Search Results for: cloud

As part of Amalgam Insights’ research process, we also keep track of the wide array of analysts, consultants, and thought leaders who are most relevant across our practice areas. Beyond the most well-known firms, such as the likes of Gartner, Forrester, and IDC, there are a wide array of bespoke and custom firms that conduct world-class work. To help provide context on how Amalgam Insights looks at our peers, partners, and competitors and to help technology buyers make better decisions, Amalgam profiles a firm or thought leader each Thursday to provide guidance on those who we think of as influential and innovative thought leaders.

This week, we profile SMB Group, a team of industry analysts focused on the technology adoption and management challenges in small and medium businesses.
Continue reading #ThoughtLeaderThursday – SMB Group

In Amalgam’s recent Analyst Insight, “Domo Hajimemashite At Domopalooza 2018, Domo Solves Its Case of Mistaken Identity”, Amalgam introduced a figure showing the 5 Tiers of Technology Value. This pyramid, based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, demonstrates how technology provides value that can be documented, calculated, and used to build business cases.

5 Tiers of Technology Value

To better understand these five tiers, Amalgam provides this guidance to companies seeking a better understanding of how IT investments are justified, as well as the pros and cons associated with each tier.
Continue reading Amalgam’s 5 Tiers of Technology Value

As part of Amalgam Insights’ research process, we also keep track of the wide array of analysts, consultants, and thought leaders who are most relevant across our practice areas. Beyond the most well-known firms, such as the likes of Gartner, Forrester, and IDC, there are a wide array of bespoke and custom firms that conduct world-class work. To help provide context on how Amalgam Insights looks at our peers, partners, and competitors and to help technology buyers make better decisions, Amalgam profiles a firm or thought leader each Thursday to provide guidance on those who we think of as influential and innovative thought leaders.

This week, we profile Hurwitz and Associates, a team of industry analysts focused on articulating the practical value of innovation and emerging technologies.
Continue reading #ThoughtLeaderThursday – Hurwitz and Associates

Report moves beyond traditional money-only ROI, includes analysis of improved departmental collaboration, executive benefits, work-life balance

BOSTON, April 03, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Amalgam Insights (www.amalgaminsights.com), a consulting and strategy firm focused on Technology Consumption Management, today announced the launch of its Business Value Analysis (BVA) reports.  The reports, the company said, deliver far greater usefulness than traditional reports from other analyst firms because of their enhanced focus on more than merely a simple financial return on investment (ROI).

Amalgam Insights’ BVA reports are designed to not only communicate the primary value of software to a firm, but also how it can positively affect the lives of its users, managers, even C-level officers throughout an organization.  A typical Amalgam Insights BVA report analyzes multiple factors that can contribute to the success of enterprise-based software in addition to financial ROI, such as:

• Improved productivity and collaboration with other departments;
• Achieving executive benefits that the C-Suite identifies as key differentiators; and
• Work-life balance that improves morale, accelerates business outcomes, and leads to employee promotions.

“Close management software is an emerging category and as such, prospects typically have not set aside budget to purchase it,” said Wynn White, chief marketing officer at FloQast, a California-based financial Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider. “Amalgam Insights’ BVA report has been key to helping us spotlight the cost of not taking action and the value lost due to inactivity—both monetarily and strategically. Packaged as a report, webinar and online calculator it is a turn-key campaign unto itself.”

In FloQast’s case, the Amalgam Insights BVA was able to not only quantify a first-year financial ROI of almost 650 percent to FloQast’s clients, but also found that companies using FloQast reported “enhanced teamwork and shared working environments by increasing transparency and flexibility.”  Because FloQast is a cloud-based solution, the BVA noted, “employees were able to verify, authorize, and update results regardless of physical location to enable greater work-life flexibility and balance.”

“More than ever, companies are seeking the kind of understanding that goes far beyond just the financial impact on their bottom lines,” said Hyoun Park, CEO and principal analyst at Amalgam Insights.  “Our Business Value Analysis reports deliver on that need, helping firms gain the greater knowledge, stretching beyond a pure ‘dollars-and-cents’ perspective, that enables them to operate more effectively and profitably to compete in today’s marketplace.”

On February 15th, I received an update on Vodafone’s current Unified Communications business in a briefing led by Peter Terry-Brown and Craig Marshall.

Key metrics that got my attention included Vodafone’s current base of 4.7 million One Net users, 10% growth Year-over-Year in the UC business, and a massive increase in their multi-national pipeline. The adoption of these offerings are starting to accelerate as global trends for TDM retirement are forcing enterprises to re-evaluate network and voice infrastructure options and to consider SIP, cloud, network, and unified communications innovations. These trends are strong in light of Vodafone’s overall positioning as the largest voice carrier in the world with over 60 billion minutes per month and the #2 mobile subscription provider in the world behind China Mobile.
Continue reading Vodafone Unified Communications Briefing: February 15, 2018

We have just published a new document from Tom Petrocelli analyzing Red Hat’s $250 million acquisition of CoreOS and why it matters for DevOps and Systems Architecture managers.

This report is recommended for CIOs, System Architects, IT Managers, System Administrators, and Operations Managers who are evaluating CoreOS and Red Hat as container solutions to support their private and hybrid cloud solutions. In this document, Tom provides both the upside and concerns that your organization needs to consider in evaluating CoreOS.

This document includes:
A summary of Red Hat’s Acquisition of CoreOS
Why It Matters
Top Takeaways
Contextualizing CoreOS within Red Hat’s private and hybrid cloud portfolio
Alternatives to Red Hat CoreOS
Positive and negative aspects fcr current Red Hat and CoreOS customers

To download this report, please go to our Research section.

I have a new paper out called “Providing a Rapid Response to Meltdown and Spectre for Hybrid IT.” It’s sponsored by CloudPassage, and the paper is free from them.

This paper is designed to help key stakeholders mitigate the risk of Meltdown and Spectre, which will be especially difficult in hybrid or mixed systems.

There are billions of PCs and mobile devices affected by Meltdown and Spectre. That’s a big problem for OS vendors. For enterprise IT, there is also the need to deal with hundreds of millions of host servers and the virtual machines running on them. Meltdown and Spectre highlight just how difficult it is to update and patch hybrid systems with hosts, virtual machines, containers, and cloud servers in the mix. Don’t despair! There are solutions.

Take action by downloading my paper, underwritten by CloudPassage: “Providing a Rapid Response to Meltdown and Spectre for Hybrid IT.”

Note: This blog contains excerpts from Amalgam’s Market Milestone document. For the full story, including additional context and recommendations for Global 2000 organizations, purchase the full report.

Key Stakeholders: CIO, CFO, IT Finance, Telecom Managers, Network Managers, Mobility Managers, Software Asset Managers.

Key Announcement

On January 17th, Sakon, formerly known as GSG, announced the launch of the Sakon platform, a Software as a Service suite of six applications to support the following areas: Mobility and Internet of Things Service Management, Network Services, Cloud Applications Management, Expense Management, Sourcing & Transformation Management, and Insights and Intelligence. This platform will be available as an annual subscription to support telecom, network, IoT, and SaaS management needs for enterprise IT organizations.
Continue reading GSG Rebrands as Sakon and Launches the Sakon Platform

Industry: Accounting and Audit Automation
Key Stakeholders: CIO, CFO, IT Controllers, Finance Managers, Accounting Managers

On January 23rd, 2018, FloQast announced new visualization capabilities for its Close Analytics solution initially launched in April of 2017. These visualizations included views of retrospective and close trends, progress in entity management, and a filtered isolation of high risk processes and root cause drivers.

Amalgam Context for FloQast Visualizations

FloQast is a close management solution created to improve the financial close process. Through a combination of workflows, cloud storage, and deep accounting subject matter expertise, FloQast provides a cloud-based environment to coordinate and accelerate the financial close.

In April of 2017, FloQast launched its Close Analytics solution, an additional module that allowed accounting teams to add visual tracking and metrics to improve close management. These analytics have been enhanced by this most recent announcement to improve process visibility for controllers, finance and accounting executives, and other key executives tracking the accounting close process. Amalgam Insights believes this announcement and its focus on risk contextualization and process specificity reflects the culmination of multiple strategic needs and trends in the accounting world.

First, these visualizations reflect a key market trend that accounting and financial automation in and of themselves can become a Black Box of risk when the process is not completely transparent. Although FloQast was already a market leader in providing visibility in the close process, FloQast’s efforts in providing clear visualizations on an entity and process-specific basis continued FloQast’s leadership in making financial close faster, easier, and more transparent.

Second, these visualizations offer accounting and executive teams with a greater shared basis for trust in their financial close. Amalgam Insights believes that Trust is the key theme for enterprise technology in 2018, superseding speed, automation, and productivity. Fortunately for FloQast and FloQast clients, close process visualization can simultaneously accelerate both productivity and trust. However, modern solutions must focus on trusted productivity, as productivity in and of itself is not sufficient.

Third, agility requires real-time visibility, or at least a reasonable facsimile of the current state of affairs. To minimize bottlenecks in the close process, accounting leads must be aware of potential problems and delays that are currently in place. Through these added visualizations, FloQast provides a level of visualization that is not currently available in the vast majority of mid-sized and large enterprises due to the inherent disaggregation that currently is pervasive in accounting departments.

Fourth, visualizations must reflect the past, present, and future of any given process to be truly useful. Historical visualizations of the past are important for identifying patterns and viewing evolutionary changes in process and activity. Current visualizations are important in taking action in the moment and allocating resources appropriately. And expected visualizations of future processes and results are vital in forecasting the need for additional resources and time that may be necessary due to external demands such as new revenue recognition and leasing requirements, mergers and acquisitions activity, or significant portfolio reallocations.

Recommendations for the Accounting Community

The visualization of financial close processes and progress is still relatively novel because of the traditional distribution of work in managing the enterprise close. Because of this, there are very few best practices for accounting teams to follow in tracking the close other than to simply visualize all processes. As accounting departments seek to integrate visualization into their close tracking process, Amalgam provides the following recommendations.

Use cloud-based storage for managing financial close documents, including relevant reconciliation and consolidation reports that must be viewed by two or more people. Without this shared view of key documents and standardization of processes and document names, businesses will be unable to support the data access and real-time updates necessary to visualize financial close process in the first place. The ongoing creation and governance of these documents can also be improved by creating repeatable monthly, quarterly, and annual templates that are also made available to all relevant financial close stakeholders.

Ensure that close visualizations include views of the past, present, and future, but be aware that each of these sets of visualization are used for different use cases. Visualizations focused on the past are important for compliance, pattern recognition, and a historical record of evolutionary change in financial close and data collection. Visualizations portraying data in the present need to be linked with alerts, high-risk processes, and the need to take action when necessary. Visualizations showing future forecasts and potential outcomes allow departments to prepare for key events, regulatory changes, or business transactions that may require reallocation, additional preparation, or additional investment to ensure consistent delivery of accounting services.

Be careful that the financial close is not a black box of activity. It is not sufficient to simply create a set of financial documents that reflect the business activity of the past fiscal period. Without sufficient explanatory documentation, progress tracking, and identification of key drivers that affect financial close efficacy, the financial close is not repeatable and companies will be stuck reinventing the wheel every month simply to conduct a basic business task. This lack of repeatability from Black Box thinking will prevent accountants from taking on higher business value tasks, such as resource optimization, sales operations, and other analysis that can elevate accountants from operational bean counters to strategic business consultants.

By aligning accounting process visibility to these key industry trends, Amalgam believes that FloQast’s focus on visibility has enhanced the Close Analytics module that this vendor offers and met a key need for improving accounting environments. FloQast’s improved visualizations reflect holistic business needs for increased trust, real-time agility, and risk contextualization in accounting departments. Mid-sized and large enterprises must adopt visualizations that portray retrospective trends, entity-specific close processes, and risk-prioritized isolation to truly gain control of their close environments.