Helping Define the Future Workplace
I recently wrote a couple of articles on Linkedin. With some hints/tips on how to verify the Kaizala product/service in your 2019 Digital Workplace
Yesterday Praveen updated the Kaizala blog with some more information. It may help you further in your discovery…
Microsoft have major advantages within the Productivity market; an unprecedented install base, Office, large account presence and a strong technical platform to name but a few so why do the likes of Verizon and Airbus look to move away from Microsoft and why does the perception of many enterprise customers maintain that they purchase Microsoft licences but fail to exploit them?
The primary reason I believe is that there remains a gap in the market to deliver Office 365 effectively for customers. Microsoft have built a world class cloud platform for Productivity and have a highly effective sales machine but the market doesn’t yet provide the required skills and experience to exploit.
How do organisations currently fill their Productivity programmes and projects?
Many of the challenges of Office 365 fall outside of a the core technical delivery. This was not the case in the old world where the technical deployment with servers, data centres and configuration would take several months and many days of effort. Through years of experience SI’s understand how to deploy and price for these services.
But the the key challenges within an Office 365 deployment are not deploying equipment and software they are management of change and customer dependencies such as Network, clients, policies etc. These challenges are typically highly variable in nature and difficult to price and deliver for an external organisation. They miss the core capabilities which SIs attempt to deliver.
Microsoft helping with this challenge
Over the past 5 years Microsoft have implemented key initiatives to help with this challenge; focusing the sales teams on adoption/utilisation as opposed to license sales, gearing up Microsoft Consulting Services to meet the SI challenge, Business Funding, Fast track and Customer Success Unit to name but a few.
These key initiatives are in themselves valid and useful but are missing a vital element of delivering the change successfully within an organisation.
A new type of Partner needs to emerge
Partners need to emerge who lead on End User Adoption but have specific knowledge of programme management and technical delivery.
Key elements of what a Partner needs to bring:
Since the launch of BPOS and the evolution to Office 365 Microsoft have built an excellent cloud based Productivity suite. Shifting the Office and Productivity business from an on premise/waterfall upgrade cycle to cloud is no mean achievement. In doing this Microsoft have protected their licence based business and made significant inroads into the service revenue which was the preserve of the large System Integrators – displacing SI revenue for direct subscription fees.
I wrote on Tuesday that Office 365 if deployed correctly can add significant value however Microsoft face a set of competitors within the Productivity space which for Microsoft to maintain their lead need to be addressed and quickly.
Competitors have several core elements in common:
For an organisation’s IT department as a whole these competitors create difficulties including duplicate costs, systems, non integration with AD and security frameworks but IT has limited control to prevent usage. Even if they are aware of usage (often they are not) they don’t wish to be seen to prevent the business from being productive.
Here are a few of the competitors currently making ground against Microsoft:
Zoom Video Conferencing
Eric S Yuan at Zoom is the epitome of the challenger brand, his elevator pitch for Zoom is perfect; ‘Delivering Happiness to Our Users. Your Happiness is My Happiness.’ Microsoft has a very strong video upgrade in Microsoft Teams, the technical improvements made by Teams provides a very good experience however very few users know how to use Microsoft Teams video if enabled. I’m willing to wager that most users would not be able to start a Microsoft Teams video call without direction or help guides.
Zoom just works, sign up and within minutes you can start a video call with virtually anyone. It is such low friction to start using the application it draws a user in and while it wont have the quality of service implemented on a corporate network the quality is ‘good enough’ for normal users to be happy and not be interested in Microsoft’s solutions.
Zoom certainly seems to be increasing market share and adding partners – as large organisations face video upgrade cycles Zoom becomes a very significant option.
Workplace by Facebook
Yammer is an interesting service from Microsoft. Before being bought by Microsoft Yammer was one of the poster children of freemium/shadow IT. It was an easy service to sign up to and consume and BPOS/Office 365 didn’t have any real comparison to Yammer. I think it’s fair to say since Yammer was purchased it has lost some of its dynamism and it doesn’t seem to have really progressed much over the years. Yammer with effort still holds significant value however it takes effort and thought to launch Yammer, without guidance and cultivation Yammer dies on the vine.
Compare with Workplace by Facebook, everyone knows the Facebook interface. When released into an organisation Workplace often grows like wild fire (some might say knot weed). People will have concerns over privacy and Facebook’s recent consumer challenges will lead users to complain about using Workplace but they are typically the people who tend to complain about any IT system. For users who want to collaborate quickly and effortlessly Workplace is ideal. Starbucks have an example with Workplace link.
Workplace recently announced they were moving off the Facebook domain and they have been adding partners to fill the potential gaps in areas such as compliance which are both sensible moves. It’s also interesting to note Facebook do use Office 365 themselves, primarily for email. This gives the Workplace team a good understanding of how Office 365 and Workplace can work together which they can share with potential customers.
I also really think there is great potential in the use of Oculus within the Productivity area – take a look at this recent Walmart example. Especially with Oculus Quest due to launch early next year.
Google Cloud Platform
Google has been trying to attack Microsoft’s Productivity suite for several years and they have definitely made progress but I’d imagine not as much as market analysts would have thought or Google management. However Google Cloud Platform (GCP) could pose a significant challenge within the Productivity area. The growth of machine learning, AI aren’t just buzzwords, they are at the heart of every modern business and with GCP (which includes G Suite) non IT users can relatively easily and quickly create business critical applications. This may send shivers down of an IT department but the challenge very quickly comes back – what should we use? Microsoft are certainly developing their capabilities with Excel online/PowerApps and Flow but Google has a lead in this space, one small example is the ability to share data between Google sheets which currently can’t be done easily with Excel online.
I wrote an article several months back about the Airbus decision to move to Google and I was sceptical of the move but having spent several months with users who use GCP on a daily basis I do understand the benefits. I’m still just not quite sure the market fully understands the impact of building business applications without central IT can have on making Productivity technology decisions.
** There are several others competitors also challenging, please don’t take offence if I haven’t mentioned you, this article is already too long.
I wrote this article just after the acquisition of Acano by Cisco, as always in the Tech industry a great deal seems to have changed since then:
In the mean time Cisco and Microsoft customers have become thoroughly confused about what to do next – especially those large enterprise who have Microsoft for Productivity and Voice and Cisco for Video. Three years ago Acano was a perfect solution to marry the two technologies together. This was especially important for large organisations who invested millions of dollars in Cisco video rooms and Lync/Skype for Business.
Today those large organisations face a challenge as they look at the current upgrade cycle of Cisco TelePresence and Skype for Business. Do they:
To set expectations straight away if you are expecting an answer please don’t be disappointed – I don’t know what Microsoft are or plan to do with Kaizala. This article will be entirely speculative and based on no sourced information.
If you are deploying Office 365 or planning to in 2019 I do think you need to find an answer to what Microsoft plan to do with Kaizala.
Kaizala is a mobile messaging app built for iOS and Android with many features similar to WhatsApp, initially released for countries where low bandwidth mobiles dominate. You can have one-to-one and group chats, voice, video and bot integration. Hold on a minute isn’t that what Microsoft Teams does I hear you say. And you would be correct there is a significant overlap between the Teams Chat function and Kaizala. Through to this November the discussion between Teams and Kaizala was academic – Kaizala not being available for Office 365, this changed in November Kaizala now being available for Office 365 commercial tenants.
So why did Microsoft choose to release Kaizala to Office 365? Redmond don’t simply release new services onto Office 365 in a random fashion. As I mentioned before I have no knowledge as to why but here are a few possible ideas:
No doubt there are issues and questions before anyone deploys Kaizala and my speculation may be over blown – I’ll try and cover these in Part Two. Meanwhile if you think of any more reasons why Microsoft released Kaizala to Office 365 please feel free to comment.
In Part One I provided some thoughts on why Microsoft released Kaizala to Office 365. In Part Two I’m going to provide my practical advice on finding out what Microsoft really think of Kaizala.
If you are deploying Office 365 in 2019 and you want to know more about Kaizala and how it could affect your deployment/roadmap – even if it’s just to confirm a ‘nothing to see here’ moment.
At the moment I’d imagine it would be difficult to ascertain answers to the above. This would provide a steer on the maturity of thought on Kaizala within Microsoft. Having said all that it is still intriguing on the release of Kaizala to Office 365 tenants.