APRIL 2015, VOLUME 3, NUMBER 2 Business …docs.media.bitpipe.com/.../item_1135193/BI_final.pdf · 2015-04-13 · HubSpot Exec Leans on Data to Lead Sales Why Not Microsoft? Mary

HubSpot Exec Leans on Data to Lead Sales

Why Not Microsoft? Mary Driscoll: Finance in the Cloud? Count On It

Stop the Excuses

APRIL 2015, VOLUME 3, NUMBER 2

Business InformationINSIGHT ON MANAGING AND USING DATA

Steps in a New DirectionThe future may well be in the cloud, but few organizations are heading there wholesale. Most are acclimating themselves by gradually moving their applications off terra-firma systems.

PLUS: Keep Track of Development Projects With Portfolio Management

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HUBSPOT EXEC LEANS ON DATA TO LEAD SALES

AMAZON’S LOVE LETTER TO DEVELOPERS

ADOBE GETS PERSONAL ON MARKETING

CELSO MELLO: WHY NOT MICROSOFT?

GETTING INTO THE CLOUD A STEP-BY-STEP PROCESS

PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT ZOOMS OUT ON THE BIG PICTURE

MARY DRISCOLL: FINANCE IN THE CLOUD? COUNT ON IT

STOP THE EXCUSES

2 BUSINESS INFORMATION • APRIL 2015

THE THEME OF this issue of Business Information—the future of enterprise applications—took us quickly and inevitably to the cloud. The future is in the cloud, then. The end.

Yet things are far from settled. Certainly the cloud is ready for business, but not all businesses are ready for the cloud. And not all applications are equal when it comes to cloud computing. So while we know the future, we ar-en’t quite sure how, or how long it will take, to get there.

Many organizations find themselves in that space be-tween starting in the cloud and becoming fully detached from on-premises software. Others are moving for-ward as improvements in security allay concerns about whether the cloud is the right place for sensitive data.

For finance and accounting, for instance, “the majority of companies still rely on physical servers,” writes colum-nist Mary Driscoll. But, “a growing number of financial management executives are warming to the idea of care-fully and deliberately moving certain transaction-based financial work to the cloud.”

Those who have gone beyond testing the waters are finding there is no looking back. In Tony Kontzer’s cover story, Ovation Brands CIO Patrick Benson recounts how the chain restaurant operator was faced with an outdated

IT infrastructure and needed help fast; it found it in soft-ware as a service. “The major difference in the journey has been the warp speed at which we were really able to do this. It wasn’t artificial or forced. It’s just an organi-cally faster process,” Benson said. “We used to wait a day or two just to get the previous day’s performance infor-mation. That stuff now becomes real-time.”

No IT deployment comes risk-free, and no cloud project comes without the need to give up some control of the way a company conducts business. But organiza-tions that take the chance are seeing the cloud pay off. “People who are willing to make a lot of tradeoffs are ac-tually finding a lot of success in the public cloud,” said Ed Anderson, an analyst at Gartner.

Until the day when organizations are fully cloud- enabled, vendors must adapt to the needs of their cus-tomers. If users want hybrid options, then hybrid options like those from Microsoft must be made available, writes our resident CIO columnist, Celso Mello. Because, in the end, even with cloud, supply will have to meet demand. n

When will cloud become a reality for your business? Write to us at [email protected].

EDITOR’S NOTE | SCOT PETERSEN

Business Apps Forecast: Cloudy

mailto:[email protected]

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TREND SPOTTER | EXECUTIVE DASHBOARD

SOURCE: TECHTARGET’S 2015 IT PRIORITIES SURVEY; BASED ON 2,212 RESPONSES FROM IT AND BUSINESS PROFESSIONALS WORLDWIDE

31%

30%

30%

26%

25%

21%

21%

20%

19%

17%

The Big PictureBig data isn’t only grabbing headlines—it’s taking a large share of IT budgets in 2015. It might even be taking a bite out of the rush for the old stalwarts, basic data analytics and data warehousing projects.

Business intelligence/ analytics/data warehousing

Mobile applications

Data integration

Business process automation/ business process management

Big data analytics

Content management

Big data processing/management

Data governance/data quality

Collaboration software

Packaged business applications

The growing mix

of data sources amplifies the need

for integration initiatives

High rankings show

interest in using new data

types

Still No. 1, but down

10 percentage points from the

2014 survey

Not sexy, but important,

especially as self- service BI opens up data to more

business users


TREND SPOTTER | VERBATIM

ART: MEJN/FOTOLIA

“ It’s a completely different approach. You have to be very economical with what you put into the application.”VAN BAKER, analyst at Gartner

“ Mobile apps often are built on [a model of] ‘release often and fail fast.’ You have to be willing to experiment.”ALAIN GAEREMYNCK, senior enterprise architect at Canadian directory publisher Yellow Pages

“ Mobile has changed how applications are being built and deployed. The biggest piece of the mobile revolution has been ‘API first’-driven development.”CHARLIE KEY, founder of cloud platform provider Modulus

“ There is a lot that the mobility world has brought to looking at architecture differ-ently and you can’t ignore that. You have to sort of embrace it.”BRIAN S. MITCHELL, enterprise architect at Cigna and associate professor at Drexel University

A Moving ExperienceBusiness information wanted to know how the increasing prevalence of mobile devices in the workplace has affected development processes, architecture and infrastructure. So we asked around the conference circuit and elsewhere.

“ Mobile application development is just another group in our portfolio— just one more team of resources at the portfolio level.”PATRICIA SCHNEIDER, director of planning and programs at Arizona State University

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MARK ROBERGE, chief revenue officer at Cambridge, Mass., software vendor HubSpot Inc., uses data analysis to dictate key business decisions. The numbers greatly influence how he hires, trains and manages his sales team of several hundred people. HubSpot develops mar-keting tools that help businesses promote themselves using social media, search engine optimization and Web analytics. In a recent interview, Roberge outlined his sales management strategy. Here are excerpts from that conversation.

Why is data so critical to managing your sales staff?

I’m not a natural sales leader with 20 years of experience coming up through sales. I’m an engineer by training, and I began my career writing code. I use a blend of tech-nology and science for everything: hiring reps, training them, building a management and coaching framework, thinking about demand [generation], thinking about sales-marketing alignment.

Explain your strategy to hire and train salespeople.

Hire. Much of what defines a successful salesperson is contextual to the business. I hired a top performer from a public company. Among an 800-salesperson team, he was No. 1. But what happened was surprising. The

TREND SPOTTER | MEETING ROOM


HubSpot Exec Leans on Data to Lead Sales

NAME: Mark Roberge

TITLE: Chief revenue officer

ORGANIZATION: HubSpot Inc.

HEADQUARTERS: Cambridge, Mass.

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salesperson didn’t fail, but he didn’t crush it either.While it took 10 seconds to explain the value [propo-

sition] of the brand at the company this rep came from, HubSpot required a specific skill set. I identified several criteria that were correlated with successful salespeople in our environment. The top five were coachability, curi-osity, intelligence, prior success [and] work ethic.

Train. When I met with other VPs of sales, most had set up a culture of having new reps shadow existing reps. That didn’t feel predictable or scalable to me. Our top salespeople are top for different reasons: Some are activity hounds who crush the phones every day; others are amazing rapport builders. And I couldn’t imagine the activity hound training the rapport builder or vice versa; they all had unique superpowers.

So I set out to build more of a structured sales process. Training at HubSpot is all about getting the sales team to understand the role of the people they are trying to sell to every day. Every salesperson at HubSpot builds a web-site, builds a blog, builds a social media following, creates landing pages, sends email, does A/B testing, does a lead nurturing campaign [and] runs an analytic funnel on a website they dream up during training.

HubSpot has a new free email management

offering called Sidekick. How does that shift

the sales and marketing focus?

We are running more of a “freemium” model with

Sidekick. The type of sales and marketing model you want to run against that distribution strategy is different. Unlike the HubSpot marketing software, where it’s a consultative sell to sell the marketing proposition, in this case it’s more correlated to product adoption. So these salespeople need to be more technical, and they need to run a different process where they almost prefer to start with front-line users, not buying decision makers, and make sure adoption is occurring—then leverage the groundswell to influence a purchase.

With the consumerization of software, C-level execu-tives are just trying to keep up with the tools their front-line workers are using and trying to create some sort of consistency across the organization and running profes-sional, secure business versions. For the first time we’re running a model like that. That is influencing our sales process and the type of people that we want navigating it.

Are there times when the data is telling

you one thing, but your instinct is telling

you something else?

There’s still a lot of qualitative instincts that come with leading the team. There are always extenuating circum-stances, where someone got caught with bad timing that influenced the numbers. The data is really important to us, and we probably live by it more than most organiza-tions, but it’s not the end-all be-all. Sometimes your in-stinct does come into play. —LAUREN HORWITZ

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AWS LAMBDA IS a cloud-based programming and process-ing service designed to let developers write code that runs automatically in response to specific “events,” such as clicks on a website or updates to a database. Amazon Web Services says the technology makes it easier to build, deploy and manage applications that can respond immediately when triggered.

THE BUZZThe freedom to write and execute code without having to manage a complex hardware and software infrastruc-ture has been an unattainable golden fleece for devel-opers. Lambda, though, offers a zero-administration platform that lets users create processing “functions” and then leave it to the service to marshal the required AWS resources and monitor the execution process. “With Lambda, you don’t worry about underlying hosts at all. You just write a few lines of code and tell it when to execute,” said Chris Moyer, technology vice president at content aggregation service ACI.

THE REALITYAWS Lambda sounds like good news—for developers and organizations that are on AWS and committed to staying there. Compare that with IronMQ, a similar,

four-year-old product that can be deployed in public and hybrid clouds on AWS and other platforms. Also, while users can bypass steps in executing code with Lambda, they lose customization and local storage options. Fi-nally, AWS Lambda is still a preview technology. One can only hope that as it progresses toward a general release, it’s not in like a lion and out like a … you know.

—JAN STAFFORD

TREND SPOTTER | WHAT’S THE BUZZ?

Amazon’s Love Letter to Developers

Lambda, Lambda, LambdaThe AWS Lambda compute service stirred up ex-

citement at Amazon’s re:Invent conference in No-

vember 2014. It also caused confusion among Java

developers. To them, the Greek letter means at least

two other things:

n Lambda expressions, also known as anonymous

functions, are shortcuts that let developers write

smaller snippets of code.

n Project Lambda takes lambda expressions to Java

8, the latest version of the programming language.

The aim is a simpler approach to software design.


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INNOVATION SPOTLIGHT

Adobe Gets Personal on Marketing

ADOBE SOFTWARE INC.

WHAT IT IS

Adobe Campaign is an automation tool that lets marketing teams create tailored email for custom-ers using criteria such as what they’ve bought and where they’re from. One feature allows recipients to click on links in mes-sages to buy products; another lets departments share customer info.

WHY IT MATTERS

Campaign uses location-based customer data to transmit information that’s relevant when an email is opened; a message can change depending on the day and time. For example, an email announcing a Monday sale can advertise another event if clicked on later in the week.

WHAT USERS SAY

Q&A website JustAnswer’s Kara Douglas says Campaign reduced the number of email messages the com-pany sends to new members. “Now we wait about an hour and look to see what they’ve done on the site before we send a welcome email,” she said.

WHAT IT COSTS

Adobe offers three pricing bundles—Standard, Premium and Ultimate, which are based on cus-tomer profiles versus CPM, or cost per thousand emails sent. Pricing depends on the number of active site members.


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Why Not Microsoft?Lots of criticism is leveled against the vendor. It doesn’t lead; its software is costly. But there are good reasons to do things the Windows way.

THE CORNER OFFICE CELSO MELLO

THREE DECADES AGO, during the days of the mainframe, corporate software selection generally centered on IBM. Big Blue’s dominance at the time—famously portrayed by Apple as Orwellian control over the market—gave way as new trends and needs in software emerged.

Along came the ERP era, for example: SAP and Ora-cle became new leaders in enterprise resource planning software. Later, the focus was on customer relationship management—remember Siebel Systems? Cloud com-puting is corporate software’s latest backdrop. Consider the success of Salesforce and NetSuite.

Of course, these new “generations” of enterprise software come to life only to the extent that they pro-vide value to the business. And whether they do or not has more to do with how the software is used in an

environment than which software vendor is selected.So switching vendors is not the key to bringing about

expected benefits from technology. In fact, it’s a nui-sance. While some providers may argue that they’re the one-stop shop for all technology needs, I say Microsoft is an underrated leader, especially if total cost of owner-ship is the top priority. So let’s explore the reasons to buy Microsoft.

Microsoft has often been criticized for being a me-too provider in the cloud and in key business applications, such as CRM and ERP. Many technologists have ques-tioned why going with Microsoft makes sense when it has rarely been an innovator, but rather, more of a fol-lower. The company has been blistered for its “halfway” approach to the cloud as well: creating cloud-based versions of its software but offering some features only when customers buy a cloud-based and on-premises li-cense. Others have called its partner strategy misaligned and unclear; it’s as though Microsoft outsourced its own sales and service to focus on its products.

But if not a leader in some of the cutting-edge tech-nologies that dominate today—that is, cloud, mobile and social media—Microsoft is a willing learner, and once it catches on, it can often fortify the foundation. This has been the case with Microsoft’s platform-as-a-service offering, Azure, as well as Dynamics CRM, which has

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THE CORNER OFFICE | CELSO MELLO

tripled its market share over the past four years. Micro-soft’s products have three attributes that add up to a com-petitive advantage.

1. Breadth of product offerings. Microsoft is probably the only provider that offers high-quality software for everyone and everything companies need software for: end users, infrastructure, databases and framework and business applications. It’s like building a Lego sculpture: You buy only what you need, and the pieces connect. This speeds implementations, simplifies ongoing mainte-nance and improves agility and user experience, all ulti-mately translating into cost savings.

2. Reduced labor costs. Microsoft’s partner strategy and extensive presence allow for a competitive special-ist market, which lowers labor costs. Consider what it costs to hire a programmer with Microsoft skills; now consider someone who knows, say, SAP. The website PayScale shows the median salary of a .NET programmer in Canada is approximately $55,000, while a comparable ABAP programmer makes $81,000. That survey included 61 ABAP programmers and 1,160 .NET programmers, which indicates a greater prevalence of developers with Microsoft skills in the market. That means faster and higher-quality recruiting.

3. Flexibility. Microsoft has publically declared that 100% of its products will be available on-premises and in the cloud—and the software will be interchangeable,

so companies can work in the cloud and have those changes sync back to their on-premises systems. As with any cloud vendor, you can use the software in the cloud with minimal investment. But once you reach a critical mass of users, it might be more economical to bring it

on-premises. Microsoft shops can do that without having to retrain users, and licensing can be optimized. Many other vendors offer cloud and on-premises as well, but with Microsoft, cloud and on-premises products can be integrated with ease. That’s typically the biggest chal-lenge with cloud implementations.

Over the past 20 years, Microsoft has incorporated every new generation of technology. While it may be late to the party at times, it always comes through. The three unique characteristics of Microsoft I outlined prove that total cost of ownership of its products is lower compared with the competition’s. So the question really is, “Why not Microsoft?” n

CELSO MELLO is the CIO of Reliance Home Comfort, a supplier of home heating and cooling systems throughout Canada. Email him at [email protected].

WITH MICROSOFT, CLOUD AND ON-PREMISES PRODUCTS CAN BE INTEGRATED WITH EASE.

http://www.payscale.com



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IT INFRASTRUCTURE | TONY KONTZER

GETTING INTOTHE CLOUD ASTEP-BY-STEPPROCESSMore organizations are moving business applications off-premises, relying on technology once thought of as cutting-edge, like software as a service—but full steam ahead it’s not.

Three years ago, chain restaurantoperator Ovation Brands wasn’t get-ting much applause for its business performance. Then called Buffets Inc., the company was emerging from its second bankruptcy since 2008, so it hired turnaround CEO Anthony Wedo to reinvent the cor-porate culture. It also brought in a new CIO, Patrick Benson.

It didn’t take long for Benson to realize that he would have to reinvent the company’s IT architecture, too.

“I inherited an IT portfolio that was well past its end of life,” Benson said of the aging and highly customized Oracle on-premises systems Buffets relied on. “There was little opportunity for timely business insight with what the old systems were providing.”

The company, based in Greer, S.C., currently runs 328 family-style restaurants in 35 states. When Wedo took over, he envisioned it as a model of efficiency. Benson



had a simple message for him: “Time is not our friend.” To help get things back on the right track, Buffets

needed a new IT strategy lickety-split, one that would let it focus on its core business. It quickly became clear that a software-as-a-service approach was the way to go.

“It was going to let us shed some things that, frankly, we didn’t need to be doing,” Benson said.

Cloud computing has come a long way in a short time. In less than a decade, what was seen as little more than a tool for quirky departmental experiments or develop-ment sandboxes-for-rent has become a new model for enterprise IT.

Initially, organizations might have dabbled with a single SaaS application—a browser-based business pro-gram hosted in the cloud and delivered over the Internet. Compared with on-premises deployments, SaaS apps could be up and running in no time, the upfront cost was dirt-cheap and there was no hardware to maintain. Early adopters were considered innovative then; today the idea of running the bulk of business applications in the cloud is becoming mainstream.

“In many ways, it’s a new way of doing business,” said Christine Dover, an analyst at market research outfit IDC.

Large organizations jettisoning functional on-premises apps for cloud-based alternatives “doesn’t really happen,” Dover said, but the one-off experiments of yesteryear have given way to stepping-stone deployments that grad-ually lead to enterprisewide migration.

“They are picking where they start, and they’re figur-ing out what’s an area of low risk or saying, ‘I’ve got to automate this process that we’ve done on spreadsheets,’ ” Dover said. Once a company has deployed a cloud-based app, she added, it typically looks to replicate that success elsewhere in the organization.

Easing Into SaaSThe newly refashioned Ovation took the kind of path to the cloud that Dover laid out. Even so, the move was a big step for the company—and before Benson could charge ahead, he had to make some preparations. He set new expectations about the pace of change that was com-ing and established a project management team, seeking

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(Continued on page 14)

PATRICK BENSON, CIO at

Ovation Brands, oversaw a

gradual rollout of software-

as-a-service apps to transform

IT at the chain restaurant

operator.

TODAY THE IDEA OF RUNNING THE BULK OF BUSINESS APPLICATIONS IN THE CLOUD IS BECOMING MAINSTREAM.



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NOT ALL ORGANIZATIONS should move from on-premises

business applications to software as a service. But

the ones that should share some of the same charac-

teristics, industry watchers say:

n They’re new. Starting from scratch means no legacy.

Switching—even from a cloud app—is where much

of the risk comes in.

n They’re in emerging, highly competitive sectors.

Such organizations tend to be more open to the

cloud as a competitive advantage. On-premises

enterprise resource planning was the only option

when most older companies started out.

n They have generic processes. Companies whose

value isn’t derived from a largely ERP-driven pro-

cess—the way, for example, a tech manufacturer

usually is—can do fine with plain-vanilla software as

a service.

n Their data is uncomplicated. Apps such as email can

be easily moved along with their data. Others raise

data migration and compliance issues that are best

avoided.

n They require little customization. Taking applica-

tions largely as they come is a hallmark of software

as a service.

n Their demand for data is uniform. Software that

hums along 24/7 won’t benefit as much from the

cloud’s resource variability and might be cheaper to

run internally.

n The country or industry in which they operate

is lightly regulated. Some countries are strict

about where sensitive data must be physically

stored. SaaS might not have servers in the needed

locations.

n They’re in the service industry. Products managed

and, in some cases, delivered digitally can more

easily move to the cloud than can goods—physi-

cal or digital—produced on complex, customized

infrastructure.

n They have workers across the globe. The cloud

makes it easier to connect a far-flung workforce.

n They have merged with other companies. Cloud ERP

can help integrate businesses, especially if one is

already in the cloud. —DAVID ESSEX

Are You the Cloud Type?

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involvement from every part of the business.Benson decided to start small, at the restaurant level,

deploying a back-office SaaS app called CrunchTime in the spring of 2013. The restaurant management and an-alytics software tracks food inventory in real time to cut down on food waste and does customer volume forecast-ing to help in scheduling workers. A smooth implemen-tation and warm reception from restaurant managers “gave us a comfort level” with the cloud, Benson said.

Emboldened, Benson moved to the front of the house, adding the SaaS version of Micros Systems’ Simphony point-of-sale application across the company’s six restaurant chains, which include Country Buffet and HomeTown Buffet. After wrapping up a nine-month deployment last September, Ovation saw lower food and labor costs, increased insight into business results and customer tendencies and a variety of efficiency gains.

“You see success, and you see speed, with these kinds of rollouts,” Benson said. “And we saw adoption. The up-take was pretty phenomenal from stores.”

Seeking Agility in the CloudSimilarly, business benefits and deeper analytical under-standing resulted from One Call Now’s move to SaaS ap-plications. But unlike Ovation, which turned to the cloud to replace an aging legacy environment, One Call Now’s migration was spurred by the desire to build a legacy.

Founded in 2002, the Troy, Ohio, provider of mass-messaging services hummed along for its first few

years, building a base of clients that ranged from school districts and sports leagues to churches and local gov-ernment agencies. Apart from its core telephony system and customer interface, which it built in-house, the company relied on two on-premises apps that could only be considered placeholders for a startup with big plans: QuickBooks for accounting and GoldMine for email and customer relationship management.

By 2006 it was clear that One Call Now had outgrown those parts of its IT environment.

“When you’re a small company, you do a lot of things manually,” said CTO Todd Penkowski. “We would have to manually copy data into QuickBooks and GoldMine. We wanted to get away from all that manual movement of data.”

The company, which at the time had just a couple dozen employees, also was looking to get away from building or buying any on-premises software other than its core service platform. In searching for a cloud-based

TODD PENKOWSKI, CTO at

One Call Now, moved his

company from labor-intensive,

on-premises applications

to NetSuite’s software-as-

a-service apps.

(Continued from page 12)

(Continued on page 16)

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THE CLOUD SHOULD never be an end in itself but a means

chosen only after formulating business goals, indus-

try watchers say.

Donald Dawson, a consultant at Strategy&, recom-

mends that organizations draft a short list of things

they need to succeed and then categorize them as

foundational—back-office functions like finance,

human resources and payroll—or differentiating. A

trendy e-commerce site, for example, might be seen

as key to expanding into new markets. “Do I keep

them on-premises or do I source them in the cloud?”

Dawson asked. “It may be that the capabilities that

differentiate you in the market aren’t best supported

by a full-blown ERP.”

Conversely, figure out what doesn’t distinguish the

company—commoditized processes such as procure-

ment of office supplies—said Nathaniel Clark, another

Strategy& consultant. “Things that are foundational

are also less necessary to have you maintain, and

[they’re] opportunities to be more efficient.” Out-

sourcing them to specialized cloud services could

save time and money.

But don’t take lower upfront costs at face value.

Calculate total cost of ownership over five years and

“read the fine print,” Clark advised. Licensing terms

can change, possibly leading to the unpleasant task

of taking features away from users.

And understand where the cloud fits in the budget.

“Subscription costs generally are not capitalizable,”

Clark said. Paying for cloud from operating expenses

—often touted as an advantage over on-premises—

might be discouraged in organizations with richer

capital budgets to spend on equipment. Misplaced

concern for accounting can tip the balance in favor of

less-efficient systems.

To avoid this, accounting departments must rethink

their approaches. “Even though you’re in the cloud,

you really do have an asset within the company,” he

said. “You’re making an investment that’s going to

pay dividends.”

Ed Anderson, an analyst at Gartner, said it’s a ques-

tion of trading customization for standardization and

relinquishing some control over the applications and

data. “It’s not like public cloud is good and private

cloud or non-cloud is bad,” Anderson said. “People

who are willing to make a lot of tradeoffs are actually

finding a lot of success in the public cloud.”

—DAVID ESSEX

Where, Oh Where Does My App Belong?

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system that could replace both QuickBooks and Gold-Mine, Penkowski found NetSuite’s SaaS applications, which not only provided a platform for integrating customer and accounting data but also for managing customer support. One Call Now simultaneously moved

its email system to a Microsoft Exchange server hosted by SherWeb before migrating it last year to Microsoft’s SaaS-based Office 365 service, which also enables Drop-box-style file sharing.

Now a tightly integrated environment has replaced those pesky manual processes. Data entered by

Class and SaaSThe technology, consumer and retail sectors have gone the furthest in migrating to software-as-a-service applications for most business functions.

DESIGN

DISTRIBUTION

FINANCE

HUMAN RESOURCES

PROCUREMENT

RESEARCH/DEVELOPMENT

SALES/MARKETING

Construction n n

Retail n n n n n n

Financial services n n n

Healthcare n n n

Technology n n n n n n n

Manufacturing n n

Mining

Oil and gas n n n

Transportation n n n

Utilities n n n

SOURCE: “BEYOND ERP: NEW TECHNOLOGY, NEW OPTIONS,” A REPORT BY MARKET RESEARCH COMPANY STRATEGY&

(Continued from page 14)

NO MIGRATION

TO SAAS

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customers via the company’s secure website is automat-ically pushed through an API into NetSuite, where it can be sliced and diced to deliver real-time insights. And with its newly streamlined processes, One Call Now has grown to 80 people serving 22,000 clients who sent 200 million messages last year, generating revenue of $17 million.

All Together NowOvation also reaped rewards from its pursuit of tight systems integration—and almost by accident. As it was implementing Simphony’s checkout software, the com-pany’s confidence in the cloud rose, so it started consid-ering a more ambitious migration of its core ERP and human resources systems to SaaS platforms. Then, while Ovation was evaluating vendors, news broke last year that Oracle was in talks to acquire Micros. That swayed Benson, who felt that moving to a more modern Oracle environment, combined with eventual integration be-tween the Micros and Oracle software, would benefit Ovation.

Six weeks after a kickoff meeting for the ERP deploy-ment, and a few weeks after Oracle’s Micros acquisition was officially announced in June 2014, an initial iteration was ready. Just seven months later, in February—on Fri-day the 13th, of all dates—Ovation’s SaaS ERP and HR applications went live.

The contrast with an on-premises deployment was striking.

“The major difference in the journey has been the

warp speed at which we were really able to do this,” Ben-son said. “It wasn’t artificial or forced. It’s just an organi-cally faster process.”

Even more important, it has resulted in a faster-mov-ing business. “We used to wait a day or two just to get the previous day’s performance information. That stuff now becomes real-time. We can see those business results and drill down into them. It’s a step change from where we were before.”

New Shoes, Sore FeetOvation’s move to the cloud hasn’t come without tradeoffs. For instance, the company had to accept that it would no longer have a highly customized system and would instead have to adapt to the built-in processes in its various cloud platforms. And the shift in emphasis from software development to business analysis made some of the IT department’s “tinkerers” leave for jobs where they could continue programming.

But the good has outweighed the bad, according to

“ WE’RE NEVER GOING TO HAVE TO AGONIZE OVER AN EX PENSIVE RELEASE OR UPGRADE CYCLE.” —PATRICK BENSON, CIO at Ovation Brands

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Benson. In addition to the business gains, Ovation’s newfound analytical insight and lower operating costs brought peace of mind to him and other executives at the company. “We’re always going to be up to date,” Benson said. “We’re never going to have to agonize over an ex-pensive release or upgrade cycle.”

One Call Now had its own hurdles to jump. NetSuite was primarily built for companies that sell physical goods. “Sometimes we had to change our own processes,” Penkowski said. “But we worked with NetSuite to tweak the tool to make it more service-environment friendly.”

Specifically, One Call Now had to change its internal terminology to sell its messaging service as part num-bers—one for sports teams that play for three months, another for schools that are open 12 months and so on.

But that was a small sacrifice for an IT platform that requires no maintenance, has reduced sales inefficiencies and has given One Call Now new visibility into its cus-tomer support efforts.

The company has no plans to move its core telephony service into the cloud, but everything else is fair game, Penkowski said, and he believes other companies should consider migrating anything that isn’t a core competency.

“If it’s something that supports your business and is not what you’re selling, then find someone who makes you comfortable,” he said. “It’s not worth the time and money to do it yourself.”

Spoken like a true SaaS evangelist. n

TONY KONTZER is a freelance writer and a correspondent for Business Information. Email him at [email protected].



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PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT ZOOMS OUT ON THE BIG PICTUREIt’s easy to get tunnel vision on application development projects. Organizations need centralized efforts and tools to give them a better view of everything that’s going on.

ADMINISTRATION | JAMES DENMAN

When Starbucks started offering freeonline education to its employees last year, through a partnership with Arizona State University, thousands of people were given the chance to further their studies and eventually land a high-paying job beyond the confines of a coffeeshop.

But that dream for many could have spelled disaster for ASU, which has one of the largest online degree pro-grams in the world, with 11,000 students enrolled in 40 undergraduate majors even before the Starbucks deal. A surge of baristas accessing its servers could have caused website operations to grind to a halt, or left the school struggling to deliver the applications needed to support the new students.

Online courses involve capturing and streaming video lectures, offering platforms for teachers to create as-signments and for students to work on them, setting up tools for grading and reporting and more. At the same time, a brick-and-mortar school like ASU can’t ignore

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the increasing demand for online tools from teachers and students on its campuses. Without some means to effectively manage the various development efforts it’s juggling, the sheer size and complexity of the university’s application portfolio would overwhelm project manag-ers, developers and the IT department.

It hasn’t, and the arrangement with Starbucks didn’t cause the online education program to buckle, even with 4,000 new students applying for classes last fall. The smooth transition is thanks to the university’s efforts to centrally manage projects, applications and technologies through a practice called project portfolio management, or PPM.

The Starbucks partnership went off without a hitch in large part because ASU already has a mature PPM practice. The new application projects—including doz-ens of mobile apps—were just slotted into the existing processes, said Patricia Schneider, a director of planning and programs there. “At ASU, mobile application devel-opment is just another group in our portfolio—just one more team of resources at the portfolio level.”

Getting It TogetherThe purpose of PPM is to keep a running inventory of all an organization’s applications and the projects involved in updating and maintaining them. “Without a good knowledge of the state of the portfolio, project prioritiza-tion may not account for major business risks or needs,” said Gartner analyst Jim Duggan.

In other words, focusing on new applications and

software projects, rather than overarching goals, is coun-terproductive. Continually adding new software without a solid understanding of the overall state of an applica-tion portfolio leads project managers to make develop-ment decisions on the fly; they lose the broad view. And that’s where most organizations are today, even as online technology evolves at breakneck speed—changing the way business users and consumers not only take classes but also go about their daily business.

Large-scale PPM efforts like the one at ASU are rela-tively new. “Historically, IT has managed projects rather than products or business outcomes,” Duggan said. As a result, he added, IT departments typically are focused more on undertaking new projects than on “fixing the underperforming parts of the existing inventory.”

In many ways, PPM has evolved alongside software development. In the 1980s, software projects were com-paratively simple, and so were project management techniques. Then came Web applications, mobile apps and cloud services. The landscape quickly grew broader

PATRICIA SCHNEIDER, a director

of planning and programs at

Arizona State University, helps

manage the school’s efforts to

centrally organize projects and

applications associated with

ASU’s giant online education

program.


and more complex. Now organizations need tools and processes to handle more than just single projects as sep-arate entities.

Patience Is the Third P in PPM Developing a smooth portfolio management practice at ASU took a lot of patience and required a lot of internal change. It started three years ago, when the universi-ty’s online program was just ramping up. Schneider estimated that about 20% of the effort involves process

changes: finding bottlenecks in the daily workflow and tweaking the details to make things run more smoothly. The remaining 80% is cultural changes designed to open minds to new approaches.

To make the right changes in development processes, managers had to be willing to experiment—and they haven’t shied away from doing so. “In the past three years, we’ve made significant process changes four or five times,” Schneider said.

PPM also helps with day-to-day project management


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A Simple Guide to PrioritizingREGARDLESS OF WHETHER a company is an old hand at project portfolio management or new to the practice, software

development consultant Johanna Rothman suggests taking a step-by-step approach:

n List all your projects and rank them by importance.

n Assign the top-priority project to a project team.

n Assign the next most important project to a different team and so on.

“Stop when you run out of teams,” she said. Rothman also wants to see each team working on one problem

until it’s finished—before moving on to the next. Otherwise, “you have fewer completed projects because of the

multitasking.”

The real challenge in this approach, she said, is in the ranking. She suggested having regular evaluation meet-

ings during which project rankings can and will change. And she stressed the importance of getting everyone who

evaluates the project portfolio to agree on the rankings. It can help to remind all involved that the ranking is based

on each project’s immediate value and that priorities are flexible. “This decision is not forever,” Rothman said. “It

only lasts until the next evaluation meeting.” n

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and prioritization of development initiatives. All the project teams at ASU connect and collaborate through Planview Enterprise to plan and execute projects and ser-vices across the university’s IT department and beyond. Project managers use a Web-based interface in the PPM software to track project timelines and request necessary resources.

“We always have more work than we have resources for,” Schneider said. Project managers are still handling four to eight projects at a time—for example, adding new capabilities for more interactive online classrooms or upgrading old financial systems to maintain compliance. PPM hasn’t changed that. But it has changed which proj-ects get done and which projects sit on the sidelines.

And now all that information gets reported to the CFO and other senior executives, who can see how everything is progressing and drill down into specific projects if needed. That visibility helps them make better decisions about where to invest.

The PPM implementation at ASU “was a huge change for us,” Schneider said. “We had nothing formal in place before this.” But she said the PPM office’s processes have matured quickly. “Now all parts are progressing nicely.”

Not All About the Books Now But ASU is far ahead of many other organizations, even ones that manage projects and applications in a similar way. Take Yellow Pages Ltd., a Montreal-based publisher of telephone directories in Canada. YP started taking its core product online several years ago, as more and more

people used search engines rather than the phonebook to find names and addresses. To stay relevant, the com-pany started using its phone and address directories to provide Web services. As a result, project deadlines changed from yearly updates delivered to doorsteps to daily information delivered to Web browsers, smart-phones and tablets. To make those deliveries, YP needed apps—lots of them.

“Four years ago, YP was in the middle of figuring out what to do with their transformation,” said Alain Gaer-emynck, the company’s senior enterprise architect. At first, online services were seen as an extension of the traditional print directory. But the print approach didn’t work online. “People want the ability to search and have a rich user experience,” Gaeremynck explained.

So he started modernizing. YP now uses a service-ori-ented architecture to support services, components and APIs used by its employees, customers and partners. That simplifies many engineering challenges and enables the company to quickly deliver new software features. But

ALAIN GAEREMYNCK, senior

enterprise architect at Yellow

Pages, modernized processes

at the publisher but has yet to

put a formal project portfolio

management practice in

place.

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it also stuffs the company’s application portfolio with reams of software. Gaeremynck can’t even give an exact number of applications YP has running at any given time. “What is an application?” he asked. “How do you define what constitutes a single application?”

Keeping track of everything is a daunting task, Gaere-mynck said. “Right now, it involves a well-managed wiki, a very busy Jira [issue-tracking] server and a lot of atten-tion from a lot of very interested parties.” The system works, he said, but it could be better.

Formalizing PPM processes will help YP sustain its current momentum, Gaeremynck said. One option he’s exploring is implementing an enterprise architec-ture framework, such as The Open Group Architecture Framework, or TOGAF. Rather than a suite of tools, TOGAF provides guidelines for designing, deploying and governing a complex set of application components. Architecture frameworks don’t focus on daily workflows, as the PPM tools being used by ASU do—instead, they can help project managers and IT architects ensure that developers build maintainable code, which in turn can make future development projects simpler to manage.

The challenge for YP is in the technology, Gaeremynck said. For example, some applications are written in Java and some in .NET. Finding ways to make those two en-vironments work together isn’t always easy. Educating

developers and ensuring consistency are the mainstays of Gaeremynck’s strategy. “That’s the hardest challenge and the most fun task,” he said. “Once people understand that change is happening—positive change—it’s very rewarding.” n

JAMES DENMAN is site editor of SearchSOA. Email him at [email protected] and follow him on @TTJDenman.

FINDING WAYS TO MAKE APPLICATIONS WRITTEN IN DIFFERENT PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES IS A HUGE CHALLENGE FOR YELLOW PAGES.

mailto:jdenman%40techtarget.com?subject=

https://twitter.com/ttjdenman


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CONNECT IT MARY DRISCOLL

FOR MORE THAN a decade, IT analysts and vendors have been talking about the benefits of cloud computing for finance and accounting. My first paper on the topic came out in 2004 and landed without much notice.

The appeal of the cloud at the time was pinned to cost savings, but CFOs and CEOs weren’t buying it. The message was companies could avoid large, upfront in-vestments in on-premises enterprise software —not to mention hardware and annual fees—when they wanted to streamline the labor-intensive processes that were the bedrock of business administration. Human resources and finance were seen as perfect fits.

That early pitch didn’t work. The concept wasn’t easy to grasp, and the marketing messages from ana-lysts and vendors mixed into an alphabet soup of ter-minology. The idea of processing and storing sensitive

financial information on somebody else’s servers was unfathomable.

An unhelpful backdrop of headline-grabbing account-ing scandals in the early 2000s underscored the fiduciary responsibilities of senior managers. Then in 2002, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act said CEOs and CFOs could go to jail for accounting screw-ups. Even five years ago, business leaders weren’t confident that they knew how to frame good-versus-bad scenarios on return on investment.

Up and ComingBut those worries have been melting away in the past year or so. The major cloud service vendors have made a convincing argument that they offer better data security than many organizations can muster on their own. Plus, CFOs are no longer distracted by recession worries, and many are focusing on new ways to cut the cost of run-ning finance.

Today’s cloud offerings make sense for functions viewed as ancillary to finance and accounting’s core mis-sion of managing financial performance. More CFOs are green-lighting efforts to move processes such as travel and expense and talent management to the cloud. Ac-cording to a 2014 report by CFO Research Services and Grant Thornton, “Many [CFOs] now understand the ru-diments of cloud computing quite well and view it as an

Finance in the Cloud? Count On ItAs the business world becomes more mobile, its cloud comfort level on financial apps will reach greater heights.

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acceptable option for many IT applications.” More recent research by my organization, APQC,

shows that the majority of companies still rely on physi-cal servers to capture financial performance information and serve it to internal users as well as to prepare offi-cial sales and earnings reports. But a growing number of financial management executives are warming to the idea of carefully and deliberately moving certain transac-tion-based financial work to the cloud (see “Rising to the Occasion”). Survey respondents who say they are open to the idea of financial processing in the cloud outnumber those who won’t budge.

Finance’s To-Do ListAPQC is also seeing cloud moves that reach beyond the low-hanging fruit of travel and expense. CFOs are consid-ering cloud-based applications to optimize the manage-ment of working capital. For example, cloud computing can help a company reduce its days sales outstanding, a calculation used to gauge the average bill collection period. A cloud-based transaction-processing platform can significantly reduce the time it takes to reach across multiple in-house systems, assemble the data needed for accurate invoices and send them to customers. And workers in sales or customer service can access an in-tegrated cloud platform more easily to make queries on customers’ behalf.

Two years ago, market research outfit IDC predicted that nearly 40% of the world’s workforce would be able to do at least some of their work on mobile devices by

Rising to the OccasionFinance executives who have moved financial processes to the cloud, or are planning or considering such shifts, now outnumber those who have no cloud plans.

0 20 40 60 80 100

CONNECT IT | MARY DRISCOLL

SOURCE: APQC’S NOVEMBER 2014 PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT AND REPORTING SURVEY, WHICH CANVASSED 130 MULTINATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

Some work is enabled by cloud technology

Planning to move to the cloud, but it’s more than a year away

Considering a move to the cloud

Don’t know

Planning a move to the cloud in the next 12 months

No plans to move to the cloud

33% 25%10%

8%

4%

20%

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CONNECT IT | MARY DRISCOLL

the end of 2015. Executives on the move, salespeople and business-unit managers at multinational corporations—who could be working in practically any city on the planet—are already clamoring for access to finance and operations information anytime, anywhere on a variety of mobile devices.

The implications for finance? First, to avoid a fracas with important internal users, it’s better to figure out a way to get information on a secure, reliable and acces-sible platform that can support mobile employees in a cost-effective way.

Second, mobile employee self-service is intended to free finance staff from having to take direct calls about missing, late or erroneous invoices or payments—the kind of mind-numbing work that slows everything down and depresses productivity stats. For senior executives in finance, IT and operations, that will mean taking a seri-ous look at the cloud. n

MARY DRISCOLL is senior research fellow at APQC, a Houston-based nonprofit that provides consulting services on business benchmarking. Email her at [email protected].



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THE RECENT SPATE of high-profile data breaches is a reminder that too often the vast amounts of data busi-nesses store lie unsecured, practically waiting for hackers to strike. Cyberattacks have become a fact of life, and most responses to the problem have been insufficient.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Cybersecurity analytics can cut down on data breaches and limit the amount of valuable data hackers can abscond with. All it takes is a relatively small investment.

The matter isn’t trivial. The recent breach at Anthem Inc., the country’s second-largest health insurance com-pany, exposed the names, birthdates, addresses, Social Security numbers and healthcare ID numbers of poten-tially tens of millions of patients—everything fraudsters need to do their nefarious work. That news was followed

by software security vendor Kaspersky Lab’s announce-ment that Russian hackers had stolen at least $1 billion from global banks over a two-year period. The events came to light over the course of 10 days, a pace the global economy can’t sustain.

There’s no way to keep everyone out of a network, but there are ways to track hackers once they’re in. That’s where analytics comes in. By logging and analyzing net-work data, organizations can identify anomalous activity and stop intruders from leaving behind malware or other malicious code that could be used in a data heist.

It’s relatively simple to secure a network using analyt-ics. Yet not enough organizations have gone this route. That may be changing, as Forrester Research has pre-dicted that information security budgets will increase in 2015, and security analytics will be central to businesses’ plans. But the fact that breaches keep happening shows how far organizations need to go to catch up.

It’s hard not to see the current state of cybersecurity as a case of misplaced priorities. Jeff Hammerbacher, the former chief research scientist at Facebook, famously told Bloomberg Businessweek: “The best minds of my gen-eration are thinking about how to make people click on ads. That sucks.”

He’s right. There’s nothing sexy about making it harder for hackers to take advantage of network vulnerabilities.

Stop the ExcusesOrganizations need to start investing in security analytics—or there will be no end to cyberattacks and data breaches.

HINDSIGHT ED BURNS

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HINDSIGHT | ED BURNS

But if you can develop an algorithm that conjures up seductive email subject lines that get customers to open the message and click on a link— and better yet, buy something—you’re a rock star. The focus among data scientists and analytics teams is on generating revenue, even at the expense of data security.

Part of the problem is it’s hard to prove the return on investment of security analytics. You can’t demonstrate to the CEO or the CFO how much money hackers might have stolen from you had you not acted, so it’s difficult to make the case.

But looking at the aggregate is sobering. Forrester es-timates that in 2012, breaches cost the global economy $11.27 billion. That number has likely grown in recent years, and it doesn’t address reputational harm that comes from customers not trusting you with their data after there’s a breach.

Cybersecurity analytics isn’t particularly challenging to set up or maintain, but it can save businesses billions—and it’s the right thing to do for customers. n

ED BURNS is site editor of SearchBusinessAnalytics. Email him at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter: @EdBurnsTT.

Business Information is a SearchDataManagement.com e-publication.

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APRIL 2015, VOLUME 3, NUMBER 2 Business …docs.media.bitpipe.com/.../item_1135193/BI_final.pdf · 2015-04-13 · HubSpot Exec Leans on Data to Lead Sales Why Not Microsoft? Mary