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Make addressing emerging market changes a priority for your tech-driven innovation efforts

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If your firm strives to be Customer Obsessed then a key focus should be on addressing emerging customer needs and challenges. Sadly, where and how they can live is rising fast as a global concern. As noted in my new Forrester report on the importance and impact of Moonshot innovations , I mentioned that part of your focus should be on emerging customer needs and issues. One of those issues that is clearly rising across the globe is climate change. As noted last week by David Randall in the Los Angeles Times , the longer, hotter summer weather patterns being experiences in LA, Houston, New York and other cities could bring the Bubonic Plague back to the largest cities in the world. This climate change is extending the breeding season of rats, squirrels and rodents and leading to their significant increase in numbers. According to rodent control consultant Bobby Corrigan, in the last 10 years this has raised their urban population by 15-20 percent. These animals increas
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GDPR and the End of Reckless Data Sharing

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Originally posted: https://www.securityroundtable.org/gdpr-end-reckless-data-sharing/ The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will  put every company with a digital strategy  at risk of significant financial penalties. Any company that processes  any  personal information on EU citizens—whether as customers, employees, or business partners—and fails to comply, could face fines up to four percent of their annual global revenues, as well as severe reputational damage. And compliance will require much more than simply encrypting this data.     The GDPR, which kicks in on May 25 of this year, harmonizes national data-protection laws within the EU. It seeks to ensure that personal data is protected against misuse and theft and gives EU citizens control over how their data is used. Most companies today are at risk of non-compliance, since few, if any, actually have full control over their customer’s data. While many organizations have made strides in protectin
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Video: Building a Digital Edge Strategy

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A discussion between me and Erik Weaver, Global Marketing Director of Media & Entertainment to discuss interconnection oriented architecture and best-practices for building a digital edge strategy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7F1vX_u0fSM&feature=youtu.be
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Digital Edge Strategy and Why Enterprises Should Care - Podcast transcript

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On October 12th, 2017, top cloud influencer, David Linthicum and I got together to discuss the importance of your company's digital edge strategy and how Interconnection can help you optimize this strategy from a latency, security and cost perspective. The audio discussion can be found at the Cloud Weekly Podcast ( subscribe here ) and on the Cloud Technology Partners web site . David : Anything new going on in (the world of Equinix ) since we last talked? James : Oh yeah, it's been fantastic. We've made a couple acquisitions which have grown our footprint globally , so we can now satisfy customers needs to be in pretty much every region of the globe where they are doing business. And we recently published a new set of research we call the Global Interconnection Index which really shows the growth of the private connectivity that companies are needing to do to really help them deliver better solutions with lower latency, violation-protections so they don't
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Whole Foods Gives Amazon a new Digital Edge

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While much of the focus on Amazon’s massive acquisition of Whole Foods Markets has been on what many believe is a move into broader retail footprint and its ongoing attack on consumer margins , the reality is that this acquisition is about locality and Amazon extending its Digital Edge. First off, what is the Digital Edge? It’s a shift nearly every business is going through to better embrace its customer base where they live and how they want things. Started in the dawn of the web era, reaching a broad market of geographically dispersed customers was not well accomplished simply by being on the Internet. To deliver a strong customer experience you needed to get your content as close to your customer as possible, as quickly as possible. And this was only achieved, at the time, via a content delivery network, like Akamai. As we shifted to mobile applications and continue to shift to more real-time interactions with clients, caching static content at the edge isn’t good en
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Solving for Hybrid App Customer Experience

The future of application design is not  serverless , containers, microservices,  bots  or something completely new. It’s the integration of these new capabilities with your company’s existing assets, applications and cloud services. But these amalgams won’t add a lot of value if their connections to these existing assets degrade the customer experience.  Sadly, this is the reality for many companies today. They are pushing these new capabilities to the edge, but still using old-school integration practices to link these apps to the above assets. Two approaches are all too common: Trust the Internet  - it's everywhere, it's open and it's fast. If only this were true. With internet traffic growing at exponential rates trusting that your connection will be low latency is very high risk. And we all know how “open” aligns to secure. :) Bring it all home  - if you can’t trust the internet, then the simple answer is to use secure, private connections, such as MPLS lines to
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Apps are No Longer Apps

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There’s been significant debate over the last couple years about where the future of application design will land -  serverless , containers, microservices,  bots  or something completely new. The real answer - none of the above. The future of application design, and frankly the reality today, is hybrid.  Apps aren’t self-contained code anymore. Apps today are really workflows that integrate multiple components to deliver a defined customer experience, address a business need or enable a product or service capability. These workflows often involve a mobile app talking to a SaaS service, connected to an on-premise data or a legacy tool. For example, look at the architecture of  GE Predix . It’s inherently hybrid, bringing together data from on-premise resources and field locations to empowering remote workers and smart devices through the CloudFoundry microservices platform. While Predix is a platform, your use of it is what creates your hybrid app.  This isn’t to say that the em
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