Forrester Blogs

eBusiness Leaders are Optimistic about 2010

Carrie Johnson — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:41:01 +0000

No one that manages a P&L will ever look back at 2009 and say "what a fun year!" eBusiness executives are certainly glad to have 2009 behind them and report to us that 2010 is not as fraught with economic concerns. We just published the results of our most recent survey of 100 eBusiness and Channel Strategy executives and found that although overall budgets for eBusiness aren't increasing that dramatically, our respondents aren't feeling the heat to cut back like they were last year.

Even better, our survey respondents are increasing their budget for new innovation and technology. In 2010, the percentage of the online budget dedicated to new investment and innovation is expected to increase or significantly increase at 52% of firms. Hooray! It's a battle cry for all eBusiness execs to step up their games, and for senior executives in their firms to step up their commitment to and support of the channel. Spending (by our respondents) will focus on analytics and then ratings and review platforms.

Analytics have been a constant in our surveys, and ratings and reviews don't surprise us. Social media is hard for eBusiness execs to get their heads around because many social efforts clearly drive marketing objectives like brand engagement, but the impact on actual sales and conversion is fuzzier. Ratings and reviews are a clearer conversion tool for retailers in particular. My colleague Brad Strothkamp wrote a blog post though about the use of ratings and reviews in financial services, which is not nearly as black and white an issue.

SAP Middleware Directions: More Open Source, In-Memory Stuff

John R. Rymer — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:51:09 +0000

At the 15 March press and analyst Q&A by SAP co-CEOs Jim Hagemann Snabe and Bill McDermott, new middleware boss Vishal Sikka shed more light on the company's intentions for NetWeaver. Many of SAP's business applications customers use NetWeaver, both as a foundation for SAP's applications and to extend those applications using integration, portals, and custom developed apps. For about a year, the question has been how much additional investment SAP will put into NetWeaver.

Sikka made two comments that indicate how he's thinking about the NetWeaver portfolio.

1. In response to my question about whether SAP is concerned that Oracle's ownership of Java will put it at a disadvantage, Sikka started by highlighting SAP's work on Java performance, but then noted the availability of good open-source Java software to support the requirements of SAP customers.

Social, Spatial, & Temporal: The Coordinates of Community in the Cloud

James Kobielus — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:00:39 +0000

Social networks have their foundations in the space-time continuum—you know, the funky coordinate system that Einstein was so keen about.

Social network analysis is all about looking for patterns of “proximity” among people, considered in their cultural capacities as influencers and followers, innovators and imitators, first-movers and late adopters. Down deep, I consider social network analysis an important new branch of decision support systems as a discipline. The core question is: What unique situational chemistry causes various people, individually or collectively, to make various decisions at various places and times?

That’s where space and time enter the social network analysis equation. It’s not enough that I look up to your shining example and take my lead from what you say and do. It’s just as important that we be in the same city, neighborhood, or room. More than that, it’s important that you and I actually cross paths in order for you to actively influence me to buy that latte, or for you to calm me down and thereby stop me from storming out the door and severing my relationship with a retailer who has ignored my complaints one time too many.

Three Key Considerations On Social Media For Market Research

Tamara Barber — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 12:00:00 +0000

For my current research on social media and market research, I’m interested in listening platforms (and the text analysis that’s usually packaged with them) for the purposes of mining the social Web – be it on blogs, open community sites, social networks or the like.

There’s a lively debate around the value of social media listening for market research, and there are many people willing to share their opinion. Last week, I attended a Webinar on this very subject, hosted by Peanut Labs, with multiple guest speakers from the industry. Here are some of the key points that market researchers should consider when assessing the need for – and effort in -- social media research.

“Process and methods need to be developed to make social media data be another source for Marketing Research” -- From Jean Davis, co-founder of Conversition, and former president of Ipsos Online, North America. This means: Platforms need to be created with the market researcher in mind. They must be able to reliably sift through online conversations to sort out low-quality data; apply weighting schemes to that data reflects that true share of volume that different sources have online; and create constructs so that data from social media can be proxied to represent common measures such as five-point scales and top-two boxes.

USAA proves the value of Web site ratings and reviews to financial services

Brad Strothkamp — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Numerous conversations over the last few months with financial service firms has proven one thing to me - most are dealing with questions around social media and social commerce and yet few are sure how best to proceed. Much of what has been written thus far centers around the role social can play in the areas of marketing and brand, but there are beginning to be more stories that are surfacing around uses directly related to eBusiness on a firm's Web site.

The best case I have seen for social on a Web site came from USAA and is part of a case study I wrote with Tom Vaughn, director of social media at USAA. View Now.

What separates USAA's story from others we have heard? It is backed up with direct ROI and metrics in areas that drive the business - conversion and sales. USAA was able to prove that providing ratings and reviews using Bazaarvoice's solution drove an incremental 15 thousand plus products sales in a nine month period.

So should you rush out and add ratings and reviews to your Web site? Probably not since most financial services Web site fail to get the basics done right. But assuming you have the basics down, I would consider adding this one to your functionality roadmap.

Brad

Don't outsmart yourself

Tom Grant — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 23:03:33 +0000

In product marketing, you always want to sound like the smartest person in the room. However, you shouldn't prove it with marketing messages that only you fully understand.

At last, someone who can understand my brilliance
Colleague Mary Gerush and I are working on a market segmentation for requirements tools. It's a great excuse to get into a lot of very interesting conversations about some very deep topics. The requirements market is in transition, from an era of heavy-weight tools designed to address information management challenges, to something very different. (You'll have to stay tuned to find out what the new market looks like.) We're starting from scratch, with no particular attachment to the traditional terms and concepts for describing what these tools are supposed to do.

That's the entree into the very interesting conversations. Vendors in this space, whatever it is, are very smart people who think about the shape of the requirements market all day long. Not surprisingly, their opinions about the market, which are reflected in their marketing messages, are very smart, too. In fact, in a couple of occasions, I wonder if they were being a little too smart.

You do not understand collaboration

Tom Grant — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 22:00:10 +0000

I swore that I was not going to say anything further. I really, really tried, but I'm going to have to throw away the little plastic medal that says, "Two Weeks And No Buzz." Here's a must-read quote that a colleague forwarded to me:

So why exactly did Google Buzz launch with some key social features missing? Jackson said that while Google employees were testing out the product internally, they never had much desire to mute any of their coworkers, and that their email contact list closely matched the people they wanted to follow on Buzz. Obviously, that wasn’t true for most people once the product was released outside of the Googleplex. Which is why Google is considering pre-releasing new Buzz features to a few thousand opt-in users long before they’re rolled out to the public.

The short version: "It worked for us inside the firewall, so we never thought it'd have a problem outside the firewall." Of course, an enterprise collaboration tool is a wholly different kind of solution than a social networking tool, so the requirements for the former do not completely cover the latter.

SAP 3rd Party Maintenance: An alternative for me? - Part Two

Stefan Ried — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 19:01:47 +0000

Translated and condensed by Charles Green.

Hi, I’d like to share part two of a recent discussion that I had with Martin Schindler, Editor of Silicon.de. See part one here in case you missed it.

Martin Schindler: You indicated earlier that interest in third-party maintenance has increased since SAP wanted to make its Enterprise Support basically mandatory. Is this just excitement or real demand?

Stefan Ried: Yes, interest has increased. We’re also seeing that from the vendor side. In addition to Rimini Street, which already offers maintenance for SAP systems, there is also Aptech, netCustomer, the Spinnaker Management Group, and Versytec, which are today limited to PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel. The vendor space has developed further, and the list of SAP-supporting vendors will soon become longer. Finally, it makes sense to ask the larger systems integrators, such as Wipro, Tata Consultancy Services, IBM Global Services, and Siemens (SIS), which are also the largest SAP integrators, to quote for offering SAP third-party maintenance.

Martin Schindler: This is interesting. We’ve read little about such offers.

Stefan Ried: These integrators naturally don’t make a lot of noise about these things, as they also have a partner relationship with SAP, of course. At the end of the day, the demand will be balanced with the supply — and if more customers request SAP maintenance from their systems integrator, they will start to offer it.

Really end to end management: Gomez and Compuware

Jean-Pierre Garbani — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:12:01 +0000

The marriage of Gomez and Compuware is starting to bear fruits. One of the key aspects of web application performance management is end user experience. This is approached largely from the data center standpoint, within the firewall. But the best solution to understand the real customer experience is to have an agent sitting on the customer side of the application, without the firewall, a possibility that is clearly out of bounds for most public facing applications. The Gomez-Compuware alliance is the first time that these two sides are brought together within the same management application, Compuware Vantage. What Vantage brings to the equation is the Application Performance Management (APM) view of IT Operations: response time collected from the network and correlated with infrastructure and application monitoring in the data center. But, it’s not the customer view. What Gomez brings with its recent version, the “Gomez Winter 2010 Platform Release” is a number of features that let IT understand what goes beyond the firewall: not only how the application content was delivered, but how the additional content from external providers was delivered and what was the actual performance at the end user level: the outside-in view of the application is now combined with the inside-out view of IT Operations provided by Vantage APM. And this is now spreading outside the pure desktop/laptop user group to reach out the increasing mobile and smart phone crowd. IT used to be able to answer the question of “is it the application or the infrastructure?” with Vantage. IT can now answer a broader set of questions: “is it the application, the internet service provider, the web services providers?’ for an increasingly broader range of use-case scenarios.

Wipro prepares for the Business Technology Challenge

Christopher Andrews — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:42:23 +0000

I just completed a day of analyst information sessions hosted by executives at Wipro Technologies. A few of my thoughts: