Archive | March, 2011

Ocado and Tesco Technology Competition

by on March 19, 2011 in UC News

Nick Lansley of Tesco’s is a particular favourite blog of mine and reading his latest blog post on Ocado scraping the Tesco website proves a fascinating insight into how technology is fueling the competition within the  supermaket sector.

At the Retail Week conference, Ocado CFO Andrew Bracey admitted that they scrape the Tesco grocery site in order to get Tesco prices with which they price match with 8,000 of their own products.

Sitting in the audience, I was intrigued by Ocado’s admission that they scrape our site (that is, run scripts from client machines that mechanically operate our web site pretending to be a human customer. Such scripts will loop through every department, aisle and shelf, and then harvest the text of all the products that appear on the page).

Only recently I would assume supermarkets would have to rely on specialist agencies to track their competitors pricing with people visiting the shops and recording the costs (I’m certain this still takes place).  In such a manual process price data could take several days of lag before moving through to the finance and pricing teams.  With server based scripting however data gathering time differential could be reduced to hours and minutes.

As Nick points out the Tesco pricing being scraped by Ocado is not quite real time but I would assume the data is accurate enough to produce exception reports to the Ocado buying, pricing and store management teams that could quickly adjust the pricing.  Indeed the process could be taken one stage further and potentially automatically update pricing to reflect competitor pricing.

This example typifies how crucial technology is to a company’s competitive advantage.  The ability for a company to generate and capture large data in real time dramatically effects the potential to gain sales and market share.  To highlight a negative example on how IT can effect the bottom line the recent sad end to Auto Windscreens was reportedly due to a mis-performing IT system that was delayed and then did not function correctly when released.

The message for me for crucial to any board of directors. Where ever your CIO sits make sure he or she is fully embedded within the strategy and operations of your core business.  They can literally make or brake your business.

As a quick aside I wonder if the next generation of cloud computing will see providers such as Google and Microsoft storing company data with offers such as Office 365 and Google Apps and then providing the stored data back to the company in real time with business intelligence applied?

Popularity: 3% [?]

Microsoft’s Maturing Office Cloud

by on March 17, 2011 in Microsoft, Office 365

I’ve been fortunate enough to be involved with projects that have reviewed Microsoft’s BPOS (and now Office 365) readiness for large enterprise and have also had a chance to speak to some of MS’s largest case studies.  I think it is fair to say that with the BPOS service Microsoft has had something of a roller coaster ride with rapid evolutions to the commercial and service framework over the past two to three years.

Given the maturing nature of the service Microsoft seem to be entering a third phase of BPOS/Office 365.  They have learned from their early mistakes that allowed salesmen to over promise yet provide a delivery and service organisation that at times underdelivered to customers.  After locking down the service and offer in 2010 it now seems Microsoft are confident enough in their own ability to deliver to provide increased services, features and partners to the Office 365 offer.

From Simon Leyland Blog

There are still plenty of challenges ahead, especially with regards to how Microsoft manage their relationship with resellers of Office 365 and how they can transfer customers over quickly and seamlessly in large software upgrades (2007 – 2010 – 2012/3).  Having been on the inside of these developments it is clear to me that Microsoft are investing heavily in Cloud and while they will continue to make mistakes they have a financial and resource commitment to get their offer to market right.

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3D Avatars and Kinect

by on March 15, 2011 in Kinect, Microsoft, Wave 15

It’s clear that Microsoft would like to implement their Kinect technology into the enterprise and here is another research project that is developing technology to inject live speech within an interactive 3D avatar. I’m sure a company like Proton Media (who already work closely with Microsoft) would be interested in implementing this type of technology within their 3D worlds.

I’m convinced that Microsoft’s Wave 15 will start to incorporate many elements of the Kinect and Research projects and if they do manage to execute correctly it could bring an entirely new dimension (forgive the pun) to their Office, Desktop and Collaboration value proposition.

Take a look at the avatar project here

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Home Automation with Kinect

by on March 14, 2011 in Kinect, Microsoft

Another video of how Kinect technology can and most likely will be used within the home over the next 10 years.

For further detail take a look at the authors blog here

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Windows Phone 7 ‘NoDo’ Video Update

by on March 13, 2011 in Microsoft

Via the excellent Winrumors here is a good summary video of the new features contained within Microsoft’s interim Windows Phone 7 update ‘NoDo’.  The video highlights the three major features to be updated;

  • Copy and Paste
  • Improved Application Resumption
  • Marketplace Search

Take a look at the video below:

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Kinect and 3D Capture

by on March 13, 2011 in Business Process, Kinect, Lync, Microsoft, UC News

Mirageblocks is a very interesting concept. Merging 3D projector, Kinect and Capture technology you can start to quickly and easily virtualise real world objects. As the blog states this could have many different applications. Taking online shopping to the next level is certainly one but I also see plenty of opportunities within the enterprise.

One use case springs to mind immediately. Manufacturers continue to divide the design and build process. Typically the design is taking place in the west and manufacture taking place in the east. I know from experience that this process is not smooth. The process has to be iterative but communication challenges and the long distance can often elongate the manufacture time to several months. Utilising UC technology with innovative products such as Mirageblocks will significantly reduce the time it takes from design to manufacture by reducing the amount of lag that it can take to move from the design to manufacture. Companies that embrace this way of working will certainly reduce product development time and reduce cost and as a result will gain competitive advantage.

Take a look at the Mirageblock blog here from the Microsoft Research team

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Google Voice Turns Two

by on March 12, 2011 in Google, Google Voice

The Google Voice product team have just released a brief summary of the features they have added to Google Voice over the past two years. While it’s great to see what has been completed it would be great to know more about the plans for 2011 and 2012.

Voice is a critical element of consumer and enterprise communication and the companies that can make voice easier to use and cheaper to run will have a distinct advantage in the market place.

Interestingly Google and Microsoft diverge on the issue of providing voice services to consumers and enterprise. Google seem keen to provide voice services directly from their own cloud and take on the regulatory responsibility which that entails. Microsoft however are purposefully staying away from providing voice services from their Office 365 cloud – potentially relying on partners.

Read the Google Voice article here

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iLync Confirmed: No Date Though

by on March 2, 2011 in Apple, Lync, Microsoft

Microsoft keynote at Enterprise Connect has just shown off the Lync mobile client for iPhone and it will be called iLync. Unfortunately there was no release date within the presentation other than 2011 but we are one step closer having an official Lync mobile client and it’s on the iPhone.

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Unofficial Windows Phone 7 Lync Client

by on March 1, 2011 in Lync, Microsoft

While Lync users await the official release of clients for iOS, Android, Nokia, RIM and Windows Phone 7 sometime in 2011 a great looking unofficial Windows Phone 7 client video has been released on Youtube. Take a look over at Michael Olesen’s blog entry for further details on the application and some more screenshots. It seems this WP7 client was developed in their spare time.

We know that Microsoft are working on a WP7 Lync client and if it looks as good as the client in the video then there is an exciting year ahead for the mobile Lync space.  The integration of the Hub and contacts looks great.  They’ve also managed to draw down the photos.  The video is a little long and has no commentary but stick with it.  It demonstrates the ability to establish groups, set presence and invite other people into the chat.

No voice or video is demonstrated but I wouldn’t expect that this year. 2011 is going to be the year of Lync IM/Presence mobile clients. We might have to wait another year for the voice and video clients to be released.

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