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How To Prioritize Education Production For Cloud Software

March 26, 2020 BI News and Info

Cloud software, by its nature, is released through continuous deployment, a regular release cycle that keeps customers happy but sets a difficult pace for the production of enabling materials. Learning departments must develop a rapid decision-making process to keep up with software changes, accommodate to market trends, and adapt to organizational changes.

With a agile content development (ACD) framework, companies can prioritize the content backlog to make transparent quality decisions on education content production in a large enterprise.

The challenge

Running an education team in a large enterprise in the IT industry means your educational materials – videos, tutorials, classroom, or virtual training – must form a cohesive portfolio. You must release them in sync with the software, tailored to the right audience and their needs. Your product is running on a continuous release cycle, and you have resource constraints and limited information about your audience. Being part of a big enterprise also means engaging with many stakeholders: product teams, customer- and partner-success organizations, services, etc., who will come to you with their audience’s needs, ideas, and opinions, all to influence your decisions on what assets your department should produce next. You must also adapt effectively to trends in e-learning and your industry as well as changes in your organization.

So, with so many moving parts, how do you decide which educational asset to produce now? By introducing the content backlog and the prioritization process around it.

To understand it, you need to know a bit about the ACD first.

Agile content development

If your software teams follow an agile development methodology, so should the adjacent departments, like learning. That’s what we did when we created the ACD framework. We borrowed concepts from the agile project management framework (see DSDM) and the scrum agile methodology and adapted them to fit the development of educational material in a large enterprise. Sandra Policht’s post explains more about the ACD.

In agile software development, the product backlog is essentially a prioritized list of product features. This list is dynamic, and each entry (feature) has an estimated effort and measurable value to the customer.

In ACD, the content backlog is a prioritized list of all requests for content. It’s a living document, transparent to all internal stakeholders. Each content request is scoped to determine the estimated effort, and like its software development counterpart, it has measurable value to the customer.

Maintaining the requests on the content backlog is the responsibility of a product owner (PO). In the ACD world, this is a person with an understanding of customers’ needs and what’s essential for them. The PO owns the corresponding education portfolio and has a high-level understanding of product capabilities. Their key responsibility is to continuously and proactively seek feedback from various sources and turn them into requests on the content backlog. The sources usually are customers, product management, trainers, customer/partner success organizations and consultants, feedback from the company’s learning platforms, surveys, etc.

In a software enterprise with a vast software portfolio, a team of POs (with each PO having a distinct area of responsibility) is accompanied by a portfolio manager (PM) who owns the execution of the content backlog prioritization process; and by a project coordinator (PC) who owns production estimates and governs the team of scrum masters (SM) to ensure the expected workload doesn’t the exceed team’s capacity.

To understand the scope of all involved roles and their responsibilities in ACD, refer to Angelina Padarnitsas’ post. Keep in mind these roles diverge from their DSDM and scrum prototypes, and we invented a few new roles.

Prioritizing the content backlog

The content backlog prioritization process is a methodical approach to cope with the competing requests and many different factors/criteria to consider. The process consists of the following four steps, which each PO executes to arrive at the optimal decision for the next production cycle.

Step 1: Measuring against key criteria

For each request on the backlog, the PO goes through the following list of criteria (this is not an exhaustive list but a solid start) and gives it a score (e.g., 0-10). The higher the total score on a request, the more important it is to address it in the next production cycle.

Business and product strategy: These are the most important criteria to consider. The PO and the education material must follow it. What are the company’s focus areas? Is there a key customer segment, region, or audience? What’s coming in the next product release? What is the company’s flagship product? Is there a part of the product that should be emphasized? For example, the education department may have to support building a software-developer community and therefore would focus production on content for a technical audience and their preferred asset types. POs should prioritize accordingly and give high scores to the content requests that are in line with company strategies, and give low (i.e., 0) scores to all other requests.

Audience size: While addressing all relevant audience types is important, POs must prioritize proportionally to audience size and importance. For example, POs in a company selling a software framework may prioritize coding tutorials for partners’ developers over end-user guides for business users. Requests addressing the major audience get a high score and those for niche audiences get low scores.

Portfolio gap: Is each learning path fully covered with content? If an asset is missing in a learning path, especially at the beginning, and for the key audience, POs must prioritize accordingly (i.e., give a high score).

Release stretch: If an asset (e.g., a video) is relevant for the audience but becomes outdated and far behind the current software version, the PO should give a high score to the corresponding request, low in other cases.

Feedback: Consider external and internal feedback about content quality and topic accuracy: if it is negative and the topic is in demand, the PO should give the request a very high score.

Timing: Are there upcoming events, hack-a-thons, marketing campaigns, or other promotional opportunities? The PO will give higher scores to those highly exposed topics and assets.

Product road map: By staying close to product teams, the PO can identify which elements from the product roadmap may change (be postponed or dropped) and prioritize content requests accordingly: stable topics get a higher score; volatile topics a lower score.

Product adoption and revenue: Is a product or module in high demand by customers? Content for a frequently used or sold product takes priority over others (i.e., gets a higher score).

Content adoption and revenue: A very popular free asset (tutorial, video) or a frequently scheduled or high-revenue paid asset (training, e-learning) takes priority (higher score) over less-consumed assets.

Step 2: Defining the scope

At this stage, each PO has a prioritized list with high-score requests on top. What remains is to estimate the production effort and analyze the scope of the top requests.

Adding estimates: Maintaining the data for past projects is the best effort predictor of future projects – see the roles of the project coordinator and scrum master. The PO consults with the content architect (CA) who has detailed technical product knowledge to ensure the estimates’ accuracy.

Analyzing the scope: While detailed scope definition of each request is part of the content production (which happens after Step 4), at this stage the PO determines the “must-have” and the “won’t have” from the customers’ point of view (see the MoSCoW method). This approach enables the PO to consider alternative types of assets for the required work. The PO finds smarter alternatives to fulfill (at least partially) more resource-demanding requests, e.g., a video series instead of an extra day of training, or covering a “should have” topic with a trainer demo instead of an exercise for students (a lower system cost). In the end, each request’s scope is reduced to the minimal viable product, but not less. Because POs own the corresponding education portfolio, they keep it clean of duplicates and outdated material. For example, they have the discretion to address a request for new developer training by changing the content of existing assets in the developer learning path. They find smarter alternatives to fulfill the more resource-demanding requests.

Step 3: Deciding

At this stage, POs have all the necessary data at hand to make a quality decision on what to produce next. Thanks to the criteria scoring, they know the importance of the requests and the necessary scope of each (“must” vs. “won’t”). Thanks to the PCs, they know team capacity and how many of the high-score requests their team can address. Thanks to the CAs, they understand the technical complexity, such as introducing demos or exercises (if there are any). POs start to see alternatives and focus on what’s essential. They can, with confidence, decide to reduce an asset’s scope without compromising the quality and still effectively increase learner engagement with the content. In the end, the PO has the content production road map ready.

Step 4: Communicating

The PM and the PO communicate with stakeholders, presenting the portfolio production roadmap for the next production cycle, the decisions behind it, and the team’s capacity to produce the content. Presenting all gathered requests, considered criteria, and explaining the decision-making process prevents disappointment from the more vocal stakeholders. Opportunities for synergy also emerge here, as other teams decide to reuse assets and volunteer to co-produce assets together. After this step, the team starts the next content production cycle; but that’s material for another article.

Summary

ACD has served us well for the past several years, and it’s evolved along with our team to meet our growing set of products, audiences, channels, and organizational complexity. What once was done by a single person now is split into several roles.

Whatever the size of your organization, you will need a repeatable method to make quality decisions on content production. The next time you are under pressure from time and stakeholders, apply this prioritization process or even consider fully implementing the ACD.

Dive deeper into The Digital Workforce Experience: The Shift From HR Tools To Employee Tools.

This article originally appeared on SAP Community.

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Digitalist Magazine

Google Cloud launches machine images to simplify data science workflows

March 9, 2020 Big Data

Google today announced machine images, a new type of Compute Engine resource in Google Cloud that contains all the information required to create, back up, or restore a virtual machine. The company claims it’ll reduce the time network admins and data scientists spend managing their cloud environments by eliminating extra steps and streamlining operations.

The news is no doubt music to the ears of enterprises, which run 77% of their workloads in the cloud, according to Rightscale. Public cloud computing — a technology that’s intertwined with AI and machine learning — is anticipated to exceed $ 330 billion in market value this year, with organizations’ average yearly cloud budget exceeding $ 2.2 million.

In contrast to custom images that capture the contents of a single disk, machine images — which can be created whether the source instance is running or stopped — contain multiple disks as well as other data required to create a new instance. This includes instance properties like machine type, labels, volume mapping, and network tags; the data of all attached disks; instance metadata; and permissions, including the service account used to create the instance.

When machine images are created from an instance, the instance information and disk data are stored into a single resource, the location of which can be specified from the Google Cloud dashboard. When it comes time to restore the instance, all that’s required is providing the machine image and a new instance name.

“The new machine images make it easy to create new instances at the heart of your scalability, backup and disaster recovery strategy,” wrote Google Compute Engine product manager Ari Liberman. “Machine images use the same differential disk backup technology that powers incremental snapshots, giving you fast, reliable and cost-effective instance backups.”

To create a new machine image, try choosing the “Machine images” option from the left menu in the Compute Engine console. Then select “Create a machine image” from the menu. To create an instance from a machine image, either create it directly from the machine images page or from the instance creation page by selecting the “New VM instance from machine image” option from the left menu.

Machine images are currently in beta, Google says. For this reason, they’re currently not covered by service-level agreements or depreciation policy and might be subject to unspecified “backward-incompatible” changes.

The new Google Cloud machine images instance is not to be confused with Amazon Machine Image (AMI), a special type of virtual appliance that’s used to create a virtual machine within Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud service. AMIs are read-only filesystem images that include an operating system and any additional software required to deliver a service or a portion of it, like a template for the root volume for the instance and launch permissions that control which Amazon Web Services accounts can use the AMI to launch instances.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Google Cloud AI removes gender labels from Cloud Vision API to avoid bias

February 21, 2020 Big Data

Google Cloud AI is removing the ability to label people in images as “man” or “woman” with its Cloud Vision API, the company told VentureBeat today. Labeling is used to classify images and train machine learning models, but Google is removing gendered labels because it violates Google’s AI principle to avoid creating biased systems.

“Given that a person’s gender cannot be inferred by appearance, we have decided to remove these labels in order to align with the artificial intelligence principles at Google, specifically Principle #2: avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias. After today, a non-gendered label such as ‘person’ will be returned by Cloud Vision API,” a Google spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.

VentureBeat reached out to Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s AWS to ask if they intend to remove gender labels from their cloud AI services. We will update this story with more information when we hear back.

The Google Cloud Vision API provides computer vision for customers to detect objects and faces. Google previously blocked the use of gender-based pronouns in an AI tool in 2018.

Many facial analysis and facial recognition systems on the market today predict gender but have challenges identifying people who do not conform to gender norms, people who are transgender, and women of color.

A study last fall by University of Colorado, Boulder researchers found that AI from Amazon, Clarifai, Microsoft, and others maintained accuracy rates above 95% for cisgender men and women but misidentified trans men as women 38% of the time. People with no gender identity were misidentified 100% of the time.

Lead author Morgan Klaus Scheuerman told VentureBeat he believes Google is attempting to set itself apart from competitors. The analysis found that Google did not provide gender classification services but did allow “man” and “woman” labels. Systems from companies like Microsoft can label people like waitresses, air woman, or military woman.

“We basically discussed [in work last fall] how the decisions that are being made in all systems are inherently political. And in the cases of where you’re kind of classifying things about human beings, it becomes more. I think we should assess more what the political notions of that are. And so I’m very excited that Google is kind of taking that seriously,” he told VentureBeat in a phone interview.

In recent years, researchers like Joy Boulamwini performing system audits found major facial recognition providers tend to work best on white men and worse on women of color.

A lack of high performance for all people is a primary reason lawmakers in state legislatures, cities like San Francisco, and the U.S. Senate have proposed bans or moratoriums on the use of facial recognition systems.

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5 Ways Cloud ERP Cures Furniture Retailers’ Biggest Headaches

February 15, 2020 NetSuite

Posted by John Goode, Senior Director, Channel Marketing

With annual revenues of about $ 114 billion, the U.S. retail furniture market has been on a steady growth curve over the past few years. Driven by a strong national economy, the industry is seeing healthy growth in its ecommerce sales as furniture shopping becomes increasingly popular among millennials.

The furniture industry is also facing its fair share of challenges. For example, delivering an omnichannel experience has become an imperative and online furniture retailers are eating away at brick-and-mortar profits. Historically focused on getting a certain number of people through their front doors, and then converting about 25% of them into paying customers, retail furniture stores have also watched that foot traffic dwindle over the past two decades.

“Closing percentages have gone up,” said Rich Rotman, Senior Solutions Consultant at 5-Star NetSuite Provider Centium Consulting, Inc., “but traffic has plummeted.”

These realities have created both concern and panic for furniture retailers, many of which are beginning to develop their first ecommerce storefronts.

Making the Move to the Cloud

Working with furniture retailers whose annual revenues range from $ 20 million to $ 500 million, the Centium team sees firsthand the obstacles these organizations face in the race to digitize their operations and serve their online customers. Exacerbating the challenges is a workforce where salespeople aren’t generally tech-savvy, and where customer databases are both outdated and stored in on-premises, legacy systems.

To overcome these obstacles, furniture retailers not only need robust, engaging ecommerce storefronts, they also need unified cloud technology systems that integrate well with other applications. Learn more by downloading the Centium kit.

“The industry as a whole has been dogged by legacy applications,” said

Brian Denham, Centium’s President. “It’s also using applications with industry-specific functionalities, with the end result being a lot of information silos and systems that don’t ‘talk’ to one another.”

These siloed systems can create major bottlenecks for furniture retailers. For example, Centium recently worked with one company that couldn’t even extract simple cashflow statements from its stores.

“They can’t even figure out their cash position, which is pretty unbelievable in this day and age,” said Denham. “The company’s applications are so siloed that even getting this very basic level of information is impossible.”

5 Ways Cloud ERP Supports Furniture Retailers

An industry where everything from purchasing to ordering to managing salesperson commissions is handled manually, the furniture industry is ripe for automation. Here are some of the biggest advantages that retailers gain by implementing NetSuite’s cloud ERP:

Effectively manage stackable promotions. With NetSuite’s built-in functionality, the retail furniture industry can more effectively manage stackable promotions—those that include a certain product, a financing deal and free shipping, for example—which are extremely popular among furniture buyers. “Most software platforms can’t handle two promotions at the same time,” said Rotman, “let alone three or four.” NetSuite can easily work with multiple offers being applied to the same customer order.
Take off the legacy system handcuffs. “We’re at a point where these companies really need to evolve, and their legacy systems are keeping them stuck in a box,” Rotman said. “The great thing about NetSuite is it allows you to evolve your business without being handcuffed. If you want to change your business model, alter the way you do things, or move from being a special-order retailer to one that holds more inventory, NetSuite can handle it all for you.”
Manage multiple commission structures. Centium recently worked with a furniture retailer that used roughly 25 different commissions across multiple sales forces. All of those allocations and distributions were handled manually—a process that ate up time, money and valuable human resources. That company has since automated the process using the standard version of NetSuite, versus a customized solution that might have cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Print and change merchandise tags on the fly. The cloud ERP system also features saved searches, customized templates and scheduling capabilities that allow furniture retailers to more readily print up merchandise tags for its showroom products. It also enables quick switching up of those tags when, say, a holiday promotion kicks in. “This is a feature that many retailers don’t catch onto until after the ERP has been implemented,” said Rotman, “and it’s a nice surprise for anyone who was handling the process manually.”
Provide a better customer experience. Operating in an industry where a good customer experience is paramount—and where the nearest competitor is now just a single screen tap or mouse click away—furniture retailers also need good customer case management capabilities. “With NetSuite,” said Rotman, “retailers can customize their customer support to provide a much better experience than they ever could with a legacy system.”

Ultimately, these and other wins help furniture retailers cater to customers that are less likely to visit their stores and more likely to shop online when buying new furniture and accessories, and where providing the ultimate customer experience has become a vital competitive advantage. Download the Centium kit to learn more.

Posted on Fri, February 14, 2020
by NetSuite filed under

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For SK Hynix, Cloud Is A Happiness Tool (Part 1)

February 5, 2020 BI News and Info

Part 1 in a 2-part series about SK Hynix and its philosophy that the cloud is the way to make future generations happy and productive at work – to support a sustainable business. For more customer perspectives, read the “Digital CIO” series.

There are many great speeches at big conferences. Unfortunately, it’s impossible for me, with just one body, to attend all of the impressive speeches going on at the same time. I’d like to virtualize my body and containerize it to go freely here and there to gather all the insights, but I don’t have the ability to do that yet.

So, it felt like I’d met a goddess of luck when I happened up a talk at a recent conference led by a speaker who provided unexpected insights. In his talk, “Why hybrid cloud?” Mr. Chang-rock Song, CIO of leading semiconductor company SK Hynix, surprised me by pondering in a surprising way why the company was using the cloud.

I had thought this would be one of those typical cloud technology sessions when suddenly the speaker uttered the keywords “happiness” and “membership.” His in-depth insight and strong beliefs about serving employees inspired my in-depth reflection about the reasons IT exists.

A view toward future generations

CIO Song said, “The bottom line is that we needed to create an information infrastructure that would make everyone happy – those who are currently working in the enterprise and those who will join us in the future. The cloud is the only solution. It is a strategy that looks to the distant future and is faithful to reality.

“By 2022, those who have been called Generation X will become executives. There are millennials who are behind Generation X. The average age in our M15 plant is 29 years old, and they are all in science and engineering. Baby boomers and others become the protagonists of the world. We cannot insist on the tools that our current officers use; we also have to support the younger generation’s culture, the tools they use.

“In 2027, the YouTube generation will join the company. They will be familiar with videos and video-making tools. I don’t think I’m going to make a report with a video!

“By 2039, a new generation that sees books without reading will appear. This generation is trying to fine-tune with their fingers everything they see in the picture frame, and things that don’t work with touch seem to them to be broken. Everything they have adapted to is cloud-based. That’s why the cloud is essential to support the happiness of our members now and in the future.”

Mr. Tae-won Chey, chairman of The SK Group, also spoke at the conference. He remarked: “How can SK function as a healthy community and at the same time foster more happiness? The measure is social value. For this, we decided to improve management strategies based on happiness-creation methodology. We have accelerated the innovation of business models and global performance through social value by adapting to changes in the domestic and international management environment.”

Happiness as a management philosophy

Chairman Chey believes that the highest work performance is achieved and organizational unity is possible only if its members are happy – that creating a virtuous cycle based on this philosophy will naturally make the group’s growth sustainable.

CIO Song added: “We try to find the invisible value of happiness, not the visible value of money. Rather than the happiness of potential customers, we first consider members’ happiness. Defining happiness as corporate purpose changes the purpose of both the member and the work. We asked, ‘Who are our members now? Who else will be?’ In the future, prospects will also be our members. As we expanded the concept and definition of our members, we clearly had to consider the cloud. That’s why we turned the cloud into a ‘happiness tool.’”

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series, which explores how SK Hynix revolutionized its business for the benefit of its extended member community.

Get to know how to build chatbots with SAP Conversational AI in order to improve your customer and employee experiences by signing up for our webinar on March 3.

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Digitalist Magazine

5 Ways Cloud ERP Helps Solar Installers Reduce Soft Costs

January 28, 2020 NetSuite

Posted by John Goode, Senior Director, Channel Marketing

The amount of solar energy connected to the national electric grid has increased more than 20-fold since 2008, as millions of Americans choose clean technology to power their lives. As solar use has grown, technology development, commercialization and the scaling of manufacturing processes have all helped drive down solar hardware costs, according to the Department of Energy (DOE).

The “soft costs” of going solar have not declined nearly as rapidly. Defined as the non-hardware costs associated with moving to solar, soft costs include permitting, financing and installing solar panels, as well as all the expenses solar companies incur to acquire new customers, pay suppliers, train staff and cover their bottom lines.

These soft costs comprise as much as 64% of the total cost of a new solar system, according to the DOE, and make up the largest component of any installation. When a solar installer runs its business using incompatible technology applications that don’t “talk” to each other—and when each area of that business has its own individual applications and data sets—the soft costs can add up pretty quickly.

Blu Banyan, a Berkeley, Calif.-based Solution Provider and SuiteApp developer with a dedicated NetSuite practice for the solar industry, recognizes the challenges of these soft costs and developed SolarSuccess, a NetSuite application specifically optimized for residential and commercial solar installers of all sizes. The NetSuite/SolarSuccess solution helps installers leverage the rapid decline in hardware costs over the past decade, while making the reductions in soft-costs necessary to improve organizational efficiency, profitability and competitive position.

5 Ways ERP Reduces Solar Soft Costs

Here are five ways that a unified, cloud ERP built for the solar industry helps installers effectively reduce their projects’ soft costs and improve their profitability on every project.

1. Replaces widely-used, off-the-shelf software. As companies grow, incompatible “point” applications that don’t scale effectively or profitably in combination—including widely-used programs like QuickBooks and Salesforce—all eventually have to be replaced, at ever-greater financial and disruption costs. In their place, companies are turning to integrated management solutions that support all the core company functions, including accounting, finance, project management, inventory/procurement, sales/marketing and human resources.

2. Provides reliable, real-time data. Without good data providing visibility across all company operations, scaling productively is next to impossible for solar installers. “When you’re working with incompatible, incomplete, out-of-date data, it can turn into a nightmare pretty quickly,” said Blu Banyan’s Chief Executive Officer Jan Rippingale. “To improve efficiency and profitability, solar installers must have real-time visibility into their entire end-to-end businesses.”

3. Breaks down information silos. Many installers continue to use programs like QuickBooks to run their businesses even as they scale up to meet the growing demand for solar power. Because QuickBooks doesn’t “talk” to Salesforce.com—and because Salesforce doesn’t integrate with job-costing tools—an installer’s procurement, accounting and sales teams are working from different playbooks. This siloed approach simply doesn’t cut it in today’s flat, collaborative world, where both internal and external partners need common technology platforms and data compatibility.

4. Integrates all aspects of the installation business. SolarSuccess brings sales pipeline management, CRM, accounting, purchasing, installation project management (including per project costing and profitability), inventory management, customer invoicing, universal financier connectivity and business intelligence all onto a single platform. The solution provides end-to-end visibility on cash flow, profitability, acquisition costs, project tracking and alerts, sub-contractor monitoring and other functions that are keys to a solar installer’s success. “When you’re aggregating a group of point applications—and regardless of how good each of those programs is individually—you really need them to be able to talk to one another,” said Rippingale. “The only way to make that happen, and to effectively reduce the soft costs identified by the DOE, is with an integrated application suite that provides reliable data and a common interface across all functions.”

5. Supports scale and growth. Using an end-to-end, fully-integrated software suite that was specifically optimized for the solar industry, installers can effectively meet the demands of their growing customer bases while also keeping soft costs to a minimum, ensuring profitable growth for the installer. “A lot of companies in this space are at a point where the acceleration in demand literally puts them in the position where they can’t scale or grow further,” said Rippingale. “In fact, many of them won’t even be able to sustain their current profitability levels and competitive position without switching to a system that allows them to use the same data across all of their departments.”

Blu Banyan’s premier end-to-end solar solution has been built on the NetSuite platform to give installers a software stack that’s specifically tailored for their needs. Optimized for residential and commercial solar installers of any size, SolarSuccess helps installers successfully leverage the rapid decline in hardware costs over the last decade with soft-cost reductions that improve margins even as overall installation costs decline. Access this whitepaper to learn more about Blu Banyan’s SolarSuccess product and how it helps drive down the soft costs in a solar installer’s business.

Posted on Mon, January 27, 2020
by NetSuite filed under

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Periscope Data Is now Sisense for Cloud Data Teams

January 22, 2020 Sisense

Sisense News is your home for corporate announcements, new Sisense features, product innovation, and everything we roll out to empower our users to get the most out of their data.

Uniting to empower data analytic teams

Last May, we made a decision to join forces with Periscope Data to build a true end-to-end analytics platform. Our vision was a single data platform that combined features custom-built for data, product, and BI teams for every step in the analysis process. Both companies shared the common vision that the most successful companies are transforming into data companies. The end product that we envisioned would allow these customers to extract deeper insights from their data and make those insights more actionable across every line of business.

Today, I’m proud to announce that we’ve hit another important milestone on our merger journey. We no longer have any reason to talk about Sisense and Periscope Data as separate entities. I couldn’t be more excited to say that effective today, Periscope Data will be renamed Sisense for Cloud Data Teams.

pd blog banner new world data teams min 770x250 Periscope Data Is now Sisense for Cloud Data Teams

Building the future for advanced data teams

Periscope Data has officially been a part of Sisense for quite some time now. The effect can be seen on the combined company culture, product roadmap, and especially our current data offerings. The announcement of Sisense for Cloud Data Teams illustrates the progress we’ve made as part of the merger.

Periscope Data Is now Sisense for Cloud Data Teams

The platform will still provide the same powerful in-app experience that our thousands of customers have come to love, now as an official part of the Sisense product family. The name will be changing, but the offering will remain the same: world-class technology for advanced data teams to discover powerful insights in data. We’re 100% committed to executing on our roadmap and continuing to innovate Sisense for Cloud Data Teams going forward.

Supercharging advanced data teams

Part of the new name is an appropriate recognition of the community of builders that has partnered with us to evolve the combined Sisense-Periscope offering to the world-class solution it is today: cloud data teams. These data professionals are driving the data revolution that is changing the way companies win with data. They’re asking new questions and continually pushing the boundaries of what can be done with our products.

In addition to the broad range of capabilities already offered as part of the Periscope Data product, such as data pipelines and advanced ad-hoc analysis, the Sisense for Cloud Data Teams package will enjoy numerous benefits from being a part of the core Sisense platform. Over time users will be empowered with self-service dashboard creation and a more interactive exploratory environment.

These builders are the reason Sisense invests so heavily in delivering new technology to elevate the effectiveness and enhance the impact of data and insights. The announcement of Sisense for Cloud Data Teams is an acknowledgment of the value these experts provide and a promise to execute on an aggressive roadmap for them.

Building a common Sisense vision

From the beginning, the merger of Sisense and Periscope Data was always about finding a way to create a single data platform that would deliver the most value to every user, regardless of their data needs or technical ability. However, Sisense for Cloud Data Teams is a huge step for advanced data teams. This data analytics platform gives those teams a more powerful way to make their insights operational for other leaders within their organizations.

The co-founder of Periscope and now one of my partners on this journey, our CMO Harry Glaser, has brought his own perspective and energy to Sisense’s vision of a true end-to-end data platform and has expressed his thoughts here.

Sisense for Cloud Data Teams is the operational realization of the vision we shared last year at the outset of the merger. It’s the result of years of work to build a platform that enables advanced data teams to accelerate organizations all over the world. We couldn’t be more excited about the journey to deliver this functionality to modern data builders.

While delivering Sisense for Cloud Data Teams is an important milestone, it’s only the beginning of our goal to deliver the best data analytics platform. I’d like to thank the customers who have come this far with us and encourage builders everywhere (including product and BI teams) to continue innovating with Sisense. Power to the builders; insights for everyone!

Amir Orad is the CEO of Sisense, a successful entrepreneur and a Big Data, cybersecurity, and financial technology thought leader, with proven success in leading and scaling businesses.

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Blog – Sisense

Adobe Offers Experience Manager as Cloud Service

January 16, 2020 CRM News and Info

Adobe on Monday announced the availability of Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service for B2B and B2C companies of all sizes.

The service provides “a globally scalable, agile and secure digital foundation that optimizes marketer and developer workflows across the entire content lifecycle, and connects to data insights to deliver personalized experiences across the customer journey,” said Haresh Kumar, director of product marketing for Adobe Experience Manager.

“It allows companies to be far more nimble and scale at any point, because Experience Manager is always on, always current, always at scale, and always learning,” he told CRM Buyer.

Built-In Intelligence

Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service integrates scalable, secure and agile content management; digital asset management; digital signage management; and customer communication applications.

It eliminates the need to build in downtime to accommodate version upgrades.
The production environment is configured and constantly maintained to be consistent with Adobe’s standard security practices and controls.

Brands can combine insights from a customer’s previous purchases and interest in emails about particular products using Adobe Sensei, the company’s artificial intelligence and machine learning framework, to recommend items the customer is likely to purchase. Adobe Sensei also lets brands automatically tag images and videos.

Brands can create and deliver experiences across any channel, device or app, using built-in Adobe Sensei capabilities to automate the adaptation of content for different channels.

Teams can work simultaneously on multiple assets for multiple channels, saving time.

Pricing scales seamlessly and the solution can be scaled based on usage metrics.

Early results from mid-market companies to large enterprises using the application show ingestion time is 50 percent faster, administrative efficiency increased 40 percent and author productivity increased by more than 20 percent, Adobe said.

Good for Customers, Good for Adobe

“This is a good move for Adobe, and one that should have considerable benefits for its customers,” remarked Nicole France, principal analyst at Constellation Research.

By redesigning Adobe Experience Manager to operate through a microservices architecture, the company “is making it significantly easier for its customers both to integrate various sources of digital assets and content, and to present that content across digital channels,” she told CRM Buyer.

In general, offerings that manage multiple sources of content and information across multiple channels with a consistent, easy-to-use interface make it possible for companies to streamline and improve the way they interact with their customers, France observed.

They therefore let staff focus on the messages or sentiments they’re trying to communicate and how to do that most effectively rather than on the minutiae of which assets and channels to use, she noted.

“Focusing on the higher-order customer interaction, rather than the mechanics of how to make it happen, certainly improves a company’s ability to create positive customer experiences,” France said.

However, the term “experience manager” is a misnomer, in her view.

“This really isn’t a tool for managing customer experiences — not least because no one can ‘manage’ customer experiences — but one for dynamically managing the assets that form a large part of digital customer interactions,” France explained.

“Experiences are, by definition, subjective. It’s impossible to manage a customer’s experience, but it is possible to stack the deck to make it more likely that the experience is a good one. Having the right tools is an important step in that direction,” she said.

Continuous Innovation

“This really is a matter of speed and ease rather than a revolutionary shift in offering, allowing for an acceleration of delivery of omnichannel assets,” said Liz Miller, principal analyst at Constellation Research.

For both B2B and B2C companies, the modernization of the Experience Manager architecture “enables the power of the cloud to meet the power of creativity, allowing for a broad range of assets to be quickly accessed, updated, personalized or modified on the fly with strong uptime and availability,” she told CRM Buyer.

Access to Adobe’s continuous innovation means customers do not have to wait for the next update or round of releases, Miller said.”Innovation can be made available on the fly and without lag.”

For B2C companies in particular, the rapid scale up and down based on their needs means the assets they need and the experience they want to deliver through their content “is just as robust in points of uptime crunch as it is in low traffic moments,” she added, which “empowers performance at the scale of a customer, versus the scale and uptime availability of how the Adobe platform is implemented.”

Edge on the Competition

Oracle and Salesforce have been offering service clouds for years, and SAP is working with Accenture to develop vertical service clouds for industries.

Adobe’s heritage in content development gives it the edge, because “Experience Manager empowers the engagement process from creative ideation all the way through to optimized asset delivery,” Miller said. Adobe is “looking to eliminate the creative gap between asset creation and engagement.”

Richard%20Adhikari Adobe Offers Experience Manager as Cloud Service
Richard Adhikari has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2008. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, mobile technologies, CRM, databases, software development, mainframe and mid-range computing, and application development. He has written and edited for numerous publications, including Information Week and Computerworld. He is the author of two books on client/server technology.
Email Richard.

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Organizations across the Middle East unlock growth with cloud company Oracle NetSuite

January 15, 2020 NetSuite

Organizations across the Middle East are increasingly selecting Oracle NetSuite to unlock growth and take their businesses to the next level. With NetSuite, organizations operating in the region, such as Property Finder Group, Al Jabr Holding and the International Cricket Council Limited, can take advantage of an integrated business platform in the cloud to gain the visibility and control needed to navigate change, meet regulatory requirements, and accelerate growth.

“There’s a significant culture of entrepreneurialism and innovation across the Middle East region, and this presents a huge opportunity for business growth,” said Nicky Tozer, VP of EMEA, Oracle NetSuite. “In the last year alone, we have seen more and more organizations that are operating in this region rethink their traditional business systems as they seek to increase operational efficiency and unlock new growth opportunities. At NetSuite, we are committed to helping organizations across the Middle East take advantage of the cloud to elevate their business to the next level.”

Property Finder Group selects NetSuite to support growth targets

Property Finder Group is the leading real estate digital platform, providing a convenient rental and sale marketplace for residential and commercial properties in the Middle East and North Africa. With over six million monthly visits across its platforms, and a growing ecosystem of users throughout the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Qatar, Bahrain, Lebanon, and Morocco, Property Finder needed a cloud-based platform to efficiently manage its multinational and multi-subsidiary operations.

“Our mission is to provide the most convenient house hunting and real estate journey for millions of users across multiple countries,” said Anas Qudah, Group Enterprise Systems Controller, Property Finder. “As we grew, we needed to improve our revenue recognition and ability to operate across borders. NetSuite gives us the flexibility to act local but be global, gives a real-time view into our business, and ultimately improves the experience for our customers.”

Al Jabr brings in NetSuite to unlock portfolio growth

Founded in 1952, Al Jabr Holding Co. is a Saudi-based conglomerate with a broad investment portfolio across sectors including automotive, car rental, laundry, investment and real estate, financing and construction, contracting and manufacturing, and is the national dealer for KIA MOTORS in Saudi Arabia. To supports its mission to deliver products and services of unmatched quality across its portfolio, Al Jabr needed greater visibility into financial and operational performance across its business.

“Al Jabr stands for quality, and maintaining such high standards across a diverse portfolio requires clarity and vision as we pursue ambitious economic, social, and environmental objectives,” said Ihab Hawari, CIO, Al Jabr Group. “NetSuite has given us a deep understanding of our performance across our range of business interests. This is helping us forward-plan, explore new growth opportunities and contributing to our digital transformation efforts which will help us better engage with our customers.”

NetSuite helps the ICC lay the foundation for cricket growth

The International Cricket Council Limited (ICC) is the international body that governs the sport of cricket. Representing 105 member organizations across the globe, the ICC plays an integral role in the global growth of cricket. To help support its plans for the expansion of the game and successfully manage ICC Events, the ICC needs an integrated business platform to capture insights into commercial performance and enhance decision-making. With NetSuite, the ICC will benefit from greater visibility into its financial operations in its drive towards delivering more competitive, entertaining, and meaningful cricket for players and fans.

UFC GYM strengthens its operations

UFC GYM is the first major brand extension of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC®). With an aggressive franchise growth strategy across the Middle East and North Africa and existing clubs in the UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Egypt and with new fitness facilities opening in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, UFC GYM needed to consolidate its operations and streamline its financial and statutory reporting.

“Our success is driven by providing world-class mixed martial arts and functional training to our members which we have mastered. Providing real-time reporting to our management team is just as essential to run an exceptional operation and to achieve our growth strategy,” said Ibrahim Mohamed, CFO, UFC GYM ME. “NetSuite allows us to manage multiple subsidiaries and business units on one platform, comply with local and international standards and ensure that our required reporting obligations are being met”.

MELiUS grows with NetSuite

Dubai-based MELiUS provides an e-learning resource to help business owners take advantage of new technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence, as well as delivering commercial insights and research to help clients make more informed decisions. To support increasing demand for the MELiUS interactive learning space, MELiUS needed to replace its previous finance system, which was unintuitive and unable to deliver detailed performance reports.

“Our mission is to deliver targeted information that helps business owners reach their objectives,” said Moyn Islam, co-founder and CEO, MELiUS. “NetSuite is a perfect choice for a growing company like ours. It has allowed us to track our growth and better understand how, when, and where to expand. Our efficiency has increased exponentially since using NetSuite, and we have far greater visibility into our performance, which is important as we embark on new projects to help even more business owners.”

About Oracle NetSuite
For more than 20 years, Oracle NetSuite has helped organizations grow, scale and adapt to change. NetSuite provides a suite of cloud-based applications, which includes financials / Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), HR, professional services automation and omnichannel commerce, used by more than 19,000 customers in 203 countries and dependent territories.

For more information, please visit https://www.netsuite.com.

Follow NetSuite’s Cloud blog, Facebook page and @NetSuite Twitter handle for real-time updates.

About Oracle
The Oracle Cloud offers complete SaaS application suites for ERP, HCM and CX, plus best-in-class database Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) from data centers throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. For more information about Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), please visit us at oracle.com.

Trademarks
Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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Sisense for Cloud Data Teams: a Step Forward for Builders Everywhere

January 11, 2020 Sisense

Sisense News is your home for corporate announcements, new Sisense features, product innovation, and everything we roll out to empower our users to get the most out of their data.

A vision for builders

Nearly eight years ago, I joined my friend and Periscope Data co-founder Tom O’Neill (now Sisense Chief Cloud Officer) on a journey to build an advanced analytics platform that empowered data teams to build amazing new things. Last May, that journey took a big leap forward with the decision to merge Periscope Data and Sisense. In the time since that announcement, our team has been working extremely hard to combine technologies, customer bases, and internal operations into a single organization that achieves the goal we set out to accomplish in 2012.

Sisense for Cloud Data Teams: a Step Forward for Builders Everywhere

Recently, that merger matured to a point where we felt it necessary to change the way we talk about the products. Internally, we were no longer keeping Periscope Data and Sisense separate products in our long-term vision and we wanted to make the external conversations we were having consistent. Rather than building two separate data analytics platforms for two separate parts of the overall data analysis process, we are focusing on building a single data platform with tools optimized for every user.

To reinforce that cohesion, we renamed Periscope Data as Sisense for Cloud Data Teams. When we began setting important checkpoints for the progress of this merger, this change was always an important milestone. I’m proud to be able to say that we’ve officially achieved it.

pd blog banner new world data teams min 770x250 Sisense for Cloud Data Teams: a Step Forward for Builders Everywhere

Building a shared culture

To this point, the merger has been a success story. Part of that success is due to our incredible customer base, which has been eager to listen to the shared vision and work with us to make it a reality. The truth is that building an ambitious product like this requires equally ambitious customers who can be relied on to take our data analytics platform to new heights and provide feedback along the way. It is neither a nicety nor an oversimplification to say that we could not have done this without the brilliant data professionals who use Sisense every day.

At this time last year, Periscope Data and Sisense both had strong company cultures. Merging them together required shared focus and developing a new culture around that commonality. For us, that common goal was a dedication to customers. Sisense for Cloud Data Teams is a testament to how well the new culture has jelled around servicing our combined customer base.

While the two original products focused on different users and unique parts of the data analysis process, the end-to-end platform available today is the result of a shared passion for empowering customers to create value from data. There’s a lot of enthusiasm about the data platform we are building and how it will be used to help out customers move their organizations forward.

Rewarding our internal builders

Another big pillar of the culture at Sisense is a commitment to employee success. Independently, both Sisense and Periscope Data had made several “best places to work” lists before the merger, which is illustrative of the priority given to employee satisfaction. There’s no pressure to produce perfect results, we’ve built an atmosphere that encourages continual experimentation and rewards those who help others. We set high standards for our work, give employees the resources they need to hit their goals, and trust that they’ll succeed.

That attitude is a huge reason why Sisense for Cloud Data Teams is available today and why future innovations at Sisense will set new industry standards for data platform possibilities. Renaming a product is not a simple process. It’s one that takes cooperation from all parts of the organization.

While the announcement of Sisense for Cloud Data Teams is a big reason to celebrate, there’s an understanding around the company that we’re not just building a product, we’re building a culture. The success of one goes hand-in-hand with the success of the other.

Building for the future

The announcement of Sisense for Cloud Data Teams is a milestone commemorating our dedication to building tools for advanced data professionals. It’s an industry-leading tool that already plays a crucial role in the way the most advanced companies are analyzing data. The success of that product so far is the result of individual people — both customers and employees — who share a vision for the possibilities of data and work to achieve it.

Sisense for Cloud Data Teams is also the next step forward in the journey to empower data teams. It removes existing workflow barriers between data professionals and the rest of their teams, streamlining the path from actions to insights. This tool is a leap ahead for modern data teams. The unified team Sisense and Persicope Data tea is building something truly incredible.

Harry Glaser is the Chief Marketing Officer and General Manager of San Francisco at Sisense. He was the co-founder and CEO of Periscope Data, which merged with Sisense in May 2019. Prior to founding Periscope Data in 2012, Harry was a Product Lead at Google AdWords and graduated from the University of Rochester with a bachelor’s degree in computer science.

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