Welcome to Digital Transformation Digest, Constellation's daily compendium of news and analysis covering forward-thinking enterprises, mega-vendors, startups and developers.
Salesforce adds AI platform services for developers, opens up DX in beta: The CRM giant has made a steady stream of announcements in recent months around its AI technology, Einstein, which is the product of a string of acquisitions and organic development. In the latest, Salesforce has unveiled new Einstein platform services for its developer base.
The services include Einstein Sentiment, for analyzing the tone of text generated by social media, web reviews and other mediums; Einstein Intent, which provides machine learning models that can classify the intent of inbound customer messages and route them appropriately; and Einstein Object Detection, for analyzing the content of images. Salesforce sees the last as ideal for retail, service and inventory management scenarios.
Go here for a deeper dive into the new services, with analysis from Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen.
Salesforce has also announced an open beta for DX, its new developer environment, which was first announced at last year's Dreamforce.
POV: Salesforce is betting big on expanding its already large developer base in a bid for growth. It has rolled out an extensive online training program called Trailhead, which is aimed at both those aspiring to be full-time Salesforce professionals, as well as "citizen" developers. The latter could be just as important for Salesforce's prospects given the potential for adding stickiness to its products within companies large and small.
The news is all happening in conjunction with TrailheaDX, Salesforce's second annual developer conference. Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller will be in attendance, so look for his coverage on his Twitter feed, Constellation's website and his blog this week.
Cisco ups its IoT ante post-Jasper acquisition: Last year's $1.4 billion purchase of IoT connectivity platform Jasper seemed like a shrewd move for Cisco, as it picked up one of the most mature and widely-used products of its kind.
Jasper was founded in 2004 and at the time of the acquisition, it already had 3,500 enterprise customers. (It now has 11,000, in a testament to Cisco's much larger channel and sales capability.) And on paper, the technical fit was sterling, with the combination of Cisco's networking gear and Jasper's software.
While there have been some incremental announcements since the deal, the big news arrived this week in the form of Control Center 7.0, which ties an array of Cisco technologies into Jasper's platform. You can go here for all the details, courtesy of Cisco.
POV: "It took some time from the acquisition of Jasper, but now we see the benefits in Cisco Control Center 7.0," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Andy Mulholland. "It's a combination of network topology types combined with the management experience of both Cisco and Jasper. As an example of the art of the possible in IoT connectivity spanning network types, it's well worth taking a close look."
Google teams with Nutanix for hybrid cloud: Google—technically, its parent company Alphabet—has inked a pact with hyperconvergence vendor Nutanix for hybrid cloud scenarios. Nutanix offers hardware and software for running mission-critical applications on private clouds, while providing connectivity to public cloud services for other workloads.
The integration is set to be complete in the first quarter of 2018. It will enable applications to be wrapped in Kubernetes-based containers and moved back and forth between Nutanix hardware and Google's cloud.
POV: This is certainly a big deal for Nutanix but also an acknowledgment by Google that hybrid cloud is what many enterprises want or require. Nutanix has strong credibility in its own right, with an enviable customer list using its products to build hybrid cloud datacenters.
Legacy Watch: Looming deadline for Office 2007 support: Companies and individuals still using Office 2007 have just three more months of support before Microsoft pulls the plug, as Computerworld reports. While they have the option of upgrading to a newer version of Office, such as 2013 or even 2016, Microsoft is pushing hard on the idea of jumping straight to the cloud-based Office365 or Office365 Plus, the fat-client version.
POV: It's not clear how many copies of Office 2007 are still chugging away out there, but we can be sure it's far more than one. Office365 has developed a rich feature set and is certainly worth a close look. For its part, Microsoft has a detailed end-of-life guide for Office 2007 at this link. (It also doubles as a passive but persistent product pitch for Office365).
