Cloud Productivity Platform Wars

"Latest Synergy Research data shows Microsoft lapping at Cisco's heels in the overall collaboration market, and well ahead in the hosted/cloud segment. A couple of primary tussles characterize the collaboration decision today: Cisco vs. Microsoft, and cloud vs. premises. So it behooves us to ask, then: What impact might we expect Microsoft's big push into the cloud, a la Skype for Business and Office 365, to have on each of these critical enterprise decision points? Will Microsoft push ahead of Cisco as it makes cloud the center of its collaboration universe? And will its Skype for Business/Office 365/voice story make the cloud an easier choice for enterprise communications professionals trying to determine whether to ditch a premises installation? This is certainly one way to think about the latest collaboration market data from Synergy Research Group, released this week for first-quarter 2015. The Synergy research shows Microsoft trailing Cisco ever so slightly in the total collaboration market, but well ahead of its chief competitor in hosted/cloud collaboration, as displayed in the graphic below. "

"In recent weeks, email and other collaboration and workflow tools are being re-imagined with new interfaces, social components, integrated video conferencing and easy swipes to dismiss messages. To wit: IBM launched  its Verse effort with a snazzy interface that combines, social, email, analytics and mobile nicely. Google floated Inbox , an app designed to help you manage your email better. For the most part, it's effective. Cisco's Project Squared is an app that runs on its collaboration cloud and integrates video conferencing, messaging and other tools. Facebook is pondering Facebook at Work with a news feed and doc sharing. We could go on, but the list of tech vendors trying to deliver a workflow leapfrog is long. And we're not even counting efforts by Workday, Salesforce and others to include collaboration with core business functions. WHAT'S HOT ON ZDNET Windows 10: You've got questions, I've got answers Windows 10 ​How to use Google's new My Account, the one-stop control center for all of its services Security Apple Watch or Android Wear? Neither. Why smartwatches aren't ready for prime time Mobility The tech of Computex 2015 in pictures Hardware Here's where all these efforts fall flat: These products are all pitched as magic bullets to simplify your work life, but in reality are just another item to sell or keep current customers in the fold. Another reality: These applications are trying to tackle human issues with collaboration and communications. Tech isn't going to fix those communication quirks or cure humans' need to try and keep up. We don't need another tool. We need less of them. We don't need another app to aggregate tech functions. We need to simplify tech functions starting with a bunch of check boxes marked delete. We don't need technology to help us communicate. We need to be taught how to communicate. And we sure don't need more messaging. We need to turn our damn phones off so maybe we can really get some work done or look up a

""The real opportunity is moving mission critical systems in the cloud. [Industries] are the biggest hold out. We see that as the biggest opportunity." That's how Stephan Scholl, co-president of Infor--an enterprise software company that specializes in solutions for specific industries--explains what he sees when he looks at the cloud market. For all of the endless hype about cloud computing over the past five years, most companies have remained slow to move their most important applications to the cloud. Sure, the cloud has been good enough to run a few experiments and save big money on licensing fees with less critical apps like HR and collaboration and some overly-glorified shared address books. That's because if those services go down or get hacked or employees have a slow internet connection then it's no big deal because people can still get their work done. It's different when it comes to the software that your whole company is logged into every minute of the business day. That was the conventional wisdom. But, it's starting to change. PINBOX The Industry Cloud: Why It's Next Read More Large enterprises, SMBs, startups, and everything in between are now taking a hard look at moving their core business applications to the cloud. While that obviously includes software like ERP and financial systems, the even more interesting story is the software that's specific to each industry--insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, real estate, etc. These industries all have specialized needs because they all have very different kinds of business processes. In many of them there are even sub-specialties within industries that have even more specialized needs. "

"Collaboration platforms offer the promise to eliminate unnecessary meetings, phone calls and other time-consuming interactions. However, to succeed those tools have to perform better than the incumbent, which for most people is still email."

An amazing article about Marc Andressen and his a16z VC firm on Sand Hill Road. Covers the entire story and provides a great insight into how Silicon Valley and VC industry work. It's long, but nevertheless a must read. Very enjoyable! " At his firm, Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capitalist routinely lays out "what will happen in the next ten, twenty, thirty years." CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE PUGLIESE On a bright October morning, Suhail Doshi drove to Silicon Valley in his parents' Honda Civic, carrying a laptop with a twelve-slide presentation that was surely worth at least fifty million dollars. Doshi, the twenty-six-year-old C.E.O. of a data-analytics startup called Mixpanel, had come from San Francisco to Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where many of the world's most prestigious venture-capital firms cluster, to pitch Andreessen Horowitz, the road's newest and most unusual firm. Inside the offices, he stood at the head of a massive beechwood conference table to address the firm's deal team and its seven general partners-the men who venture the money, take a seat on the board, and fire the entrepreneur if things go wrong. Marc Andreessen, the firm's co-founder, fixed his gaze on Doshi as he disinfected his germless hands with a sanitizing wipe. Andreessen is forty-three years old and six feet five inches tall, with a cranium so large, bald, and oblong that you can't help but think of words like "jumbo" and "Grade A." Two decades ago, he was the animating spirit of Netscape, the Web browser that launched the Internet boom. In many respects, he is the quintessential Silicon Valley venture capitalist: an imposing, fortyish, long-celebrated white man. (Forbes's Midas List of the top hundred V.C.s includes just five women.) But, whereas most V.C.s maintain a casual-Friday vibe, Andreessen seethes with beliefs. He's an evangelist for the church of technology, afire to reorder life as we know it. He believes that tech products will soon

"Microsoft loves subscriptions. Moving a corporate customer from "transactional" purchases of Office -- the once-traditional practice of purchasing one-time, perpetual licenses that let workers use the suite as long as their firms want -- to Office 365 rent-not-buy subscriptions results in almost a doubling of revenue for Microsoft. "Over the lifetime, the increased reach, the increased frequency in this example, as well as some yield, adding some incremental services, results in a 1.8 times lifetime value of that user in the transition," said CFO Amy Hood in a meeting with Wall Street last week."

"Google has been incrementally making its workplace products more and more functional - all, it seems, with one goal in mind. It would like to eat Microsoft Office 365's lunch. When it first launched Google Apps (now called Google for Work), the best feature was the cost. The products were free to use, although there was little in the way of service or advanced business functionality. But that's been changing. More companies are piggybacking on Google for Work's foundation to launch their own products and, as these products mature, continue to invest and expand them. One of the latest examples is ProsperWorks, the developer of Simple CRM for Google Apps.   "

"Several forces are at work in the "social collaboration" tool marketplace that are creating great turbulence.  It's fairly well-known that businesses face a systemic issue with adoption of social collaboration tools. These tools (also called enterprise social networks, or social business) share some common design motifs, like activity streams, project or group workspaces, file sharing, user profiles, and various communication mechanisms such as direct messages, @mentions and so on. But what isn't generally acknowledged is that business productivity was much higher in the years preceding the emergence of Web 2.0 social collaboration tools. This means that Web 1.0 era tools - like instant messenger and the much maligned email - may have offered more oomph, at least when compared with pre-Web techniques like fax, phone calls and inter-office mail."

"One of the best parts about being in marketing is that most of us can work anywhere and everywhere -- as long as we have an internet connection, it's relatively easy for us to get most our day-to-day work done. To publish that blog post, send that email, or set up that email nurturing workflow, we simply need to connect to Wi-Fi and get to work.  But an internet connection doesn't solve everything we need to accomplish during the day. Often, we need to communicate with team members, project managers, and freelancers -- and when you're remote, that communication can get a little ... messy.  To help make it easier for their employees to have flexible work arrangements, many companies are discovering and implementing new tools and resources. To help you figure out which tools might be handy for your team's work arrangement, we compiled some of the best ones my friends on the Inbound.org discussion boards suggested for remote working. Check 'em out below."

"Free Online Tech Courses At one time, universities and colleges were institutes of higher learning for those who were passionate about acquiring knowledge. Today, education discussions tend to to center around how much individuals can make with their degree. Thanks to the Internet there are still places that offer open learning initiatives designed to help a new generation of technologists succeed. If money was the only thing holding you back from learning more about technology, we've got good news for you. There are many places offering free online tech training that while may not be degree/certificate driven can still give you a leg up on the competition. While many of the courses listed here offer either a certificate or credit for a fee, they also all are free for those who just want to learn about technology or add a new skill to their "toolbox.""

"Ever since 802.11ac started appearing in routers we've been dreaming of getting honest-to-goodness 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps) Wi-Fi speeds. Ha! The fastest 802.11ac router CNET or ZDNet has seen to date, the Asus AC2400 RT-AC87U Dual-band Wireless Gigabit Router delivers 504 Megabits per second (Mbps) to clients. D-Link's new AC3200 ULTRA Wi-Fi Router (DIR-890L/R), introduced at CES, promises to deliver speeds of up to 1.3Gbps."

Has Google fixed Java? Sure looks like it.

Excellent explanation of how VC Companies work. CC Jason "Marc Andreessen recently lamented the death of the IPO in the United States, blaming over regulation and short sellers as the reason why the general public no longer gets to share in the spectacular capital returns that earlier technology stocks like Microsoft and Amazon delivered. While over regulation in the US with regimes like Sarbanes Oxley is a major problem, the data from the National Venture Capital Association shows that over the last five years that both the number of IPOs and the total amount offered is actually in an uptrend. In fact, the first quarter of 2014 saw the strongest three month period for new listings since 2000, and Alibaba is imminently coming to market which will lift the trend in 2014 significantly."

"Research firm Gartner's annual report card on the public IaaS cloud computing market shows there is one clear leader - Amazon Web Services - and another clear challenger - Microsoft Azure. And then there is everyone else. "The market is dominated by only a few global providers - most notably Amazon Web Services, but increasingly also Microsoft Azure," Gartner researchers say, giving Google Cloud Platform an honorable mention. "Between them, these three providers comprise the majority of workloads running in public cloud IaaS in 2015.""

"Microsoft is starting to roll out to testers the real-time coauthoring functionality it has promised will be part of the next version of Office for Windows desktops. Microsoft officials said in early May that real-time coauthoring would be coming to Office 2016. The first public preview of Office 2016, which Microsoft made available in May, did not include this functionality. In a blog post that Microsoft inadvertently published on June 3 and later unpublished, company officials said that real-time presence -- a key piece of real-time coauthoring -- is rolling out to Word 2016 testers. The real-time typing component of coauthoring is still not there and will be included in subsequent test builds, officials said. From the blog post: "Real Time Presence in Word: While Real Time Typing will ship in subsequent builds, we are rolling out a key part of that collaborative experience with Real Time Presence. Real Time Presence allows you to see where in a document your teammates are editing. We are turning this on first for OneDrive for Business subscribers but it will be available more broadly soon.""

"Nintex has partnered NEC Australia to provide customers with the company's workflow and forms solutions. The partnership with NEC Australia will allow Nintex to provide additional support to the many customers looking to boost their workplace efficiency and effectiveness. Nintex has a strong presence in Australia and is continuing to evolve its partner network in the region to ensure customers have the best possible experience with Nintex's workflow productivity platform. The rise of organisations focusing on streamlining and automating their business processes demonstrates an increase in partners looking to Nintex to provide a value-added offering around workflow automation to their services and solutions, according to a company statement. NEC Australia partner alliance practice lead, Tim Pagram, said he had seen businesses across the board experience significant gains in productivity and customer satisfaction by using Nintex technology."

"Today Microsoft starts shipping Office for iPad, finally plugging the gap in its portfolio that's been filled by popular document viewers and editors like QuickOffice and SlideShark.   Does this come too late for Microsoft? As much as naysayers like to proclaim Office is dying, people still overwhelmingly use it at home and at work. Office is supported at virtually every organization. Our survey of Forrester clients at the end of last year showed strong strides by Google Docs with 13% of firms using it.* However, the caveat is companies that have gone Google are using Docs to complement Office with collaboration features and mobile support, not to replace it.   You could argue how much incremental revenue Microsoft lost out on, but I don't think the lack of native Office apps has caused Microsoft to cede ground to other office productivity suites on the PC, where the vast majority of content is still created. Keep in mind that out of the 20% of information workers in North America and Europe that use a tablet for work, 60% of them use some office productivity software on it.** Half of tablets used for work are iPads. So immediately just 6% of information workers will be considering the Office apps as an alternative to what they are using on their tablets today.    Is Microsoft really multi-platform now?"

"We just published a report on the state of adoption of Office 2013 And Productivity Suite Alternatives based on a survey of 155 Forrester clients with responsibility for those investments. The sample does not fully represent the market, but lets us draw comparisons to the results of our previous survey in 2011. Some key takeaways from the data: One in five firms uses email in the cloud. Another quarter plans to move at some point. More are using Office 365 (14 percent) than Google Apps (9 percent).  Just 22 percent of respondents are on Office 2013. Another 36 percent have plans to be on it. Office 2013's uptake will be slower than Office 2010 because fewer firms plan to combine the rollout of Office 2013 with Windows 8 as they combined Office 2010 with Windows 7. Alternatives to Microsoft Office show little traction. In 2011, 13 percent of respondents supported open source alternatives to Office. This year the number is just 5 percent. Google Docs has slightly higher adoption and is in use at 13 percent of companies. "

"Flow, Microsoft's lightweight email/chat application that looks as if it will debut on iPhones, seems to be just one of a number of new mobile-first productivity apps the company is building. Microsoft also is believed to be working on a lightweight collaboration and document-sharing app (which may be using "Flip" as its working name), as well as a lightweight project-management application, (which may be known as "Highlander"), according to sources of mine who asked not to be named. Flow, Flip and Highlander are all productivity apps that are aimed at mobile users. My bet is they're all the handy work of the "Do More Experiences" team that is part of Microsoft's Applications & Services group, as that team is focused on redefining productivity and building "next-generation experiences" for mobile platforms, including phones and tablets. One of my contacts said Flip may include some of the features that will be part of the Flow email/chat application, but will go beyond Flow by offering document viewing, editing and collaboration features. Highlander is meant to provide lightweight project management for smaller-sized projects, making it easy for users to update tasks and watch projects' progress, that same contact said. Microsoft already sells a more fully featured project-management application, Microsoft Project."