The primary purpose of pursuing an Internet of Things (IoT) strategy is to gain greater insight into how your products and services are being utilized. In capturing IoT data, this allows you to better serve your customers, discover new business opportunities and gain a greater competitive advantage.

IoT is all about capturing data from a broader set of endpoints and making that data available to a wider set of internal and external stakeholders. Due to the sensitivity of this data, it must be moved in a secure and reliable fashion. However, the volume and velocity of the data requires that the data traffic be monitored.

Click here to read why THINKstrategies believes CIOs and their IT organizations should carefully evaluate their current file transfer policies and tools to be sure they’re properly designed and configured to meet the more complicated requirements of the … Read More »

More than half of major new business processes and systems will incorporate some element of the Internet of Things by 2020, according to Gartner.

That means that every piece of software that supports those business processes and systems must be redesigned to accommodate the requirements of the rapidly evolving IoT market.

Nearly every major independent software vendor (ISV) is making moves to respond to the IoT challenge. Some are adding new functionality to their existing applications organically. Others are making acquisitions to enhance their established capabilities.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ views in E-Commerce Times about how leading ISVs are repositioning themselves to address the unique challenges created by the IoT.

Growing acceptance of cloud computing is quickly becoming a double-edged sword for the leading players in the SaaS, PaaS and IaaS marketplaces.

As a broader set of customers adopts cloud-first strategies, even the biggest cloud players are being challenged to scale their operations to keep pace with escalating customer demands without becoming too complex for customers to easily utilize their solutions.

The clearest example of a cloud company facing these issues head-on is Salesforce.com. It’s hard to suggest the company is suffering from its own success as it continues to defy the law of big numbers by posting impressive quarterly results a regular basis. Not only is it grappling with rapid growth, it must continuously reimagine its solutions to take into consideration new variables, such as mobile, social, big data and the Internet of Things.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ perspectives in E-Commerce … Read More »

For the past few years, the tech industry has become fixated on kicking off the new year with a festival of connected devices at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. The fact that this show has become so significant to the tech industry is another indication of the potential importance of the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) and growing impact of the ‘consumerization of IT’ on the way IT is adopted and managed.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ views in the Ipswitch Network Monitor Blog about how IT organizations must re-think their role and responsibilities in order to help the broader enterprise successfully capitalize on IoT’s promise.

Nearly every Internet of Things (IoT) industry survey and market forecast has suggested that there is plenty of interest in the potential value of connecting products and even more reasons to pursue IoT strategies.

Yet, candid conversations with corporate executives at many major enterprises and leading technology companies reveals that there has been far less movement to capitalize on the IoT opportunities than the market research and consulting firms anticipated.

Any bold, new idea that promises to transform the way organizations operate is bound to come with as many potential challenges and risks as opportunities and benefits.

THINKstrategies believes organizations should take advantage of the business idea popularized by Chris Anderson a decade ago – the ‘long tail’ concept – but in a new way.

Click here to read our views in the Wall Street Journal about how organizations can apply the long tail concept to … Read More »

There may be no better way to capture the state of the technology industry than to borrow Charles Dickens’ famous opening from A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”

It never has been a better time to launch new offerings via the cloud. However, the availability of low-cost computing power combined with open source software development resources has lowered the barriers to entry in every market and created unprecedented competitive challenges as customer expectations continue to rise. All of these trends have impacted the nature of IT and how organizations leverage it.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ views in E-Commerce Times about the macro-market trends that will reshape further the priorities and responsibilities of IT in 2016. Contact us if you’d like to discuss ways THINKstrategies can help your organization respond to … Read More »

A growing number of Internet of Things (IoT) vendors are teetering on the edge of Gartner’s “peak of inflated expectations” and risk falling into the “trough of disillusionment” in Gartner’s Hype Cycle because of slower-than-expected IoT adoption in 2015.

Rather than face another frustrating year, I think there’s an opportunity to jumpstart corporate IoT initiatives in 2016 by turning around the “long-tail” idea.

Click here to read my latest commentary in Sandhill.com about Turning the Long Tail around in the IoT.

THINKstrategies is pleased to now be contributing its industry perspectives to TechTarget’s SearchCRM website.

Our first guest blogpost examines Salesforce’s foray into IoT extends personalized CRM, and our second commentary discusses how SAP’s customer engagement strategy could trump CRM.

I hope you find these columns valuable and welcome your feedback.

The cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) are creating new business possibilities for value-added resellers (VARs), systems integrators (SIs) and other solution providers despite past predictions of the “disintermediation of the channel.”

However, the nature of the cloud marketplace and the way in which IoT initiatives are actually deployed also make it harder for hardware vendors and software developers to track how their systems and applications are sold and utilized.

This creates a myriad of channel sales, marketing, billing, compensation, support and compliance issues that need to be addressed if the cloud and IoT markets are going to continue to expand via third-party channels.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ perspectives about the challenges of tracking these issues, and how Zyme is addressing these issues in Sandhill.com.

Salesforce.com unveiled its Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities, the IoT Cloud, and new Health Cloud at Dreamforce 2015. See what I had to say about these new offerings at the event in this video interview with TechTarget’s SearchCRM.

Contact us if you’d like to discuss how these announcements impact your business.