Marketing Creates And Captures Markets

We recently won a Global Innovation Award for our Asia Pacific efforts to grow and capture the market.  It was a recognition of marketing in our true profession of strategy, management, multi-channel and integrated marketing across content, social, digital.

Code named CAMP (Create A Market For Power), marketing lead the initiative with understanding the market dynamics, being creative to develop a programmatic approach, daring to do things differently and making an impact to the business.

It helped us achieve several consecutive quarters of year on year growth. Here is the story of how marketing led the way to this transformation.

IBM Power Systems in Asia Pacific is the market leader in the Systems of Records for IT infrastructure requirements.  With the shift in infrastructure consumption to solutions for big data, , we needed to take a hard look at our business to assess what we needed to do differently to win. We started by understanding more about the market place.

Understand The Market. Use Analytics.
The market had developed besides Systems of Records to Systems of Engagement, Insights, etc.  This new area was a fair fight with many market players who were trying to make the shift.  We assessed our position of power, who we needed to work with to extend into the new solution areas and what was needed for the shift.  This was done by using analytics, social and other listening.

Appoint Champions. Lead The Business Plan
Within the business, we needed champions who could prioritize and focus on the growth areas. The champions were needed to pitch the propositions, drive capabilities and align resources. We then mapped out the business and marketing priorities and what the game plan was. Resources included budgets, facilities and people across sales, technical, marketing from both internal and external. 

Develop The New Approach. Make It Simple.
We clearly defined the business problem as “How do we generate revenue for Brand with Who for What Solutions in Where".  The plan included considerations for conditioning the market, recruiting key players, training to develop skills, developing joint go to market, creating the market demand and generated business opportunities.  The approach had to be systematic and scalable, easy to understand and execute, convincing for investors and worthwhile for the time and effort spent.

Choose The Battle Field. Define Success
We chose to test the approach in a region where the opportunity was the largest but adoption was the lowest and in another region where adoption could match up to the pace of the opportunity growth. The approach yielded great results against the targets. In the first market, we grew our revenue by over 400% year on year.  In the second market, we achieved grew almost 200% of our target.

Determine Success Factors. Learn As You Go.
Through this initiative, we learnt that there are critical success factors that made a significant difference.

1. Quality over quantity: creating an impact helps to then ramp up the volume
2. Standardize and simplify: making things easy to speed up go to market.
3. Leveraging others' ability: Each party is better positioned as advocates and have greater influence to their segments, and it would greatly accelerate the results where we can overcome resource or capability limitations and creates self-sufficiency
4. Ownership & team work: Strong collaboration across each activity phase across the various stakeholders is crucial.  Often, one of the team members will just step up to lead beyond their role to ensure success.
5. Integrated marketing: A 360-degree engagement is required - internal and external communications, digital and off-line, business and technical, social and content, etc.

Marketing truly creates and captures the market.  While this winning initiative is being replicated across the business. The principles of how marketing can lead in business transformation can be applied to what we can create to make a difference.

This is the awesomeness of marketing!

IBM-Apple Strikes in Enterprise Mobility with “AppleCare for Enterprise”

This week, Apple has launched a new AppleCare for Enterprise website as the first output from the Enterprise Mobility Deal that Apple (AAPL) and IBM made in July 2014.

Apple enterprise customers will be able to receive round-the-clock phone support to priority on-site repairs and personalized assistance from Apple experts so that businesses can keep their Apple devices working smoothly.  Each company subscribing to AppleCare for Enterprise will get a “personal liaison” to handle its account, who can respond to urgent issues within an hour. Businesses can sign up for onsite hardware service for either two or three years provided by IBM Global Technology Services.

Customers can also get free replacements for “up to 10 percent” of covered iOS devices — so if one out of 10 of your employees has fumble fingers and cracks their screen, businesses can get those iPhones and iPads replaced without additional cost.

Let’s check out what else is in store from  enterprise app pact of Watson meets iPad that the two IT heavyweights Apple and IBM had forged in July 2014.

The Apple-IBM Enterprise Mobility Deal

Dubbed the IBM MobileFirst for iOS, the collaboration includes:

• Apple and IBM will create more than 100 vertical-focused enterprise apps built only for the iPhone and iPad. Target markets include retail, healthcare, banking, travel and transportation, telecommunications and insurance starting in the fall.
• IBM's cloud services such as device management, security and analytics will be optimized for iOS. Private app catalogs and productivity suites will be available. Services will be available on IBM's Bluemix development platform.
• AppleCare will be tailored for enterprise deployments with support on-site via IBM.
• There's a commitment to use IBM's Fiberlink MaaS360 for mobile device management. 
• Apple is standardizing on IBM's analytics and big data apps. 
• IBM will package device activation, supply and management for the iOS partnership. IBM will also sell industry-focused iPhones and iPads as a bundle.
• Big Blue's 100,000 consultants will push Apple wares in the field.
• And finally, IBM's financing arm will be in on the deal.

What’s In It For Apple

While Apple's iOS dominates the consumer market space, it is no where to be seen as Androids rule in the enterprise space.

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook faces increasing competition in the consumer space, saying “The market opportunity reference is critical. Apple has been knocked for lack of an iTV or iWatch (at least for now), but if it mines the enterprise better it'll keep the cash cow going for years.”

With IBM’s vast army, Apple can now get into the enterprise space without having to exclusively build and market to corporations.

Jefferies analysts Sundeep Bajikar and Mark Lipacis said to investors that the Apple-IBM partnership could bring in 42 million new users for Apple. That could amount to billions in iPhone and iPad sales, giving Apple a needed boost to iPad sales in particular — especially in the enterprise.

Apple’s Tim Cook adds, "We're putting IBM's renowned big data analytics at iOS users’ fingertips, which opens up a large market opportunity for Apple. This is a radical step for enterprise and something that only Apple and IBM can deliver.”

What’s In It For IBM

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty said the alliance will transform "the way people work, industries operate and companies perform."

Besides the “cool” cred, IBM now gets to resell the devices, have them configured out of the box, preloaded with apps, software and policies such as security that the enterprise needs.  IBM gets the supply, activation and mobile device management (MDM) business.  IBM will also offer app development for custom-built apps, using its big data, analytics and software stack.

Apple's Tim Cook shares about the apps, "We think that the core thing that unleashes this is a better go-to-market, which IBM clearly brings to the table. But more importantly, apps written with mobile first-in-mind. Not all of the enterprise apps written for iPad have been ported from a desktop arrangement and not taken full advantage of mobile."

IBM Gets A Head Start in Mobile Enterprise Leadership

Forrester analyst Frank Gillett believes, “The Apple IBM partnership is a landmark agreement. Given IBM’s market strength and coverage, this partnership gives Apple enterprise capabilities and credibility at one stroke -- and gives IBM a premium advantage in the race for mobile enterprise leadership.”

The AppleCare for Enterprise is only the first. Watch this space for more new innovations to come.

Technology in the driver’s seat, ASEAN CIOs in the hot seat

Over the last month in Jun 2013, we met with almost 6000 clients from 7 cities across ASEAN at the IBM Technology Conference and Expo 2013 roadshow. It was great to see a lot of old friends from existing client organizations and to meet many new ones. We also saw a growing number of attendees from non-IT departments – line of business leaders, marketing folks, finance and so on.

Why did they come? Well, I would suggest that it’s because the role of technology in any industry, function and geography is becoming increasingly important. They are already big users of technology, but they needed to know “what next?”

In this, they mirrored the thoughts of more than 1,700 global CEOs IBM interviewed in 2012 as part of our bi-annual CEO survey. Technology has been moving up the rankings over the eight years we have done the study and in 2012 was identified as the single most important external force impacting their organizations. In fact, 71 percent of them believe technology will be the most important driver of change from 2012 to 2015. 

The question is: is your infrastructure ready for this?

Many organizations here are deploying virtualization as a start. According to IDC[1], nearly 71 percent of organizations in Asia Pacific have started or plan to start virtualization projects, nearly 50 percent of CIOs have started and another  21 percent plan to start soon. Cost control, consolidation and the need for increased IT flexibility are the main drivers for this move towards virtualization in Asia Pacific. The flexibility of being able to provision resources on the fly and deploy applications faster in a market travelling at warp speed just makes business sense.

But virtualization is not an end in itself. It is a means to getting the customer insights that CEOs have identified as the most critical investment area for them with 73 percent of CEOs surveyed making significant investments in this area.

This may sound a bit strange as obviously the need for customer insight isn’t new but what customer insight actually means today has. For a start, there’s far more raw data to draw from than ever before and data is coming at us with a furious pace due to social media interactions. So the infrastructure and the tools needed to make sense of this must be more powerful and in real time. Secondly, where customer segmentation with post analysis of demographics and psychographics was the height of sophistication before, today we as marketers want to understand individual customers, not just the groups they belong to, we want to know instantaneously how customers are interacting and respond to them in real time, and on an even more advance level, predict customers’ behavior.

This is important because there seems to be a strong correlation between the ability to tap into and use data effectively, and business performance. Outperformers have been shown to be twice as good at deriving value from data across the three dimensions of access, insights and action – which are key to engaging customers as individuals.

The bad news is that in another IBM study of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs)[2], 71 percent of CMOs said they are underprepared for data explosion. Over seventy percent of the CMOs who are underprepared intend to invest in technology and need to integrate insights to deal with data explosion.  This puts the limelight back on the CIOs to come up with a quick solution to this growing need. The bad news is that sixty percent of the CMOs who are underprepared stated that their inhibitors are cost and that marketing is not aligned with the IT team. As marketers, we need to build the business case together with the CIOs. 

The good news is that both IDC[3] and Gartner[4] have predicted CIO’s top focus areas for 2013 are – among the usual suspects of cloud and mobile – Big Data, Analytics and Business Intelligence. So both CMOs and CIOs have the opportunity to build the case together and demonstrate the return on investment that the business requires.

Another interesting fact is that both analysts predict that CIOs talk about a high degree of interest in what they call converged or integrated systems, which in a nutshell means infrastructure that combines server, storage and network technologies into a stack.

This is exactly why IBM's Smarter Computing approach was designed to deliver what organizations need in three key areas of cloud, data and security. Today, CIOs don’t want to worry about putting the pieces together; they want a platform that integrates hardware, analytics-based software, network management services and virtualization, so that they can hit the road running.  

As technology moves into the driver’s seat for enterprise agendas in 2013, ASEAN CIOs will find themselves increasingly in the hot seat to identify new ways to store and manage Big Data and most importantly, make sense of it. Smarter Computing can help.

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[1] IDC Asia Pacific IT Services Survey, Server Virtualization Services 2011-2015 Forecast Market Trends and Opportunities, Dec 2011

[2] From Stretched To Strengthened: Insights from the Global Chief Marketing Officer Study, IBM (September 2011)

[3] IDC Predictions 2013, Enterprise Servers (Feb 2013)

[4] Gartner Webinar CIO Agenda 2013 – Implications for High-Tech Providers, Mark P. McDonald (Feb 2013)