Keumars Afifi-Sabet

Bobby Hellard

IBM and AT&T have announced a multi-year 'strategic alliance' whereby the telco will utilise IBM's cloud, as well as the Red Hat platform.

The Armonk firm will make AT&T Business its primary provider of sofware-defined networking (SDN) alongside this, building on the companies' existing relationships around AT&T being IBM's strategic global networking provider.

Alongside the moves to preferred providers, the companies will also collaborate on various initiatives, including edge computing platforms. AT&T and IBM see benefits in both directions on this: using 5G speed at the edge of the network, enterprises will be able to get greater insights and efficiencies. AT&T naturally wants to play a part in the former, with IBM there at the latter.

The two companies have been long-time partners; at InterConnect in 2017, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson joined IBM chief exec Ginni Rometty on stage to discuss the increasing 'enterprise strong' element of IBM's offering. "I don't believe we're more than three or for years away from being indistinguishable from the 'data cloud' to the 'network cloud'," said Stephenson at the time.

"Building on IBM's 20-year relationship with AT&T, today's agreement is another major step forward in delivering flexibility to AT&T Business so it can provide IBM and its customers with innovative services at a faster pace than ever before," said Arvind Krishna, IBM SVP cloud and cognitive software in a statement. "We are proud to collaborate with AT&T Business, provide the scale and performance of our global footprint of cloud data centres, and deliver a common environment on which they can build once and deploy in any one of the appropriate footprints to be faster and more agile."

This makes for an interesting comparison with Verizon, who moved to Amazon Web Services (AWS) as preferred public cloud provider in May last year. The operator said it was migrating more 1,000 business critical applications and backend systems as part of the process.

In 2017, AT&T signed an agreement with Oracle whereby the telco moved 'thousands' of its large scale internal databases to Oracle's IaaS and PaaS offerings.

CloudTech has reached out to AT&T and will update the story in due course.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Dale Walker

Facebook is set to remodel its pricing structure for its collaboration service Workplace in what equates to a price hike for users currently paying for the service.

Since its launch in 2016, the two million paying users the company has attracted have been on a $3 per user per month plan, the only ‘premium’ tier available, with a basic version given to users for free.

As of September, Workplace will offer three pricing tiers instead, including a rebranded premium tier – Workplace Advanced – that raises the cost of the platform to $4 per user per month. The basic package has also had a name change, now called “Essential”, and a new tier known as “Enterprise” will run at $8 per user per month and will offer priority support services and early access to new features.

The “per user per month” format is also a change for the company, having previously charged based on how many users were currently active on a company’s account. Charging a flat fee will generally result in higher overall costs, but this will also mean customers will pay the same predictable rate each month.

Facebook has confirmed that existing paying users will continue to pay $3 per user per month until 30 September 2020, after which time the new pricing structure will come into effect.

Interestingly, Facebook is also introducing a new add-on package called Workplace Frontline, specifically designed to cater for those frontline workers who engage directly with the general public, such as a cashier or those on a shop floor, who may sometimes feel disconnected from the rest of the business.

Organisations on the Advanced or Enterprise plans can bolt-on these users to their price plan for an additional $1.50 per user per month, regardless of whether they are active or not.

According to Facebook, workers are classed as frontline if they spend less than 50% of their time at a desk, are paid hourly, or do not have an email address. Nurses, doctors, facility workers, those in public services, couriers, warehouse staff, and those in the hospitality industry would all qualify for this status.

Aside from these changes, the individual features assigned to the tiers will remain the same.

The platform currently boasts over two million paid users, having attracted big brands like Walmart, Nestlé and Teléfonica, as well as the likes of Spotify, Grab, WWF and Save the Children.

While a price hike is never a welcome change, the restructure is the first in the platform’s short history and somewhat necessary given the fierce competition in the market. It needs to mature in the face of the rapidly growing Microsoft Teams, which recently passed Slack in terms of subscribers and offers similar services targeting both backend and frontline workers.

Slack, for its part, is also garnering a great deal of attention following its decision to become a publicly traded company, particularly as stocks sold far higher than expected. It, too, will be looking to compete against its rivals, but doubts remain as to whether it has the business model and infrastructure clout to remain competitive.

More and more businesses are waking up to the significant opportunities that embracing artificial intelligence (AI) could offer – from improved customer service to increased productivity. But simply not knowing where to start on their digital transformation journey can often hold them back.

A major benefit of AI is the potential to use new technology to gather fresh insights from data. If that sounds like something your company could benefit from, the best place to embark on your digital transformation journey is by creating the right data strategy. A strategy that will harness all the information typically gathered and processed by today’s businesses in a clear and useful manner.

But where do you start when creating a robust data strategy?

Think about storage

Identify where your data is stored – and how. Think about all potential formats, from emails and documents to databases. Without a clear view of your data, you could be missing out on all kinds of opportunities to utilise it, from coordinating customer offers to ordering stock in response to expected demand at different times of year.

Once you’ve finished your data audit, your next aim should be to keep all data within a centralised repository that’s easily accessible. Cloud-based services are ideal places to start, as they have a much lower capital outlay than attempting to store data using an on-site solution.

Ideally, organisations of all sizes should choose a platform that’s easy to scale – in both capacity and performance – and think about which format they need their data to be available in. Using a translation tool such as Kafka will make it easier for companies to manage data from different apps.

However, with so much important information held together in one place, the issue of security becomes more important than ever. A solid backup and recovery plan is therefore a vital element of any data strategy.

Time for a clean-up

In the day-to-day running of a business, it can be easy to forget to dispose of data that’s no longer used or of value. Not only is this very important when meeting GDPR regulations, it’s also a waste of time and money to store decades-old data that no longer has any benefit.

Finding this data and destroying it appropriately is critical to being able to manage all your relevant data effectively.

What do you need from your data?

Once you’ve gathered, cleansed and stored your organisation’s data in one secure place, the next step is to think about what you want from your data. What are the specific questions you need to ask? This is essentially about understanding and looking for the insights that will make the difference to your business.

Test those questions with a smaller data set to reveal whether you’re truly asking the right questions – and whether the right algorithms are being used to answer them.

The ultimate aim of any data strategy is to create a single point of truth. Achieve this and you are well on your way to embracing AI and all the potential benefits it has to offer your business.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

In this modern world, organisations are facing great pressure to adapt rapidly and innovate to keep up with their competitors. Businesses are being forced to move faster and faster, with the only constant  being change: changing infrastructure, changing strategies and changing technologies. Transforming to a ‘digital business’ by implementing cloud services and platforms is no longer an option but an absolute necessity, failure to do so will lead to an organisation’s failure.

It is clear that cloud has become a key enabler for strategic success—but not everyone’s cloud journey looks the same. Different businesses have different ambitions, and their journeys are rarely as straightforward as just deploying servers and virtual machines into the cloud. It can be difficult for a number of reasons, including the choices of platforms and decisions over where the data should sit.

One option organisations should look at is the hybrid-cloud model and Gartner experts have stated that by 2020, 90% of organizations will have adopted some type of hybrid cloud. It is therefore important to understand what it is and how enterprises benefit from the hybrid cloud.

What is hybrid cloud?

Forrester research describes hybrid cloud as: “one or more public clouds connected to something in my data center. That thing could be a private cloud; that thing could just be traditional data center infrastructure.” To put it simply, a hybrid cloud is a mash-up of on-premises and off-premises IT resources.

To expand on that, hybrid cloud is a cloud-computing environment that connects a mix of public cloud, private cloud and on-premises infrastructure. A key advantage to this model is that it allows workloads and data to travel between private and public clouds as demands and costs change, providing businesses with the flexibility they need.

There is not a single hybrid cloud model that works for every organisation and every model should fit the unique needs of each company. By allowing multiple deployment models in a hybrid cloud, organisations are able to benefit from a seamless and secure environment which enables productivity and flexibility.

Why choose hybrid cloud?

It is not usually feasible for businesses to go all in and move completely into the cloud straight away, unless they happen to be  cloud-native organisations. That doesn’t mean that enterprises with legacy systems have been unable to make any headway with the cloud. To get around this, they can try a mixture of public and private clouds, and  combine this with hosted, colocated and on-premise infrastructure where necessary.

Hybrid cloud allows organisations to experience the advantages of both types of cloud. By spreading computational data across both resources, it is possible to optimise the environment whilst keeping everyday functions as streamlined as possible. Enterprises can make their own minds up on which type of data should be stored in a public cloud, whilst keeping any sensitive data in the private cloud. This is granting them the key element that they need: control. Access to the benefits of private and public clouds is perfect for organisations wanting to grow at the speed they need.

Hybrid solutions grant business the key element that they need: control. Control to optimise their IT investment by selecting the best-fit infrastructure for different categories of workload. Control to choose where their most critical data should reside. Control to spread their workloads across multiple platforms to avoid the risk of vendor lock in from a single platform strategy.

What next?

Hybrid cloud is set to evolve in the years to come, with technology playing a key role in this. We will see the incorporation of automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence into cloud platforms and this will impact the way the cloud environment is managed and maintained.

Organisations need to understand that before choosing a hybrid cloud model, it needs to understand exactly why it is doing so, the impact it will have upon the business and how it will carry out the transformation. Moving to the cloud is not just a technology upgrade, but a complete change of mindset that effects the entire business: from technology and process, to employees and skills. It is vital to choose the right partner to help navigate this journey and ensure cloud investment enables organisations to achieve their objectives.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Bobby Hellard

• Top-performing companies are more than twice as likely to be using AI for marketing (28% vs. 12%) according to Adobe’s latest Digital Intelligence Briefing.
• Retailers are investing $5.9B this year in AI-based marketing and customer service solutions to improve shoppers’ buying experiences according to IDC.
• Financial Services marketers lead all other industries in AI application adoption, with 37% currently using them today.
• Sales and Marketing teams most often collaborate using Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) and Marketing Automation AI-based applications, with sales leaders predicting AI adoption will increase 155% across sales teams in two years.

Artificial Intelligence enables marketers to understand sales cycles better, correlating their strategies and spending to sales results. AI-driven insights are also helping to break down data silos so marketing and sales can collaborate more on deals. Marketing is more analytics and quant-driven than ever before with the best CMOs knowing which metrics and KPIs to track and why they fluctuate.

The bottom line is that machine learning and AI are the technologies CMOs and their teams need to excel today. The best CMOs balance the quant-intensive nature of running marketing with qualitative factors that make a company’s brand and customer experience unique. With greater insight into how prospects make decisions when, where, and how to buy, CMOs are bringing a new level of intensity into driving outcomes. An example of this can be seen from the recent Forbes Insights and Quantcast research, Lessons of 21st-Century Brands Modern Brands & AI Report (17 pp., PDF, free, opt-in). The study found that AI enables marketers to increase sales (52%), increase in customer retention (51%), and succeed at new product launches (49%). AI is making solid contributions to improving lead quality, persona development, segmentation, pricing, and service.

The following ten charts provide insights into how AI is transforming marketing:

21% of sales leaders rely on AI-based applications today, with the majority collaborating with marketing teams sharing these applications

Sales leaders predict that their use of AI will increase 155% in the next two years. Sales leaders predict AI will reach critical mass by 2020 when 54% expect to be using these technologies. Marketing and sales are relying on AI-based marketing automation, configure-price-quote (CPQ), and intelligent selling systems to increase revenue and profit growth significantly in the next two years. Source: Salesforce Research, State of Sales, 3rd edition. (58 pp., PDF, free, opt-in).

AI sees the most significant adoption by marketers working in $500m to $1bn companies, with conversational AI for customer service the most dominant

Businesses with between $500M to $1B lead all other revenue categories in the number and depth of AI adoption use cases. Just over 52% of small businesses with sales of $25M or less are using AI for predictive analytics for customer insights. It’s interesting to note that small companies are the leaders in AI spending, at 38.1%, to improve marketing ROI by optimising marketing content and timing. Source: The CMO Survey: Highlights and Insights Report, February 2019. Duke University, Deloitte and American Marketing Association. (71 pp., PDF, free, no opt-in).

22% of marketers currently are using AI-based applications with an additional 57% planning to use in the next two years

There are nine dominant use cases marketers are concentrating on today, ranging from personalised channel experiences to programmatic advertising and media buying to predictive customer journeys and real-time next best offers. Source: Salesforce’s State of Marketing Study, 5th edition

Content personalisation and predictive analytics from customer insights are the two areas CMOs most prioritise AI spending today

The CMO study found that B2B service companies are the top user of AI for content personalisation (62.2%) and B2B product companies use AI for augmented and virtual reality, facial recognition and visual search more than any other business types. Source: CMOs’ Top Uses For AI: Personalisation and Predictive Analytics. Marketing Charts. March 14, 2019

45% of retailers are either planning to or have already implemented AI to improve multichannel customer engagement as a core part of their marketing mix

Reflecting how dependent retailers are on supply chains, 37% of retailers are investing in AI today to improve supply chain logistics, supply chain management, and forecasting (37%). Source: AI and Machine Learning use cases in the retail industry worldwide as of 2019, Statista.

Personalising the overall customer journey and driving next-best offers in real-time are the two most common ways marketing leaders are using AI today, according to Salesforce

Improving customer segmentation, improving advertising and media buying, and personalising channel experiences are the next fastest-growing areas of AI adoption in marketing today. Source: Salesforce’s State of Marketing Study, 5th edition

82% of marketing leaders say improving customer experience is the leading factor in their decision to adopt AI

The timing and delivery of content, offers, and contextually relevant experiences are second (67%), and improving performance metrics is third at 57%. Source: Leading reasons to use artificial intelligence (AI) for marketing personalisation according to industry professionals worldwide in 2018, Statista.

81% of marketers are either planning to or are using AI in audience targeting this year

80% are currently using or planning to use AI for audience segmentation. EConsultancy’s study found marketers are enthusiastic about AI’s potential to increase marketing effectiveness and track progress. 88% of marketers interviewed say AI will enable them t be more effective in getting to their goals. Source: Dream vs. Reality: The State of Consumer First and Omnichannel Marketing. EConsultancy (36 pp., PDF, free, no opt-in).

Over 41% of marketers say AI is enabling them to generate higher revenues from email marketing

They also see an over 13% improvement in click-through rates and 7.64% improvement in open rates. Source: 4 Positive Effects of AI Use in Email Marketing, Statista (infographic), March 1, 2019.

Marketers and agencies are most comfortable with AI-enabled bid optimisation for media buying, followed by fraud mitigation

Marketers and their agencies differ on ad inventory selection and optimisation, with marketing teams often opting to use their analytics and reporting instead of relying on agency AI methods. Source: Share of marketing and agency professionals who are comfortable with AI-enabled technology automated handling of their campaigns in the United States as of June 2018, Statista.

Additional data sources on AI’s use in marketing:

• 15 examples of artificial intelligence in marketing, eConsultancy, February 28, 2019
• 4 Positive Effects of AI Use in Email Marketing, Statista, March 1, 2019
• 4 Ways Artificial Intelligence Can Improve Your Marketing (Plus 10 Provider Suggestions), Forbes, Kate Harrison, January 20, 2019
• AI: The Next Generation Of Marketing Driving Competitive Advantage Throughout The Customer Life Cycle, Forrester Consulting. February 2017 (10 pp., PDF, free, no opt-in)
• Artificial Intelligence for Marketing (complete book) (361 pp., PDF, free, no opt-in)
• Artificial Intelligence Roundup, eMarketer, May 2018 (15 pp., PDF, free, no opt-in)
• Digital Intelligence Briefing, Adobe, 2018 (43 pp., PDF, free, no opt-in)
• How 28 Brands Are Using AI to Enhance Their Marketing [Infographic], Impact Blog
• How AI Is Changing Sales, Harvard Business Review, July 30, 2018
• How Top Marketers Use Artificial Intelligence On-Demand Webinar with Vala Afshar, Chief Digital Evangelist, Salesforce and Meghann York, Director, Product Marketing, Salesforce
• How To Win Tomorrow’s Car Buyers – Artificial Intelligence in Marketing & Sales, McKinsey Center for Future Mobility, McKinsey & Company. February 2019. (44 pp., PDF, free, no opt-in)
• IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Artificial Intelligence in Enterprise Marketing Clouds 2017 Vendor Assessment, (11 pp., PDF, free, no opt-in)
• In-depth: Artificial Intelligence 2019, Statista Digital Market Outlook, February 2019 (client access required)
• Leading reasons to use artificial intelligence (AI) for marketing personalization according to industry professionals worldwide in 2018, Statista
• Lessons of 21st-Century Brands Modern Brands & AI Report, Forbes Insights and Quantcast Study (17 pp., PDF, free, opt-in)
• Powerful pricing: The next frontier in apparel and fashion advanced analytics, McKinsey & Company, December 2018
• Share of marketing and agency professionals who are comfortable with AI-enabled technology automated handling of their campaigns in the United States as of June 2018, Statista
• The CMO Survey: Highlights and Insights Report, February 2019. Duke University, Deloitte and American Marketing Association. (71 pp., PDF, free, no opt-in)
• Visualizing the uses and potential impact of AI and other analytics, McKinsey Global Institute, April 2018.  Interactive page based on Tableau data set can be found here
• What really matters in B2B dynamic pricing, McKinsey & Company, October 2018
• Winning tomorrow’s car buyers using artificial intelligence in marketing and sales, McKinsey & Company, February 2019
• Worldwide Spending on Artificial Intelligence Systems Will Grow to Nearly $35.8 Billion in 2019, According to New IDC Spending Guide, IDC; March 11, 2019

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Bobby Hellard

Keumars Afifi-Sabet