders also don’t want to migrate everything to a public cloud.  There’s been a constant struggle between accessing the benefits of the cloud while dealing with the limitations of moving data.  HPE’s GreenLake is one potential solution to this problem that allows IT buyers to bridge the best of both worlds. It should look very appealing to HPE’s existing customers, but the real win requires HPE to steal business away from competing brands.

  • Microsoft Showcases How Companies Are Using Technology To Thrive During A Pandemic

    Microsoft Showcases How Companies Are Using Technology To Thrive During A Pandemic

    The COVID-19 pandemic forced companies of all sizes to shift business practices. Technology plays an increasingly important role as organizations enable remote work and contactless engagement. Microsoft showcased many examples of how companies were transforming their business at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit. Alysa Taylor, Corporate Vice President Microsoft Business Applications & Global Industry, launched her keynote with a discussion of how the world and Microsoft have changed. “This is a whole new era for us. Historically, big transformation initiatives that would happen over the years have condensed out of necessity to weeks or even in days.”

    Systems that enable agility are critical. Microsoft’s Taylor described how L’Oreal expanded from manufacturing beauty products to creating hand sanitizers as an example of how technology can support adaptive, flexible businesses.  Companies are also moving faster with their deployments. For example, C3.ai  moved from selecting to deploying Dynamics 365 within several weeks.

    Taylor spoke of how Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform were helping companies move from reactive to proactive business workflows where employees could take intelligent actions based on data. Today, everything from connected devices to data in the supply chain and collaborative applications is a source of potential insight.  Microsoft describes this as a digital feedback loop that captures and utilizes information from products, assets, customers and people (employees). Each touchpoint offers more data that enhances the feedback. Microsoft also highlighted the importance of having a cloud strategy where you can securely store data and comply with nation-state regulations.

    Enter Microsoft with the mega stack.

    Unfortunately, IT struggles to incorporate this type of context into legacy apps. Companies need to redesign or purchase solutions that can integrate and analyze data from a wide range of sources.

    None of these concepts are new. What’s different today is that vendors, such as Microsoft, are delivering more comprehensive portfolios. In the past two years, Microsoft integrated various assets from app development to customer engagement into what it calls the Power Platform, which includes Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agent. Many of the tools were design to allow everyone, not just professional developers and data scientists, to create applications and analyze data. Additionally, Microsoft integrated these functions with the Dynamics 365 applications and Azure to enable a closed-loop process from data collection through insight and action.

    Leading companies are delivering rich customer experiences.

    The Microsoft Business Applications Summit is typically an event where customers come to showcase and share ideas on how to use Microsoft’s technology. With the change to a virtual event, Microsoft took the lead in sharing how its customers are delivering proactive and intelligent engagement. For example:

    Chipotle creates a data-driven customer profile.

    It uses a combination of Microsoft’s Power Platform, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Azure to unify the company’s current customer information and enrich the customer profile with proprietary signals from the Microsoft Graph. Chipotle leveraged its existing investment and third-party sources using connectors in the Microsoft platform to create a 360 view of the customer from multiple data sources, such as the point of sale transactions, digital transactions, reward information, web, and mobile usage data.

    With a unified customer profile, Chipotle can create segments that provide important insights, such as loyalty members and frequent repeat customers. Chipotle can analyze the average spend across regions and use that data to prioritization decisions. Additionally, Chipotle can connect to Microsoft power automate to trigger workflows, in response to customer actions and signals in real-time. For example, when a customer places an order and completes the purchase on a mobile app, the customer profile is instantly updated. These customer profiles and new engagement models are even more important in a world where Chipolte has to deliver contactless engagement.

    Companies want to provide the right information to their employees at the right-time. Lopez Research calls these a right-time experience (RTE). For example, by scanning a customer’s QR code in the app, the store associate can see the full purchase history, and all past activities, all in one place. This information enables the store associate to provide the next best actions, such as a pre-delivery for the following order, based on analyzing contextual data stored in the cloud for scalable processing. Using tools such as Azure synapse analytics, organizations can ingest operations and other streaming data at petabyte scale, allowing them to develop custom AI and machine learning models.

    Chateau St. Michelle uses Dynamics 365 to shift from in-winery to online sales.

    Cloud computing and SaaS services have been critical in allowing companies to work remotely and offer new services. Chateau St Michelle talked of how it had to shut down and move to a new facility during the COVID crisis, which it said would have been impossible if they were using homegrown customer systems. Initially, 90% of the direct consumer was through the wineries, and 10% was via e-commerce. In the last couple of weeks, Chateau St Michelle flipped to 90% via e-commerce, completely changing its distribution model within a few hours using the Microsoft suite.

    IKEA improves the multi-channel sales process and workforce management.

    IKEA uses the power platform and Dynamics 365 to create a better omnichannel experience. Microsoft showcased how IKEA combined online kitchen cabinet configuration, virtual agents, power automate and Dynamics 365 resource scheduling to improve the customer’s kitchen design experience. In creating conversation interfaces, IKEA was able to use the Microsoft tracing feature that allows the app developer to simulate what a customer would experience and then see how a chatbot would respond.

    IKEA employees use power apps on a tablet to improve the customer’s in-store experience. IKEA used power apps data connectors so it could leverage existing systems. Microsoft’s UI flow provided the capability to connect legacy application data and new data into a business process. It took the project a step further by using mixed reality, which meant it could add kitchen visualization to the app without the team needing to understand AR Kit, 3D models, and writing code.

    While the focus on the customer is vital, the solution must provide the right information to IKEA’s employees as well. For example, IKEA’s store managers can use Power BI to visualize all the booked appointments, where the appointments originated (online or in-store), and view the close rate for in-store appointments. It also uses Microsoft’s resource scheduling to ensure it has the right number of employees to support demand at various times.

    Are we there yet?

    Microsoft upped its game in Dynamics 365 and made itself more relevant by integrating with other products in its portfolio, such as the Power Platform and Azure cloud services. Yet, this brings up a consistent technology buyer lament where the buyer says it only works if they purchase many products from a single vendor. In truth, the buyers have a solid point. Vendor lock-in is a legitimate concern. However, the counterpoint is that it takes significant integration across multiple products to deliver an accurate 365-degree view of the customer. The integration work is time-consuming, challenging and quickly breaks down if any one piece of the puzzle changes.

    A company can’t and shouldn’t source everything from one vendor. However, a company should be looking for a modern suite of pre-integrated products that allow them to leverage legacy apps through connectors where necessary. Companies have multiple CRM, ERP and homegrown systems. Microsoft spoke on how it can use the hundreds of connectors it created in the Power Platform to help companies build specific business process workflows that pull together legacy systems and solve problems off-the-shelf applications can’t. A new suite should also provide enhancements such as machine learning, visualization, and easy workflow creation. Ideally, it would be modular and cloud-native.

    Is everything as easy as Microsoft made it sound? Probably not. It never is easy for an organization to make these transformations. However, Microsoft made its solutions more powerful and easier to use. At the summit, Microsoft said over half of the Fortune 500 are leveraging Dynamics 365, and the company achieved a 50% year over year growth in the Dynamics 365 business. It would be hard to argue that the company’s strategy isn’t working.

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  • Samsung Expands A Series Lineup In Bid To Grab MidTier Market As Competition Heats Up

    Samsung has offered mid-tier and lower-end smartphones globally for years. However, there was never a substantial mid-tier smartphone push from Samsung in the U.S. market. All of that changed in April as Samsung introduced an expanded line up of A-series smartphones. There are six versions in the new A-series lineup with prices that range from $109.99 to $599.99.

    The 2020 Galaxy A series focuses on offering the smartphone essentials at a variety of reasonable price points. For example, each A series device offers a multi-lens camera system with resolutions that a range of 12 to 64 megapixels. Cameras are one of the most important buying criteria for consumers. One of the exciting things is that many camera features found in its flagship smartphones such as multiple lenses, super steady feature and 4K video filming can found within the lineup. Additionally, the screens range in size from a 5.7in HD+ Infinity V display to a 6.7-inch Full HD+ Infinity-O AMOLED display. There is also a range of battery, RAM and expandable storage options.

    5G for all

    The real surprises in the lineup were the Galaxy A51 5G and A71 5G smartphones. Both of these products introduce 5G at a far more affordable price point. The A51 5G at $499.99 meets the price point of other mid-tier 5G smartphones, such as Motorola’s Moto Z4. Meanwhile, the Galaxy 71 5G sports a 6.7″ FHD+ Super AMOLED Plus Infinity-O display and a 64MP quad-camera system for $599.99. Samsung’s goal is obviously to take 5G mainstream. Of course, there are nuances that consumers must be aware of in 5G. Given the smartphone’s lower price point, it wasn’t possible to put every type of 5G radio into a phone. As a result, if a consumer purchases a 5G phone for one operator’s network, they may not be able to use the same smartphone if the consumer switches to another carrier’s network.

    Samsung’s move is a sign of changing times.

    Consumers are holding on to smartphones longer, up to 28 months. It’s also becoming increasingly tricky for smartphone vendors to grow share as the premium smartphone segment prices topped $1,000. Segmentation becomes increasingly important in a mature smartphone market. It’s critical for Samsung to create a product segmentation strategy that allows consumers to make the right tradeoffs between price and desired features. Given the time it takes to create and manufacture a smartphone, it’s clear that Samsung forecasted an emerging need for a mid-tier smartphone product series many months ago.

    Smartphones remain an essential purchase for many consumers. With the COVID-19 pandemic wreaking havoc with the global economy, there’s never been a better time to introduce a set of lower-cost smartphone options. While consumers may aspire to purchase a flagship smartphone, their budget may demand a mid-tier phone. The expansion of the A series showcases how Samsung plans to address this market, particularly during a difficult time.

    At this point, you may be asking why you’d need to upgrade to a more premium product. Flagship devices have notable differences such as processors that run A.I. models and of course, foldable materials. There’s a right smartphone, for the right time, and the right buyer. There will always be a premium buyer. What Samsung needs is the ability to capture a wide swath of buyers.

    The U.S. mid-tier market was scant and ill-defined. Last year’s success of the Samsung A50 proved that there is a market for a mid-tier device and that it doesn’t necessarily cannibalize the flagship smartphones. While other smartphone vendors may offer a cheaper midtier product, not everyone is going to have a quality line up. The great news about the A series launch is that consumers shouldn’t feel they have to purchase a 2-year-old model to get something that’s affordable.

    Samsung’s timing is right but Apple swooped in

    As noted above, Samsung’s timing is perfect for offering a range of middle-tier smartphones without compromises. However, it’s not the only company with that idea. The question remains will other low-cost products give Samsung a run for their money? Or will it just be Apple who swoops in with a high-quality competing product? Apple launched the new budget iPhone SE merely days after Samsung’s launch, offering a compelling product in the space However, it’s only one model. While Apple’s product will successful, it’s unclear what impact that will have on Samsung’s sales. No matter what happens, mid-tier smartphones are a win for the consumer.

    This is an updated version of a post contributed to Forbes.com, you can read more of my pieces here.