Techaisle Analyst Insights

Techaisle’s recently completely study 2015 US SMB Mobility Solutions Adoption Trends shows that mobility adoption within US SMB is reaching 86 percent by end of 2015. However, mobility adoption is not about mobile devices anymore, rather it has transitioned to mobility applications and over to mobility solutions (solutions that provide management, security and infrastructure needed to connect mobile devices and applications into the corporate IT environment).

Unfortunately for SMBs, each of the above three essential areas of investment has different suppliers. Data from the survey shows that SMB buyers are therefore confused about where to turn for help, especially with respect to mobility solutions needed to integrate and manage their burgeoning mobility portfolios that includes both company and employee mobility activity.

I recently attended and "Small Business Analyst" event hosted by Cisco in which the Company talked to us analyst types about their strategy in approaching the SB market on a worldwide basis. The conference lasted a day, the group of attending analysts was small but well represented including leading names in the IT analyst market such as Gartner, Forrester and Yankee Group.

New products were showcased and strategies outlined and while I won't go into detail about new products due to non-disclosure conditions on many of them and also because it wasn't the products that impressed me the most. Make no mistake the products did impress me and my colleague - enough for us to decide that we should evaluate them for our own business.

What impressed me the most was the focus and disciple Cisco has brought to bear. Too often we see companies that are leaders in the enterprise space take on the SB market opportunity under the rationale that what's good for enterprise is good for SBs - with a few changes. Wrong. Too often we have seen it doesn't work and when it doesn't these firm redefine "SB market" to simply mean companies that are a little bit smaller than their traditional market and calling it SB or worse "SMB". The latter often used as a catch all for all those firms that are currently not being sold to be the comapny's sales force which is too boxed in in their thinking of who their customers are and how they should be sold. Its organizational inertia at work.

Cisco, themselves a leader in the enterprise space is approaching the market as any company in it's position should - with a strategy, products and organization designed to address SB needs. Here are some of the key elements

• Cisco has created an entirely new group to not just market products to SBs but to design products that fit SB needs. The product development group will re-think products ranging from simple routers, switches to telephony products keeping SB needs as their sole perspective. For a company used to enterprise style margins on products they have realized that they may not be able to gain the same kind of margins on thee SB products but the important point is that they are incorporating that reality into their strategy. This is a very difficult shift to make for most companies but Cisco realizes it is not just about how products are manufactured but how the organization is structured as well.

• Speaking of organization, the Cisco SB organization is in many ways a company within a company with its own set of priorities and complete in that it has its own sales, marketing, services, support and product development initiatives.
  
  
  • Marketing: Cisco has come to terms with some market realities such as the fact that the Cisco brand is not well known among SBs. Cisco's VP of Small Business Marketing Rick Moran, stressed this point as a major component of their SB marketing strategy. Here again we see Cisco's pragmatism, willingness to adapt and learn come through. For a company traditionally used to talking about speeds and feeds their SB marketing efforts exhibit a focus on SBs and the people running them. The importance of SB to Cisco as a company is evident from the fact that there is a link to a variety of SB related pages on the Cisco home page. Cisco has established a place where SBs can have a conversation with Cisco, its employees and its partners called Cisco Community Central. the site is less used to market Cisco products and more to help SBs learn about the developments relevant to them - technological or otherwise. It's a young site - barely a year old but a promising start.
  
  
  • Sales/Channel Development: Cisco has always relied on a strong network of channel partners to sell, service and support its products. Now Cisco has introduced a special certification for channel partners selling to SBs called "Cisco Select Certification". Achieving that certification requires taking training and an exam. Interestingly, Cisco has laid out the return in investment for a channel partner to help them decide whether it is worth it to achieve that certification or not. Achieving the certification comes with the usual benefits of support and market development funds.
  
  
  • Regional Sensitivity: Cisco is showing a lot of pragmatism by not taking a "one-size-fits-all" approach to SB marketing. The bulk of the current SB effort appears to be targeted towrads countries where Cisco has a leadership position in the enterprise space. In other words, given their penetration of enterprise markets its seems logical to go after SB markets in order to increase revenues from a region. Also not all solutions are being marketed aggressively to SBs in all regions. For example, in countries such as India where are large opportunity still exists among enterprise markets for solutions such as collaboration or enterprise network hardware, the SB market is taking a back seat - for now.
  
  
  • Services and Support: Cisco VP Sherri Liebo introduced the services and support offerings targeted towards SBs. These include add-on warranties and varying levels of support for channel partners as well as end customers. The support solutions range from entry level technical support (branded as Smart Foundation services) to ongoing monitoring of network resources (SmartCare and SmartNET). All have varying levels of support and hardware replacement options. These will also be sold through the burgeoning network of SB channel partners.
  
  
  

Bottom line - I believe Cisco is off to a good start in the SB space exhibiting the focus and discipline required to gain share in this very difficult market.

Abhijeet Rane
Techaisle

There's been a lot of talk and blogging about communities being central to people on the web. The web, pundits say is changing from one of passive consumption to a participatory (I hate the word "interactive") experience. A lot of web x.0 sites such as Diggit, MySpace, facebook are exactly about that. Despite the talk and clear evidence marketing departments are mired in traditional approaches that do not directly address the power of Value Based Communities. Lets just call them VBCs for simplicity. I believe that these marketers ignore communities at their own risk. So what are VBCs and why are they important? Its easy to define a VBC - a community that comes together as a result of shared beliefs. Those beliefs could range from an interest in saving the environment, a love for dogs (or other animals), a passion for astronomy and so forth. Communities have existed throughout evolution. The first community was drawn together with a common belief in survival resulting in early instances of prehistoric man hunting in groups and forming families. Communities then are the basis of existence! indeed great changes have come about as a result of communities being created along shared values - The creation of America being a prime example. But enough about history. What about today? What role do communities play and why are they ever more relevant? One has only to witness the current election where Obama's message of "Change" is creating a voter community sharing a common belief and value that change is essential in government (Politicians in my view have been consummate marketers to creating and pandering to communities). It is amazing then that so few marketing efforts focus on understanding and mining the power of communities engaging instead in traditional marketing efforts. Market research in particular tends to fall short in this respect. Here are some reasons why marketers should actively focus on VBCs

1. Shared values = MOTIVATION: Every marketer seeks to understand what motivates a customer. Values are the strongest form of motivation that spurs action

2. Community = ACTION: A community comes together for the purpose of taking action, driven by a set of values. All communities without exception can clearly identify their purpose and values. Conversely, communities that cannot do so eventually fracture and fade away or give rise to new communities

3. Community = VALUED PEER INFLUENCES: A community's members are highly instrumental in impacting each others choices about a variety of things. The affinity brought about by shared values often leads to valuing a peer's recommendation and eventual purchase

As stated earlier, current marketing approaches often ignore these realities, in most cases either totally ignoring their existence or ignoring the values that created the community in the first place. Traditional marketing tactics place emphasis on a standard criteria such as customer's location, demographics, purchase preferences, race, age, education etc. - in other words, marketers understand the "what" and the "how" but rarely do they venture into understanding the "why" from a values perspective. And if at all they do, there is a broad generalization that hides critical differences among individuals. Among voters, for example, labels such as Republican or Democrat are supposed to indicate shared beliefs but the truth is that such generalizations mask shifts in values occurring within each party. Each party now has sub-groups such as Liberal Republicans and Conservative Democrats. Consumer group descriptions such as GenX, GenY also mask a multitude of values. I will stop here now and continue on this topic over the next few days. In the mean time, I look forward to your thoughts, comments and opinions in the coming days.....

Abhijeet Rane (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

"As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information."
- Benjamin Disraeli (1804 - 1881), British Prime Minister

We are in a transformational time for Mobility and Mobile Business Intelligence, with lots of innovation happening in both hardware and software. Factors such as declining data plan prices, improved broadband availability, software investment, and widespread access to Smart Phone applications will continue to drive market acceptance as barriers to adoption fall away.

Taking a channel partner  view of the market, this chart shows what SMB Channel Partners (50%+ Revenue from SMBs) are hearing from their customers: overall 60% report that customers are asking for Mobile Solutions, including ~80% of ISVs, 54% of VAR/Sis and 47% of Service Providers.

One of the trends in BI overall is a large  increase in embedded BI functionality into software applications. This arose through the enterprise-level dashboards and  reporting capabilities that SMBs saw with Salesforce.com functionality and quickly become must-have features for serious software applications, especially those delivered as a Service (SaaS). On premise and SaaS versions have been updated through development of new internal code or OEM arrangements and open source code from players like Pentaho and Jaspersoft.

Enabling BI mobility is accomplished by moving  existing functionality to a mobile environment, using the new technologies on top of the old, which is more complicated than starting from scratch in many cases.  The larger companies such as Oracle, IBM and SAP are approaching  this through acquisition of smaller companies and integrating them into existing products. But in a classic build vs. buy fashion, smaller companies offering SaaS BI services have been building new offers from the ground up, directly employing the newest technologies like HTML5, iOS and Android for delivery to Apple devices, smartphones and the burgeoning number of tablets in the market. Smaller providers in many cases have gained a timing advantage; using native technology brings existing mobile functionality to bear on the problem; instead of simple links to server data, the presentation of the information can immediately be rich and interactive using screen manipulation, i.e., pinch and squeeze or geo-location awareness, as part of the data exploration and visualization experience.

Other features of “true” mobility integrated with “true” BI include the ability to interact with data objects on the screen, such as search, filters, check-boxes, drill-down and drill-through to the record level and other interactive functionality. Of course, then being able to use the built-in device communications capabilities is also important once the information has been isolated – SMS, email and  forms should be available for manipulation and dissemination of the information.

Many use case scenarios present themselves from the low end retail – such as immediate revenue and profit reporting from the new generation of card swipers into QuickBooks or MS Dynamics and received on a smartphone, to a mid-market electronic component manufacturer checking inventory turns in the Singapore distribution center using SAP Business Objects or IBM Cognos 10 through a Samsung Galaxy Note Tablet.

Among the pure-play SaaS Mobile BI firms to have emerged in the last few years is Exxova, based out of Atlanta, which we chose as our Cloud Vendor Pick of the Week. We chose Exxova because they have a unique value proposition: although they use some of the most powerful  back end analytics technology – SAP, Business Objects, Oracle, etc., they have managed to simplify this technology and allow administration of database structure and reporting by literally dragging and dropping fields in a web-based interface, creating new groups and calculations, and having the results delivered immediately through mobile devices running iOS and Android as described earlier. Having separated the reporting layer from the analytical engine allows them to provide deep BI capabilities to end users without the additional cost of licenses for all the back end tools, while at the same time allowing Flash and Flex to be delivered in original format to the Apple environment.

We interviewed their President Mark Hillam, a BI industry veteran and former Business Objects executive for this post. In response to how Exxova reduces complexity for the users and administrators of Mobile BI, Mr. Hillam replied:

“Every report, dashboard, and analytic is rendered with perfect fidelity to the original source.  All of this is accomplished without any modification or changes to the Enterprise BI platform or the existing content.  Even full report editing is capable from the mobile platforms.”

Exxova offers a strong example of true Mobile BI functionality which is relatively easy to administer and use at a good price point. There are others in the market such as SAP, Microstrategy, Oracle and IBM, who also have strong mobile solutions. For the SMB marketplace there will always be a balance between cost, complexity and functionality to be taken into account before long term commitments are made, Exxova seems to fit this space well. For more information, see it in action below.