Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Business in the Cloud: How Efficient Networks Help the Smallest Companies Do Brisk Business with the Largest

Transcript of a discussion on making and managing the business connections that matter most with SAP Ariba Spot Buy.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: SAP Ariba.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Gardner
Our next technology innovation thought leadership discussion examines new ways for small businesses to make and manage the connections that matter to them most using cloud-based networks to bring intelligent buying and digital business benefits to any type of company.

To learn more about the business of doing more commerce in the digital economy using cloud-based networks, please join me in welcoming our guests, Bob Rosenthal, Chairman and CEO of JP Promotional Products, Inc. in Ossining, New York. Welcome to BriefingsDirect, Bob.

Bob Rosenthal: Hi, Dana. Thank you.

Gardner: We’re also here with Anne Kramer, CEO at Ergo Works, Inc. in Palo Alto, California. Welcome, Anne.

Anne Kramer: Thank you very much.

Gardner: First let’s hear a little bit about your companies. Bob, what is JP Promotional Products? What do you do?

Rosenthal: JP Promotional Products is a distributor of imprinted promotional products. Anything you can put an imprint or logo on. We've had this company with my daughter for about 12 years now and we sell to small companies, large companies, anyone who buys promotional products from us.

Rosenthal
Gardner: Why is being digital, being on business networks, an important part of the way you find new clients?

Rosenthal: What this has given us is the ability to find the size of client that we could not ordinarily find. We're getting into large corporations, and it is very difficult for a small company to get access to a large entity. Being on a network like SAP Ariba and leveraging services like Ariba Discovery has gotten us into some of these very large corporations.

Gardner: Anne, tell us about Egro Works.


Kramer: Ergo Works is a small, woman-owned company based in Palo Alto, California. We're a full-service ergonomics company. We offer workstation evaluations and consulting, a complete line of ergonomic furniture, accessories and computer peripherals, as well as installation services. So, I would call it solution selling.

Gardner: And do you also share Bob’s challenge of trying to be seen and heard in a busy world, by big companies that perhaps don’t know about small vendors?

Kramer: Absolutely. It’s a challenge to get an audience with this group. They generally have established vendors, and trying to knock down those doors is challenging at best.

Gardner: We know that many of the buyers of goods are looking for increased automation. They're looking for intelligence in that network and the partnerships and ecosystem that they play in. So they want to find people like you that have goods and services for them. What was it that you had to do in order to then be seen and heard, be and recognized among them?

Rosenthal: We joined Ariba Discovery, and that gave us the ability to search for leads as well as respond to matched leads. As a matter of fact, one of the first ones I got was about a half an hour after I paid for Ariba Discovery. It was a Fortune 100 Company. They were looking for a thousand pair of imprinted socks, something I knew we could do. It was a no-brainer. We established our relationship with the procurement manager. They never bought the socks, but we have a relationship now, and without Ariba Discovery, there was no way we could have done that.

Gardner: And is geography a barrier for you or you can do business with anyone, anywhere?

Rosenthal: We can do business with anyone, anywhere. The bulk of it is in the Continental US. We can ship to England or Canada and we do bring some product in from China as well.

Gardner: And for you, Anne, tell us about what you needed to in order to find clients.

Challenge of growing

Kramer: We're located in Palo Alto, which is ground zero in Silicon Valley for ergonomics. So, we are well poised in that regard. Nonetheless, the challenge of growing a small business is ever present.

Kramer
One way that we've overcome that is to participate in online marketplaces. Specifically, what we're excited about now, and why I'm here today, is the Ariba Spot Buy Program. This is going to give us a direct access to large companies that have been challenging for us to get into. It’s an exciting opportunity. Unlike other marketplaces that are geared to one-off end users, Ariba is geared toward large corporations; so we're very excited.

Gardner: Can you give us a bit more about background and understanding of Ariba Spot Buy? These are not the usual contracts that are ongoing and repeatable, but are instances where there is a need, an ad-hoc need perhaps, in a large organization. A purchasing department has been tasked with doing this or maybe people directly in the company have got the authority to find and buy things on their own.

Kramer: That’s very well put. For example, we are currently an Ariba supplier with  several clients and we offer a static catalog. We often provide or make recommendations for products that are off catalog, and Ariba Spot Buy allows companies to buy products from vendors that they don’t currently have a contractual relationship with.

The niche that we're in is a relatively small niche. So it may not warrant a company wanting to put together a catalog. This is an opportunity for them to buy these products, yet stay compliant within the Ariba ecosystem.
So that’s what Ariba Spot Buy does. It allows companies to buy products that they don’t currently have a contractual relationship with.

Gardner: Now, of course, a big approach to finding things nowadays is through search on the web and having a good website, and getting good rankings on the search engines is a big part of that. But it strikes me that you're small, you're not going to get the kind of traffic on your website that might elevate you in those search results, and you are also highly customizable. So you're not just putting a big billboard up on the Internet, so to speak, and say, here we are.

You're offering custom types of things, with promotional products in your case, Bob, and you probably want to hear a lot about each customer and tailor your services to them. How do you overcome the challenge of not being able to put a billboard up on the Internet, but also maintain the advantage of having highly customized products, Bob?

Rosenthal: Our own website has hundreds of thousands of items on it. It’s an industry-based website. If you're searching for almost any product, you'll find it on our site.

In terms of how we got people to our site, we did invest some money a few years ago. We decided to go with what’s called Local Search. We put money into being on the first page in New York State, the Tri-State area, and that’s gotten us a few large accounts.

What we're looking for in Ariba Spot Buy is to bring in more business because a lot of our products are last minute. Someone will remember at the last minute, "Oh, I'm doing a trade show next week; I need a thousand widgets to give away. I forgot to buy them. I don't want to go through a contract." That's where I think Ariba Spot Buy will help us because we can deliver products in 24 hours if we have to.

Network advantage

Gardner: So there is an advantage to being in a business network versus just the worldwide wild web?

Rosenthal: Right. What that gets us is more targeted corporations, hopefully larger entities. Where a small corporation might buy 100 pieces, the big corporation is going to buy thousands of pieces. That’s why we've joined Ariba Discovery and are looking at Ariba Spot Buy.

Gardner: And I suppose, as someone in a selling position, you're also getting a lot more information about who you're selling to, given that they're in the network and you can see and access more about what they're looking for?

Rosenthal: That’s true, and where that helps is that we tend to add a lot of creativity to it. If we know who you are and what you do, we can make recommendations for certain kind of products. If you're a tractor company exhibiting at a show, maybe we'll suggest a squeeze toy in the shape of a tractor. Knowing who you are and where you are helps us with our creativity in suggesting products.
The ability to be on Ariba Spot Buy will give us the ability to interact with our customer to then have the opportunity to sell these more custom products and get into project-based opportunities.

Gardner: And for you, Anne, in the same vein, trying to be seen, heard, and understood in the Worldwide Web is perhaps a bit more daunting than on a business network. How do you overcome that need to customize and tailor your goods and services?

Kramer: Certain products lend themselves more to selling on the web than others, and same with online marketplaces. The visibility with  Ariba Spot Buy will give us the opportunity to interact with our customers to offer them custom products and get into project-based opportunities.

Gardner: We're also seeing from SAP Ariba the desire to bring more collaboration embedded and automated into these applications and services. Also, with Guided Buying, they're allowing the sellers to be part of an intelligence network, so that buyers can be led through the process and automation can be brought to bear. How do these new technological advantages affect you as a small businesses particularly, Anne?

Kramer: Technology helps us with new ways to bring our products to market and expose our offerings to a larger audience. That’s really the biggest benefit. 

In addition, it helps us to expand our current relationships with our Ariba buyers. They can now buy off-catalog, which is a win-win. Technology also impacts the products that we sell. As technology changes, the products change in response to the latest mouse design or the material that a wrist rest is covered in, maybe it's anti-microbial for instance. So technology has a huge impact on direct and indirect part of our business. 

Running the business

 Gardner: Of course, it's important for small businesses to have visibility into cash flow, when to expect payments, and how to bill accurately and appropriately. Any thoughts, Bob, on how this business network for you also adds to your own ability to run your business properly?

Rosenthal: In terms of technology, the biggest issue with us is the logo. Anyone can say they want a Bic pen. Where the technology should help us is in getting the art files from one point to the other and knowing, as far as things like cash flow, who we're dealing with, that it's a large corporation. Some use POs, some don't, for these type of buys. It gives me more comfort that we are going to get paid.

It's difficult to ask General Motors for a deposit for a $1,000 order, but we might ask the insurance broker down the street for that. So that comfort level of knowing we should be paid on a certain date is a big advantage.

Gardner: Anne, the same thing. Business visibility is important. Is there something about a business-network approach that's beneficial to you in being able to run your business well?

Kramer: Well, specifically what I am excited about with Ariba Spot Buy is that all the purchases are made using a credit card, which we love because it helps us control our cash flow. We don't have to go chasing after past-due invoices, and that time can be better spent selling more products. We love the fact that it's all credit-card based.
What I am excited about with Ariba Spot Buy is that all the purchases are made using a credit card, which we love because it helps us control our cash flow.

Gardner: Are there any specific examples of actual customers that you found through the Ariba Discovery process in this online marketplace that would illustrate some of these points? You don't have to name them necessarily, but maybe walk us through how it's worked and how that's different from the other approaches that you've had to find in customers, Bob?

Rosenthal: Well, the big account that we got, which I can't name, has turned into a huge account for us. We've established a relationship with the procurement people, and I think that relationship has built this business with them over the last 18 months, because they have a confidence level in us, and we are confident in them that, a) we're going to get paid, and paid on time, and b) it's a continuing relationship.

We do a lot of one-offs. We get a hit on our website, I need something tomorrow, can you get it? We never hear from the people again but we get an order, which is great; we do a lot of that. But we also try and establish relationships and that's what we get out of Discovery so far.

Gardner: As a small-business person myself, I know that you don't want to push that rock up the hill every month. You want to have the recurring dependable revenue; it's super important, right?

Kramer: Right. Ariba Spot Buy is an opportunity for ongoing and repeat business from companies participating in this technology.

Gardner: But this allows you to get the best of both worlds, which you can discover and find new interesting clients, but you can also maintain a steady flow from, from your installed base.

Kramer: That's right. This technology offer us an opportunity to engage new corporate customers and get paid quickly with credit card payments.

Gardner: Well, great. I'm afraid we will have to leave it there. You’ve been listening to a BriefingsDirect thought leadership podcast discussion examining new ways for small businesses to better match their services with sellers, particularly a small organization selling to a large organization, and using SAP Ariba business networks to accomplish that.

Please join me in thanking our guests, Bob Rosenthal, Chairman and CEO of JP Promotional Products in Ossining, New York. Thank you, Bob, and if people want to learn more about your organization, how might they do that?

Rosenthal: Our website is www.jppromoproducts.com or feel free to call us at 1-800-920-3451.

Gardner: We have also been joined by Anne Kramer, CEO at Ergo Works in Palo Alto, California. Thank you, Anne. And how could organizations learn more about your company?

Kramer: They could go to our website at www.askergoworks.com or our toll free number 866-ASK-ERGO.

Gardner: And also a big thank you to our audience for joining us for this SAP Ariba-sponsored business innovation thought leadership discussion.

I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator. Thanks again for listening, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: SAP Ariba.

Transcript of a discussion on new ways for small businesses to better match their services with sellers using SAP Ariba business networks. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2016. All rights reserved.

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Thursday, April 21, 2016

Intralinks Uses Hybrid Cloud to Blaze a Compliance Trail Across the Regulatory Mine Field of Data Sovereignty

Transcript of a discussion on how data sovereignty regulations force enterprises to consider new approaches to data, intellectual property, and cloud collaboration services.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) transformation interview series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on IT transformation and innovation -- and how it's making an impact on people's lives.

Gardner
Our next hybrid computing IT case study discussion explores how regulations around data sovereignty are forcing enterprises to consider new approaches to data, intellectual property, and cloud collaboration services.

As organizations move beyond their on-premises data centers, regulation and data sovereignty issues have become as important as the technical requirements for their infrastructure and applications.

To learn how organizations have been able to get the best of data control and protection -- along with business agility -- from hybrid cloud models, we're joined Richard Anstey, CTO at Intralinks, and he's based in London. Welcome, Richard.
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Anstey: Thank you, Dana. Nice to be here.

Gardner: Tell us about the trends that make data sovereignty so important as a consideration when organizations look at how and where to manage, house, and store their data.

Anstey: This is becoming a much more important topic. It has obviously been in the news very much recently in association with the Safe Harbor regulation having been effectively annulled by the European courts.

Anstey
This is the regulators catching up with the Internet. The Internet has been somewhat unregulated for a long time, and quite rightly, the national and regional authorities are putting in place the right protections to ensure that citizens’ data are looked after and treated with the respect they deserve.

So it's becoming more important for companies to understand the regulatory environment, even those organizations that did not previously feel that they were subject to such regulation.

Gardner: So the pendulum seems to have swung from the Wild West Internet toward greater security oversight.  Do we expect more laws across more jurisdictions to make placement of data more restricted? Are we seeing this pendulum swing more toward regulation?

Anstey: Yes, it’s certainly swinging that way, and the big one for the European Region of course is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is the European Commission initiative to unify the regulations, at least across the European Union. But the pendulum is swinging toward a greater level of regulation.

Gardner: How about in Asia-Pacific (APAC) and North America, what’s happening there?

Global issue

Anstey: Post-Snowden, this has become much more of an issue globally, and certainly across APAC there have been some very specific regulations in place for sometime, Singapore Banking Authority being the famous one, but globally this is becoming much more of an important issue for companies to be aware of.

Gardner: So while the regulatory atmosphere is becoming more important for companies to keep track of, its also more onerous for them as businesses to comply. The Internet is still a very powerful tool and people want to take advantage of cloud models and compliant data lifecycle models. Tell us about Intralinks, and about how organizations can have the best of both protected data and cloud models.

Anstey: Intralinks is in the fortunate position of having been offering cloud services in highly regulated environments for almost 20 years now. Back when we were founded, which by the way was really before most people would do their shopping online, Intralinks was operating things called Virtual Data Rooms to facilitate very high value, market-moving transactions through effectively a cloud service. We didn’t call it cloud at that time; we called it software as a service (SaaS).

But Intralinks has come from this environment. We've always been operating in highly regulated environments, and so we're able to bring that expertise that we have built up over the last 20 years or so to bear on solving this problem for a wider range of organizations as the regulation really steps in to control a greater part of the services delivered over the Internet today.

Gardner: In a nutshell, how is it that you're able to do, in a highly regulated environment, what people think of as putting everything in a cloud?
Physical location may be one thing to think about, but there's another thing called logical location.

Anstey: Well, in a nutshell, it may be tricky, because there's lot to it. There's a lot of technology that goes into this. And there are a lot of dimensions around which you need to consider this problem. It's not just about the physical location of data. Although that may be important, there are other dimensions. Physical location may be one thing to think about, but there's another thing called logical location.

The logical location is defined as the location of the control point of the encryption as opposed to the location of highly encrypted data, which many people would argue is somewhat irrelevant. If it's sufficiently encrypted, it doesn't matter where it is. The location of the key is actually more important than who controls that key, and more important than where your encrypted data lives.

In fact, we all implicitly accept that principle. When you use your online bank, you don't know the route that that information takes between your home computer and the bank. It may well be routed across the Atlantic, based on conditions of the Internet. You just don't know, and yet we implicitly accept that because it's encrypted in transit, it doesn't really matter what route it takes.

So there is the physical location and the logical location, but there is still also the legal location, which might be to what jurisdiction this information pertains. Perhaps it pertains to a citizen of a certain country, and so there is a legal location angle to consider.

And there is also a political location to consider, which may be, for example, the jurisdiction under which the service provider is operating and where the headquarters of that service provider is.

Four dimensions

There are four dimensions already, but there is another one as well, which is the time dimension. While it may be suitable for you to share information with a third party in perhaps a different jurisdiction for a period of time, the moment that business agreement comes to an end, or perhaps the purpose or the project for which that information was being used has come to an end, you also need to be able to clear it up.

You need to tidy up and remove those things over time and make sure that just because that particular information-sharing activity was valid at one point, it doesn't mean that that’s true forever, and so you need to take the responsibility to clear it up. So there are technologies that you can bring to bear to make that happen as well.

Gardner: It sounds as if there is a full spectrum, a marketplace, of different solutions and approaches to suit whatever particular issues an organization needs in order to satisfy the regulatory, audit, and other security requirements.

Tell us about how you have been working with HPE to increase this marketplace and solve data sovereignty issues as they become more prominent in more places.

Anstey: The thing that HPE really helps us with is the fact that while we've been able for quite a long time to have data centers in multiple regions -- as the regulation and the requirements of our customers grow -- we need to be even more agile with bringing new workloads up and running in different locations.

With HPE Helion OpenStack we're able to spin up a new environment -- a new data center perhaps, or a new service -- to run in a new location far more quickly and more cost effectively than we would otherwise be able to if we were starting from the ground-up.
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Gardner: So it's important to not just be able to take advantage of cloud conceptually, but to be able to move those cloud data centers, have the fungibility, if you will, of a cloud infrastructure, a standardized approach that can be accepted in many different data-center locations, many different jurisdictions.

Is that the case, and what can we expect for the depth and reach of your services? Are you truly global?

Anstey: We are certainly truly global. We've been operating right across the world for a number of years now. The key elements that we require from this infrastructure are things like workload portability and the ability to plug into additional service providers at any time we need to be able to create a truly distributed platform.

In order to do that, you need some kind of cloud operating system, and that's what we feel we get from the HPE Helion OpenStack technology. It means that we have become much more portable to move our services around whenever we need to.

Gardner: When you're an organization and you know that there's that data portability, that there's a true global footprint for your data that you can comply with the regulations, what does that do for you as a business?

How does this, from a business perspective, benefit your bottom line? How does it translate into business terms?

Enormous uncertainty

Anstey: The key thing to realize is that there has been an enormous amount of uncertainty, and in a way, the closure of the Safe Harbor agreement has been a good thing in that there was always some doubt over its applicability and its suitability. If you'll forgive the pun, there was a cloud hanging over it. When you remove that, you still have to get a little bit more certainty, of ... "Well, that thing definitely doesn't work and so we need to have a different structure."

Nevertheless, what happens in that environment of uncertainty is that people start to play it safe and they start to think, "This cloud thing is a bit scary. Maybe we should just do it all ourselves, or maybe we should only consider private cloud deployments." When you do that, you cut off the huge options and agility that's available from using the cloud to its full extent.

What would be a bad thing is if, as the pendulum swings, as you described, toward regulation, people retreat and give up and say, "This Internet thing, we don’t want to do that. We're going to reverse the trends and the huge technological advances that we've been able to leverage over the last 10 years of growth of cloud."

We believe that by building technology in the way that we are able to construct it, with all of those options associated with ways in which you can demonstrably prove that you are responsibly looking after data over time, you don't have to sacrifice the agility of the cloud in order to adhere to the regulations as they come in.
The net is cast wider and wider for the regulation, to the point where any company that deals with personal data and needs to use that data for legitimate business purposes will now be covered by regulation.

Gardner: We've talked about data sovereignty from a geographic perspective, but how about vertical industries? Are there certain industries that require that global reach, but also need to be highly regulated?

Anstey: The vast majority of the global banks are our customers already. We also have a very large footprint in the life sciences, which often has a similar nature in terms of the level of regulation, especially if you're dealing with patient data in the field of clinical trials, for example.

But the reality is that, as this pendulum swings, the net is cast wider and wider for the regulation, to the point where any company that deals with personal data and needs to use that data for legitimate business purposes will now be covered by regulation. This isn't just guidance now.

When we get through to the next level of EU regulation, there are some serious fines, including criminal penalties for executives and fines of up to two percent of global revenue, which really makes people wake up. It will make a far wider group of companies wake up than the previous ones who knew that they were operating in a strict regulatory framework.

Gardner: So in other words, this probably is going to pertain to many more industries than they may have thought. This is really something that’s going to hit home for just about everybody.

Anstey: Absolutely. Every industry becomes a regulated industry at that point, when to do business you need to handle the type of data that gets covered by the regulation, especially if you are operating in the EU, but as we described, with more to follow.

Gardner: I'm afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been exploring issues around data sovereignty and how it's forcing enterprises to consider new approaches to data, intellectual property and cloud collaboration.
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We have heard from Intralinks, based in New York, about how they have developed Virtual Data Rooms and are working with HPE to extend their services to virtually any market around the world.

So a big thank you to our guest, Richard Anstey, CTO at Intralinks. Thank you, Richard.

Anstey: Thank you very much.

Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining us for this Hewlett Packard Enterprise transformation and innovation interview. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HPE-sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Transcript of a discussion on how data sovereignty regulations force enterprises to consider new approaches to data, intellectual property, and cloud collaboration services.
Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2016. All rights reserved.

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