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3CLogic: Connecting Voice to Business Processes

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An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

While these days it may seem that everything is going ‘digital,’ the reality is that a lot of the communication that takes place between an organization and its customers (and employees and partners) still happens via voice calls. These phone-based interactions, however, remain disconnected from the otherwise digitally-enabled business processes of which they are an essential element.

3CLogic provides an integrated, cloud-based communications platform that it believes solves this problem. The company’s platform integrates directly with business process platforms and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms such as ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Microsoft Dynamics, and enables organizations to connect their voice interactions with their business processes. These integrations enable everything from simple screenpops and outbound dialing capabilities, to automated activity posting with recording access.

Moreover, the company also provides what it calls voice-to-action capabilities. In addition to providing traditional analytics based on call metadata, the company also converts voice calls into text-based transcripts and then uses natural language processing (NLP) to analyze calls for sentiment, competitive identification and other relevant information that can lead to better customer engagement and a better understanding of the nature of customer interactions.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, ServiceNow is an Intellyx client and Microsoft is a former Intellyx client. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.


HappySignals: Reinventing Service Management Satisfaction Surveys

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An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

You know the drill. Call the service desk, and when you’re done, you get a satisfaction survey. However, there are three problems with this approach. First, response rates are often low — mostly because of the way organizations ask the satisfaction questions. Second, the data often give false readings as organizations receive high satisfaction ratings yet consistently hear that their employees are unhappy. Finally, even if their employees are happy at any given point in time, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re happy overall.

Start-up HappySignals thinks there’s a better way. The company has reinvented service management satisfaction using an approach similar to the Net Promoter Score (NPS) — creating what it calls the Happiness Score. Unlike most traditional satisfaction approaches, the company uses a research-based set of standard questions that gauge the employee’s experience and happiness rather than the success of the process in the form of SLAs.

Moreover, the survey also asks its respondents to estimate their lost productivity. This survey data is then converted into a set of dynamic analytics that enable organizations to understand everything from the systems that are creating the unhappiest outcomes to the correlation between happiness, productivity and a wide range of contributing factors such as location, business unit, language, etc. Finally, the company enables organizations to continually measure employee’s overall satisfaction using sampled surveys and compare all of this data to the company’s customer-wide benchmarks. The result is a satisfaction measurement tool for service management applications that may finally help organizations improve productivity and enhance the employee experience.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

Lakeside Software: Providing Endpoint Analytics to Improve the User Experience

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An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

In IT circles today there’s plenty of talk about the cloud, DevOps, data center transformation, Artificial Intelligence, and any other number of the “cool kid” technologies taking up enterprise mindshare. When it comes to an organization’s staff, however, where the rubber meets the road for all of these technologies (and more) is at the endpoint — the employee’s device. In spite of significant advancements in big data and analytics elsewhere in the enterprise, there has been little development around endpoint analytics — at least from the perspective of the employee experience.

Lakeside Software believes that this needs to change. The company’s core product, called SysTrack, uses an endpoint agent to enable organizations to monitor, analyze and optimize the end-user experience. According to the company, their approach represents a significant leap over traditional endpoint management and real-time user monitoring solutions. While using less than 1% of the CPU and consuming under 100MB of storage space, the agent collects and stores historical information across the entirety of endpoint data points including performance, logs, and registry data.

Using a distributed approach, the system then enables organizations to monitor for changes which may impact the user experience, analyze the data to identify trends and correlations, and deliver actionable insights to help them increase user productivity, improve endpoint performance, and reduce IT management overhead.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

Morpheus: A Unified, Multi-Cloud Orchestration Platform

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An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

Almost as soon as DevOps burst onto the scene, enterprise leaders recognized the need for orchestration. When it came to the development process, there were a lot of tools necessary to transform DevOps from an idea into reality. With speed being of paramount concern, it was clear that organizations needed something that would ensure that everything hung together and worked properly. There was only one problem with this vision of orchestration-bliss. It pretty much left out the Ops side of DevOps.

Morpheus came to this realization in a bit of a round-about manner. The company’s product was initially developed as an internal toolset to help a venture capital firm employ specialist teams into their portfolio companies and rapidly deploy and manage software — regardless of the environment or the development tools they were using. After several years of internal use, the company’s founders realized that it could help enterprises deal with their increasingly complex and fragmented world — especially as the need for velocity was beginning to cause the fragile Dev-Ops relationships to break down.

The result is a unified, multi-cloud orchestration platform that enables organizations to develop, and natively deploy and manage applications throughout the development lifecycle, through operations and in both private and public cloud environments — at scale. The platform has built-in monitoring, logging, and backup, and serves as a container-as-a-service platform with native docker functionality, among other native capabilities. At the same time, however, it can connect and orchestrate across nearly any development, deployment or management tool an enterprise may already have in place.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

Navvia: Striking the Right Business Process Balance

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An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

We are in a period of business and technology transformation demanding that organizations revisit almost everything they do. While most enterprise leaders will readily agree with this statement, many are struggling with a coherent response. The reason is that while there is plenty of press about automation, cloud, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) transforming the enterprise, the starting point for any transformation is much less enticing: you must understand current business processes to transform them.

While the idea of business process modeling and analysis is not new, most traditional approaches have been too heavy-handed to be sustainable and useful for anything other than meeting compliance requirements. As a result, many organizations have turned to low-code and no-code platforms to essentially skip modeling and analysis and go straight to development. While this can be expedient, it often creates challenges with complex business processes that must span multiple systems or where automation is not feasible.

Navvia believes that it has found the right balance between these two points. The company developed its platform with simplicity and ease-of-use in mind — making it readily accessible to non-process specialists such as business executives and IT managers. Moreover, the platform provides governance capabilities and produces procedural documentation using a simple-to-use, yet comprehensive data model that is designed to ensure complete process documentation. Moreover, the same data model captures technical requirements, enabling organizations to rapidly automate processes using their preferred development approach once they have defined their desired future state.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

GitLab: A New Vision for a Single-Application DevOps Lifecycle

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An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

GitLab, the company best known for its on-premises, open source Git-repository, is now reimagining the entire DevOps lifecycle toolchain with its vision for what it calls Concurrent DevOps. The driver for this new vision, according to the company, is fundamental: the survival of every organization now depends on their ability to deliver a ‘radically faster DevOps lifecycle.’ And, as the company sees it, it is the current incarnations of the DevOps toolchain that is the limiting factor.

The company believes that it is the integration complexity that exists between the various elements of existing toolchains that slow teams down and introduces organizational disconnects. In many ways, as the company sees it, current DevOps efforts are nothing more than faster, sequential, waterfall methodologies — when what these organizations need is the ability to work in a truly parallel fashion. This parallel work effort is what the company calls  ‘Concurrent DevOps.’

To solve this problem, the company built a new, single application from the ground up to support the full DevOps lifecycle. The platform includes components that support planning activities, development, verification, packaging, release, configuration, and monitoring — all built upon a single data store, permission model, and interface. Moreover, the platform also includes built-in governance, collaboration, and analytics.

True to its open-source roots, all elements of the platform are based on open source technologies, and the integrations that they’ve built between them are also open sourced. While the company believes that their single-application vision will result in significantly reduced time-to-market for its customers, it also recognizes that its enterprise clients need the ability to implement incrementally. The company, therefore, supports deep integrations with existing toolchains and enables its customers to use the elements of the platform that best suit their needs.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

FileMaker Update: Inching Closer to the Enterprise

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An Intellyx Brain Candy Update

We last spoke with the folks at FileMaker almost a year and a half ago. Since that time, the company has doubled-down on an important audience: people just getting started and looking to quickly and easily develop applications on their own. The company has released a library of starter applications and templates to help clients realize a quick time-to-value.

At the same time, the company recognizes that it has continued and increasing relevance in the enterprise market. To support this, in part, it has expanded support for iOS sensors and continues to develop its ability to connect to external data sources, execute complex calculations, and enable elaborate data transformations — all-important enterprise capabilities.

As an Apple subsidiary, it will be the combination of the company’s stock-in-trade ease-of-use and slick user experience, mixed with its deep technical capabilities that will enable the company to make serious headway into the enterprise space. But it remains to be seen if they will invest in meaningful efforts to do so.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

Software AG Cumulocity: An IoT Platform Consolidating Devices into a Manageable Operating System

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An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

One of the keys to surviving in this era of disruption is to innovate with new business models and new revenue streams. Increasingly, that means that organizations must look to innovate around digital services and how smart sensor or other Internet of Things (IoT) devices may help transform the customer experience and help to create new business models.

The challenge, however, is that working with these intelligent edge devices has proven to be very difficult as each vendor seeks to create its own ecosystem. Cumulocity by Software AG aims to solve this by delivering a platform that consolidates IoT devices into what it calls a single, manageable ‘operating system.’

The company’s agent-based approach supports over 150 different protocols enabling it to deliver plug-and-play type capabilities when adding a new device to the management network. The platform is extensible, allowing organizations to build IoT-based applications on top of it while leveraging the platform’s connectivity, analytics, security and device management capabilities.

The company claims that what sets it apart is the fact that it built its architecture with a cloud-native approach, but also with a recognition that processing would shift closer toward the edge as edge device capabilities improved. The result is an application-centric IoT platform that enables organizations to rapidly develop and deploy IoT-type applications and maintain them over time without the technical challenges typically associated with managing a collection of heterogeneous  IoT devices throughout their lifecycle.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.


Nokia: Stitching Together IoT for Transformative Value

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An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of those simple sounding buzzwords that has a mountain of complexity beneath it. As organizations take their first tentative steps into deploying IoT solutions, they quickly come face-to-face with all of this complexity, including connectivity challenges, security demands, and the ability to use the data that these smart edge devices create.

While Nokia may not immediately come to mind when you think IoT, the company’s long history in connectivity forms the foundation for its IoT go-to-market strategy — but it goes far beyond that starting point. The company has put together an integrated offering that includes connectivity (LTE and, in the future, 5G), private LTE for local connectivity, device management and security using its existing platform that presently manages over 1.5 billion mobile devices), and a new analytics and visualization platform as a result of their recent acquisition of SpaceTime Insight (which we covered last July).

The company’s vision is that IoT only becomes transformative when you can stitch all the connectivity, security, management, and usage pieces together. Together with its burgeoning ecosystem of partners, the company believes it can help enterprises put the pieces together to take IoT from a position of incremental to transformative value.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

Cradlepoint: Powering the Distributed Enterprise

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An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

Increasingly, enterprise organizations are finding that they must operate in a distributed fashion. Long gone for most organizations are the days of having a handful of large facilities that they could connect with private, high-speed and resilient network connections. We are now in a time in which pop-up stores, stores within stores, kiosks, connected vehicles and even digital signage are transforming even the most industrial age organization into a distributed enterprise.

The problem is that most enterprise technology solutions were not designed for this type of distributed operation. Focused on serving the distributed enterprise, Cradlepoint has created a full suite of software-defined solutions for this purpose. The company offers a range of solutions for branch locations, mobile needs, and Internet of Things (IoT) deployments. The company also provides a cloud-based management approach that enables organizations to centrally manage devices, monitor health, and access analytics.

The company’s solutions incorporate various technologies and approaches to solve the specific needs of each use case. This includes things like:

  • LTE for WAN fail-over, air gapping networks in multi-use locations, and for mobile connectivity
  • Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) for branch versatility and cost efficiency, and for IoT connectivity
  • Software-defined perimeters for branch and IoT security

The company believes that unlike traditional approaches which are technology-focused, the combination of its use-case focused solutions, its use of LTE (moving toward 5G), and its focus on meeting enterprise-specific management, compliance, and security needs, makes it particularly suited to meet the needs of the distributed enterprise.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

WebNMS: An IoT Application Enablement Platform

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An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a little bit like a newly discovered land full of promise and potential. Everyone, from large enterprise organizations to service providers, is seeing its possibilities. But seeing the potential and acting on it — particularly when it comes to a domain as disjointed and complex as IoT — are two different things.

WebNMS, a division of Zoho, believes that it can help organizations explore and realize the benefits that IoT can have on business outcomes without having to deal with its underlying complexity. The company believes that there is a wealth of opportunity for vertically-oriented IoT applications, but that those organizations best positioned to leverage IoT in these situations lack the capabilities to do so.

The company has, therefore, developed what it calls an IoT Application Enablement Platform that enables organizations to build solutions that use the platform for core functionality such as connecting devices to the cloud, transporting data from the edge, running analytics, managing devices, and visualizing data. The platform acts as a unified data engine enabling organizations to focus on value creation rather than on things like infrastructure, scale, and security.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

White Paper: How to Extract Business Value from Serverless Computing

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Serverless has become an essential must-have for many developers engaged in a range of web-scale and enterprise application initiatives.

However, confusion remains over exactly what serverless means as well as its pros and cons. Further muddying the waters are the limitations of Lambda: portability to other cloud providers, a lack of serverless offerings for edge and on-premises environments, high costs, operational challenges, and the lack of real-time analytics.

Open source offerings seek to resolve the limitations of public cloud-based serverless computing while also offering unprecedented performance. The end goal is to reduce barriers to serverless and bring it to the forefront of high-performance, real-time computing.

Indico: Enterprise AI for Unstructured Content

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An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

One of today’s primarily limitations of AI is that it tends to be domain-specific. Teach a system about processing invoices, say, and it would have no idea how to process purchase orders – let alone tasks outside of basic accounting.

Indico shatters this limitation with a combination of transfer learning and a massive generalized vector model of domain independent information.

Transfer learning is an approach to AI that builds models that are able to transfer insights from one task to other similar tasks, or to understand terms with similar meanings.

Indico’s models are thus far faster to train and require fewer data than other AI approaches.

Indico has found traction in automating back-office tasks, improving the efficiency of document-based workflows, and extracting insights from a range of unstructured content, including both text and images.

Indico’s latest version announced today is purpose-built for business users.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

To be Truly Compliant with GDPR, Use a Blockchain that Facilitates the “Right to be Forgotten.

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By Dominic McCann

So you can only be assured of deletion of data if the chain that that data that is stored on is erased. A succinct and concise explanation of how our Interbit platform works is provided by the IT industry analyst Jason Bloomberg who writes “BTL’s architecture is like no other I’ve seen, and it is the only one that succinctly deals with the GDPR ‘right to be forgotten’ requirement: to forget a user, simply delete their blockchains” – click here to read his article.

Read the entire article at http://btl.co/opinion/gdpr-compliant-with-blockchain.html

Closing Keynote: On the Role of the CIO: Where We Are and Where We Are Heading

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EFT Logistics CIO Forum North America
Austin TX, Marriott South
November 6 – 7, 2018

Evolution: Hear insights from non-logistics industries on where they see the role of the CIO changing.

Business Objective: Practical insights to presenting to the Board of Directors in order to synthesize technology and innovation needs with evolving business objectives.

Develop Skills: Listen to how you can evolve your skills to meet the requirements of today and tomorrow, and how to build a blueprint for the growth of your team.

Moderator: Charles Araujo, Principal Analyst, Intellyx and Contributing Writer, CIO.com

Greg Sanchez, VP and CIO, General Dynamics Information Technology

Click here for more information and to register.


What If All Data Were Hot Data? Flash Storage Hits Two Inflection Points

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The history of data storage ranging from our devices to our data centers amounts to a years’ long progression of bigger, faster, and over time, cheaper.

Within the enterprise data center, today’s state of the art is the All-Flash Array, which depends upon non-volatile Flash storage to provide high performance and durability, as compared to the spinning disk technology that preceded it.

Mat Kixmoeller, Vice President of Strategy for Pure Storage, celebrating at Pure Accelerate.

Mat Kixmoeller, Vice President of Strategy for Pure Storage, celebrating at Pure Accelerate.

Hot, Warm, and Cold Data

Until recently, however, Flash arrays were decidedly more expensive than hard drives, prompting enterprises to implement a mix of different storage technologies for different purposes.

At the high end, Flash supports high performance computing (HPC) and certain mission-critical tasks that require real-time processing of data – what we call ‘hot data.’ For top performance, hot data require expensive network protocols like InfiniBand or similarly costly storage-area networks (SANs) that depend upon Fibre Channel networking technology.

In the middle are ‘warm data’ on hard drives that leverage earlier spinning disk technology. Due to their moving parts, such disks wear out with annoying frequency. In larger data centers, replacing them can be a full-time job.

Furthermore, it takes a moment for a such a disk to start spinning – on the order of milliseconds. Milliseconds don’t sound like a lot, but Flash ‘spins’ up (in quotes since no spinning is involved) in microseconds – a thousand-times improvement in latency.

And then there are ‘cold data,’ typically on tape. Yes, the magnetic tape familiar from quaint movies of 1960s data centers – with more advanced technology to be sure, but still tape. Tape is really not good for anything but backup purposes, but it’s still a favorite technology because of its extraordinarily low media cost.

The problem with tape – or any backup technology, for that matter – is that all of its business value depends upon the ability to recover data from the backup. Given that tape wears out over time, the only way to make sure all the data are recoverable is to try to recover them.

Just one problem: most enterprises have so much information backed up on tape that making sure all of it is recoverable is a fools’ errand. Instead, they perform random tests, maintain duplicate backups for some information (thus increasing costs), and cross their fingers about the rest.

Read the entire article at https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2018/05/29/what-if-all-data-were-hot-data-flash-storage-hits-two-inflection-points/.

Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, Pure Storage is an Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Pure Storage covered Jason Bloomberg’s expenses at Pure Accelerate, a standard industry practice. Image credit: Jason Bloomberg.

 

Blockchain/Crypto Bubble: Dot-Com Bubble All Over Again?

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I called the massive Bitcoin bubble less than two months before it popped – or perhaps my articles helped it pop, who’s to say? In any case, I’m calling another bubble – and given I now have a 100% track record on these things, perhaps people should listen.

Today, the entire blockchain/cryptocurrency hairball is itself in a massive bubble. Rather than speculation in cryptos driving the market over the cliff, however, it’s speculative interest in initial coin offerings (ICOs).

This is no mere currency play. Deep pockets with more money than sense are betting on an entire market full of startups, largely because of FOMO – ‘fear of missing out.’

All this hullabaloo is giving me a serious case of déjà vu. I’ve lived through such a bubble before – the dot-com bubble of the turn of the century.

Unlike most of the blockchain/crypto players out there who were children at the time, I saw the craziness of the dot-com runup and bust from the inside. Similarities to the current bubble abound.

Lest we make the mistakes of the past, however, it’s also important to point out the differences. In truth, the two bubbles only have superficial similarities. We can only gain wisdom by understanding both how they are alike – and how they are different.

Scammers’ Paradise?

How they’re similar: All the money pouring in is bringing out the scammers in droves.

How they’re different: The World Wide Web really began to take off in 1994, but it wasn’t until 1998 or so that the VCs caught on and money started pouring in. By then many companies had web sites, JavaScript was working in the Netscape browser, and an entire market of consulting firms had established themselves.

In contrast, the money has poured into the blockchain/crypto world much sooner. The speculative interest in Bitcoin led to an explosion of speculative interest in other cryptos, and in turn, in ICOs – long before the businesses getting the funding had any real customer base.

As a result, it’s hard for any investor to differentiate the honest ICOs (assuming there are any) from the scam ones, since neither is likely to have a running business with paying customers. In addition, scammers are taking advantage of the mad rush to this market, preying upon the confusion and ignorance, as well as the lack of adequate regulation and enforcement.

Speculative Bubble?

How they’re similar: There is a massive speculative investment bubble that is bound to collapse.

How they’re different: The fact that the dot-com boom had a longer runway impacts the nature of its bubble. During the dot-com run-up, most of the speculative interest was in public companies on NASDAQ. While many were not profitable, at least they were in business, and had their act together well enough to navigate the complexities of an IPO.

In addition, the public status of many dot-com players forced them to open their books, so that everybody could see when a company was unlikely to ever turn a profit.

With blockchain/crypto, the speculative interest is primarily in ICOs for companies not yet in operation, or just launching their operations. All these investors have to go on are each company’s white papers, which they typically write in order to avoid regulatory attention, rather than to conform to it as in the dot-com days.

The risks, therefore, are far greater this time around. The rewards? Not so much.

Change the World?

How they’re similar: Talk of a ‘New Economy.’ Widespread belief that business will be forever transformed.

How they’re different: The dot-com ‘New Economy’ centered on web-based business models disrupting ‘bricks and mortar’ precursors. Yes, the Internet changed the world – but it turned out the Web was really little more than a new marketing channel.

Just how much blockchain/crypto will actually change the world remains to be seen, but it’s shaping up to be nothing more than a better way to conduct multi-party transactions.

Furthermore, much of the ‘New Economy’ buzz around blockchain/crypto is mostly around crypto’s use as money. The dot-com era had no equivalent, unless you count money alternatives like Beenz and Flooz. Don’t remember Beenz or Flooz? Maybe there’s a reason.

Will there be Survivors?

How they’re similar: All the hype and speculation obscure some real businesses that will survive the crash and disrupt the world. Perhaps that disruption will be so great as to swamp the silliness that came before.

How they’re different: True, dot-coms like Amazon and Google survived and ended up disrupting the world. But other than those two exceptional cases, disruptive dot-com survivors are few and far between. Yahoo! survived the crash but is no more. eBay caused its fair share of disruption in its day, but nobody cares about it or companies of its ilk anymore. It’s hard to even think of many others.

It’s too early to be sure about blockchain/crypto, of course, but the most disruptive ideas are plans for fully distributed platforms of various sorts. Just one problem: because they are fully distributed, founding such a platform isn’t a good way to make money.

It’s no wonder so many blockchain platform businesses are ‘dot orgs.’ They have no clear business model. Amazon and Google may have been among the only broadly disruptive dot-coms to survive, but so far there’s no new blockchain/crypto Amazon or Google in the offing.

What about Technology Standards?

How they’re similar: A handful of open standards-based technologies are at the heart of the movement.

How they’re different: HTTP and HTML in particular have proven to be remarkably versatile, even as they matured. We can even consider XML to be a dot-com era standard. XML had a good run, and while JSON has largely supplanted it, JSON itself is simply JavaScript, another dot-com success story.

The dot-com era’s B2B standards like ebXML, however, didn’t fare as well. The complexities of business interactions largely proved too complex for the standards of the day.

Unlike core Internet standards, core blockchain technologies have a far narrower applicability. Because of its multiparty transaction sweet spot, blockchain’s promise lies in B2B transactions.

However, just as with the dot-com days, nascent blockchain standards aren’t likely to address general B2B scenarios.

In fact, it’s not clear if a core set of generalized blockchain standards is going to coalesce, as many of the standards efforts underway are industry-specific.

Finally, what about the security standards that underlie blockchain? Such standards predate the blockchain/crypto movement, and in fact, some of them date to the dot-com era.

What About the Community?

How they’re similar: A vast community of techies, entrepreneurs, investors, consultants, and others are changing their career paths to join the new community.

On the one hand, this exodus is depriving enterprises of desperately needed expertise. On the other hand, when the bubble bursts, these people will return to more traditional employment, the better for their experience.

How they’re different: The people at the heart of the dot-com movement were a mix of university intellectuals and US Department of Defense and other government techies. In fact, it wasn’t until the US National Science Foundation ended its sponsorship of the Internet in May 1995 that it was technically legal to build a for-profit business (aka a ‘dot-com’) on it.

The initial instigators of the blockchain/crypto movement – early Bitcoin insiders – couldn’t have been more different. This crew was a core group of radical libertarian anarchist misogynists, intent on bringing down the global financial system.

Even though the blockchain/crypto community has expanded well beyond this rotten core, its radical principles still pervade the movement. The belief that decentralized transaction processing holds the moral high ground over its centralized alternative impacts blockchain businesses broadly, even those business that have nothing to do with crypto.

The problem with radical libertarian ideals, of course, is that they are really only good at one thing: giving criminals cover. Organized crime in particular has ridden the coattails of this trend, and now threatens the entire permissionless side of the blockchain/crypto movement. Nothing even remotely like this craziness took place during the dot-com days.

The Intellyx Take

The biggest difference between the dot-com and blockchain/crypto bubbles, of course, is that we know how the former ends, while the latter is a book that is still being written. There is always the possibility that cooler heads will prevail where they didn’t before, thus proving skeptics like myself wrong.

All indications, however, point to the opposite happening. The blockchain/crypto bubble is more inflated, more scam-ridden, more devoid of business value than the dot-com craziness ever was. And it will pop much more loudly as a result.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Beenz and Flooz.

NetFoundry: Application-Specific, Zero-Trust Networks

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An Intellyx Brain Candy Update

When we last covered NetFoundry in September 2017, the vendor was struggling with its ‘like an SD-WAN or VPN but not a SD-WAN or VPN’ conundrum.

In fact, NetFoundry’s application-centric networking approach offers the same functionality of either SD-WAN or VPN and much more.

Today, its messaging is much crisper, focusing primarily on cloud connectivity challenges, including secure cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-edge connected solutions independent of access provider, without the need for private networks.

A key part of NetFoundry’s zero-trust security story comes from Dispersive Technologies, which offers a well-differentiated software-defined overlay network that takes advantage of combinations of rotating secure connections.

The combination gives NetFoundry a powerful, secure abstraction layer that offers its customers an important combination of flexibility, control, and security.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, Dispersive Technologies is a former Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

‘Smart’ Vendors Make Splash

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At last fall’s NetEvents press/analyst/vendor confab, I called out three vendors as ‘sexy.’ This year, the three vendors that stand out are ‘smart.’

Not that smart isn’t sexy, of course – but in this case, I mean smart in the context of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

In fact, it’s not simply these vendors’ use of AI that makes them smart, but rather, the innovation they have brought to the AI story – either in the application of AI or how they support their customers’ AI initiatives.

‘Smart’ apps are becoming the normMellanox: High-Speed Networking for AI

Jask: AI for Security Operations Centers

AISense: AI-Driven Voice Transcription

Read the entire article at https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2018/05/30/smart-vendors-make-splash/.

Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. NetEvents covered Jason Bloomberg’s expenses at the NetEvents Global Press and Analyst Summit, a standard industry practice. Image credit: Gerd Leonhard.

NETSCOUT: From Wire Data to Digital Transformation

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An Intellyx Brain Candy Update

When I last wrote about NETSCOUT for Forbes in September 2017, the vendor had just come off a flurry of acquisitions, including security vendor Arbor Networks. It was thus predictably in a period of integration of products as well as rationalization of marketing messages.

This integration and rationalization is essentially complete. Today, NETSCOUT’s offerings divide cleanly along enterprise and telco service provider lines – subtly bringing the promise of carrier-grade technology to the enterprise market.

For enterprise customers, the vendor is emphasizing visibility and continuous monitoring for cloud, DevOps, and unified communications. It also offers a business assurance solution that targets digital transformation initiatives at enterprises who are revamping their IT strategies to meet the dynamic requirements of customers in the Digital Era.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, NETSCOUT is an Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

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