IBRS Advisor Team
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The Latest
In late January, Google presented a detailed report entitled “Operating the cleanest cloud in the industry” to analysts. The private briefing detailed Google’s current status as a ‘net zero-carbon emitter’ (meaning it offsets any carbon emissions from its current operations with other programs). It also outlined its plans to be running entirely on carbon-free energy by 2030.
Why it’s Important
All of the hyperscale Cloud vendors - Google, AWS, Microsoft, Oracle and Alibaba - have well-documented strategies to reduce their reliance on carbon-based fuel sources. Their strategies are all similar and simple: reduce energy consumption (with accompanying higher computing density) and development of renewable energy sources as part of data centre planning. Their efforts in this area are not just for environmental reasons, there are significant cost benefits in the immediate term to being free of fossil energy supply chains. All also see competitive advantages, not just against each other, but against on-premises data centres.
As these Cloud vendors announce not only net zero-carbon emission targets as being met, but zero carbon energy targets, the issue of sustainable ICT will once again start to emerge as a serial consideration for CIOs and data centre architects.
IBRS and BIAP (via the IT Leaders Summits) have tracked CIOs interests in the topic of green IT. An IBRS study in 2008 had sustainable ICT being rated as “very important” for 25% of CIOs and “somewhat important” for 59% of CIOs. Since then, interest in sustainable computing has plummeted year-on-year. The IBRS / BIAP data for 2016 had 6% of CIOs rating sustainable ICT as a priority. By 2020, less than 0.5% of CIOs rated sustainable ICT as a priority.
With the growing call for action on climate change and the economic advantages the hyperscale Cloud vendors will have by moving to carbon-free energy sources, the pressure to provide sustainable ICT metrics will re-emerge.
Who’s impacted
- CIO
- CFO
- Data centre leads
- Infrastructure architects
What’s Next?
CIOs and infrastructure leads for organisations running on-premises services / data centres should expect a swing back to discussions of sustainability. However, unlike the 2000’s, the benchmarks for sustainability will be set by the hyperscale Cloud providers. By 2025, all Cloud vendors will start using their leadership in sustainable ICT as a selling point for policy-makers to mandate Cloud computing, or possibly even place unattainable goals for architects of on-premises data centres.
Rather than waiting, CIOs should review previous strategies for sustainable ICT, with the expectation that these will need to be updated and reinstated within the next 3-5 years.
Related IBRS Advisory
- The Status of Green IT in Australian and New Zealand (2008)
- Building your Green IT strategy
- Think green IT: Think saving money
- Forget Green; think sustainable computing in 2009
- Strategy & Transformation
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22 February 2021
The Latest
17 February 2021: At the Learning with Google global event, the Cloud giant announced a slew of new education-oriented features for its education productivity suite. Previously called G Suite for Education, the Google Workspace for Education is now being aggressively commercialised.
What’s included
The free tier service - now called Google Workspaces for Education Fundamentals, had found strong acceptance in Australia by providing educators and students with collaborative learning capabilities.
This free tier now has three paid tiers, each with increasing levels of security and manageability.
- Standard: Adds security and analytics capabilities. The new features are aimed at improving traceability and providing more nuanced access rights to information.
- Teaching and Learning Upgrade: Adds features to better manage the classroom experience.
- Education Plus: Combines all the features of the previous tiers, in addition to extra management capabilities.
In addition, Google increased the baseline storage capacity for educational institutions to a whopping 100 TB, and added online-learning features to Google Meet.
Why it’s Important
Google and Microsoft are locked in a fierce battle for ‘hearts and minds’ in education. Both vendors know that student’s experiences with their productivity platforms today, will set expectations and habits for the workforce of tomorrow. This battle extends beyond the productivity suite to device, operating systems and ultimately, the entire digital workspace.
By introducing features that have been much in demand by education (especially K12) into commercial tiers, Google is fundamentally changing its stance in this war. In most State K12 and private education systems, Principals have the final say on the extent to which Google or Microsoft is used in classrooms. Often the decision is delegated down to the teachers and often both vendor’s offerings sit side by side.
Google’s evolving commercial stance means that this can no longer be the case. Given the total national cost (as ultimate schools are funded through State and Federal funds) educational policy setters now need to consider taking a side in the battle.
Who’s impacted
- Educational policy makers
- CIOs
- Educational ICT strategy leads
- Principals and senior leadership of higher education institutions
- Digital workspace teams
What’s Next?
Stakeholders within education need to immediately begin the laborious task of evaluating Google’s and Microsoft’s offerings, not just from the perspective of current offerings, but from their likely future directions. While the need to rationalise to one platform today may not be a burning priority, the need will increase over the next decade.
Stakeholders outside of education should monitor the decisions of education networks, as the platforms they select will impact new staff expectations and work habits.
Related IBRS Advisory
- Dr Sweeney on the Post-COVID Lessons for Education (Video Interview)
- Kids, Education and The Future of Work with Dr Joseph Sweeney - Potential Psychology - 25 July 2018
- Higher Education Technology Future State Vision
- BYOD in Education: A report for Australia and New Zealand
- Strategy & Transformation
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22 February 2021
Conclusion:
Thinking that the pandemic will soon be past and some form of new normal will emerge, be it working from home or office work, or a hybrid mix - is a misconception. Even with a vaccine, the pandemic will continue in isolated, difficult to predict pockets, and cause sporadic rapid changes to work practices for the foreseeable future. Organisations will need to be able to quickly flip-flop work environments rapidly, and work processes - and thus technologies - must evolve to meet the challenges of the 'age of uncertainty'. A fourth wave of ICT architecture is emerging, with a focus on information over architecture, low-code everything and powered by algorithms.
Find attached at the bottom od the article a free downloadable PDF copy of the trends for 2021-2026 executive presentation deck.
- Strategy & Transformation
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18 February 2021
The Latest
17 February 2021: Google Apigee announced the release of Apigee X, its latest edition of its API management solution.
Why it’s Important
IBRS has found that the topic of APIs has moved out of the boiler room to the boardroom. During a series of roundtables with CEOs, CFOs and Heads of HR in late 2019, IBRS noted that many of these executives were advocates for ‘API enabled enterprise solutions’. Upon further questioning, these non-technical executives were able to accurately describe the core concepts and purposes of APIs. Much of their knowledge had come from engagements with combined SalesForce / Mulesoft sales teams. During 2020, the demand for rapid digitisation of processes with low-code platforms further raised the profile of API usage.
Expectations for APIs are high. Meeting those expectations demands a structured approach to management of APIs, and the ability to report on their usage.
Who’s impacted
- CTO
- Software development teams
What’s Next?
Consider how the topic of APIs - which many executives see as critical for evolving business functions, or even a building block of digital transform efforts, needs to be communicated within the organisation. Explore how the adoption of low-code platforms both within and tangential to the ICT group will further expand the use of APIs. If not already available, put in place a roadmap for the introduction of API management capabilities, factoring both governance issues and supporting technologies.
Related IBRS Advisory
- Architectures for Mobilised Enterprise Applications
- Running IT-as-a-Service Part 15: Traditional enterprise architecture is irrelevant to digital transformation
- IBRSiQ: Can IBRS advise on the pros and cons of best of breed combined EAM/ERP vs fully integrated ERP/EAM?
- The impact of Software-as-a-Service on enterprise solutions: Why you must run IT-as-a-Service
- Enterprise resource planning (ERP) Part 2: Planning the ERP strategy for modernisation
- How to succeed with eforms Part 4: Selection framework
- Making the case for enterprise architecture
- IT Operational Excellence
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23 February 2021
The Latest
10 February 2021: Competition for highly secure hyperscale Cloud capabilities for government services has been boosted with Oracle joining forces with Australian Data Centres (ADC) to provide Canberra-based services. Oracle now has three Australian regions for managed Cloud, with Sydney and Melbourne.
Why it’s Important
Oracle’s Cloud service is highly attractive for organisations looking for a simpler Cloud transformation journey for critical, Oracle-based solutions.
Last year, Oracle’s SaaS solutions in the areas of security, human services, and health were certified as offering PROTECTED data capabilities. ADC has a strong presence in the Australia government, already running sensitive workloads and being connected to the secure Intra-Government Communications Network (ICON). By leveraging ADC’s footprint in Canberra, Oracle is now able to meet the second part of the trust equation: the physical safety of the environment.
Who’s impacted
- CIO
- Cloud migration teams
What’s Next?
Oracle now joins Microsoft in offering a specialised, highly secure Cloud capability for government agencies in Canberra. Agencies looking to quickly adopt a Cloud first strategy now have clear Microsoft and Oracle trajectories that include a physical presence, while AWS approaches the PROTECTED Cloud stance solely through a service-by-service model. When considering Cloud migration, agencies should review the extent of Oracle in their ICT architecture and factor this into the Cloud platform (or platforms) to be selected.
Related IBRS Advisory
- Strategy & Transformation
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12 February 2021
The Latest
16 February 2021: Veeam continues to expand its footprint across the hyperscale Cloud vendors with the introduction of Veeam Backup for Google Cloud Platform. This follows its December 2020 announcement when Veeam announced the general availability of AWS v3 Backup and Azure v4 Backup. As a result, Veeam now provides backup and recover capabilities across - and just as importantly between - the three major hyperscale Cloud vendors.
Why it’s Important
During a briefing with IBRS, Veeam detailed its strong growth in the Asia Pacific region. It also discussed its strategy for providing backup and recovery capabilities over the major hyperscale Cloud services: Azure, AWS and Google. The demand for Cloud backup and recovery is growing with greater recognition organisations adopting hybrid Cloud (the most likely future state for many organisations) demands more consistent and consolidated approaches to management - including backup and migration of data between Clouds. VMWare is seeing growth in its hybrid Cloud management capabilities as well, and the synergy between Veeam and VMWare productions is no coincidence.
Who’s Impacted
- Cloud architects
- Business continuity teams
What’s Next?
Backing up Cloud resources appears to be a simple process. Taken on as service-by-service, this might be true. However, in reality the backup becomes increasingly challenging. As more and more applications are made up of a myriad of components, this leads to a rapidly evolving ecosystem of solutions. Hence, data recovery and restoration are also getting more complex. This is further exacerbated by the growing adoption of hybrid Cloud.
Organisations need to explore backup and recovery based on not only current state Cloud architecture, but possible migration between Cloud services and where different integrated applications reside on different Cloud platforms.
Related IBRS Advisory
- New generation IT service management tools Part 3: Multi-Cloud backup and recovery
- Sustaining efficiency gains demands architecture risks mitigation Part 2
- The journey to Office 365 Part 8: Is a third-party backup or archival solution needed?
- IT Operational Excellence
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12 February 2021
The Latest
2 February 2021: Google has announced general availability of Dialogflow CX, it’s virtual agent (chatbot) technology for call centres. The service is a platform to create and deploy virtual agents for public-facing customer services. Google has embraced low-code concepts to allow for rapid development of such virtual agents with a visual builder. The platform also allows for switching between conversational ‘contexts’, which allows for greater flexibility in how the agents can converse with people that have multiple, simultaneous customer service issues.
Why it’s Important
While virtual agents are relatively easy to develop over time, two key challenges have remained:
- the ability to allow non-technical, customer service specialists to be directly involved in the creation and continual evolution of the virtual agents
- the capability of virtual agents to correctly react to humans’ non-linier conversational patterns.
Google’s Dialogflow CX has adopted aspects of low-code development to address the first challenge. The platform offers a visual builder and the way conversations are developed (contexts) can be described as ‘program by example’. While there are third-party virtual agent platforms that further simplify the development of agent workflows (many of which build on top of Dialogflow), the Google approach is proving sufficient for non-technical specialists to get heavily involved in the development and fine-tuning of virtual agents
Who’s impacted
- CIO
- Development team leads
- Business analysts
What’s Next?
If not already in place, organisations should establish a group of technical and non-technical staff to explore where and how virtual agents can be used. Do not attempt a big bang approach: keep expectations small, be experimental and iterative. Leverage low-code ‘chatbot builder’ tools to simplify the creation of virtual agent workflows, while leveraging available hyperscale cloud platforms for the back end of the agents.
Related IBRS Advisory
- Chatbots Part 1: Start creating capabilities with a super-low-cost experiment
- Virtual Service Desk Agent Critical Success Factors
- SNAPSHOT: The Chatbot Mantra: Experimental, experiential and iterative
- New generation IT service management tools Part 1
- Artificial intelligence Part 3: Preparing IT organisations for artificial intelligence deployment
- VENDORiQ: Tribal Sage chatbot
- Strategy & Transformation
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11 February 2021
The Latest
20 January 2021: In its 2020 Q4 quarterly earnings report, Citrix announced it is buying Wrike, a Cloud-based, collaborative project management service, for US$2.25 billion.
Why it’s Important
The market for collaborative workforce management tools has grown sharply in 2020. Prior to the pandemic, products such as Write were generally procured by business stakeholders. The ICT group’s ability to mandate a specific collaborative workforce management tool was limited due to the ease of acquiring such tools, strong user preferences based on past experiences with tools and waves of vendor’s branding activities. As a result, most organisations have a myriad of collaborator workforce management tools, including: Wrike, Monday, Trello, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Planner, Plutio and others.
However, as outlined in IBRS’s whiteboard session on Disruptive Collaboration, this situation is unsustainable. These Cloud-based tools can not only create pockets of documents and sensitive information, but also act as barriers for different teams to work together when they each have different tools.
Citrix’s acquisition of Wrike is a sign that the market for such tools may be starting to consolidate.
However, for existing Citrix customers and for Wrike customers, the acquisition will have little direct impact at this time.
Who’s impacted
- Project managers
- Business stakeholders involved with workforce management / project delivery
What’s Next?
- ICT groups should seek out which workforce collaboration tools are in use across the organisation. Longer term, plans should be in place to begin limiting the number of tools in an effort to improve information management and compliance, collaboration between disparate teams and reduce the security footprint.
Related IBRS Advisory
- Disruptive Collaboration (whiteboard session)
- Strategy & Transformation
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11 February 2021
The Latest
27 January 2020: Sitecore, which offers a web content management and online customer experience platform, announced a US$1.2 billion investment plan to grow its global footprint.
Why it’s Important
In the market for online customer experience, Sitecore is the key rival to Adobe. While Sitecore does not provide the breadth of digital design services that Adobe offers, its web content and digital marketing capabilities are competitive. This US$1.2 billion investment plan signals Sitecore’s desire to take advantage of the increased demand for digital service delivery in the wake of the pandemic.
Sitecore’s offering is price-competitive against Adobe, though still at the high-end of the market. However, it does need to boost its support network and partners if it wishes to encroach on Adobe, while also defending against mid-tier players and modern CRMs such as Salesforce and Netsuite ecommerce and customer service offerings.
Who’s impacted
- CMO
- Sales / Marketing teams
What’s Next?
While Sitecore is well-known in Australia and the Asia Pacific / Japan region, strengthening its implementation partners and support network will go a long way to positioning it against Adobe. IBRS has noted that some Australian Sitecore clients have expressed frustration with the availability of local Sitecore skills and sought US-based contractors to fill the gaps. Investment in building an international footprint may help alleviate local skills shortages.
Related IBRS Advisory
- CRM modernisation Part 1: Strategy, planning & selection
- CRM modernisation Part 2B: Creating a customer experience strategy
- Positive customer experiences must lead digital transformation
- Leadership & People
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02 February 2021
The Latest
19 January 2021: Salesforce has added a customer loyalty management module to its Customer 365 Platform. The new module allows organisations to define and deploy programs for incentives and rewards, linked to customer data held within the core Salesforce and customer experience platform.
Why it’s Important
During the pandemic and related lockdowns, digital service delivery has surged. More significantly, as consumers adopted more online service delivery, they also tried out new brands. McKinsey estimates that 80% of US consumers stuck with their new channels, with digital customer loyalty programs being a significant force in this trend.
Who’s impacted
- CMO
- Sales executives
- E-commerce teams
What’s Next?
While data for Australian consumers' adoption of digital channels and digital loyalty programs is not readily available, anecdotal evidence from discussions with IBRS clients and from well established online retailers such as Kogan and Woolworths, suggests Australia has also seen a similar pattern to that of North America, though perhaps not as pronounced.
Loyalty programs will likely become a key differentiating factor for brands to maintain repeat business as more (niche) Australian retailers take up digital channels to meet their client demands. Organisations should begin to explore how digital loyalty programs can:
- drive repeat and regular online engagement
- build brand awareness and affiliation, and
- increase life-time-value measures.
Related IBRS Advisory
- CRM modernisation Part 1: Strategy, planning & selection
- CRM modernisation Part 2B: Creating a customer experience strategy
- Positive customer experiences must lead digital transformation
- Leadership & People
-
02 February 2021