Musings from the World of Consulting

This segment of the market has been striving for credibility and notable traction since its emergence a year or two ago. Though scalability and proposition positioning are to be validated through an employee only roll out, a positive outcome can have major implications for both merchants and other discount sites such as Groupon and Mint. It goes without saying that this will aid in Cardyltics being able to sign up issuers who may have been otherwise hesitant to partner with a startup.

For Bank of America, the proposition for its cardholders is clear: Number of proposed offers are proportional to transaction volume. This drives consumer usage which in turn enhances customer stickiness / loyalty while increasing payment fees. In addition, it positions BofA to gain consumer behavioral insights that can then be packaged for potential use by merchants, CPG companies and marketing firms.

Conversely, for merchants, this provides a more effective means to target marketing campaigns while being able to trace lift through to actual conversion. Though BofA has not stated what merchant pricing structure is going to be, the potential in supplemental income can be significant enough to surpass those from traditional payment processing and settlement.

This trend has implications for existing firms that support marketing and customer acquisition activities. Their ability to detect consumer behavior and to track campaign effectiveness is short-circuited by vendors like Cardlytics in conjunction with credit card issuers and processors. Thus, companies like Groupon may have to evolve to provide either similar capabilities or for partnerships with others, such as those in emerging digital wallet space.

Speaking of which, it would not be surprising to see Google enter this space once sufficient momentum has been attained by its Google Wallet offering. It can extend its existing capabilities and do a tuck in acquisition to gain specific expertise / IP and industry connections.

2012 will probably see a fair amount of traction as NFC, digital wallets and other trans reality (physical - virtual) payment technologies gain consumer mind share.

Well written - reminds me how software was written, deployed and supported prior to “Enterprise IT” or “formal SDLC”/CMMI v.X hit mainstream corporate world.

Though the emphasis then was more on people than process ;)

howardtharp:

DevOps. Many of us in enterprise IT look longingly upon the growing DevOps movement. We have a significant challenge: Often the “dev” in DevOps isn’t just another team or department, but in a completely different corporate group, with a different VP. Unlike a web company (often not big enough to…

Guess nothing is quite free and not quite unprecedented. For authors to be distribution agnostic, they probably need to stick to other paid for tools like Adobe’s assorted suites or open source.

I do think that for occasional / first time creators, the price / lock-in is probably worth it.

dwineman:

Apple just released iBooks Author, a free Mac app for creating digital books for the new version of iBooks. I haven’t played with it much, but so far it looks like a very good tool. However, a curious thing happens when you go to export your work in iBooks format:

This restriction — that…

Great use of 60GHz band to support point to point data interchange between racks. As the article alludes to, the rise of distributed (as in parallel processing) and increasing virtualization density has lead to increasing intra-server traffic (E-W in DC network parlace). These run contrary to over-subscription models used for switch designs resulting in network congestion. 

Thus to relieve transient congestion, an approach would be to install wireless transceivers between specific racks. Though for sustained loads, it is hard to beat a properly provisioned network topology using wired connections. 

GE is taking a leaf from IBM’s playbook in establishing an internal Center of Excellence (COE) to act as a catalyst / accelerator within its vast organization for a cloud centric approach. As one of its rivals, Rolls Royce, has demonstrated the margins of pre-emptive maintenance exceed the initial sale of the aircraft engines.

It will probably take GE 2-3 years to demonstrate a visible impact, though it is an affirmation that the age of network connected industrial equipment is here.

Some great points

deliveryking:

An executive once asked me, “What is your biggest concern with the plan?”

I had just reviewed a multimillion dollar roadmap spanning several years, involving hundreds of resources, multiple concurrent and dependent projects, a brand new architecture, and a laundry list of business and…

Given the relentless growth in mobile data, any pause in telco carrier build out is exactly that, ‘a pause’. It would not be surprising to hear that some of that pause was due to AT&T and T-mobile proposed merger, which led to both carriers slowing down their capital network build programs. 

Well with merger off ans Sprint / Clear shifting to LTE to keep up with demand, 2012 should see investment at parity if not slightly positive to 2011.

This is great news as it finally provides casual users resilient storage in the era of multi terabyte storage and removable storage devices. More importantly, it is seamless to users in terms of configuration and has relaxed requirements in terms of supporting different storage device profiles.

Its intent is summarized well by this quote: …some of us have used (or are still using), the Windows Home Server Drive Extender technology which was deprecated. Storage Spaces is not intended to be a feature-by-feature replacement for that specialized solution, but it does deliver on many of its core requirements…

Seems that Google Wallet and the traditonal payment networks push into digital payments (ala NFC) have Paypal playing defense by extending its reach to physical retail locations. 

It is going to be a challenge as Paypal offers no major incentive to merchants. Originally it allowed ‘casual’ merchants to accept payments without the overhead of traditional commercial banking facilities. However, that advantage is being eliminated as processors streamline their offerings and vendors like Square emerge.

The reduced risk of fraud by use of Paypal (i.e., merchant does not receive the payment card information) is also being mitigated via new digital wallets (with aid from technologies such as NFC) and programs like V.me from Visa.

To stay relevant, Paypal needs to revamp its pricing strategy to encompass nuances specific to a multi-channel world, while providing capabilities that will differentiate it in the eyes of merchants and consumers in realm of physical retail.

That transformation is yet to be seen…

Neven has a great point. SMS is the *most* profitable data product that US carriers have. Based on usage fees and bundles, it is around $20,000-$30,000 per GB of revenue. 

With iMessage uptake, that revenue base is facing a serious challenge. Would not surprised to see carriers offer ‘binary’ plans (per per message on unlimited) as a way to counter it. Just don’t expect anything innovative… 

mrgan:

iOS 5 introduced iMessage, a service that seeks to replace text messaging. Carriers view text messaging as a special, astronomically priced type of data - iMessage undoes this madness and uses your dumb data pipe to send text, pictures, and videos to users identified by their email or phone…

MS team outlined the functionality behind Windows 8’s refresh and reset functionality. Basically, both will require re-install of ‘classic’ applications when used. 

As most corporate legacy applications will be ‘classic’ (for the near term), to lower support costs, it may be easier to roll-out Windows 8 (or adopt ‘bring your own computing device’) and provide users to legacy applications via virtual desktops.

Over time, as these classic applications are retired (hopefully ported to web apps versus Metro-style), VDI instances can be retired.

Yet another reason why in reality, Windows XP will exist for a few more years in corporate settings.