Business performance at 'ungodly' speed

So the Sunday night keynote brought us a notion of what great hardware there is around and actually is capable of today. Great to know that if you want to be an innovator, you should be into columns, not into rows. You Senior DBA will be able to tell you all about it. Rumours go actually that the new iPhone 5s is using this column approach as well, but it's not confirmed.

OK, so what can I do with it from a business point of view, or even why the heck should I bother?
Luckily Mark Hurd made some sense out of it and explained a bit what this technology is able to bring you in his keynote yesterday

What he explained to the audience is the enormous amount of data or information which is coming at us already today, but will grow tremendously in the next couple of years. Elements adding in like the Internet of Things, where devices push information out to the internet without any involvement of a human being, which will boost this. Another trend which pushes this is mobile, with people being more able than ever (4G, WiFi everywhere, etc.) to push information out and share seamlessly. Probably the biggest example of that of course is the information people push out on social media, not in the last part on what they think of your products and services. And guess what, still a lot of business application are already lasting for decades and they will need to cope with all of that information.

The bottom-line is: if you want to be relevant to your customers when interacting with them. Or if you will want to provide an easy and fast way for them to order your products or apply for your services. Or maybe if you want to be able to apply the intelligence about your customers and let it provide new insights to both your employees when they are handling a care request or to your customer when they are in your self-care environment and deliberate whether they should upgrade to your next level of service.
In all these cases you systems will increasingly want to rely on a good infrastructure that is capable of capturing the information and holding it, but also make it applicable to drive your business while supporting your employees and your customers.

So think of what your scenario would be, how BigData will impact your business and reach out to the people that can make applying BigData and turning it into profit real for you.

Originally posted on the Capgemini Technology Blog: Capping IT Off  

Customer Experience is about the customer, you know...

After the Sunday afternoon OOW keynote it might not feel as such, but you should not forget that Customer Experience is about the customer.
I'll tell you what I mean…

In the IT industry people tend to loose themselves in Terabytes, the number of MHz per second, that the system is now 10 times faster and those kind of things. Although these elements are very relevant, eventually Customer Experience is about the customer and making sure he or she gets the right and most relevant offer, the best customer service and is rewarded for his loyalty.

I was actually triggered by watching "the internship" on my flight to San Francisco to write this blog. Clearly it is a movie about the IT industry and how things work in there, but it's also clear that at the end of the day, technology is absolutely not the only thing that counts, not even by far!
For those that didn't see the movie it's about two guys with no technical skills at all joining in an internship program at Google, and the finally get to work at Google.

Like I said having the best performance is absolutely relevant in a lot of cases for customer experience. For instance when you want to use analytics to determine in realtime what the best possible offers are for a customer who is in you web-shop. You will want to use every single piece of customer information available within your IT landscape, but also through social media and even third parties and determine the most relevant offer in split seconds.

My point is however, it should always be absolutely clear how you want to be relevant to your customer, let's say "why a customer should choose your company, product or service" in order to create that customer experience. It will be the only way, and we studied it to really get value out of a good all-channel experience for your company. Once you determine that, you then start crafting the accompanying IT Solution as well as developing the correct organisation to support this customer experience.

If you want to know more on how we apply our methodologies for making All-Channel Experience real for our customer in specific industries?

Come and watch our experts on Utilities and Retail to see how, here at Oracle OpenWorld 2013

Originally posted on the Capgemini Technology Blog: Capping IT Off

Predictions for Oracle OpenWorld 2013

With only a few days left before Oracle OpenWorld 2013 will start, it's good to spend some time on predictions of what is to come and what to look for specifically @ the event.
This year, Oracle expects over 50.000 people at it's yearly global event and these are the topics I believe that will be the top priority ones:

Customer Experience
Needless to say that Customer Experience is a hot topic for Oracle in the last couple of years. Taking a look at all the acquisitions Oracle has been conducting in the past, this year has been about converging these solutions and making components work even closer together than they already could.

This year instead of having a separate conference (like last year) there is a separate track on Customer Experience, with a couple of high value partners that sponsor the event.
Oracle and their partners will share their view on determining Business Vision on Customer Experience  building a strategy and roadmap for transforming towards a full all-channel customer experience and most important how to really get value from that.

Capgemini is supporting this event by presenting, showcasing and interacting.
We will present our view on how to implement best in class customer experience specifically in the Retail, as well as in the Utilities sector.
Over in the exhibitor grounds we will be showcasing our best practices and ready to implement solutions based on Oracle technology.
And of course lots of opportunities to interact with our Experts on the topic of All-Channel Experience, face-to-face or through social media.

Why we are stressing this topic so heavily is obvious: We believe that Customer Experience is one of the most important topics for business in todays era of the customer driven world. To address this as an organisation you should be focused on how you want to be relevant to your customer, who that customer is, how you transform your organisation towards a customer centric one and of course how you should implement IT solutions that make a good All-Channel Experience reality.
At the end of the day, you want your customers to become your fans.

Cloud, Big data and Engineered systems
Three other big topics that actually are very much aligned with the topic of Customer Experience are Oracle Cloud, how Oracle covers Big Data and how the engineered systems support this.
I expect more in depth announcements in area of cloud on the way Oracle partners with others like Microsoft and SFDC. In the recent past there have been rumours about Oracle rebranding their Cloud offerings and moving away from the Fusion Applications brand, positioning Oracle in a certain way towards their competitors… One thing is sure, Oracle is transforming to become a cloud company and making changes in order for the organisation to be able to handle the new business models to come with it, but still making the same amount of money.

Be sure not to mis our view on how to apply Oracle cloud applications as they will increasingly help businesses adapt to changes at cloud speed.

On Big Data, of course a better insight can be expected on how engineered systems as well as the new Database 12c can give better and broader support for handling Big Data. In the same time sharing new features and evolution of Oracle's analytics tools to make sense of all internal as well as external, social data.

I don't want to keep you from an upcoming topic for Oracle, as they are trying to become part of the wave of the Internet of Things. Mostly showing how Oracle's product stack is and will be supporting it. To be continued I believe as this is in some industries a key part of something like Customer Experience, like smart technologies in the Utilities sector.

As you can see there is a lot to be watching at this years Oracle OpenWorld, want to be guided through the highlights?
Stay tuned to Capgemini's Social Channel and get all of the key information from #oow13 delivered right to your timeline!

Originally posted on the Capgemini Technology Blog: Capping IT Off