FALL 2013

SAP, Omnichannel UX, Five Cart Test, The Clouds, & Umbrella.

SAP

SAP made news recently with the purchase of KXEN, a predictive analytics vendor focused on business users and process automation. SAP now plans on integrating KXEN to its on premise and cloud based applications on SAP HANA.

The company also announced that it will be a reseller and support for Intel (Distribution Apache Hadoop) and Hortonworks Data Platform.

The latest developments combine the power of predictive analytics software with in-memory database and large scale application. For more details on this have a look here.

Omnichannel UX

Renée Boucher Ferguson at MIT reported on the impact of the increasing number of channels, on the retail landscape. More channels mean more choice, retailer's need to harness those channels to maintain competitive advantage.

Interestingly, it looks like solutions for anonymous identification are coming from the mobile world. This can potentially represent the emergence of a paradigm shift in the data source(s) required to deliver meaningful customer experiences.

Five Cart Test

We found this piece by Darrell Benatar to be incredibly powerful. We highly recommend it to any organization with a shopping cart. Go ahead and invest five minutes; you won't regret it!

The Clouds

Everybody talks about cloud computing but many don't understand it. We found this video to be really helpful in explaining the concept. CLICK HERE to get there.

Looks nebulous? Here are seven commercial examples. It looks like a storm is coming!

Umbrella

Talking about storms, a good umbrella is always helpful. Actually, want to see what happens when you collaborate under the clouds? Have a look here.

Alternately, there's always Christo and Jean-Claude's Umbrella project.

Have a great autumn!

"A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves."
-Marcel Proust