Thought Leaders in Big Data: Naveen Sharma, Chief Innovation Officer, Retail, Xerox (Part 1)

We have two interesting discussions in this interview with Naveen: one about Big Data and a second one about Corporate Incubation. As you know, in 1M/1M, we’re working on Corporate Incubation quite extensively. Naveen throws light on Xerox’s strategy.

Sramana Mitra: Naveen, let’s start with a bit of your background and also by setting the context of the old Xerox versus the new Xerox.

Naveen Sharma: First of all, thank you for this opportunity. My name is Naveen Sharma. I have a dual role in Xerox. I manage a resource lab in one of Xerox’s innovation center, which is in Webster, New York. Concurrently, I also have a role as the Chief Innovation Officer, Xerox Retail. As part of my Chief Innovation Officer role, I’m tasked to develop and deliver new innovations that can eventually become new Xerox services. Most people would associate Xerox with printing services, but over fifty percent of our revenue now comes from services. It’s an area that is growing as we take a vertical approach.We are looking to bring some innovations in retail IT, as well as IT applied to some of the specific domains, such as industrial, hospitality, or media.

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Sameer Patel, Senior VP and GM – Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, SAP (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: If you were to start a company today, what would you do in this area?

Sameer Patel: There are several network-first business models waiting to disrupt some highly transactive areas inside organizations that should never have been transaction-first.

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Sameer Patel, Senior VP and GM – Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, SAP (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What I was trying to get to was the whole enterprise social network. The impact of social sharing behavior inside the enterprise is a relatively new phenomenon. It’s probably five years old, right?

Sameer Patel: It’s actually 2006, so seven years.

Sramana Mitra: Maybe seven years for the early adopters but five years after coming into the mainstream. Now we are coming to a point where, continually, there are actual metrics available on what kind of real ROI impact we are seeing. I remember I started covering the cloud computing trend a long time ago and then we started seeing actual metrics around 2009 when the companies were able to hard-core quantify what was the impact of Cloud Computing on enterprises. I was getting numbers from Intel and CIL which were really hard-core numbers. The question I was asking is where are we in that evolution?

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Pivotal Riding High on PaaS Growth

Cloud computing is expected to be the big driving force in IT spending in the coming years. In fact, it already is. According to a Gartner report, cloud computing will account for the bulk of new IT spending by 2016. Gartner estimates that nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017. In another report, IDC maintains a similar understanding. IDC expects global spend on cloud computing to exceed $100 billion in 2014. Within the market, they also predict that companies will start shifting their interests from Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Sameer Patel, Senior VP and GM – Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, SAP (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You said you were going to do a couple more customer examples. Are you going to do one from the CRM side? Let’s hear about the deal cycle optimization.

Sameer Patel: CRM will be an interesting scenario. There’s a customer,Kaiser Compressor, who are a large manufacturing organization in Europe. Kaiser was going through a business transformation where their business was going to move from a manufacturer of products to a services business. Customer relationships are going to be at the center of what they do, not just the product they sell.

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Is Marketo Next on the Acquisition List?

According to a report by research firm Custora, e-mail as a medium of customer acquisition grew from 0.88% in 2009 to 6.84% in 2013. Email marketing is on the rise due to its significantly low cost and ability to reach out on a massive scale. However, the media faces several challenges. Not only does it have weaker customer engagement metrics, but the increased use of smartphones is also hurting its already low click-through rates. Marketers believe that as email marketing campaigns improve, the opening rates will improve as well. Recent reports reveal that opening rates are now hovering around 30%. The increasing importance of email marketing campaigns has also led to product innovations and acquisitions in the space.

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Sameer Patel, Senior VP and GM – Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, SAP (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: If I were looking at the multi-vision and the psychology of what’s happening, if there’s an incentive to create content and knowledge, and then you get credit in your appraisals and promotions. Those are the more direct psychological incentives, I think.

Sameer Patel: I agree. Again, we haven’t spent enough time looking at the value of these technologies in the context of what’s in it for the employee. Outside of the soft benefits and maybe the bragging rights of the stars and badges, they only go so far. You should use it in a way where it can actually drive both employee productivity, which is natural for them to understand, and also be cognizant about what the companies are trying to drive.

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Sameer Patel, Senior VP and GM – Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, SAP (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The one thing that I haven’t heard you talk about in this whole picture is the incentives for the employees to create this kind of knowledge. That must be part of the system, right?

Sameer Patel: That’s a really good point. In the last few weeks, we met some pretty big investments in how you can use, what the market calls, gamification in a very different way, rather than just badges and challenges. Today, a lot of gamification is useful, but it has its limitations because it’s 100% dependent on social. To incentivize people to utilize the social network, we look at the value of incentive based on not just what someone is doing in the social system but what they’re also doing in the transactional system.

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